Virtual Desktop Corrupted

I had a good sized task to complete at work. Told my boss it could be done in around two weeks. He thought that estimate was too small. I did not argue with him. We settled in at three weeks. I got some initial work done and published some docs and fixed one bug. Things were looking good.

I used this opportunity to refactor some test data gen programs. Was going to merge three separate programs into one. That would decrease future maintenance a lot. The code was written in Oracle PL/SQL with hard coded tables and columns. I figured it was time to turn this code into some dynamic SQL where I could plug in appropriate tables.

Spent a week and a half refactoring the code. Did all the work on a virtual machine because that is where my best tools were. Last Friday, the machine was acting weird. I could only access my Visual Studio program. Nothing else in Windows would come up. I rebooted the machine at the end of the day.

Monday morning came around. I could not log in. Tried to contact the customer help desk. Spent all afternoon on hold. Got up early Tuesday. Was able to speak to the help desk. The technician seemed confused and could not resolve my problem. Issue was escalated to second tier help desk.

Later on I found out a couple other developers lost access to their virtual machines. Apparently they pushed some "Data Loss Prevention" software to our machines. The software install must have been super buggy. It corrupted all our virtual machines. I lost all my work for the last two weeks.

Worst part is now I don't have a virtual machine to do my work on. I need to rely on my laptop and shell access to a Solaris UNIX server. Ouch. I told my boss I am not that productive in this environment. I started out using Windows Notepad. But I recalled that I had NotePad++ from a prior project installed. A bit better. But I work best in Visual Studio.

The only upside is that I love database programming. So I just got two more weeks of heavy work in my favorite environment. Schedule is not looking too good though.

Humble Bundle Book Deals

There is a book sale going on at Humble Bundle. You can get 15 Python books for $18. Now I already own some of those books. But I did find at least 5 that I would definitely buy. The value here seems so strong. I am a sucker for deals. However these books are in digital form only. I have come to hate eBooks.

I do have another option. If I buy books for college or for certification, my company will usually reimburse me. They have a high budget per employee each year for this. This year I have already got the company to buy me 6 books. I figure I might be reading these books past the end of the calendar year.

Still. I would like to also get these books. So I am going to wait until I am ready to take a mid-level Python certification exam. Then when I do, I will ask for those 5 interesting books to be purchased by the company. That should keep me busy well into 2022. The total cost for the print versions from Amazon is $135. That is even with Amazon's discount from the MSRP.

Perl Code Broken

We were getting close to turn on some software we developed last year. The last piece we forgot about was the piece that automatically ran the jobs on a weekly basis. I negotiated the timing of the jobs with other stakeholders. Then I figured out some cron job entries to make these jobs wake up at the right time. Last piece was to test the cron job runs in development.

At first, I scheduled the simple job to run. The thing bombed because it could not find an include file. That seemed odd. The file was in the same directory as the Perl script that was running. But that directory was not in the @INC path. Why not? I thought this had worked before. It actually works when I run the job manually.

Upon further inspection, I found that the profile that was run when the cron job executes had a bug. It was not setting the PERL5LIB directory correctly, which in turn would get added to the @INC array. That was too much details for somebody who is not a Perl programmer. But hey. I guess this was a small opportunity to learn something.

Harvard Learning

I have previously heard about Harvard offering some courses online for free. Well you can do that now with CS50. This course seems to teach a ton of info. It seems to last almost as long as a normal college semester. It claims to teach you C, PHP, and JavaScript programming. You will also learn SQL.

There are a total of 9 assignments in the class. There is also 1 final project. You only get to audit the class. However, if you plunk down $199, you can get a certificate of completion. I bet I could have my company pay for this course. Not sure if it will do me any good.

I do like the idea of being able to tell people that I "went to Harvard" for computer science. LOL.