It’s Friday the 13th, and the workday is almost over. Or at least it should be. Right now I’m nearly dozing in the office, waiting for some software to finish installing.
The worst part of it is that the software install is my own fault. I was trying to add some functions to our web server and I wound up trashing the test machine I was working on.
Fortunately it was just a test machine. I’ve learned enough working with computers to not mess with ‘production’ machines until you’re sure you won’t render them useless.
A friend of mine has a wonderful horror story about a script he wrote that was supposed to look for dead links on a library web server. Because of a minor error it wound up overwriting files instead of appending text to the end of them… He’d left it to run overnight and came in the next morning to find the entire website gone.
The tough part is that a lot of the changes that need to happen to these machines have to be done while they’re up and running. It’s not as if we’re working on a car after all… I mean, it’d be pretty unreasonable to expect a mechanic to stick his hands under the hood of a running engine. Of course, with a computer, you can just make a backup copy of something and test out the modification there first. And if it works, you can just replace the original with the copy…
I guess it’d be like having a mechanic create a clone of a problem car, fiddle around with the still-running engine, and when he got it all fixed he’d destroy your original car and give you the keys to the new one.
Except a lot less greasy.