[Gllug] Re: [ignore] partition table screwup

[John Hearns]

On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 05:43 -0500, Andrew Farnsworth wrote:

> 
> You have discovered what is commonly called "Confessional Debugging".  When faced with a problem you cannot seem to solve (or are in panic mode about), sitting down and explaining it to someone while trying to get help will almost always show you the correct answer without any help.  Your email to the list was one way of doing this and it keyed you into the solution.  If you want to see a really weird variation of this, grab your mother[1] and "confess" to her what is wrong and you will be amazed it works.  For a step further along the weird scale, grab your dog. ;-)
> 
Indeed.
My first computer science lecturer, Dr. Jennifer Hazelgrove taught us
this in the first lecture.
She said to talk someone  through each step of your program, and
suggested the cat as an (un)willing victim.
We were also taught top-down programming by setting out the steps to
make a cup of tea. Computers being notoriously unable to make a decent
cuppa.

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