Month: June 2024

Exponentials & Climate (June 20)

When Covid-19 first appeared, I wrote about exponential growth. It’s why pandemics happen. Conditions change faster than anyone expects, so they get out of control.

All exponential growth tapers off, eventually. Sometimes it plateaus, sometimes it goes down to small or zero. Sometimes there are hills and valleys. Covid is doing that now.

TurtleSoft also began exponentially. Sales of our estimating software tripled annually over the first few years. Then it flattened for a few years, then shrank by 50% a couple times after Apple Computer almost died. Goldenseal created another spurt of exponential up, followed by a second slow ebb.

When this blog started, we expected to quickly update our accounting software to 64-bit, and see a third spurt of exponential growth. Maybe even bigger than the first two. After ten years of struggle, now we just want to finally finish the project. Then see whatever happens.

Meanwhile, the series of hottest-ever months continues. Last winter it was bad news for TurtleSoft users: great weather for outdoor work, so the usual spurt of stuck-indoors programming didn’t happen. Now it’s good news. AC + Computer > Sweat + Heat Stroke + Garden.

For me, the scariest part of climate change is the chance it also goes exponential. That happens when there’s positive feedback. For example, extra heat causes wildfires, vegetation loss and melting of permafrost, which increases CO2 and methane and heat. Repeat and multiply.

From ice cores and sediments, there’s evidence of large, rapid climate changes in the past: some in just a single decade. Life will be very interesting if we’re headed into one of those now.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com

Edge Cases (June 10)

A software tester walks into a bar and orders a beer. They order 0 beers. They order 99999999 beers. They order asdfff beers. They order -1 beers for everyone in the house. The dogs playing poker each order a beer.

It’s called edge cases. Sometimes we try them deliberately. Often, our staff runs into them while testing other things in the new accounting software.

For example, we started with a brand new bank account to test a recent bug fix. Adding one transaction worked OK, but clicking the previous and next buttons gave weird errors. Those have no place to go, so it needed some code to disable them. Adding a second transaction worked OK, but when we came back later it gave an even weirder error, and eventually crashed. Fixing that solved a long-term bug in the way we load the most recently-used item. More code we forgot to add.

Many of the problems are in the screen interface, which is entirely new. The worst are in the links between the screen fields and accounting records. Those can cause all sorts of scary messages, plus corrupted data.

Sadly, I think it will be a few months until there’s a version we aren’t ashamed to release. Too many serious bugs are still turning up.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com