God I can be a twerd sometimes.
Note to self : When sending an email to directors of the company you work for, don’t bloody send it from a D4D email account.
Tithead.
Sometimes I really wonder how I’ve survived this long.
This may be a really really bad idea, but I’ve signed up for this year’s Script Frenzy in April.
The challenge is to write 100 pages of screenplay in the 30 days of April. Should be interesting – assuming I can get my brain and motivation into gear.
Anyway, I’ve signed up, and we’ll see how it goes.
In the run-up to the Festering Season, I had one hell of a lot of work coming in with some documentation that needed doing in order to get us what’s known as PCI-DSS accreditation. PCI-DSS stands for “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard”, and it’s a total fucking nightmare.
Anyway, one of the big steps in attaining this PCI-DSS standard is to have somewhere around a metric shit-ton of paperwork. No kidding. There’s some 230-odd points in the PCI-DSS standard, and each one of the bloody things needs documenting. It’s a serious bit of work just getting all the paperwork done.
With the other stuff I also had to do in order to get everything in place, the documentation took a back-seat, and we ended up getting it done by me speaking into a dictaphone, and then getting an audio-typist to type it all up. It was supposed to save me a stuff-load of time. And it worked – I’d got all the dictation done in two and a half days, and the typist did everything in time for mid-January.
Or so we thought.
It turned out that the audio-typist was a tossbag, and didn’t actually do all that much in the day they were in – at the end of which they said they’d done it all.
Cunty fucking bugger.
It’s taken me the intervening three fucking weeks to get things back to where I thought I was in mid-January. Three weeks of doing this sodding documentation, three weeks of making sure it’s right, and that it all makes sense. Oh, and still doing all my normal insane workload as well.
This goes some way to explaining why I haven’t been writing much on D4D in that time – I’m utterly damn sick of typing, and didn’t have the time or headspace to do much here.
I’ve just now finished the documentation for PCI-DSS. We’ll review it tomorrow and next week, so I’m sure there’ll be some edits. But that’s just fiddly crap – the most important thing is that I’ve broken the back of it. I’m done.
I’m also utterly fucked. But that’s beside the point. I’m done with the documentation. Happy, happy day.
Already we’re one month into 2010. Where the hell did January go? (I know for me it went mainly in a blur of broken databases, fixing inherited ropy code and just generally fire-fighting)
Still, at least February starts with a nice palindromic date. I know, geeky as fuck. Live with it – we won’t have another one like this for another 110 years…
It’s been a quiet couple of days here on D4D™, and with good reason.
On Thursday, the database at work died in spectacular fashion. It’s been getting shaky for a while, but this week it keeled over totally, and since then I’ve been putting in silly hours getting things back to something approaching usable.
The problems are many, but basically the entire site – user-facing and company-facing – is database-driven. Without the database, there’s no business. It just grinds to a halt. So it’s been a case of “fix the essential bits, deal with the rest later”.
The other main problem is that the database was originally written as a proof-of-concept, a basic thing that’s then been extended and extended. Think of the original as a bungalow. The current site, all built off that bungalow, is the size of an airport, and all balanced on the roof of that original bungalow.
Because it wasn’t written with “the big picture” in mind, some of it is downright fucking nasty- and I suspect the original developer was also learning as he went along. For example, there were no date columns in there ’til I came along – instead it all used some very dodgy string-handling to figure out dates.
One of the main tables in the database now has 170,000 records in it. Which (in the database scheme of things) is nothing. Well, until you realise that each of those 170,000 records has 180 fields in it. That one database table is 600Mb in size. Oops.
So the last couple of days have been spent in Database Intensive Care. I’m through the brunt of it now, but it’s meant that other things – food, sleep, relaxation, D4D™ – have taken a back seat. I’m still going to be working on stuff around this for the next week, but things should be a bit calmer now that the urgent repairs are done, and it’s now more a case of fixing the underlying issues.
Thank fuck my assessment isn’t next week.
As is the tradition on years with a zero at the end, I’m taking this opportunity to look back over the last ten years.
It’s strange really – in some ways, the turn into 2000 seems like only yesterday, in others you count back and realise just how much has actually happened in that decade…
Ten years ago, I was up in Manchester, in a very different relationship, working on a contract at the Equal Opportunities Commission, living in a rented house in a grim bit of East Manchester, and beginning to realise I was nearly 30. (And as an aside, that must mean I’m heading towards 40 now. Fuck.) D4D™ didn’t exist, wasn’t even a glint in the eye.
In the last ten years I’ve
I wonder what the next ten will bring? Lots more changes, I suspect.
OK, 2010, let’s see what you’ve got in store for me.
I’m pretty much ready for you, I think.
And 2009, you can go fuck off.
Amazingly, D4D™ now contains no less than 846,444 words.
D4D™ started on 9th August 2002, so it's been going 2771 days or roughly 7.59 years.
In that time, I've not posted on 185 days all told. Not bad.
