Tower cranes

Today I wasn't able to do other things and spent the day debugging a production problem with a colleague, in the production system. It wasn't an ideal way of doing things, but sometimes it's better to have two pair of eyes on the problem anyway. In the end we found that the business had changed how they were using the program and the test hadn't really tested the code and it simple wasn't designed to work the way they wanted to use it. So it wasn't a bug but a change request that wasn't tested properly. The solution thankfully turned out to be trivial, so they were able to get their change in the the end.

For the last half an hour of the day I looked at another problem for a different client to relax... They have a process which connects and disconnects to a server faster than the server can cope with, so after many-many meetings trying to convince people that it wasn't something else, I put some tiny delays into the program, 4 milliseconds seems to be enough, and a retry loop so it tries again if it didn't connect the first time. I'll do some more tomorrow if I can, and then it will be ready for the client to test next week.

Today's picture is the sky again at the hippodrome, with two tower cranes visible. Standing here I can see seven or eight of these giant cranes towering over building sites. Saint-Malo isn't that big, but the scale of construction is phenomenal, and sadly a lot of it is of an inappropriate style and totally out of character for Brittany...

More rabbit chasing today, but for the moment they seem to have the upper hand...