waaaaaah?

I was feeling good this morning. Ran the regression suite overnight through Purify, and it had found some problems. Uninitialized memory references. Who would have thought that hundreds of 5-50 field structs in a 300 kloc code base with no standard initialization routines would have this problem. Bizarre.

So far I've resisted the urge to go fix all the potential instances of the problems, and only fixed the problems exposed by the regression suite. Maybe for next month's release.

Then I spent about 4 hours in conference calls. At about the third hour in I realize the crick in my neck that I'd blamed on sleeping oddly was more in fact from the previous day's conference calls. Jeff helpfully points out over IM, "Yes, this meeting is a pain in the neck."

Then I finally get a response from technical support on 2 of my tickets, after they'd spent ~3 weeks in a black hole.
"Due to ... blahblahlbha... we cannot install open source applications on any servers."

The offending applications? Zip. Unzip. GNU Make.

I can't decide to laugh or cry. The HP-UX server in question already has the GCC toolchain, GNU tar, ant, CVS, CruiseControl and the list goes on. Not to mention widespread use of Hibernate, Spring, ehcache, and tons of Apache and Jakarta projects throughout our Java and .Net products. WTF?

I've learned my lesson. Attempts at following procedure will only be made as a last resort. I need anti-action-item-Wonder-Woman-bracelets to deflect IT-related action items onto my coworkers.

Speaking of playing dress up...

I have to keep reminding myself I have better things to do than spend $250 on t-shirts.

further lessons in not believing anyone

More whining about work.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that the previous development staff of Project A were lazy. Definitely not stupid, only people confident in their brilliance could produce such a poorly documented and nightmarish code base.

Lazy in terms of, "Hey, that's acting weird... it seems hard to figure out too. I'll blame X and the business people will live with it."

The latest example is the supposedly 'inconsistent' regression test results. When Jeff and I joined the project, we were repeatedly warned in reverent tones of the odd non-deterministic regression test. The first time the 10k+ bills in the regression suite are run, some bills fail. If you run those bills through again, they work.

On the face of it, it seems very odd. The way it was presented to us it seemed that the failing bills were random, and on re-run the identical bill would produce different results. Various things were blamed: memory leaks, buffer overrun, bad casts.

As we dug into it, it became clear that wasn't the case:

• the bill processing engine wasn't re-started between the failure and success.
• for at least one large set of the failing bills, the same bills fail every time the regression test is run.
• The regression test's preparatory script actually modifies the bill in such a way that they become illegal bills
• the engine sees the illegal bill, and tweaks it such that works again
• but, many of the failing bills are only partially tweaked because they have manual override codes. The partial tweaking sets the bill up to fail the first time, but corrects things enough that it will work the second time through the system.

Definitely a bug in the engine. The data that's reset by the prep script shouldn't make it behave that badly.