Hacked Off

Track 981 of 3593, that one. That puts us in the D’s. And that’s the only clue you get.

Talking of not having much of a clue, I’m breathing more easily again today after a nearly spectacular cockup of potentially legendary proportions. Technical geekery aside, suffice to say that the extra flag I added to a particularly sensitive bit of code has turned out to be benign, after all. This after much shrieking and finger-pointing from the more flappable members of the department, and a well-concealed near-heart-attack by yours truly.

Turns out I’d just re-added something that had been accidentally thrown out the last time they did a spring clean, and that the new catastrophic build failures were the result of someone else’s muppetry.

Phew.

So on that note I can sit here and look forward to the “magic of Christmas”, as the radio keeps telling me to do.

I would, but the spectre of a “team Christmas drink” appeared today. I’m lucky enough to actually quite like most of the people I work with, but there are a few insufferable politicians amongst them, and there’s nothing I hate more than ending up at the wrong end of the team table having to talk shop with someone I know will simply nick my ideas and try to pass them off as his own.

So this year I’m just going to get hideously drunk and swear a lot. See you on the dole queue.

No prizes for this one. But it seems (just about) fitting for this vomitworthy viral vid that M$ absolutely definitely didn’t stage and seed.

I tell you – the day they introduce this at the place I work is the day you’ll see me copycatting this poor unfortunate:

So, back to the hack today. First task – fix a Priority 1 bug. Preferably by lunchtime.

These are the jobs I hate the most. Panic-stricken progress-chasers breathing down my neck every half an hour:

“How’s it going?”
“Not so good”
“Oh no! What’s the problem?”
“Can’t seem to concentrate – this muppet with a spreadsheet keeps breaking my train of thought”
“Right! Tell me who it is and I’ll make sure they leave you alone!”
“It’s you, you cretin…”

Turned out that today’s problem was down to somebody deleting half of the software that they were trying to test. Hmmm. It was a miracle that anything worked at all – as it turned out, enough of it worked to throw up a scary-looking error message that nobody had ever seen before, and muggins here was the first available body to throw at it.

Ah, it’s good to be back.

So that’s the end of my jury service. Shocking, confusing, nerve-wracking, edifying, sobering, thought-provoking, even amusing at times… life will never feel quite the same again. Seems odd to think I’ve never considered the law as a profession – it’s the perfect mix of people-watching and the application of cold logic. I reckon I would probably have made a pretty good barrister. Too late now, but maybe in the next life…

The most interesting thing about being inside a courtroom is the tension – palpable at times – the barristers and judge are very much constrained by what they can and can’t say, but there were occasions when it was clear to us in the jury exactly what the counsel was trying to do, yet for some reason it wasn’t to the person in the witness box. At such times I caught myself literally out of breath – will they say it? Do they see what’s going on? How many different ways can the counsel put the same question? Is the counsel barking up the wrong tree entirely? Is this a critical piece of evidence – a clear contradiction between what the witness said to the police and what they’re now telling us, or is it simply stage fright? Is the judge about to tell counsel off for leading the witness into saying something they don’t mean? Is he going to clarify the question, enabling the penny to drop?

Absolutely fascinating.

I had never set foot inside a courtroom until a couple of weeks ago, but now I’m tempted to visit the public gallery from time to time – it’s an entirely different world.

Blimey, is it really 20 years since the Berlin Wall was first opened? I can remember that evening as clear as if it were yesterday. I’d visited Berlin for the first time that July, and at the time it seemed that the wall was there to stay. Even when the TV pictures of the hoardes of East Germans going on permanent holiday via Hungary started to be shown, I thought “no way.” So when I came home from work that night and saw the pictures of people streaming through the Bernauer Strasse checkpoint I was utterly amazed. Had to get a takeaway pizza and a four-pack of McEwans Export to celebrate, right there and then.

20 years, eh? Incredible. In theory 20 years is a long time. In reality it’s nothing. On the Liesenstrasse in Humboldthain there’s still a section of the wall that nobody seems to have done anything about. It’s not an official monument, but it also hasn’t been torn down. It hasn’t been hacked to bits by souvenir hunters, either (well, I admit I’ve got a big chunk of it on the shelf in the box room). It’s just there. Still.

And I’m still a programmer. 20 years – blink and you miss it.

‘Tis nearly the season of the Bell Curve. Again. In less than a month from now I could be out of a job.

Again.

Despite there being next to no software department left to downsize, the rumour mill is busy grinding out the usual gloomy doomness – it seems that the company are intent on axing the usual two or three, after all…

All completely illegal, of course, but that won’t stop them.

So we’ll be down to less than 20 developers, and the lucky two or three sacrificial lambs will be looking at six months’ “go quietly” pay and a trawl round the local job market.

To be honest, I don’t give a sloppy any more whether it’s my turn or not. I’m fed up of two week “sprints”, management-induced artificial crises, patronising pep talks, ill-judged threat-talks, meaningless breathless “new logo” announcements and all the rest of the shite that passes for “communication” hereabouts.

Maybe my stint of jury service has woken me up to The Real World at last. Yes, it seemingly does exist. Perhaps it’s time I took my place in it.

LOL, meanwhile, back in my own little Dream World I’m sitting pretty on 82407 words of a novel that I’m convinced will be published one day.

Can’t hurt to dream, can it?

Wasn’t Swine Flu. Not yet, anyhow. The book arrived. Was scribbled over. Almost enjoyed.

Moved on to JEE now. How long can this last?

I think I must be coming down with something. I feel very out of sorts. Only three hours ago I caught myself thinking “I must buy a book on this, it’s actually quite interesting”.

The subject?

Maven. Yes, MAVEN! A build tool! And a bloody hideously over-engineered one, at that!

What’s the matter with me? I never find software technology interesting any more. And builds? Forget it! What the hell is interesting about slapping a bunch of files together into a jar? Nothing!

And what’s all this about buying a book?

I never buy books about software any more. I’ve got shelves full of dusty old Microsoft books – MFC, OLE, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 3.1 – ancient, stone-age rubbish that I just haven’t got round to throwing away. Yet, these are the books that actually stood the test of time – I could count on them being useful for at least a couple of years. Then along came Java and doing things “on Internet time”. No sooner was a book published than the technology underwent a major point upgrade – usually deprecating all the old APIs that you’d just taken the time to learn, when it turned out that the APIs were in fact a load of half-baked old bollocks.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse – even the official websites of supposedly “mature” technologies are full of out-of-date information. So why buy a book?

Can’t beat a good scribble in the margins, that’s what. I like scribbling on my books. And filling them full of Post-It note placeholders.

So. I must be ill. Perhaps it’s Swine Flu, at last?

Been up to HR today. Nothing serious. Just needed to get a form filled in.

Guess what… there was NOBODY THERE.

Not a soul.

They were all (I say “all”, when I really mean “both” – it’s not much of a Department any more) in the  other offices. If they were lucky they’ll be in London, otherwise it’s the wastelands of Reading I guess.

So. No HR! I thought it was impossible for a company to function without those magnificent Wealders Of The Company Manual. I guess I’m wrong.