A diary of problems and solutions

It just hit me. Often times I spend 2, 4 hours or even a day killing myself with one little issue in my programs. Be it a documentation snafoo on the libraries, a problem with an algorithm, or a misconception about a language feature. What's common among those is that they are very obscure corner cases, ones that don't even get solved by the best web search available. If the answers were spelled out in the web somewhere, I could have spent those investigation hours being productive and writing code.

I can't prove it, but I have a feeling that most people have the same problems and they usually solve them - I usually do - , because everything always works out in the end. But that does not help anyone else, because that solution becomes a lunchtime anecdote at best. So here's my tiny contribution to solve that. Every time that I get stuck with something, I'll post here on how I detangled myself.

With enough luck the search engines will do a good enough job of surfacing those little gold nuggets of information to those in need.

I don't expect this post to be particularly useful to anyone, just to give some context, in the case this collection of random problem and solutions ever get some page view love, so let's keep it short and wait for the first nugget :-)