The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Back in the day, I used to use a program called Windows made by a little company called Microsoft.  I liked windows, and for the most part it did what I needed it to do.  But it also had a nasty habit of crashing when I tried to do something complex.  And this was really annoying.

Well as time went on, and I became more adept at using windows, I noticed that it tried to tell me what was wrong.  Windows was writing out a crash report.  And it had a message on the blue screen of death.  (a mostly incomprehensible message, but at least it was trying.)  And I discovered that if you looked for the error codes in Microsoft’s knowledge base, you could find the errors had corresponding articles for many of them.  (some of these articles were also incomprehensible.  ) (more…)

A circular file is not a nickname for the waste can. Circular files, sometimes called round files, are useful in some applications and support tasks.  With a normal log file or repository, the log grows as logged events are added to the log.  The obvious danger is that if the space where the log is located becomes saturated when the log grows to fill this space.  Many applications will shut down and refuse to restart if this happens.  For some applications, having the log write to a circular file is the answer.

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