"Gerald Weinberg tells the story of a programmer who was flown to Detroit to help debug a troubled program. The programmer worked with the team who had developed the program and concluded after several days that the situation was hopeless.
On the flight home, he mulled over the situation and realized what the problem was. By the end of the flight, he had an outline for the new code. He tested the code for several days and was about to return to Detroit when he got a telegram saying that the project was canceled because the program was impossible to write. He headed back to Detroit anyway and convinced the executives that the project could be completed.
Then he had to convince the project's original programmers. They listened to his presentation, and when he'd finished, the creator of the old system asked, "And how long does your program take?"
"That varies, but about ten seconds per input."
"Aha! But my program takes only one second per input." The veteran leaned back, satisfied that he'd stumped the upstart. The other programmers seemed to agree, but the new programmer wasn't intimidated."
"Yes, but your program doesn't work. If mine doesn't have to work, I can make it run instantly."
- _Code Complete_, pp.595-596
It's not "completely broken," but no hits for a query of "zag" in an email that contains "zagg" comes uncomfortably close to "doesn't work." (FWIW, I use gmail and haven't had any huge problems with search, although I have had to do way more work to find something than I would expect given that it's from Google).
Code Complete? really, just read Weinberg
'twas just a quick copy and paste from my fortune file. Although as far as I'm concerned there ain't nothing wrong with Code Complete.
It's ok but relatively mediocre, and in my observation usually indicates a programmer who hasn't sought out better sources.
Those being?
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...
Javier Kragen Sitaker's article/mail "My Evolution as a Programmer", recounts one coder's his growth as a programmer, career, and exposure to a variety of books throughout. It's really an excellent read, and contains some comparisons between a few good books - particularly Code Complete and The Pracice of Programming. I quote,
During this time, I read "The Practice of Programming", which is a lot like "Code Complete", but shorter and much higher in quality. I had read the same authors' "The Elements of Programming Style" back in 1995, on much the same subjects, but that book is nearly unreadable today --- it's written in PL/1 and FORTRAN IV. TPoP, aside from being written with modern programming languages, also contains insights from several decades more of the authors' experience.
-- The author in question is Brian Kernighan. Anyrate, I leave any interested person to go check the article out, if you haven't seen it already.
If you've been working as a programmer for 12 years it probably won't teach you too many new things, but if you've been working for 12 weeks it is a great book.
(not that its age should detract anything of course, I just found the obvious historic reference amusing).
Hound your incompetent IT department and say you need to search your email and you need Windows Search 4 installed on your machine instead of blaming a 6 year old product and a 8 year old operating system.
I haven't had a problem with Gmail search as described, but I would not classify it as fast. Often I'll type in a simple query and have it spend 10-20 seconds before it returns results. If I perform the same query on the same dataset in Spotlight in Mac OS X, it starts to return results instantly with the search completing within 5-10.