after 3.5 hours of sleep, a triumph

[sergebroom]

We had a database problem last night so I had to stay up until 2:30am. I woke up at 6am and, not long after that was hit by another problem - this one caused by a user having entered screwy data. I thought I'd have to wait until the end of the ongoing processing to implement my potentially lengthy solution, so I cleaned the house and ran errands while trying to stay awake. Then something occurred to me and less than 30 minutes later I had fixed the problem.

This is the kind of situation that reminds me I'm not stupid.

Comments

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Many years ago when I was doing QA on comm for SIGINT, we actually had programmers who designed the program so if anybody put in the wrong kind of character or data, the program crashed. Of course, from their point of view, they were making it perfect and the sailors were wrong. I truly hated finding those errors when we were already late for delivery because the programmers took too long.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

In this case, there is a specific business situation where this kind of data can be allowed. Unfortunately, this wasn't that kind of situation. Next time the user tries to do that, I'll strongly suggest making SURE that is the permissible situation.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Ah, that sounds like a good idea.

We had a programmer who put in a program that had random obscene Helen Keller joke popups. He wouldn't tell us where they were so he got fired and we had to start from a much earlier backup and keep installing. We tried to use his notes, but they were in Hungarian and we couldn't find a Hungarian translator with the right level of classification.

The next defense contractor I worked for, I was doing QA on the comm for the Tomahawk missiles that are flying now. It's been a long time and I'm sure the comm has changed a lot from the time when there were only stand-alone word processors!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

"...We tried to use his notes, but they were in Hungarian..."

And this was in Defense?
Goodness.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

We were a contractor working for the Navy. His parents had immigrated and they never really learned English, but he knew both. He almost certainly wrote his notes that way so companies would rethink firing him.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Didn't quite work out that way. :-)