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Thursday started off beautifully. I came out of sleep slowly, blinking in the sunlight streaming from my window. I snuggled into my bed, not wanting to rush anything.
Then I realized that I had forgotten to turn on my alarm before going to bed the previous night and that I had overslept.
Bleah.
So I made it into DC about two hours late to join my boss at the Cyberstop Cafe. The day didn't get any better, either. The host provider that we're using for our current project has turned out to be completely unreliable. The most obvious symptom is periodic failures of the email server, which means that ordering receipts aren't always making it to the customers. We've had customers order twice, probably because they assume they haven't ordered this week due to the missing receipts.
In addition, the system occasionally loses orders. We've been back and forth through the code and can't find any problems. No reason why the system just decides to drop an order on the floor, although it does send out the email confirmations, at least so far. Once again, we suspect the host. I've been able to recreate the orders in the database from the emails, but we're afraid of the system dropping an order while the email server is down. We'd have no way to recover the order or even know who the customer was.
Today was the last straw. Robyn called to complain that the email wasn't working again. The tech told him that everything was working fine. While Robyn was on the phone, I triggered another email, which worked, despite the fact that I got an error message just a minute before. We were about to go through our code to search for a bug when it started working again.
It turns out that the tech had reset the system, then said, "it seems to be working fine." Robyn was very displeased to have caught him in this lie of omission. Yes, it's working fine — because you just restarted it!
So the remainder of the day was spent picking out a new host, setting up an account with them and beginning the process of porting the databases and the code over to begin testing. I'm going to have to be rewriting code tomorrow because the new server is on Linux rather than Windows. The function that clears credit cards uses a COM object, so I'll have to recode it.
The database server isn't the latest version either, so I can't use subqueries. I'll have to recode three or four sections of code to accommodate that as well.
It was a very frustrating work day.
Then I realized that I had forgotten to turn on my alarm before going to bed the previous night and that I had overslept.
Bleah.
So I made it into DC about two hours late to join my boss at the Cyberstop Cafe. The day didn't get any better, either. The host provider that we're using for our current project has turned out to be completely unreliable. The most obvious symptom is periodic failures of the email server, which means that ordering receipts aren't always making it to the customers. We've had customers order twice, probably because they assume they haven't ordered this week due to the missing receipts.
In addition, the system occasionally loses orders. We've been back and forth through the code and can't find any problems. No reason why the system just decides to drop an order on the floor, although it does send out the email confirmations, at least so far. Once again, we suspect the host. I've been able to recreate the orders in the database from the emails, but we're afraid of the system dropping an order while the email server is down. We'd have no way to recover the order or even know who the customer was.
Today was the last straw. Robyn called to complain that the email wasn't working again. The tech told him that everything was working fine. While Robyn was on the phone, I triggered another email, which worked, despite the fact that I got an error message just a minute before. We were about to go through our code to search for a bug when it started working again.
It turns out that the tech had reset the system, then said, "it seems to be working fine." Robyn was very displeased to have caught him in this lie of omission. Yes, it's working fine — because you just restarted it!
So the remainder of the day was spent picking out a new host, setting up an account with them and beginning the process of porting the databases and the code over to begin testing. I'm going to have to be rewriting code tomorrow because the new server is on Linux rather than Windows. The function that clears credit cards uses a COM object, so I'll have to recode it.
The database server isn't the latest version either, so I can't use subqueries. I'll have to recode three or four sections of code to accommodate that as well.
It was a very frustrating work day.
