Software Astrology

Reprinted from http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2008/11/30/introducing-build-date-astrology/

I often hear about cosmic mysteries or influences when problems happen in computer environments. Passing by an astrology section in a local book shop yesterday a revelation came to me that a compile / link time (build time) might influence a component (DLL, EXE, SYS files), product or system behaviour. From now on I’m going to blog about every build date with examples. And as usual, I’m also going to publish a book for this iterative and incremental activity called:

Title: The Secret Language of Build Dates: Unique Astrology Profiles for Every Build of the Year with Advice on Testing, Troubleshooting and Debugging
ISBN: 978-1906717407

Knowing build dates will help you to test, troubleshoot and even debug software in hopeless cases where you don’t know where to start. Astrology will help you to choose a random direction! Finally the output of WinDbg lmv command has more sense to me

- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareAstrology.com -

It all happened at once when I was analyzing a memory dump from one computer system. The horrors of that computation were haunting me since I visited an astrology section in a local bookshop and conceived the concept of build date astrology. It was still haunting me when I suddenly realized the hidden meaning of astrology. The result of this haunting is the concept of software astrology and the following book is planned to address this gap:

Software Astrology: An Introduction (ISBN: 978-1906717414)

Please do not mistake software astrology with astrology software. This the same difference as software science vs. science software.

Some might say that software astrology is pure anthropomorphism. I would say this is the other side of applying a computer metaphor to human brains and a machine metaphor to Life. This is just one example of the so called metaphorical bijections. If we can go in one direction why not to try the very opposite and apply human characteristics and relationships to software? And have some fun…

- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareAstrology.com -