''
I'm working on it, Sandra. Patience...
There are days when I hate working with computers. Today has been one of them.
A few years ago I built a simple on-line database, using MySQL, PHP, bits of sticky-back plastic and the cardboard insides of used toilet rolls. It was a thing of beauty, until the people who had asked me to build it decided they wanted it to do more. Of course, they bribed me with money, so I complied, letting my perfect creation grow larger and larger, disfigured by unnecessary sub-routines and awkward bodges to accommodate earlier revisions. Deep inside there, the pure elegance of the original work still exists, but it's smothered in layer after layer of accumulated complexity until my eyes glaze over just looking at the function libraries.
To add insult to injury, the server on which this database lived was declared a dead thing recently, and consigned to the scrapheap. A shiny new server was provided and my Frankenstein creation was copied over like some off-the-shelf programme. Diva that she is, she refused to work.
For some reason, the website no longer wished to talk to the database. When they were on two different servers this wasn't a problem, but something about sharing the same hard-drive lead to sulking and mulishness. Today, after much banging together of heads, they finally agreed to co-operate. Which would be nice, except that the old server was running an early, experimental version of PHP, and the new one is all singing and dancing version 4*. Bits of my lovingly crafted code no longer seemed to work properly.
And so today has been an exercise in migraine-inducing eye-strain. I've been wading through endless lines of incomprehensible code, in Notepad over a remote desktop connection, removing inverted commas from some variable names and putting them around others. Don't ask me why that works, I haven't a clue. It does, and that's all I need to know.
Tomorrow I get to do the other half of the site.
Joy.
* OK, so spangly new is version 5 - but we're talking university computing here, you can't expect miracles.
There are days when I hate working with computers. Today has been one of them.
A few years ago I built a simple on-line database, using MySQL, PHP, bits of sticky-back plastic and the cardboard insides of used toilet rolls. It was a thing of beauty, until the people who had asked me to build it decided they wanted it to do more. Of course, they bribed me with money, so I complied, letting my perfect creation grow larger and larger, disfigured by unnecessary sub-routines and awkward bodges to accommodate earlier revisions. Deep inside there, the pure elegance of the original work still exists, but it's smothered in layer after layer of accumulated complexity until my eyes glaze over just looking at the function libraries.
To add insult to injury, the server on which this database lived was declared a dead thing recently, and consigned to the scrapheap. A shiny new server was provided and my Frankenstein creation was copied over like some off-the-shelf programme. Diva that she is, she refused to work.
For some reason, the website no longer wished to talk to the database. When they were on two different servers this wasn't a problem, but something about sharing the same hard-drive lead to sulking and mulishness. Today, after much banging together of heads, they finally agreed to co-operate. Which would be nice, except that the old server was running an early, experimental version of PHP, and the new one is all singing and dancing version 4*. Bits of my lovingly crafted code no longer seemed to work properly.
And so today has been an exercise in migraine-inducing eye-strain. I've been wading through endless lines of incomprehensible code, in Notepad over a remote desktop connection, removing inverted commas from some variable names and putting them around others. Don't ask me why that works, I haven't a clue. It does, and that's all I need to know.
Tomorrow I get to do the other half of the site.
Joy.
* OK, so spangly new is version 5 - but we're talking university computing here, you can't expect miracles.
Comments
Yeah, yeah, the only "patients" I was born with were the ones in the hospital, ya know!
I still have two of your stories left to read. It's been crazy but I will get to them! Promise!
You DID comment your code, didn't you James? Oh tell me you commented your code!
DEAR GOD, WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
I probably should go back to the writing now.
Trace, it's all part of the service. Not that appearing here is likely to increase sales significantly.
Stuart, oh yes, I commented my code. I always comment my code. Not enough, of course; no amount of explanation can hope to recreate the improbable situations that arose to birth my uniquely deformed coding solutions.