When I wrote the first entry to this diary, I planned to follow it up reasonably regularly. I didn't, but that is partly because I spent most of December on vacation. The new year seems like a good time to try again.

So to begin with, a few impressions gathered during that vacation.

• For two weeks, I played at being a tourist in London and England, the city and country I lived in for most my life, doing all the tourist highlights. England really is an expensive place to be a tourist, but overall seemed decent value for money.
• I drove a lot. I hadn't driven for almost 2 years, and wondered how I would find it. It was fun. The roads were clear, the weather was good, and I was driving through some pleasant places, which probably had a lot to do with it being fun.
• I spent Christmas with my parents in London. I wasn't there last year, and missed it greatly. There is something strangely magical about watching TV with a full stomach and a decorated piece of tree in the room.
• I returned to Moscow, where I now live, shortly before the new year. Three weeks away was enough to restore the sense of foreignness I felt when I first came here, the feeling was short lived.

slamb responds to my post on debuggers, and distinguishes between the different ways in which debuggers can be used.

I agree. In my previous post, I was referring to debuggers as tools for single stepping a running program, inspecting data, setting breakpints and watchpoints, etc. When programming in C and C++, I did use debuggers as slamb describes: for obtaining stack traces upon segfaults. But in the last couple of years, the majority of my development has been in Java, where exception stack traces make use of a debugger for this purpose unnecessary. And before that, when I was mostly programming in C, I implemented a simple stack trace facility, a bit like the glibc libSegFault or the Linux kernel Oops reports, and used it in a few projects (multithreaded programs, since at that time on Linux, threads and gdb did not mix well, and multithreaded core files did not work at all).

So I was referring to debuggers in a particular sense, but in my defence, I think the same sense was used in the articles which I linked to.