| A Day in the Life of a Starving Programmer |
OK, I do not look like I ever started a day in my life. I suppose if you do not include diets that is most likely true. Moving on...
Monday was a typical day. The alarm went off at 6:00 am. I had plenty of time to lounge around and get myself ready for work. After checking in on blogger a little it was time for a shower, shave and other various activities and then I was on my way in to work.
I arrived early and grabbed a quick breakfast sandwich from the snack shop in the building. Up to the office it was now time to plan my day.
It was kind of fun being back, having just returned from a weeks training. I was looking forward to continuing what I learned over the coming weeks. So I talked with my partner in crime at work a little while and then headed off to see what trouble I could get into.
All our batch processors looked great and I did not hear any of our users screaming so it was time to get down to work.
There are two of us that support this particular group of people at work. He was not up to anything critical so he came over with me to check on the install of programs we were going to use on Wednesday. Part of the system was brought up and, oh no, two machines were not upgraded. Not only that but, when the program was upgraded, it looked terrible on those machines.
Panic set in. I had less than 24 hours to get some type of solution in place and less than 48 hours to figure out what was wrong and fix it for real. I quickly found out the problem. Typically most IBM type computers run with the normal font set, but not these machines. They were using the large set. This was throwing off the program.
Back to the shop I spent 12 hours trying to track down the problem. I finally discovered that if I set machine to the new resolution, with a little effort I could compile a program that could only be run on the machines with the new resolution. I hated the solution but it would get me through the 24 hour deadline.
I called it a night just short of midnight, headed home, ate (see I was starving for a little while) and called it a night. Now one of the hazards of being a developer, at least for me, is that I never stop thinking about what I do. Sometime during the night I came up with a solution.
Morning came early and I went through the routine of getting into work. I slipped in and implemented the temporary solution so my first deadline would be met and then headed back to the office to see if I could not get this fixed properly.
Within the hour I had the fix programmed and ... IT FAILED! I went back to my buddy, the Internet. I did more research. Surely others were seeing the same problem in their developing environment that I was seeing. I could not be the first one to notice it. I mean this environment I am using is ten months old. Try as I might I could not find any other references to what I was seeing. Now there was lots of other things out there but not anything that applied.
Time for a new track. I reviewed the program. There was one of two things that could be causing the problem. I stock control or a custom control I wrote. I examined the stock control for properties that might help and I found 6 of them. I went through them and it did not seem to help. But one in particular got my attention. I looked up the method. This led to several other articles and then finally something that talked about how this new environment handled auto scaling. The more I read I knew I had found the problem.
OK, I board you long enough. I checked and my control was set to scale on font and not on screen resolution. I had no idea this feature even existed but 14 frustrating hours later I had my solution. A quick compile and install on one machine and 30 minutes of testing various screen resolutions I had the final fix.
The install went fairly quickly so we had to find something didn’t we, it is never that easy. We found three machines that were having problems starting. What a fun couple of days. Today we go live. The good news, I feel confident all will be well. Just the same I will be pacing as the day progresses. I can’t help it. Despite how cautious I usually am there is always the possibility I missed something. All I can say is it is good I double and triple check myself on the important items or we would have had problems today.
I hope your days goes as well as I am sure my day will go... I need a drink! I can’t wait for 5:00 pm.
What you see on these screens up here is a fantasy; a computer enhanced hallucination! --WarGames
Monday was a typical day. The alarm went off at 6:00 am. I had plenty of time to lounge around and get myself ready for work. After checking in on blogger a little it was time for a shower, shave and other various activities and then I was on my way in to work.
I arrived early and grabbed a quick breakfast sandwich from the snack shop in the building. Up to the office it was now time to plan my day.
It was kind of fun being back, having just returned from a weeks training. I was looking forward to continuing what I learned over the coming weeks. So I talked with my partner in crime at work a little while and then headed off to see what trouble I could get into.
All our batch processors looked great and I did not hear any of our users screaming so it was time to get down to work.
There are two of us that support this particular group of people at work. He was not up to anything critical so he came over with me to check on the install of programs we were going to use on Wednesday. Part of the system was brought up and, oh no, two machines were not upgraded. Not only that but, when the program was upgraded, it looked terrible on those machines.
Panic set in. I had less than 24 hours to get some type of solution in place and less than 48 hours to figure out what was wrong and fix it for real. I quickly found out the problem. Typically most IBM type computers run with the normal font set, but not these machines. They were using the large set. This was throwing off the program.
Back to the shop I spent 12 hours trying to track down the problem. I finally discovered that if I set machine to the new resolution, with a little effort I could compile a program that could only be run on the machines with the new resolution. I hated the solution but it would get me through the 24 hour deadline.
I called it a night just short of midnight, headed home, ate (see I was starving for a little while) and called it a night. Now one of the hazards of being a developer, at least for me, is that I never stop thinking about what I do. Sometime during the night I came up with a solution.
Morning came early and I went through the routine of getting into work. I slipped in and implemented the temporary solution so my first deadline would be met and then headed back to the office to see if I could not get this fixed properly.
Within the hour I had the fix programmed and ... IT FAILED! I went back to my buddy, the Internet. I did more research. Surely others were seeing the same problem in their developing environment that I was seeing. I could not be the first one to notice it. I mean this environment I am using is ten months old. Try as I might I could not find any other references to what I was seeing. Now there was lots of other things out there but not anything that applied.
Time for a new track. I reviewed the program. There was one of two things that could be causing the problem. I stock control or a custom control I wrote. I examined the stock control for properties that might help and I found 6 of them. I went through them and it did not seem to help. But one in particular got my attention. I looked up the method. This led to several other articles and then finally something that talked about how this new environment handled auto scaling. The more I read I knew I had found the problem.
OK, I board you long enough. I checked and my control was set to scale on font and not on screen resolution. I had no idea this feature even existed but 14 frustrating hours later I had my solution. A quick compile and install on one machine and 30 minutes of testing various screen resolutions I had the final fix.
The install went fairly quickly so we had to find something didn’t we, it is never that easy. We found three machines that were having problems starting. What a fun couple of days. Today we go live. The good news, I feel confident all will be well. Just the same I will be pacing as the day progresses. I can’t help it. Despite how cautious I usually am there is always the possibility I missed something. All I can say is it is good I double and triple check myself on the important items or we would have had problems today.
I hope your days goes as well as I am sure my day will go... I need a drink! I can’t wait for 5:00 pm.
What you see on these screens up here is a fantasy; a computer enhanced hallucination! --WarGames
Posted by barman at 7:45 AM::
Denny, I think my brain frooze too. Maybe that was the problem. I will try and keep such posts to a minimum. See, I told you I should tade it in for a nice post about poop.
WTG barman! or should I say Barman to the rescue!? Hope your day is going well.
You techies!
whenever i email the helpdesk they always have to ask a bunch of questions.
I finally realized that they can't just fix anything unless i tell them which direction to run in. And the good Lord forbid it be a web based program.
Sorry barman, but i'm angry at my helpdesk at the moment.
I love you though!
PSSST!
Early HNT at my place.
Manny, you would like where I work. Our help desk people do a good job and they don't just tell you to reboot your computer. Of course they are not the best about supporting our in house applications which I fault them for but, other then that, they are super. Oh by the way, have you ever tried to do help desk. It is not a fun thing.
Gab, my day was perfect. I was around the whole day the program was being used and no one even noticed (or they didn't say anything anyway, that the program had changed. That is a good thing. I was going for anonymous. Hey everybody, I AM NO BODY!!! Yea.
Post a Comment
<< Home