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