new things good, old things bad!

if that sounds decidedly orwellian, it is.

I'm now working with a certain team where the idea "new is good" is highly promoted. As a result, they are willing to throw away code that has been used for ages just to try to put in new stuff (without showing that the new prototype works)

unfortunately, the proposed changes have the potential to create big ripple effects - the picture i had in mind was more of a tidal wave - and that was overlooked by "oh, so? we want to fix the problem, right?"

we do want to fix the problem. but not by introducing new ones. and not before we can prove that we can fix a problem. get a working prototype that work before telling the old model to "go forth, be fruitful and multiply".

..as i seem to remember, the titanic was new when it sank..

The raiders of the lost language

After having read a few more pages of that hellish document, I've concluded that english has been raided and no survivors remain.

It can't get any worse. No Siree!

English - the lost language

I spent the last working hours of last week lamenting over a technical document written by the "consultant firm" engaged to relieve us engineers of the chore.

I was rather amazed by the text and lack of attention that the writer had: after all, how much effort would it take to attempt to rephrase a sentence? In addition, while the informal "you" can be rather charming in a personal letter, it is out of place in a technical document - even if it is a user guide.

To add to my list of gripes, I'm supposed to be an ape-like engineer whose main strength is engineering (and creating buggy software). Grammatic-wise, "urgh, OG OG OG! " is supposed to be as far as it gets for my type. If I can spot some strange things in the document, isn't it about time for it to be revised?

its obvious that that the writer is not going to be a patron saint of the english language (nor for quality work).

he's back!

unfortunately, he had a very good vacation. meaning that he forgot the work he did, and even needed some help with his password. wish i had such great vacations.

thankfully, things are more or less settled down, except for a bug which was right up his alley. unfortunately, my program was the medium in which the bug manifested itself - so I'm involved in a fool's errand to try to figure out what went wrong.

to make life abit more interesting, the same software + configuration worked on our official testing environment, but failed on our sand-box environment. so we have abit of guess work here: was the software faulty but somehow miraculously worked in the testing environment? or is the sandbox leaking sand?

either way, its not pretty.

I was about to write the following statements and pasting it to the relevant server:
danger: this server is inhabited
1. don't expose to bright lights
2. don't let them get wet
3. never ever feed them after midnight.


as what Randy Newman sang in "toy story", "strange things are happening"