The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
Today is documentation day at the EBI, which means that all normal activities are suspended while people WTFM†. There's a reason why coders leave off documentation until the very end of a project. It's brain damaging.
†akin to RTFM. bur even more boring.
Die, struts, die! I fixed you, mwahahahahahahaha!
I need to figure out a timing bug in Struts, the evil webapp framework from hell. Timing issues are a bitch to resolve in the best of time, but in Struts, you'd prefer to have your appendix taken out with a rusty spoon while fully conscious.
I've been holed up in a small lecture hall for the past 2 days, listening to academics drone on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about their pet project.
Observation #1 about conferences:
I have to go back for it. I so don't want to.
I'm not having the best of days today. So far, I've done nothing productive. Not one damn thing. While trying to fix a small annoying bug, I managed to bring down the whole framework I'd been working on. I don't know how I did it but it takes talent to kill a whole server. *grumbles* I got everything back up and running, but the bug is still there. Since this is something only a small number of people use and very infrequently at that, it's going to on the backburner cause there are more important things to deal with. This was supposed to be a quick fix but ended up wasting the better part of my day.
What's also aggravating me is that I need to get a test version up and running so that we can beat the shit out of it with functional tests before it goes live. Unfortunately, it won't deploy. It should. Everything is there for it to be up and running. It just doesn't want to. Fuck it, I'm going for coffee.
The last few days have been rather uneventful, really. Work has been mostly aggravating, to be honest. We're at the point where we're testing the code in real-life scenarios with actual data and it's making gremlins pop out of the woodwork. I spent the whole day today wrestling with Oracle JDBC. We're trying to load data that has very long text blobs to load. We found this out the hard way when JDBC was complaining about strings above 4K. We then changed the back-end tables to handle CLOBS, but then we found that the oracle:thin driver didn't handle CLOBS above 4K, so that was rather useless too. We tried to switch to the oracle:oci driver, but that needs oracle client library binaries. I spent the afternoon trying to get a windows oracle installation to play nice with java ant under cygwin. Basically, I was asking for trouble. In the end, we gave up on my laptop and we got it to run on Phil's laptop (a native linux install) and lo and behold, everything worked. I'm happy that I got it to work, but I could have done without the aggravation.
On a completely different issue, I installed a wiki on my website (http://www.flubu.com) so I have a rapid sandbox for notes and such. It's basically the electronic equivalent of my little yellow post-it notes I always carry with me.
On a final issue, I have too active an imagination and this is going to bite me in the ass shortly. Katy's become obsessed with a TV series called Millenium (I got her the series on DVD). In the last few days, she's gotten through something like 10 hours od it. Some of the themes in the show give me the serious heebyjeebies. Not good.
I was supposed to have a day off to go to a rock memorabilia auction at Cheffins today. This has not happened and basically set the tone of my day.
The auction has been postponed until August 16th, so I decided to go to work rather than spend a day doing nothing in particular. That's where the badness began. I spent the day chasing gremlins in code I've been working on. Now granted, bugs are a fact of life but I wasn't in the mood to chase them down. It ended up being a quick fix – I'd zigged when I should've zagged – but it took a while to chase down and ended up giving me a headache.
That's when the email conversation from hell started, which really added just that perfect touch to a rotten day. Over a series of emails of increasing hostility, I've been told that I'm cheap, rude, obnoxious and egotistical. That's always nice to hear. I promised that that conversation is over for today, which is probably for the best because I have rather a lot of anger in me right now.
On a completely different note, I love my sweetie.
Quote of the day:
I'm really my daddy's girl.
Why?
Cause I really need to pee but I have to dry these dishes first.
I'm testing the loader code I've been working on for the past week. For the past 28 minutes, java has been using 100% of my CPU and about 500MB of RAM to do its number crunching. If all goes well, in just over an hour and a half, it'll be done. If all doesn't go well, it'll blow up in 1:28 hours….
Update: it's now later and, as expected, it blew up. What's annoying as hell is that it blew up somewhere unexpected, not where I wanted to test it!!! GAH!
2nd update: Ahem, I rock. I've just increased my code performance by 1000fold. Instead of taking 17s to parse 50 records, it now takes 15ms. Everything is now safe and sound and loaded in the database. I am a happy bunny.
It's 12:45 and I haven't done jack shit productive today. The magic 8-ball says that the outlook ain't bright for anything better to happen either.
It's 11:30 and I've been dealing with paperwork and forms for the past 2 hours.
We are not amused.