Bricks Without Straw

I just returned from a little six-day holiday in Oregon, where moody grey days are offset by brilliant sunny ones and the constant breeze freshens your skin with salty air. It wasn't a perfect vacation - no matter where I go, work seems to haunt me like a zombie corpse - but I did manage to finish reading Peter Straub's A Dark Matter and then got well into Jo Nesbo's Nemesis . (I like a wide variety of reading material; what can I say?)

I was reading Electric Spec's interview with Robert Sawyer , and paused over his comment regarding his WWW trilogy's Webmind character as being the hardest writing task he'd ever set for himself. That made me wonder about my own hard tasks. So, here's a quick rundown, unprioritized, of writing tasks of all sorts, set by myself or someone else, that were sometimes insurmountably difficult, and often resulted in failure.

One: strtok().  See, the thing about strtok() (we're talking c here) is that you can't call this function when it's being used elsewhere. Say you have a function: void DoSomething(void) {       char MyString[] = "Hello all you people";       char seps[] " ";       char *token;       // get the first token in a string:       token = strtok(MyString,seps);       printf("token: %s\n",token);      while (token!=NULL) {            token = strtok(NULL,seps);            printf("token: %s\n",token);       } } All well and good. But, say you're in another module of code and want to use strtok() again,  called from a function within your DoSomething() function: void DoSomething...

Well, this is a first for me. I've resisted blogging for so long, hoping, I guess, that the medium would be just another passing fad. Ah, wrong again, it would seem. Why "Bricks Without Straw"? First, because if there's a hard way to do something, I'll probably find it. You see, in old-time brick-making, you could not make strong bricks without adding organic material like straw. When Pharaoh tells the Israelites they must gather their own straw, and still produce the same output of bricks every day, Moses complains, but the complaint resolves nothing. The idiom " bricks without straw " implies having to do something without appropriate resources. Second, when we were forming Metaformix Information Systems Inc. back in 1999, "Bricks From Straw Software" was one of the proposed names. So, while that wasn't really a saying in its own right, the idea behind it was that having "the right straw" we could help you "make bric...