Re: Is this Recovery? Doesn't feel like it.

The Flying Guinea Pig <qnaprfjvgupebjf@xxxxxxx> writes:

God Of Workplace Harmony scribbled thusly:
dan.birchall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dan Birchall) wrote:
... by conslutants, using MSexchange, in theory.

"You didn't get my note about taking that day off? I used Outlook to
put it on your calendar, just like the insultants told us we could
do."

I was wondering whether we'd end up with -32768 hours of vacation, and
exactly how people's brains would break trying to deal with that.

Once, when I was a programmer, I got a bug report in our Hideous Bug
Tracking System submitted by my friend[1] down in the testing lab,
saying something like "When I put -32768 into this input box something
weird happens. Why is that number special?"

I groan and hunt down the spot in the code where I wasn't handing a sign
extension properly and fix it, and then go back into HTBS and marked it
fixed[2] with the comment "You know damn well why that number is
special."

This was not very long before I saw him and he said, of another project
in testing, "If only I could run a debugger on this thing I could tell
the programmers what they need to fix." I told him that he had clearly
outgrown his position in the testing department and needed to move on.

That was many years ago. In his most recent communication with me, he
quoted a message from some chirpy brainless HR drone who, to commemorate
his massive output of overtime in some awful-sounding death march
programming project, gave him a "You Rock! Award". "Words cannot
describe how this makes me feel," he said.

[1] Folks here might recognize his sigquote "We live in the interface
between radioactive molten rock and hard vacuum and we worry about
safety."

[2] I had developed a reputation for actually fixing the bugs that were
reported by testing, in contrast with another project group that sent
testing a significant number of builds that would crash on startup, and
having an order of magnitude more bugs logged on their project, a large
proportion of which were left unfixed when it finally shipped[3].
Admittedly my project was not quite as large as theirs.

[3] One of which came back to bite me later when I later worked on its
German conversion. I ended up spending at least two or three days
laboriously debugging an issue that turned out to be a matter of code
allocating n+8 bytes of memory and writing n+10 bytes into it, and by
sheer luck surviving in the original product because of the granularity
of the memory allocator and the specific values of n chosen. I happened
to hit on a bad value of n very early on. The original programmer
seemed a bit puzzled when I went to his office and ranted about that to
him for a while.

--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
stevev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
.

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