work was interesting
yesterday. i work at a web design company doing some cgi programming for
them. that's the stuff you see around the internet like guestbooks, search
engines, anything with forms. everytime you click a little
button, you make a program go zoom! and magic stuff happens in the background.
well, i really screwed up one of these buggers that day. i pretty much
told the program to look for a file and as long as it was still there,
it was supposed to do something. i forget exactly what it was supposed
to do, it could have been to sing the lyrics to show
tunes karioki style or to print out every obsenity known in the english
language and beyond on the screen. but programs are dumb, or i should
say as dumb as the person building the program. yes, i was pretty dumb
that day.
we are actually charged for running these things on the web server. we're
allowed to run them about 3000 times a month on our hosting plan. its
alot it seems, and yes, it pretty much covers what we would ever need.
my little trip up ran alittle bit more than 3000 times that day. it pretty
much kept goin and goin. in fact, in the matter of 3 minutes, it ran
35 million times.
oops.
thats bad. because the program had an error that did that little joyous
thing, the server wrote that error down every time it happened in a text
file. here's one from my site:
Use of uninitialized value
at quotes.cgi line 328.
if your nerdy
enough (like me) you'll know what to do about that. ok, now think about
that little error message and think about that being written down 35
million times:
that the equivalent of about 245 novels.
thats bad.
thats bad because we aren't allowed to fit 245 novels worth of stuff
on the server. people who own the server get pissed. imagine jack kerouac
writing spontaneous prose for years on end. and then having to read that.
well, ok that wouldn't be bad cause he aint just writing:
Use of uninitialized value
at quotes.cgi line 328.
and unless you just don't get Beat
poetry you'd enjoy yourself. especially in prison or something. ok
wtf was i talking about?
oh yeah. 35 million times. that means unless i figured something
out, we had to pay for 35 million times that thing was used. it
cost a buck every 500 times. do the math, there's way too many numbers
in here, and i'm tired and this cd i'm listening too is really good. oh
yeah, as the server is playing "singin in the rain" the aforementioned
amount of times, i don't think anybody else could do anything on the server.
that means about 300 people were screwed.
sorry, thats bad.
it got all fixed next day. but my mind was all gluey. i had a hard time
adding and thinking about nouns like "flannel" and "romeo
and juliet." and i still had to figure out what was wrong with that
program. did it not like "Oklahoma?" was "wanker"
just borderline when it comes to obsenities?
after work, i finished setting up a new skateboard, which purchase
took a third of my pay check. had to get some aggression outta my body.
my father wasn't very keen on cosigning a $4700 loan for a computer and
he might not even cosign loans for college. which means my college trip
might be over.
which is bad.
i had a bit to get outta me. all skateboards are different and it takes
time for you to get your mind used to the new dimensions. i fell maybe
5 times flat on my back, but i couldn't feel a thing. i jumped a huge
gap i never even tried before, it took awhile, but after i did it once,
i did it about 20 times in succession. thats how learning works for me.
things finally budge in the brain. and what once was impossible now is
normal.
my roomate commented to me that everything i do is loud and goofy.
"the ra knocked on the door last night cause you were talking too
loud."
i was talking about roman wrestling and you can't go "there
was this one fight that lasted so long the judges told the fighters to
just exchange single punches, so this guy does a karate chop to the other
guys gut, rips out his heart and throws it on the ground. the guy was
disqualified and the guy who got killed was deemed the winner since the
other guy used all five fingers to rip throught the guy, counting as five
punches"
whatever, my brain is crying
and my soundtrack to the movie hair
is just chock full of naughty words. i bet if ijust take that cd off the
list in the program, it'll be coo
