I was reading Coding Horror today about "Just a Little Bit of Software History Repeating" about the failures of the Denver International Airport and London Heathrow Airport automated luggage systems. Denver's failed baggage system was designed from the inception of the airport and London Heathrow's T5 was installed with the construction of the new T5 terminal. The situations are quite similar to the "complete rewrite" scenario that developer's are frequently tempted by. It is difficult enough when other people (proposals, marketing, managers, etc.) underestimate the time required for a task or project, but unfortunately developers often vastly underestimate the time...
Well it might not be as old as "Ye Olde English" but every once in a while you have to brush the cobwebs off of binary numbers and hexadecimal formats. A coworker had a problem converting numerical constants from a PLC editor and for some reason the programmers decided to print floating-point constants in the editor as integer numbers instead of sensible real numbers. For example, the software would list 1092616192 instead of 10.0! My co-worker had found a web site tool to convert the integer numbers into floating-point but then hit a stumbling block when he encountered large negative...