Mpsig November 2Nd, 2013

7 War Stories & a MoralJohn Ashmead

Informix Stored Procedure Template

✤ Stored procedure -- about 100 lines long & did nothing!

✤ Standard comments!

✤ Standard security checks!

✤ Logged that it ran!

✤ Copy & hack!

✤ Most useful thing I did at 1838 apparently???

Reading the meta data

✤ All the foreign keys are in the meta data!

✤ Most stored procedures are just joins & a few fields!

✤ So give it the tables & it can lookup the join keys!

✤ Generated 100K lines in < 2 minutes!

✤ 90% useable, 8% good starting point, 2% -- what is life without work?!

✤ Two month contract done in 3 days

How to lie to the software

✤ Only four fonts; needed eight!

✤ Needed only four at one time, however! Did have to use the font tables!

✤ So, just mapped the four we needed on the way in & back on the way out.!

✤ Wrote a shell script to lie systematically!

✤ Got idea at 11:30 am on a Saturday in a garden

Brain damaged co-worker

✤ Had negative typing speed!

✤ Wrote a 4 up address program he couldn’t screw up!

✤ So he formatted our journal articles using it!!

✤ Finally gave up & just put him in front of a pile of envelopes

File system checker

✤ Checked for overlaps, not in backups, & so on!

✤ 1000 lines, written in a single day. !

✤ One bug, co-worker worked it out!

✤ Had every setting known to be needed by man!

✤ Operators said they needed just one: fix it!

The report of many colors

✤ 60% hit rate on video; should have gotten 90%!

✤ four departments each pointing the finger in three directions!

✤ Wrote report of: of 100 going in to your stage, what % escaped? Red, yellow, green!

✤ Turned out the damage about equally spread out!

✤ A great silence descended on the company or at least the four departments

Falling off the edge of the world

✤ Idiot switchers kept overflowing their 64K buffers!

✤ Had trouble calling home when the satellite told them to!

✤ Wrote a report: switchers at the edge of the world, with those most delinquent in orange & red!

✤ Wrote a mad-polling script to hammer them. Operators loved this!

✤ Tweaked continuously

Twelve for one

✤ Previous programmer had died; moonlighting IRS agent.!

✤ 12 copies of main report; 3 minute gaps on ideas, 11 edits would be right!

✤ Told lab director, I can do it the same way. Or I can spend two days consolidating using “make” & “m4”, so there is really only one report!

✤ Take the two days!

And a Moral

✤ Know the tech!

✤ Know the business!

✤ Take a walk in the garden