A few words about this maintenance stuff...
Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 12:36 pm
First of all, understand that taking so long to even get things to work at this level has nothing to do with my loyalty to Shireroth or lack of it. It also has rather little to do with any of the stuff I have to do to pass courses at the university, even though that *is* taking some of my time.
It's taken this long simply because it's incredibly annoying and frustrating to figure out all the little things that have changed or gone wrong in the upgrade. It's been, and will be for the remaining fixes (of which there will be many) an inexact process, fraught with anxiety, and a lot of frustration when things inevitably break due to some idiotic inconsistency(*) again. Every time I've decided "OK, this is the time, now I'll get this thing done!" I've gotten forward for a couple of minutes, then spent the rest of the session trying to follow some point of ugliness to the convoluted source code (oh, I would *pay* to have this stuff all in C, where I could set breakpoints and follow the flow of control...).
Inevitably, I've been putting off doing anything over and over again. This is simply because the task itself is so frustrating. If I had had a deadline on this, I'd have put off doing anything at all until the last night, and then probably given up somewhere around 3 AM...
(*)I fail to follow the thought processes of a person who thinks it's a good idea to use "row2" as a class name both for marking even/odd posts (so that you can change their background colours or something to improve readability)... *and* for marking the "replies" and "views" columns so that you can... um, I don't know. I can't think of any specific use for them.
</rant>
Anyway, um. Hm. Looks like the "View posts since last visit" link has gone missing... I don't know if the rest of you use it much, but I always did... *goes off to hunt that one down first*
It's taken this long simply because it's incredibly annoying and frustrating to figure out all the little things that have changed or gone wrong in the upgrade. It's been, and will be for the remaining fixes (of which there will be many) an inexact process, fraught with anxiety, and a lot of frustration when things inevitably break due to some idiotic inconsistency(*) again. Every time I've decided "OK, this is the time, now I'll get this thing done!" I've gotten forward for a couple of minutes, then spent the rest of the session trying to follow some point of ugliness to the convoluted source code (oh, I would *pay* to have this stuff all in C, where I could set breakpoints and follow the flow of control...).
Inevitably, I've been putting off doing anything over and over again. This is simply because the task itself is so frustrating. If I had had a deadline on this, I'd have put off doing anything at all until the last night, and then probably given up somewhere around 3 AM...
(*)I fail to follow the thought processes of a person who thinks it's a good idea to use "row2" as a class name both for marking even/odd posts (so that you can change their background colours or something to improve readability)... *and* for marking the "replies" and "views" columns so that you can... um, I don't know. I can't think of any specific use for them.
</rant>
Anyway, um. Hm. Looks like the "View posts since last visit" link has gone missing... I don't know if the rest of you use it much, but I always did... *goes off to hunt that one down first*