51–60 of 75 posts
While dealing with a crying baby.
On a balcony overlooking Western Baghdad figuring out why our (old and pretty well tested) network code didn't see fit to push packets. Was outside because we suspected the sat terminal was causing the problem. Only ended up taking a couple hours but it was probably my least favourite coding/debugging session.
Coming to work from 8:30 to 5:30, sitting in a cubicle with a forced dress code, while writing in... sob PHP. Rails freelance is awesome.
I am a contract Oracle DBA. One month long project I spent working in a gutted out strip mall that had card tables and Ethernet cable strung about. There was free coffee though.
I was there too!!
Well, I nearly killed myself with a line of bad code. I made a silly change to a flight simulator's "unusual attitude" logic. Unusual attitude training consists of putting the aircraft in a very difficult orientation (45 deg nose down, 60 deg left bank, etc.) and training pilots to recover. Here's what the simulators look like: http://blafsen.net/photos/simulator.jpg I changed the code, and brought the simulator up o…
It was 3AM and I had sweat dripping down my palms and wrists that I had to lay toilet paper over the keyboard and mosquitoes buzzed at my ear and neck nonstop. I had to fight with an aggressive postfix filter that kept sending mail to a lisp process and did no error checking to see if Lisp ran and processed the mail. I had to remove the filter, and manually rebuild stuff later after I had the system running around 12PM the next day.
It was one day in hell, taught me that the unix errno and process exit status can be a fucked thing to debug if you're forking multiple process from a script.
[Edit: right now I'm coding sitting on the toilet seat, with my pants on, because I'm a moody SOB and like to move around the house as the day passes :-]
I had been out for a week waiting for the stone to pass, I hadn't slept more than 15 minutes in a row in more than a week -- and those 15 mins were from sheer exhaustion and vicodin. I was hallucinating continuously and vigorously. Hadn't been eating either.
Good times.
So I had to implement a "will take only 15 minutes but is extremely important" feature, lying on my stomach with laptop on the floor, with my head dizzy because of the pain killers and a bloody butt.