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On Call Digital technology remains frighteningly finickity, which is why accurate tech encourage folks are always in demand – and also the reason The Register never tires of telling your encourage tales each Friday in On Call, the column your generosity makes doable.
This week, meet a reader we are going to Regomize as “Boris” who years ago worked for a industry providing products and services to what he described as “a large international automotive company” that ran its manufacturing planning application on an dilapidated faculty mainframe – legal supervillain lair kit, with tall tape drives whirring away all day.
The IT director at this client had a mood.
“He was known and feared as someone who ate systems support people for breakfast.”
Boris was therefore far from happy when he was called in to address a subject his colleagues had been unable to address.
“The planning application would sometimes suddenly hang at random points without any obvious reason,” Boris told On Call. “This was very upsetting as delays in the availability of manufacturing schedules interfered with plant operations, which cost serious money.”
Hardware experts were save on trans-Atlantic flights so they may pore over the mainframe’s innards. Software engineers who had hand-coded the machine’s OS were despatched to search out faults.
None may resolve the cause of the hangs. Certainly, all reported the machine was working as intended. All systems nominal.
Those investigations consumed months – and did no longer make the client happier.
Certainly, the irate IT director began making critical noises about searching for compensation and junking the mainframe.
In desperation, Boris was asked to examine the situation.
Boris wasn’t happy about that, as his talent arrangement – engineering and scientific matters – was no longer clearly applicable to the situation. And he knew nothing about scheduling assembly traces.
He nonetheless visited the client’s place of industrial, and was immediate “shouted at and threatened by the IT director.”
Boris managed to retain sufficient composure to ask for the application’s offer code.
“Fortuitously it was in Fortran – one of the programming languages I was very familiar with,” Boris told On Call. It also contained an obvious error that he noticed after about ten minutes.
“The code assumed that all the tapes were at their start point. Whether or not the program would run successfully depended on the state of the tapes left by any previously executed application. Sometimes it would run, and sometimes not.”
The fix appeared straight forward: a Rewind All; statement in the code – one at the start and one at the discontinuance – would certainly make distinct the tape was always at the start level when the application ran.
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Boris recompiled the software, ran it, and relaxed as the subject went away.
Which is where his troubles began – because the abusive IT director took a shine to him.
“Forever after I was his ‘go to’ person for advice on almost everything from hardware selection decisions to application development and I was treated with reverence and the appropriate level of respect by all.”
Nevertheless Boris knew this may no longer last – because his Fortran fix was fortuitous. He therefore lived in fear of being found out and ending up on the corrupt side of the abusive IT director’s wrath.
“Fortunately, I was moved overseas on a different project before my limitations could be tested,” he told On Call.
Phew!
Have you ever found a fix despite no longer being an expert in the timid tech you were asked to have a tendency? In that case, click on here to send On Call an email so we can feature your memoir after the festive season.
On Call needs readers all the best for their discontinuance-of-year celebrations, and thanks you all for the weekly reward of your tales. ®
