18 Sep 2000 darsal   » (Observer)

It's Monday again:

Expectations cause outcomes!

I expected to have upstream provider #2 disconnect service, but I couldn't get a firmer date than "sometime around" now. Last week, when NS1 (the only machine connected to US#2, with US#2 as its only connection) lost its network, I figured that the expected had happened a little early, and the plans I had made to switch around our nameservice this week needed to be accelerated.

So I scrambled and screamed, and made it so, and filled in some holes in my DNS knowledge in the process - yay!

Now it turns out that my only problem was a bad NIC in NS1. Because it badded at the time I expected to lose US#2, I didn't even think to look at it until I had made all the changes and moved things around and still couldn't get it to work, so all the scrambling and screaming could have been done in a more orderly manner if I had only noticed the real cause. But who would think to look at why the expected happened? From now on, I guess I will.

So last week was recovery and catch up on the database handling and web serving we do; all the things I couldn't spend time on while I was holding the entire Internet together. It pays the bills, but my boss's, not mine.

This week is dedicated to production. The CBT demo I cranked out a couple of weeks ago was well received, and the client sold quite a few copies. Problem of the moment - the demo was totally faked to look like it was handling everything, from practice questions and pedagogy to user tracking and simulated exams, through databases. That's what sold both the client and their customers - it can be updated by plugging in new databases. And that's why the boss agreed we should take on a project like this, even though it's a little unusual for us, because if all the variable stuff is in a database, we can pop out new CBT products by switching a couple of lines of code and pointing at new databases.

Except I came up with this great idea when we had an absolute wizard at DB and C++ (and other) programming working here, but he got a better offer, so it falls to me to meet the promises I made for him. Which is justice and kismet and karma and all that, but it might not get the product out the door.

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