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Status: Apprehensive. |
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Dear Diary, ... |
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==================== |
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Latest Entry |
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Sun Mar 27 12:55:48 AM EDT 2022 |
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In order to develop a deep understanding for their system, |
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I'm using it in a nonstandard way -- not outside the scope |
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of what it's designed to do, but outside how it's marketed. |
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Applying the tool to a real-world problem where I have some |
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personal interest? What could be a better driver? |
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Let's skip forward a bit: At some age, and on a date only |
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you will know, you may begin to consider that there are far |
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fewer days ahead of you than there are behind you. After |
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that date, you may find yourself more irrationally pissed |
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than you used to be at losing a day to bullshit. Today, a |
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prominent, high-dollar, proprietary software system filled |
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the bulk of its pretty UI to tell me that I'd encountered an |
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error that I had to resolve before proceeding. The error? |
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"Index out of range." |
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What index? What range? Who knows -- it didn't say. There |
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was no additional information. There was no stack trace. |
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There was no error code to search for or a link to follow. |
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Just "Index out of range." What was I doing? Well, funny |
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that: I was trying to export the work I had done on their |
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system and to import it into another system... Like |
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Microsoft Office into Open Office or the like? No. I was |
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trying to move my work from their system into an updated |
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version of that very same system. Using their own tools. |
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Following their own instructions. |
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For the deeper understanding, I dug a little deeper... |
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Alright, maybe also to cover my bases before the support |
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folks come back and tell me it's my own fault. After trying |
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to migrate the work to the target system, I tried migrating |
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it to another system -- different platform. I upgraded the |
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current system to the same system version as the target, and |
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then tried migrating to the different targets. In every |
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case, the same error. I looked for some known and some |
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hidden places where some error hints might be -- no luck. I |
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opened up the data package it had constructed -- nothing |
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obvious. In the end? I filled the support ticket. |
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But really in the end I lost one of those remaining days, |
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accomplishing nothing else but fucking around with this |
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proprietary nonsense. My data is in there, as is the |
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workflow I developed to process it all. I can't even move it |
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to a more capable platform running their latest and |
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greatest. It's stuck until I hear back on the support |
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ticket. |
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So here's the deal: Sitting off on the side are a pair of |
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Raspberry Pis collecting and preprocessing some live data |
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streams for me. They're feeding this beast, sure, but the |
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original system -- the one this work was based on? It's |
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still just chugging along. It's bespoke to the work at hand, |
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written in nodejs, dumping to mongodb -- event loops that |
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take and process the data, kicking off other flows when |
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different conditions are met. Every time I was dealing with |
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a new hiccup on the fancy system, my old stuff never missed |
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a beat... Crazy, right? |
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Fortunately, I'll never waste a day trying to get my work |
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out of their system for my own use... |
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I have a lot to say about some of these proprietary things, |
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but I'm already well over my word count for these posts. |
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Next time. |
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==================== |
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about moj / contact |
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moj.sdf.org |
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____________________________________________________________________________ |
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Gophered by Gophernicus/101 on NetBSD/amd64 9.3 |
