Fri, Dec 14, 2007
Brain on Strike
Posted to Code category
I'm not at the concert tonight. The weather is being messy enough that driving home would have been a a little scary, especially since I was up past midnight coding.
About two years ago, I made some major modifications to a program that the company sold to a couple of our customers. When I shifted over to other projects I zipped up a package of the software and it sat on the metaphorical shelf.
This year, unexpectedly, a customer asked to buy the package (which we were not actively marketing) so we gave them a copy of the package, which turned out to be corrupt. The newest versions of some of the files in the package were truncated.
All of my newest archival copies had the same truncation. The laptop I was using at the time had some memory problems and was sort of limping along: I suspect that was how the code got eaten.
Fortunately, I had a set of working files for a slightly older version of the package that had not been truncated (and were copied onto this laptop when I started using it).
So I've been working on recreating the package we thought we had for sale from the truncated pieces patched with chunks of the older code.
I worked on it this afternoon, too. (My on-site client only wants me in the mornings on Fridays.) I've done some tweaking and tuning while I was at it.
I should be working on it now, but my brain went on strike a couple of hours ago. I can be very productive with a very tight focus for long hours, but eventually I hit a wall and need a change of pace.
I'll get back to actual coding tomorrow, in between buying and setting up a Christmas tree if the weather cooperates. Most of the primary functionality is there: the bits I know I still need to work on are error handling, and a secondary operation mode that uses CGI.
Maybe I'll at least inventory the CGI scripts this evening and review the docs on how they are supposed to work.
One reaction I had to this mess: yesterday I used rsync to back up the home partition of this laptop to my server. It took all day, but future backups will be faster: I don't change that much from day to day, or even week to week. (And some of the changes I make are effectively backed up on my ISP's web server...)
Note: I make my /home partition large and I have data that needs to be backed up stored on the /home tree even if that isn't its normal home. For example: the data for the local web site I use when developing web apps is at /var/www (the normal location), but most of the directories that actually hold data are linked form /home/www.
I also have a /home/images, where my photos, etc., live and a /home/fonts directory for the good Adobe fonts and other commercial fonts I bought years ago. The fonts migrate from PC to PC as the machines die. If I ever needed to reload them from floppy, I would need to buy a floppy drive for one of my current machines, and hope that the floppies are still good.