The 420
I heard your radio show the other day and decided to take your advice. You were talking about implementing a reward system for your kids to incent them to do chores, homework, etc. Unfortunately, I'm typing this from the prison library because the authorities didn't agree with you. It seems that they don't care about educational improvement or about innovative moms who have crushes on certain radio geniuses. I mentioned your name a lot, but to no avail. They still locked me up, just for giving my son a little pot whenever he finished his homework. I'll tell you this: They ought to make a commercial where the kid's grades actually go up and the bond between mother & son is strengthened, all because of an investment in some marijuana. Why is everyone so obtuse (to quote a fellow inmate)?First of all, that "fellow inmate" was Tim Robbins from The ShawShank Redemption, and your quote is way off. Second of all, don't ever mention my name again. Third of all, how big of a crush do you have on me?
posted by Lawrence A. Fing @ 12:00 PM
1 Comments:
Hotpants Bomb #442
The case of the mysterious printout
Not a week goes by without some little problem to remind us of Mr Hotpants. He's been gone 4 or 5 months already, but his code lives on, it endures forever.
We're currently testing programs for a new warehouse in the Middle East and we get a love letter from the Netherlanders as we're leaving work on Friday.
"We just got an Inventory printout for what we assume is a test-case on a Live printer. While you guys are testing stuff, don't send the data to our LIVE printer, please! Mvg."
Ooops, that definitely shouldn't be happening. All printouts should be calling a Printer Control program and then that program directs printouts to the appropriate location. All Printers in the Test environment are just set to System Spool files so nothing comes out.
This has got Hotpants written all over it.
And sure enough, we trace the problem back to some beautiful code that writes directly to a Live Printer. Hotpants. He was too busy (read: lazy, buffoonish, incompetant) to set it up with the Printer Administration program so he just wrote directly to it. What this means is that if local staff ever wants to change the name of their printer, set up an additional printer, or print out to more than one location, the program that calls the printer directly will become useless. Best case scenerio is that it would spit out an unintelligeable error. Worst case scenerio is that program just stops printing, nobody notices it for days, and then we have a backlog of bad data to clean up. Or, in this case, we accidentally print out test data and local staff commences live operation based on that test data.
Luckily, they caught it, knew it was test data and then informed us. Now we can defuse this particular bomb without having to have witnessed it's destructive effects. Thank you Jesus.
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