![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The day after the class before
Dec. 6th, 2005 09:33 amWent to class.. and mostly good things. (A) I am definitely NOT the most behind. At least three other folks are noticeably less done than me. One of the three has a major clue-gap. (B) I am not suffering from clue-impairment (IMO), I am suffering from Making Problem Too Hard Syndrome, I now have an easier way. (C) The teacher is pushing "means to an end" as an approach. If I can make it work, I'm golden. If that means hacking the system to do things an operating system normally wouldn't be able to do - that may be OK. Especially if I document why I did the travesty that I did.
( Cut to protect the non-geeks. This is really, really geeky. )
Ah well... another fun day at work. Yesterday WAS actually kind of fun. I finally got to play with this peice of software my customer developed. I wrote a paper LAST WEEK on how we might integrate this software into our system. Do you see the logical flaw here? Wouldn't it be nice if the person writing the paper had actually used the software she was writing about? No... that's just crazy talk. I wrote the paper based on what my boss told me the software did, and based on what the two developers who had come by the week before to install the software said about it. They were not sucessful in said installation - we had connectivity issues which got resolved while I was writing said paper. This really is very pointy-hair boss-like.
But... I got to play yesterday. And, true to form, I took 10 minutes and got it to throw a nullPointerException. In coder-land this is really bad juju. If this were C/C++ the program would have crashed. In Java, it is rather like hiccuping and accidentally bringing up a hippopatamus. You kind of wonder if life goes on after something like that. Glad to see that my legendary I Can Break Anything skills are still in force. I did warn the customer that I could break *anything*, and maybe they didn't want me to play with their precious thingy. But they felt sure I couldn't do anything nasty to it. I really am why we can't have nice things.
That said, it really is a pretty swell thingy. I don't love its architecture - but it does what it's supposed to do pretty darn well. The fact that it took a pretty big licking from me, and kept on ticking really does say something. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't bring it to a Will Never Be the Same Again state. I'm like the gorilla with the suitcase. If the suitcase is still suitcase-shaped and closed with stuff in it when the gorilla is done with it, it's a pretty good suitcase. It doesn't matter if it has a few dings - after all, it was a GORILLA.
Fear the giant Lakshmi.
( Cut to protect the non-geeks. This is really, really geeky. )
Ah well... another fun day at work. Yesterday WAS actually kind of fun. I finally got to play with this peice of software my customer developed. I wrote a paper LAST WEEK on how we might integrate this software into our system. Do you see the logical flaw here? Wouldn't it be nice if the person writing the paper had actually used the software she was writing about? No... that's just crazy talk. I wrote the paper based on what my boss told me the software did, and based on what the two developers who had come by the week before to install the software said about it. They were not sucessful in said installation - we had connectivity issues which got resolved while I was writing said paper. This really is very pointy-hair boss-like.
But... I got to play yesterday. And, true to form, I took 10 minutes and got it to throw a nullPointerException. In coder-land this is really bad juju. If this were C/C++ the program would have crashed. In Java, it is rather like hiccuping and accidentally bringing up a hippopatamus. You kind of wonder if life goes on after something like that. Glad to see that my legendary I Can Break Anything skills are still in force. I did warn the customer that I could break *anything*, and maybe they didn't want me to play with their precious thingy. But they felt sure I couldn't do anything nasty to it. I really am why we can't have nice things.
That said, it really is a pretty swell thingy. I don't love its architecture - but it does what it's supposed to do pretty darn well. The fact that it took a pretty big licking from me, and kept on ticking really does say something. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't bring it to a Will Never Be the Same Again state. I'm like the gorilla with the suitcase. If the suitcase is still suitcase-shaped and closed with stuff in it when the gorilla is done with it, it's a pretty good suitcase. It doesn't matter if it has a few dings - after all, it was a GORILLA.
Fear the giant Lakshmi.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}