Finding bugs automatically

A colleague pointed me at a tool called LLVM/Clang static analyzer which is supposed to find bugs in code automatically. I was skeptical at first as how could it do it? Well, after running it on a few projects, I quickly became a believer! While it finds some stuff that isn't technically bugs, it did catch a number of memory leaks that I'm actually ashamed to have found in my code. Some of my old crufty code had leaks in it and a few places where I misunderstood memory allocation caused me to revisit them (turns out that most of the sample code I've found dealing with NSManagedObject subclasses also has memory leaks). I'm going to make sure to run this on all my projects; I need to put a better front end on it so I don't always have to type in the command and remember the syntax.

It took me awhile to get it to say that some of my projects were "bug free"; it uses function names as indicators as what should retain memory and what should not. There was a function GetSomeValue which returned a CFStringRef that had to be released by the caller. CF convention says that the caller does not have to release an object if the function name has get in it. I had to switch the name of the function to CopySomeValue as CF convention says that the caller must release an object that has copy or create in it.

Cycle of fuel costs

The price of oil took a nice nose dive today. The news says that this is in part to expected higher inflation which is attributed to higher fuel costs thus lowering demand. If the price of fuel decreases because of this, will people use more fuel and therefore drive the price of oil up again? While I hope not, thinking about that kind of cycle makes my head spin.

More AT&T Fun

So now that my voicemail is turned off on AT&T, I decided to look at call forwarding to forward my calls when I don't answer the phone. In AT&T's online phone manager, it clearly says that it will forward calls when I don't answer the phone (see picture below).

Unfortunately this isn't true; it immediately forwards the calls and only rings my number after the other number has picked up (I tried forwarding to my JConnect number) which makes call forwarding useless to me. I could get the call forwarding on busy service, but that's another $5 per month. It looks like I'm going back to Costco to look at new phones or just find a cheap answering machine. Did I make a mistake switching from MCI? I sure hope not.

Battling the phone company

So I switched us to AT&T to save a few bucks. I received the first bill and saw a charge of $8.95 for voicemail + $19.95 activation. Hmmm...I didn't want to pay this and called them. They turned off voicemail, but won't credit me for the activation. I argued that adding voicemail wasn't an option online and got no where. A manager is supposed to call me back and discuss this. I'm not sure why it is so hard to credit me $20 when it is a failure of their system. The only thing I had written on the order is a comment that I'd like to be able to add voicemail; it wasn't an option when I signed up and the cost was never revealed to me. As you can clearly see by the online confirmation that I saved, the extra charge is never listed.

Why is it so hard to deal with phone companies? First MCI didn't attempt to keep me as a customer, now AT&T doesn't seem to care about customers, either.