I found myself with some spare cycles at work the other day, so I spent some time reading a few dumps created by our online production regions.
Does that make me weird?
There was a time that I found dumps to be both tedious and intimidating, but modern dump formatters have made it much easier to figure out what happened. For example, except in very rare cases, a Cobol programmer reading a dump no longer needs to know the register contents or indeed, what a register is. Nor does the programmer have to know how to determine the instruction in error or how to find the program's BLW and BLL cells. The dump formatter lays it all out for you.
I must hasten to add that interpreting a dump is still a challenging intellectual exercise because you need the ability to understand the application logic and have enough imagination to figure out how your data got into the state it is in. In many cases you also require an intimate understanding of how your application interacts with its execution environment.
Thanks to the dump formatter, it only took me a few hours to diagnose a handful of problems that were responsible for about half of the abends in our application's online regions. Were it not for the formatter, I probably would not have volunteered for the job.
2010-11-25
2010-11-17
The Project
My wife and I both work in the IT business, so we sometimes tend to view things through the lens of our profession.
When our first child was born, we referred to him as "the Project". The objective of this multi-year endeavor was to raise a fully functional human being and good citizen who would eventually become a middle class taxpayer. Is that not the duty of every parent?
Less than two years later we were affected by "scope creep" when our second child came along. As Bill Cosby once said, you do not become a real parent until you have more than one child. "Why? Because if you have only one child, and something is broken in your house, you know who did it!"
Additional funding was not forthcoming as a result of this change. We found the money by reducing other expenses such as dining out, exotic vacations, and by eliminating most adult social activities.
Current Status: Green. We anticipate a +15% variance due to unplanned educational expenses.
When our first child was born, we referred to him as "the Project". The objective of this multi-year endeavor was to raise a fully functional human being and good citizen who would eventually become a middle class taxpayer. Is that not the duty of every parent?
Less than two years later we were affected by "scope creep" when our second child came along. As Bill Cosby once said, you do not become a real parent until you have more than one child. "Why? Because if you have only one child, and something is broken in your house, you know who did it!"
Additional funding was not forthcoming as a result of this change. We found the money by reducing other expenses such as dining out, exotic vacations, and by eliminating most adult social activities.
Current Status: Green. We anticipate a +15% variance due to unplanned educational expenses.
2010-11-12
RUT?
Like many parents, I used to cluck disapprovingly when I saw the silly short forms and tangled syntax used by my kids as they chatted with their friends. "What a waste of time!" I thought. But I never hassled them about it because I knew there were much worse things that they could have been doing on the Internet. And besides, if they didn't have chat they'd be tying up my phone line or running up their cell phone bills.
I had zero (0) interest in using chat for myself. After all, grown ups communicate in full sentences and we try to get our spelling and grammar correct. (With varying degrees of success, as any reader of this blog can attest).
Email is a much more refined method of communication; it is both fast and thoughtful. I've been using it for many years, even in prehistoric times when the corporate email system ran on an IBM mainframe. I am no Luddite pining for the days of typed memoranda* and carbon paper. I was quite happy when all of that stuff moved into the electronic age.
But chat was for kids. It was easy to avoid; every company I worked for forbade the use of chat anyway.
I recently joined a company that not only allows chat, it encourages you to use it to talk to co-workers. At first I ignored it, figuring that the only reason they allowed chat was to allow the under-30 crowd to coordinate their lunch plans. Or perhaps to save money on phone expenses for its geographically dispersed work force.
What I didn't realize is how productive chat can be when you are closely collaborating with others on a complex task. Chat eliminates a lot of phone calls and greatly reduces the amount of shouting over cubicle walls in the office. And, if you can't remember what somebody said 10 minutes ago, you can look it up.
Call me a convert. (It's okay, I've been called far worse).
* This word is so outdated that my spell checker flags it as an error.
I had zero (0) interest in using chat for myself. After all, grown ups communicate in full sentences and we try to get our spelling and grammar correct. (With varying degrees of success, as any reader of this blog can attest).
Email is a much more refined method of communication; it is both fast and thoughtful. I've been using it for many years, even in prehistoric times when the corporate email system ran on an IBM mainframe. I am no Luddite pining for the days of typed memoranda* and carbon paper. I was quite happy when all of that stuff moved into the electronic age.
But chat was for kids. It was easy to avoid; every company I worked for forbade the use of chat anyway.
I recently joined a company that not only allows chat, it encourages you to use it to talk to co-workers. At first I ignored it, figuring that the only reason they allowed chat was to allow the under-30 crowd to coordinate their lunch plans. Or perhaps to save money on phone expenses for its geographically dispersed work force.
What I didn't realize is how productive chat can be when you are closely collaborating with others on a complex task. Chat eliminates a lot of phone calls and greatly reduces the amount of shouting over cubicle walls in the office. And, if you can't remember what somebody said 10 minutes ago, you can look it up.
Call me a convert. (It's okay, I've been called far worse).
* This word is so outdated that my spell checker flags it as an error.
2010-11-11
I love bugs
Like most programmers, every now and then one of my programs works correctly the first time. Most programmers are thrilled when that happens. Personally, I feel a pang of regret.
Hunting for bugs is what I like best about this business. To me, a perfectly working program may be admirable, but it's boring.
Hunting for bugs is what I like best about this business. To me, a perfectly working program may be admirable, but it's boring.
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