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Along with the wheat in disguise, on Wednesday I also picked up one of the glossy brown snack cakes with some Chinese character in red dye on them at Mountain View Market, after being assured that it was just rice flour and brown sugar. Not knowing how much it weighed, I set it aside and gobbled 2 packs of haw flakes instead — and spent the next half hour nodding off at my keyboard. When will I ever learn?
It was about the size of a hockey puck, with a dense consistency that hinted at a startlingly high food value. I didn't bother to look up the Chinese character, but with the benefit of hindsight I'm guessing it had something to do with the new year. At home, the cake weighed in at 215 grams, which doesn't seem like much until you consider that it is a single solid lump of flour and sugar. Sugar is about 3.75 calories per gram, and rice flour isn't much less. So, this one snack cake is good for about 800 calories. Maybe some of it is water, but then, maybe some of it is vegetable oil, so I think I'll let sleeping ingredients lie.
I had it as my sole and entire snack at work on Thursday, and it was pretty good, if a little on the bland side.
Work, by the way, was yet another exercise in madness. A coworker and I spent an invigorating few hours screening errors reported by a run-time checking tool. Our testing department had helpfully omitted any mention of exactly when the tests had run, or what the state of the build was at the time, so that tracking down the actual location in each source file mentioned in the error reports was like dating tree rings. Eventually we determined that at least some of the errors were from a run against a build from about 5 months ago. I greatly fear that it will take as long again to get the testing department to do another run with the right compile options.
Later I spent about an hour going over the prospects for finding and fixing a bug that was causing mysterious crashes. The bug is actually the result of a discussion from, let's see, 3 years ago, which I render approximately here:
Zelda (middle manager): Is this really necessary to get the test suite to pass?
Me: No. (Defect) won't cause many problems until later, when
customers try to actually use it.
Zelda: What kinds of problems?
Me: Probably it'll crash for no apparent reason, each case requiring days
to debug.
No prizes for guessing what we did. Sigh.