[YLUG] Parsable Rack Diagrams

[Robert Hulme]

> A curious definition of mission-critical. Most senior management
> have *no idea* about the systems in their business that are truly
> mission-critical - that's why far too many companies have things
> like version-control systems running on clapped-out old desktop PCs
> with IDE discs, and yet 'chrome' like CRMs that contain nothing you
> can't get out of email archives, and intranet sites that nobody
> ever reads get all the budget... oh and somewhere down the bottom comes
> decent kit for developers....)
Presumably Alex's overlords are moderately clueful because they
specified that it must have a "diffable data format", which is
certainly not something my boss where I used to work would have said
(my new boss is a scientist warped by over 30 years of Fortran
programming* so what comes out of his mouth tends to be a stream of
[rather amusing] expletives).

After working at my old place (http://www.ahc.uk.com) for six years my
boss (who had been there for four years) said "Actually... what is a
software engineer?"

-Rob


* I have debugged Fortran now. I now know what hell is like.
Imagine... anything on a line after character 72 is silently ignored
as if you hadn't typed it! Or adding a print statement is (and I
quote) "quite a common way of getting a Fortran program to crash" (due
to changing where everything else is stored in memory [we're in a land
of no bounds checking afterall]. Writing to negative array elements is
OK, etc, etc... aiiiee!

-- 
http://www.robhulme.com/
http://robhu.livejournal.com/

To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say,
well done. And to the C students, I say to you: you, too, can be
president of the United States.
-- George W Bush