"This software will crash Real Soon Now™. Promise!" (02 Sep 2009)

Yes, that's right; CoCreate Modeling was supposed to alert the user before an actual crash was about to happen - by applying rocket-science dynamic program analysis and prediction techniques, sacrificing chicken and roasting them on Intel CPUs, or by having programmers dance naked around bonfires of compiler manuals. Whatever it would take.

No doubt that such a feature would be highly valuable. Imagine working on a model for several hours, and then you drive the application into a crash, and both the application and your model data disappear forever. If you could predict the crash, you'd save everybody a whole lot of time and money. Oh, and with such code, you'd always win the lottery, too. How convenient

Fortunately, CoCreate Modeling has always had pretty elaborate crash handling mechanisms. Whenever an unexpected exception occurs, a top-level crash handler catches it, pops up a message describing the problem, causes the current operation to be undone, restores the 3D model to a (hopefully) consistent state, and returns the user to the interactive top-level loop so that s/he can save the model before restarting.

Over time, we taught our crash handler to deal with more and more critical situations. (Catching stack overflows and multithreading scenarios are particularly tricky.) Hence, users rarely lose data in CoCreate Modeling even if some piece of code crashes. Which pretty much obviates the need for the proposed clairvoyance module.

PS: OK, so you found me out. The truth is that I did implement that clairvoyance module back then, hid it from my employer, and used it to win the lottery. I gambled cautiously in the beginning, winning only a couple of bucks allowing me to pay my provider for this web site. By now, I take higher risks, and it pays well. Last month, for example, I bought most parts of Barcelona. Film at 11.