Two nuns, Yíwen and Hwídah, were summoned from their midday
meal by the abbot of the Elephant’s Footprint Clan:
“Master Yishi-Shing believes he may have lost a white pearl
in the snow while walking on the temple grounds,” said the
abbot, handing each of the nuns a shovel. “It is his opinion
that the two of you should search for it.”
The two nuns labored in silence for several hours—digging,
sifting, tossing aside, and digging again—when the taller of
the two cleared her throat.
“I have been wondering,” said Yíwen carefully, “why we were
selected for this punishment. I, for one, have never met
master Yishi-Shing.”
“Then you are fortunate,” answered Hwídah as she sank her
shovel deep into a drift. “He is a disagreeable man, who
cares overmuch about the contents of our log files.”
Yíwen leaned on her shovel, her gaze distant. “Yesterday I
overheard you arguing with someone about this very topic:
the contents of our log files. There was some objection that
he had raised...”
“Warning messages,” grunted Hwídah, dumping a heaping
shovelful of snow into a sifter that had been mounted atop a
wheelbarrow.
“Yes, that was it,” nodded Yíwen. “Meaningless warnings and
errors, dozens every minute, filling the disk with garbage.
Benign exceptions. Uninitialized configuration options.
Debugging information logged at the wrong severity level. In
response, I believe you argued that cleaning up all the
relevant code would be a large and risky undertaking.”
Hwídah gasped for breath and turned the crank on the sifter.
“I also... mentioned... your own observation, about how disk
space... is cheap...”
“Ah,” said Yíwen. “How exceedingly thoughtful of you.”
Hwídah peered inside the sifter. “Still nothing.”
Yíwen stepped hard on the blade of her shovel. “By-the-by, I
understand that yesterday’s crash of our production servers
is still undiagnosed. Curious, is it not, given that our
logs are so detailed and voluminous?”
