Entries this day: funny_phrase stress_test

funny phrase

2 October 1997

Today I changed the format of my journal index to this calendar look. Yeah it looks kinda weird with various width columns and such, but I like it better. Gives me a better sense of when things happened.

Today things are kinda screwed up at work. My supervisor said, "people should be jumping through their asshole to get this fixed." I thought that was a really funny phrase. He said I could use it anytime I wanted. :)

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stress test

A super funny/awesome thing just happened here at work.

I'm writing a new application that allows users to view their invoices and print them in either text or postscript format. Printing the text invoices is easy; each invoice is already stored as an individual file, and I just queue it to the printer.

Because of the screwed up way we do the postscript invoices, I have to extract from a huge file of invoices the individual postscript invoice, write it to a file, print that file and then delete the file. Fine.

The current application that my code is replacing will break if you print three postscript invoices in quick succession. I made sure my code would not have that problem, but I didn't really want to test that because it would waste a lot of paper.

Today I made some modifications to my code to nicely display error messages to the user. So I'm testing my code and purposely defined a logical incorrectly so it couldn't print. Each time I pressed 'P', it would say, "cannot create file BLAHBLAHBLAHn. Call Customer Service" or something like that. The n was a number that was incremented each time 'P' was pressed. (for those technically inclined, this was simply to give each file a unique name). I held down 'P' and watched the number happily increase with each failed attempt to create the file. To test the robustness of my program, I used my phone receiver to hold down the 'P' key. It had counted up to 2000 when I left to go talk to Pam.

I showed Pam my new error message setup-- how it was much more user friendly and informative. To show her how it could handle three invoices being printed at time, I fixed the logical and hit 'P' three times in a row. We went to the printer and waited for them to come up (had to put more paper in the printer tray) and it printed all three. No sweat. Yay!

Came back to my cube and my computer was having a heart attack! Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep incessant beepbeepbeepbeep!!!! What the heck??? It's printing!! I ran over to the printer queue and it had printed about 20 invoices, and was still going. Shit! I paused the printer and came back to see what happened. I checked the printer queue and there were **hundreds** of identical jobs ready to print! Ack!!!

I called Systems Management and had them kill the entire queue and recreate it. They did, and problem solved. But what had happened???

When I was at Pam's desk, and fixed the logical, my computer was able to successfully create the files! It had created and queued 750+ files in about 5 minutes! Yay!!! My program blows away the current program!! Inadvertant stress testing, and my code passed with no problem.

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