test please delete

[bobsyouruncle]

The scene that cracked me up was when he had a drunken one night stand and then panicked and burnt his clothes in the bath because he thought his wife would be able to smell the other woman. The fact that he's left in his boxers in some woman's bathroom only dawns on him afterwards and Mcnulty has to rescue him

Genius.

a classic, yeah bunk was a great character

[NickFitz]

And this is the task that could have been stretched to an hour?

You'd work for food and beer, wouldn't you?

I might as well keep myself occupied - basically, they get stuff that I'm interested in for my own projects, done moderately well, so that I then know how to do it much better for my own stuff

Write one to throw away, you will anyway - or, in this case, write one and give it to the client

[NickFitz]

Code, food and beer - that's a good day

Indeed

I never mentioned the other oddity of the day - in fact, it only occurred to me how strange it all was as I was walking back from the pub

Last week (I think), they got me to do some stuff with a web server monitoring thingy. The spec is that it checks every minute to see if the sites are online. If a site remains unavailable (defined, by me, as an HTTP status of less than 200 or greater than 399 and therefore determinable with a simple HTTP HEAD request, but with an additional constraint, imposed by them, of identifying the content body of the response as containing some string known to be present in the desired page, this being necessary because "virtual servers can act funny sometimes" and therefore requiring a full-blown HTTP GET ) for ten minutes, an SMS message is sent to the victims whose mobile numbers are on the list; they are then reminded of the fact by text every five minutes, and are also then notified by text if the site has come back up, though only if the initial notification has been sent.

All very straightforward, and it works exactly to spec

I know this because last night one of the servers hosting about eight sites went down, and they started getting the texts

Did I mention that it (according to spec) sends an individual message for every domain?

As a result, three permies started getting text messages at about half two in the morning... arriving in batches of eight, every five minutes

Unsurprisingly the spec has now changed: it sends a message after ten minutes, then another five minutes later, then shuts up until the one saying that the site is now live again

As the lead developer is currently on holiday in the Lake District, but remained on the list of textees and would therefore have had to endure all of this (possibly receiving the entire lot of them en masse if he's staying somewhere out-of-signal and then popped into town), I confidently anticipate a request for a way to temporarily exclude people from the list as soon as he returns, which should give me the excuse to build another over-engineered administration user interface

[BrilloPad]

[BrilloPad]

Population
2136 Revenues
491400 € Unemployment 2 %
Transport 98 %
Crime rate 2 %
Pollution 2 %

rank=338

[BrowneIssue]

... a web server monitoring thingy ... an SMS message is sent ... started getting text messages at about half two in the morning...... another over-engineered administration user interface

I had one of these many moons ago which checked if servers were down. Very noddy, but it worked.

A looping DOS batch file on a PC which tried to open a file on each server in turn which, if unsuccessful would send a a message to a selection of pagers.

The PC that was the pager gateway / messaging machine, strangely, never went down. They should have used that spec. for all the other servers...

... much like they should build aeroplanes out of the stuff they make the black box from.

[voodooflux]

[Churchill]

... much like they should build aeroplanes out of the stuff they make the black box from.

Not until they start making people out of the same stuff. Until then you'll just end up with a steel tube full of meat flavoured jam.

On that note, good morning all!

Morning CM!

[voodooflux]

Sniping isn't annoying, it's funny.

It's denial of it that's annoying.

Absolutely, I couldn't possibly condone such behaviour.

[voodooflux]

I took the name of a character in the finest TV show ever created - The Wire.

That's on my list of programs to catch up on.