06-VI-2002.
Visiting Berix tuesday to thursday. She had some belly flu (which made rounds, in two week intervals), and recovered meanwhile so this was delayed from the original schedule. I went only to Harrisburg, ie. we didn't go to Syracuse, the other guy there will be trained by somebody else over there. Being a smartass by nature, I covered the curriculum of a three day course in fourteen hours altogether, so the plan is fulfilled, just let the rest of this day go, then into the new labour victories. I returned around sunset (at half nine), after passing through some half an hour of curtain shower in the beginning, and ending with this phenomenal rainbow - the girls shot this while I was approaching A-burg, guess I was around the airport a the time. Which means I wasn't carrying the Agfa with me, got no shots from Harrisburg.
And this is also where the emails with her cease, I guess I had to switch to doing it from the laptop, and I don't have those, so fuckit. Somehow simultaneously there was a gap of a few weeks in my correspondence with dad, so this month is practically a black hole, I got nothing.
So I'm quite clueless on what I was doing there. I remember I was learning the philosophy of a webpage - which is a piece of code which returns the whole page as one string and then forgets everything, because there's no point in remembering, not in any variables or state, it all has to be written into tables somewhere - e.g. in the table of current sessions, where it records anything that may be needed for the next visitor. Because if there's any serious load on the server, it better runs several simultaneous instances of the app, perhaps on multiple servers, so there's no chance that a visitor would get to the same instance on the same server every time during a session. So one doesn't need to know anything, it needs to read it all from the tables, which then see severe traffic, and it all has to work correctly and without slowdowns. Completely different from a desktop application, where there's one machine, one user, one app, with just tables being common for users across the local network.
And then one webpage has several states, depending on whether it's showing empty fields for a new entry, or an existing entry, or whether it's just sent the saved data and needs them redisplayed (well, same as the second case)... and it needs to recognize, somehow, which case is it, and again without any previous state to compare with, it's from scratch each time, read the tables and decide from there.
If the transition from procedural to object programming required a change of head (and even before that, switching from cobol and basic to procedural), now that head needs to be turned inside out.
And, ah, yes, been learning the version control as well, i.e. handling the common code pantry. It was easy for us in the previous firms, the apps were still relatively small and we all sat in the same room and didn't have three-four guys working on the same project, didn't clash with each other too much. This will be screwy, Berix in Harrisburg, Jerbie in Omaha or Syracuse, George in Canada, the rest of the team in, guess, Syracuse, and there's just one project, so there's a need for a fundamental code warehouse, to have one official version. We used SoS, Source Offsite, which was a third party client for something m$'s (can't remember what was it called)(ah, got it ten minutes later - SourceSafe, pron. sorsayf), which was somehow almost integrated with fox. Which meant the integration was a bitch, took an hour or two to set right, and then most of the time it didn't work. Eventually we gave up on integration and went on checking things out and in manually. Much safer and less confusing and less trouble.
Mentions: Agfa, Annenburg (A-burg), Cecilia Roxbury (Berix), fox, George Whiteley, Jerry/Jenny Beale (Jerbie), Majkrosoft (m$), in serbian
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