My latest project is forcing me to learn all about Web services in a very short period of time.
Good.
I’ve been wanting to work with SOAP for years now, and signs suggest that’s where the IT industry is headed. (No, it’s not there yet, believe it or not.) I could be securing myself a job for the next decade. An interesting one, even.
Read more...You know you've officially been corrupted when...
…you see the Reuters headline “Crack found in space shuttle foam insulation”, and your first thought is that one of the astronauts must have wanted to bring his stash with him.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060703/ts_nm/space_shuttle_crack_dc
Read more...Slap to forehead...
I’ve been trying to figure out why the new features in yesterday’s software release wasn’t working - at all.
-I checked the release checksums (which tell you that the files installed are the versions you think they are). They matched. -I re-ran my unit tests to see if the new features worked in development. They did. -I pored over the source code to see what could have caused it to fail in production. I didn’t find anything. -Eventually, I was trying pretty much random stuff - I went to the production server and looked at the date on the executable file. …April 3rd?!
Finally, after more searching, I figured it out - Operations had installed the new version correctly… on the wrong server. Per my instructions.
My release scripts auto-generate deployment instructions (because you can only type the damn thing so many times before you want to kick in your monitor). I had copied the config from a different project, without changing the server name.
Tiny mistake, made to look very big by our tedious release process. When do I get to just sit down and write code again?
Read more...Flickr Favorites...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nephariuz/favorites/
Read more...The Sofa Incident
.flickr-photo { border: solid 1px #000000; }.flickr-frame { float: right; text-align: center; margin-left: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }<div class="flickr-frame"> 
The Sofa Incident,
originally uploaded by nephariuz. </div>Our couch has a recliner seat, and one afternoon I found something
sticking out of it. Still not sure how this happened.