journey down (computer) Memory Lane

[sergebroom]

Yesterday was a journey down Memory Lane, I guess.

I cooked up a COBOL program from scratch, for the first time in years. You see, there's this mainframe system that I set up in October 1995 and we've been asked to have it process some additional feeds. The feed providers couldn't guarantee that there would be no overlap between those new feeds and their existing North-American counterparts, and such duplicates, if allowed thru, would cause the system to fail, and the mainframe operators to page our team's oncall person, who'd then have to contact me. So as to prevent interruptions of the team's overall allotment of beauty sleep, I thought it might be a good idea to clean up the merged data before passing it on to the rest of our mainframe system, and the best way to do so was a COBOL program.

Maybe I shouldn't say so, but...
I liked it.

Kinky, eh?

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

What does the program do?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, it merges the American feed with the other country's feed. If, for example, there is customer-specific information for the same customer in both feeds, the customer information from the American feed is what we use as part of our processing. It really is a simple logic, but it had been such a long time since I had cooked up that kind of logic that I actually had to think about it.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay. I hope it was fun to write.

[sajia.livejournal.com]

Off-topic: I got your books. Er, kind of.
See, what happened was, I wasn't at home to pick up the parcel, so it got returned to the post office. When I got the message on my mailbox I thought my ma had sent me some clothes or something light like that. And the post office is a mile away. So on my way back from a couple of appointments I stopped by. The box weighs 22 pounds. I barely make it to the end of the block before I go back and I beg the clerk to let me come back for it another day, when I've brought my cart. That was three hours ago.
Well, thank you. By the way, what's Susan's last name? I forgot what it was, I've been looking for her books in the libraries.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oops. I should have mentionned that the box wasn't exactly full of air. My apologies for the oversight, Sajia. I hope you find something in there that'll interest you. With a total of 22 pounds, there's got to be. As for the rest, well, maybe you can get a few dollars from selling them to a used-book store.

As for my wife, go to www.susankrinard.com and you'll know everything there is to know about her stories. Well, almost everything. I've got a few updates ready to implement on her site, but overall, all her current publications are listed.