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Ask Slashdot: Where's the Most Unusual Place You've Written a Program From?
theodp writes: "Michael Raithel was polling the SAS crowd, but it'd be interesting to hear the answers to the programming questions he posed from a broader audience: 1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from? 2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program? 3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from? 4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?"
I wrote Slashdot Beta if a fetid public toilet using only my puckered anus.
As a consultant in the UK I once worked for a council, programming out of a small caravan. It was cold, wet, and to add to the eeriness one of the guys there kept a collection of jars of pickled eggs on his table.
There is no reason to put from at the end. Is stupid just something caught the internet from?
Just my job, generally. They've no idea how to run a software business, think agile means throwing a constant stream of changing requirements and bugs at you until the minute before "go live" ... then they get annoyed at YOU for not being able to put out an emergency patch release within 24 horus (took me two weeks to track down and destroy a nasty bug, but that was my bad, apparently, not management for letting a piece of shit out the door). then there's finding out that our Prototype area of the system is being released to the public in a fortnight. Via a press release that one of our team happened to notice. And then there's the fact that despite my recommendations the manager decided the best platform was Silverlight with a VB backend. Oh and instead of using the .Net EntityFramework or in fact ANY standard components we'd write our own from scratch. Then be stuck with it for 3 years.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I didn't write the program, actually a script, but I did modify it to run on a Kindle. The epaper version with a keyboard. Needed some sort of calculations done while traveling without a laptop. Some sort of one line script, but the simplest solution was to take an existing sample script and modify hard coded numbers.
Yes, modifying a script with a web based editor on an epaper device is a bit awkward. But it got the job done.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
That would be in the butt, Bob.
When I do yearly oil changes and stuff like that it ain't worth going back home in a cab, or getting someone to drive me away, so I just take my laptop, find a quiet-ish corner and make a customer happy.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I once wrote the formula for a gravity routine while on the toilet, for a tank game written in Amiga Basic. It was in my head, so I had to quickly get back the the keyboard to type it in before I forgot it :-)
That would be in the butt, Bob.
I teach 3D graphics, programming and compositing & postproduction at a university of applied sciences. Every year, our students build machines for the annual Roboexotica cocktail robotics festival. I usually accompany the students at the event and fix their machines on the exhibition floor - with soldering irons, lots of tape and a notebook. Since most of the student machines are created in a hurry, their Processing and Arduino code usually has errors. Sometimes I find myself sitting on the floor between alcohol canisters, pumps and wires, debugging stuff while drunk people stumble around. :-)
Sounds like a Programming Purity Test?
I think this one is going to be hard to beat. I performed the hardware integration testing with the PPG (testinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph) software I had written on-site in a prison psychology department.
Wrote and debugged a dial up message board server for the Commodore 64 while at camp for 2 weeks.
In a paper notebook, since this was the 80's are we were 15 miles from the nearest power lines.
When I got home, I transcribed it, and it worked perfectly. (for a single phone line dial up board for a few friends)
1. From inside the base of a wind turbine tower in rural Inner Mongolia province, China. Or, alternatively, from a caravan in the middle of a forest in Eastern Finland in the middle of winter - minus 30 C outside.
2. While nearly frozen to death (see 1b).
3. Wrote a program from? Or wrote a program for? The latter is probably a Danish PLC which I will not name here. It has an in-house OS with an in-house executable format which is based on ELF, loosely enough that none of the standard ELF tools work on it. A serial console is the only debugging interface available. An actual debugger is out of the question. All debugging output is truncated to 20 characters. The thing has a 100MHz CPU and all floating-point math is done in software (no FPU). Its reaction to almost any programming error is to hard reboot (and "programming error" here includes calling printf with any but the most basic formatting string). Perhaps most frustratingly, when it hard reboots it claims to write a stack trace of the faulting code; about 4 times in 5, this is truncated to some extent, often to only the first function in the stack.
4. A Windows programme to drive EtherCAT IO modules from a standard Ethernet socket.
Do I win?
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
So I have written software sitting on a bucket in the electrical closet many times.
One place they were grinding the cement floors, so I found the only room that was not a cement cloud, the womens bathroom.
Behind the racks in an AV closet on the floor.
One place had no heat at all until my software was up and running, it was winter, so I was in my car with a 200 foot cat5e ran to inside the building to a small switch, and then into their network.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A about 8 years ago I was fixing a bash script for some bluetooth-related stuff at an open air music fest, sitting on a barrel because the grass was wet :-).
A DOS based database I programmed to handle a video stores inventory from a rental storage building. I was just starting out and the guy who wanted me to write it didn't pay me for it but said it was a trial. That was the last time I programmed in a rental storage facility.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I wrote the basics of a command and control interface for an Ambulance service. I did this sitting on a server (big tower case) with my laptop on another server tower, precariously balanced because the data was coming in from a serial cable that snaked through a hole in the wall and had a splitter on it, nicely held together with a few cable ties and some blutack. The serial cable was delivering telephony from live 999 calls to the call centre whilst I was trying to "reverse engineer" the data being delivered.
And all this because the telephony switch company wouldn't give us the necessary information (without paying a very extortionate amount of money for a full SDK) so I could write the code in my cosy office chair. F****rs. No wonder they went bankrupt in the end (around 2008/2009)
I spent some time writing billing data analysis by candlelight. This, of itself, is not unusual in a developing country (where I lived at the time). But since the client was the electricity company and it was their data being analysed, the irony was not lost on my client who insisted that I never mention this fact to anyone... Well, that's all over now!
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
I wrote parts of an aviation photo database while sat under a tree by the airport fence. (Keepin' it real, yo.) Naturally, I picked days when it looked like this, not like this.
OUL isn't the busiest airport in the world, so it's actually a really peaceful place most of the time, especially if you walk round to the south side. You're right on the edge of the forest, and you hear far more birdsong than jet noise.
In a very expensive 6DOF full motion flight simulator capsule with projectors whilst the motion platform was malfunctioning, all jittery. Was easier to boot up Visual Studio on the system driving the projectors used for visuals and motion then it was elsewhere, so here I was coding in a cockpit that was being thrown about waiting for me to fix it, examining debug data.
Dripping with sweat, inside a demountable building with no air con and 12 other programmers + machines (including CRT monitors, heat makers that they are) in the middle of a large black-tar carpark in the middle of an Australian summer.
The company we worked for was trying to get us to quit, so they dumped us there.
We quickly reasoned that if they were prepared to pay us for working in debilitating conditions, we were going to take their money and produce the small amount of work it was possible to get done under those circumstances.
Work attire was the first thing to go, replaced by shorts and hawaiian shirts. Management dropped in and threatened to put a mark on our files - prelude to being allowed to terminate our employment - until we pointed out that it was not in their interest for us to get the work safe authority involved.
This continued for several months while our effective output dropped to near zero, but they were still paying us.
Management blinked first. One lunchtime we all watched while the biggest forklift I've ever seen picked up the whole demountable and carried it inside one of the warehouses on site, where it became our home for the next couple of years.
The warehouse was used for military storage. One day I came into work and looked over at Mark.
"Hey, Mark" I yelled out.
"Whaddya want?" he said
"OK, " I replied, "follow these instructions. Put your chair in front of your monitor. Look at your screen. Now, swivel 90 degrees left".
Mark was a sport, so he did all that.... pointed straight at his head on the other side of his window was some sort of military artillery cannon. He screamed and fell off his chair. How we all laughed!
I work for a company with about 1000 employees as a sysadmin. I have done a fair bit of scripting with Powershell/vbscript, but no real development work. One day my boss asks me to write a web application in c# because the Dev team 'didn't have enough resources available'. He said he couldn't tell me why they needed the application, and I would have to use the free editions of visual studio as no licenses were available. I told him I had never written an application in c#. He asked me to write it in a week... 2 weeks later I had a multi-tier MVC app with an ajax frontend that queried custom restful web services to work with exchange web services using impersonation. A few weeks after that I found out the reason they wanted it... they wanted the tool to support our soon to be outsourced helpdesk staff. :/
True story. It was an emergency. Yes, I was stupid. And no, I will never do it again.
So this is more of an "unusual way to patch a system" story...
Back in the day, I used to code for an LP mud, and I accidentally locked myself - and everyone else who wasn't already logged in - out of the mud. The guy who could reboot the thing was often inaccessible, and there was only one person - another wizard (coder) - still logged in, coding away and oblivious to what had just transpired. I managed to get him to resolve the problem by inserting a file in his working directory called "(His name)_PLEASE_DO_NOT_LOG_OUT,_READ_THIS_IMMEDIATELY!!!.txt", which explained the problem and how to fix it. Half an hour later, he noticed the file and undid my mess ;)
The problem was the consequence of a coding arms race (oh, coding for LP muds was so dang fun.... every instantiated class object is treated as a physical object, its functions can be bound to user commands, and you can override the default interaction functions). Wizards (coders) often made "dest" tools - tools designed to destruct player objects, aka, kick them (temporarily) off the mud and make them have to log back in. Often they were done with artistic fluorishes, such as a long leadup sequence.
My friend at the time - oh, let's just pick a name nobody would realistically have and call him "Elim" - created this elaborate dest, wherein the target sees him pick up a flower and play "she loves me / she loves me not" with it, and when the last petal is plucked ("she loves me not"), the target would get kicked off. After he used it on me once, I wrote a counter tool which would detect when he was using his dest, and instead kick him off instead with my parody of his dest**. So he wrote an alternative dest tool, which would instantly kick me off without any leadup to detect, and do the flourishes afterward. So I wrote a tool which would be invisible and hop into his inventory and detect when he tried to use his dest tool, take precedence, and kick him off instead; plus a tool that would sit in my inventory and look for any unexpected objects and instantly destruct them. And on and on the code war went. The problem that one night, however, was when a bug led to my inventory-protector desting me and thus dropping to the floor, where it would wait to destruct any objects it could see in the same room (thinking the room was my inventory). And stupid me was coding in the login room at that time (which led to a new policy, never code in the login room! ;) )
** My parody of his dest involved sticking a paralyzation object into his inventory (one that would intercept and ignore all of his commands) and had a giant ogre run into the room, pick him as the flower, and play "She loves me, she loves me not" with his limbs making him randomly scream out for help.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
Using NS Basic for Newton, a complete IDE that ran on the Newton. I wrapped the Newton in a baggie, then went to the bottom of the pool and tapped in "Hello World".
Currently I'm sitting in the rift valley of Kenya, in a small rural Maasai community. We are the last house on the power line. No one south of us has any Utility power. We had a Giraffe just outside the back yard a few days back. Internet is via the cell network... there is a single spot in the yard where I've found 3g works. So I've planted a short pole, which has a power and a spot for the hotspot modem to sit. It's covered with a plastic bottle with the bottom cut out. to keep the rain and dust off.
Either Heathrow airport, or the middle of the Kalahari.
It was the production system for FiOS TV's design to development pipeline.
I told my team and bosses I was going to go into hiding for a week. I was off coding in a bar in Africa when they asked me if I wanted to go down the street for Indian food.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I was really bored in my college compiler design class, so I was browsing the web and came across the programming website 99-bottles-of-beer.net. While browsing, I discovered a language with the greatest name ever, Brainfuck. After looking it up on Wikipedia and quickly reading over the code sample at 99 Bottles, I wrote an interpreter during class. By then end of the lecture, I had a working interpreter that ran the sample code perfectly. So in the span of ~40 minutes, I went from never knowing about this language to having written an working interpreter for it, all out of pure boredom in a compiler design class. I showed it to the professor, who found it neat, but I couldn't get any extra credit because it is a *compiler* design class and not an *interpreter* design class.
CSB?
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Not really coding, but when I was doing the port of Wolfenstein 3D to the Acorn Archimedes, I printed out all the source code (2" of paper when printed two 80x66 pages per sheet) and stuck it in a large ring binder. Then I took it on a lads' holiday to Majorca. I sat and read it by the swimming pool while my friends were preening in front of girls. Still got more action than they did, too :p
The far end of my parents' garden. I live 50 miles from my car mechanic, while my parents lives one mile from the mechanic. So when I needed to have some repairs done, rather than take the train home, I slept at my parents place, and worked "from home" from there.
I had a 3G modem for the laptop, but unfortunately coverage was crappy. So crappy that I couldn't get a usefull signal inside, or even near the house, I needed to go to the far end of their garden, which is closer to the nearest cell tower. Eight hours of working outside with a laoptop. At least it was a sunny day and not raining, otherwise I don't think the laptop would have lasted long.
Another time, while not involving any development, I have been checking mails via a telnet to port 25 from the console port of a Cisco router, while we were waiting for a colleague to bring a hub with RJ45 and BNC, so we could connect the Cisco (RJ45) to the rest of the network (BNC).
Just the weekend before last I was writing a SMS slot machine game using my iPad while sitting around a camp fire at a Scout camp. A few of my Scouts were interested enough to let me walk them through how it worked. It was javascript for node.js.
Once my wife woke me at 2am to fix some code in a Perl script I had written months earlier. It took a few minutes to figure out what was wrong, but I soon realized it was a case that I realized could happen when I wrote the code, but I didn't account for. Maybe it took 10-15 minutes to fix the bug, and I went right back to bed. Good thing I wrote readable Perl code.
The bug was in some code that removed rows and columns of no data from a table. Where there was no data, there was a period "." in the input instead. When I wrote the code it was just easier for me to assume that the first column would never have missing data. It took months to hit this case, and it happened at 2am when my wife was on a tight deadline.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The user display end of the system was in the hut. The sensor end was in an WWII gun pillbox that was built by the Nazis as part of the Atlantic Wall. It was an empty concrete shell with all the emplacement hardware removed. Being there was unsettling.
Why is Snark Required?
1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from?
As soon as WAPs became available, I was outside by the pool on my laptop, coding from a lounge chair without cords. It was beautiful.
2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program?
Way back in school, I helped someone write a program on a phone call. The compiler was on his side. I just dictated and debugged code by memory.
3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
From? Linux used to be fairly unusual. Hardware... uh Vic20, Apple][, and an old PDP mainframe. I guess those weren't unusual for the time.
4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?
I wrote a quick-n-dirty caching-server for SETI@home before it had the capability. SETI's servers were very trusting of input which made it easy to reverse-engineer. I poked around to see the limits, but I didn't allow anyone to abuse it.
I also wrote a wxradar gif scraper. It saved and cataloged the radar images every 5 minutes. Weather sites didn't save this data for more than a couple of hours, and I wanted to track the progress of storms and recall it much later.
Strangest single incident I can remember was when I was on a tight deadline (in less than an hour) and had to write r/w caching to a filesystem while the rest of the company was having a loud party at the office.
I'd like to hear those stories. Ballmer peak etc.
When I learned programming my Dad took us to a skiing trip in the Slovak mountains - small cottage in the woods with a simple wood stove, nearest shop was 30 minute walk through the hills in deep snow, and whole days were spent skiing. The nights, however, we spent programming - with a pencil and an eraser ("the most important tool of a good programmer", my Dad said), and he was my compiler, debugger and processor, executing my handwritten programs for me and pointing out mistakes :)
1. In two different occasions, I had to edit Haskell code (on my VPS) with an N900 when I was in a bordello club. You know you are a real nerd when there is a bunch of naked ladies walking around and you can still focus.
2. Back when I was a teenager, they called me to fix an accounting bug in a COBOL program my uncle wrote. The place was a small factory of sorts and everyone was high on glue vapor. I also instantly got high and became their laughing stock. I can't remember whether I managed to fix the issue.
3. DR-DOS I guess.
4. A compressor that could squeeze any data to 5 bytes. Didn't work on the uncompressor though.
A friend wrote a Basic-like interpreter for our embedded product to occupy his mind while waiting for his first children to be born. We did uses it a little.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Working on open source Kinect drivers.
Commit message here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openkinect/8lOmCb4BFNo
This changeset pushed to github from 200 m underneath a glacier north of the Arctic circle.
http://www.nve.no/en/Water/Hydrology/Glaciers/Svartisen-subglacial-observatory/
When I was in the Navy programming was just a hobby for me. So in my spare time on the ship I did play around with learning Java 1.0. However, I did write a few UNIX scripts and DOS batch files as part of my job on the ship here and there. The only issue I had was that spending long periods of time looking at a screen would get me a little sea sick so regular breaks were always needed.
I once put the final code in place for a system that was due to be demoed live to thousands of people as part of a big keynote conference speech after the keynote had started. One of the most stressful moments in my life!
... at the Northern Caucasus. In the underground base camp. Firmware for self-designed datalogger. AVR-based.
one day I was "privelaged" to spend about 4 hours programming in a rowboat. The barge I was working on was full of visitors so with no chairs available I ducked out and did my work in a rowboat tethered nearby. No computer there but all I n eeded was a space to lay out some print-outs and do my editing, and thinking on paper. The language, HP Basic. That's how long ago this was.
As I'm a tester (yes, we read slashdot as well) thought I would give my answer to 4
Many years ago I worked for a large multinational who had a desktop program being translated into different (spoken) languages. One of these could not / would not be done, so we had to have a small stub program that did nothing (instead of running an external help demo). And by nothing I mean nothing - you start it up, it just closes down. This was a windows program.
As a tester, my test script was somewhat limited, and I'm sure the coder's unit tests were equaly simple.
It took the coder 7 (SEVEN!!") attempts to get it right.
Modifying something in Perl without having ever used the language. The only background I have in programming is 65xx BASIC (Apple ][e and C64) along with 65xx and 6809 assembler in the late '80s/early '90s.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Did some programming&debugging from inside a 3D printer:
http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG-20140...
Perched on a rickety kitchen chair in front of a monitor that was sitting on top of the computer tower with the keyboard in my lap and the mouse on a card table to the side.
We were just starting a contract and the furniture hadn't arrived yet. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If it must include "from", a nicer way is: "Where's the Most Unusual Place From Which You've Written a Program?"
Arrived at a client site and was directed to a terminal in a server closet. As I was making changes to a script something flew past the corner of my eye. There was an active wasp nest above and behind my head. I never coded so fast in my life.
From the first issue of an approved design document that itself was based on the first issue of software requirements as approved by the customer. How quaint.
Balancing a Compaq luggable and an MCS-8051 full in-circuit emulator on top of a cigarette machine in the vestibule of a restaurant next to a Methadone clinic in Brooklyn, New York. I was writing answer-detection and rate tables for a pay telephone for which I developed the hardware and firmware. After getting things right, I burned an EPROM on-site and it was good to go. This was back in about 1986 or so...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
"Ask Slashdot: Where's the Most Unusual Place You've Written a Program From?"
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with!
remoted into a server with my old blackberry bold using a SSH app that bound certain keys to the shoulder switches, volume, and custom side buttons, I had volume down bound to tab
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I actually got away from status meetings and design discussions once.
1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from?
while working for a major automotive manufacturer in the south, I once wrote a perl script from 40 feet off the ground in a hydraulic lift to update firmware across several switches in the plant. I was replacing a switch that had been tucked away near a sodium vapour lamp and had melted.
2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program?
during a celebratory lunch for our team I acted as the on-call engineer, and ended up spending an hour writing a python script to set watchdog bmc timers on servers. I never ate, and cant even remember what speech the manager gave.
3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
I once wrote a program through a dmx512 board to control conference room lighting and a projector. 5 buttons, one joystick, and a week of hell. i also programmed a 4 button sequence that triggers 'disco mode'
4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?"
A major insurance company i worked for had an HR office that could never remember to shut off the coffee maker. After several fire department visits I repurposed an old PDU from the datacenter and wired the thing up so the HR department had to send an email to get the coffee maker to turn on for 5 minutes. This started out as a joke, and unfortunately received praise from the office for 'upgrading the coffee maker' :(
Good people go to bed earlier.
Many years ago, pre cell phones, I was paged by an FDA reviewer writing on a database system I wrote, Friday night at the drive in theatre.
Fixing his proven required stepping through the code (Borland Paradox) over a pay phone in the concession stand, remembering exactly how the code worked, to tweak the behavior.
Admittedly not millions of lines of code, but still a pretty nifty feat.
Design for Use, not Construction!
The "only" place I could fix my system control code was sitting on a chair right next to the oven's output cooling fans. Lots of snacking on nice, fresh biscuits :)
Plenty of time spent in other snack food factories, and lots of other stories (eg. packaging machine failure left me frantically rebooting an NT4 system whilst it was raining corn chips from the overflowing scale above me).
You mean like the back of a Volkswagen?
..in the U.S. Navy, in the engineering log room with a broken AC system, in 17,000 feet of water. Long live Turbo C++!
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I wrote an application once to constantly update my Supermoderator forum signature with the Internet Safety Foundation's definition of theft. It did this every 3 seconds.
The reason? I discovered the Admin was mining passwords of users and taking over their accounts on other sites because the logins/passwords were the same. This was more than 10 years ago, when common logins/passwords were less taboo than today, for you young'uns.
Ultimately he was forced to ban me and others he perceived to have morals and who knew what was going on. However he had, in the past, sent the forum membership email with all the addresses in To: so I simply advised the entire community directly about what was going on. Within a month everyone had left.
He was in panic mode and planning to take down the server to boot from the installation CD in order to fix it. That would have resulted in a few hundred people unable to work for a while. I had the idea of writing a quick program on another workstation and copying that to an NFS share that was mounted by that server. The program would copy 'ldd' from another disk to '/bin/ldd' but the catch was that it could not load any system libraries, it had to be static linked with the correct version of each library it required. The bigger catch was that I had a deadline of under 5 minutes to get it working.
It worked :-)
The restroom, with a gun to one head and a woman's mouth on the other.
1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from?
:(
In the customer's basement. Their house, not their place of work.
2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program?
Pretty much the above, but with the added amusement of two other techs standing around while you sit on some heating equipment, wondering why you can't finish this faster.
3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
A headless server box? Nothing too exciting here.
4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?
I only write usual boring stuff
I was offsite production support in 2007 but decided to go to Calistoga Springs for the day. On my way back my boss BBed there was an urgent production problem. I pulled onto some dodgy side streets, the sort of area the Hells Angels might live (~2 miles from Skyline Wilderness Park), to look for an open ethernet connection from a house w/my laptop. I connected. As I was diagnosing and writing a Perl program to remediate a data problem, a dude and his wife/girlfriend were having an out-of-control screaming match. I could hear the dude starting to slap her around as I tried to compose regex in double inner loops to remove garbage data from a 2gig file. The area was so bad I didn't even put the car in park, instead I kept it in drive w/my foot on the brake. By the time I started testing it sounded like the guy was punching her and throwing furniture. As the code finally was running in production I called the police and sped off.
flying through the air while riding his motorcycle. Does that count?
I was stuck in the middle of the desert in the border region of two mid-east states waiting to be picked up by another party. With 8 hours of battery left, I was determined to quickly finish a project that was kinda important to the next stage of my trip :> Needless to say that the heat (even in the shadow) reduced my battery power to an effective 5 hours, having the fan running at max all the time. :D
Poor thing passed out when i was writing the final commit message
Back in the day the National Computer Convention was a 100,000 person event. There were so many computers there that the voltage to our machines was a touch low, which resulted in our disks spinning a touch slower...revealing a race condition. Thirty minutes before the show opened I patched the assembly code of the relevant area...adding a jump to location followed by a jump back...which solved the race and let us show our demo.
At the corner of 3rd and (if I recall correctly) Mariposa in the parking lot of an abandoned diner, sitting in a rented car writing code that talked to a box on the lamp post through special radios while the homeless ambled along on their business. This went on pretty much every other week for a several months. And this was just at the beginning of when the area was starting to get improved. Fun times.
About a month before I left in April, now slightly seasoned myself and quite used to the regular rocket attacks, I was coding up a personnel tracking system in CPOF. For the first time the operations officer could, in real time, know exactly where everyone was for whom he was responsible. It was towards the evening when about 80 meters away you heard the familiar THUD! followed by the alarm 10 seconds later. Not a drill and at this point annoying. Imaging being in the zone for hours, when suddenly you need to stop and run out to a crowded concrete bunker for hours. Damn! I was just about to compile, too. Well, being the operations center, Marines can't just leave. They have to continue running the war. So some them stay with the helmet and vest in case of a direct hit in the operations center.
Some time later I finally returned and say the assist operations officer, a very tall Marine Major (now LtCol) and one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, taking off his battle rattle. I notice a tomahawk on the back of his vest.
"Sir, what's up with the tomahawk?".
"This? Oh, I was platoon leader in Fallujah. Our designation was tomahawk and I was tomahawk-6." I smiled in genuine amazement which quickly turned to sadness.
"That is so cool! All I've done so far in my life is sit in a cube coding."
The Major stepped back and said "Wait a minute, you were just coding, weren't you?"
"Yes. The perstat program for the OpsO."
"Well, you were just coding under ENEMY FIRE. You are a COMBAT SOFTWARE ENGINEER!". He said with the seriousness you sometimes see in Marine Corps officers. It put the biggest smile on my face for the rest of my time there. On my last day, the team I worked with gave me a flag and plaque designating me a "Combat Software Engineer" which to this day is one of my most cherished possessions.
Yes, inside a military bunker. Writing a program to interconnect 4 different batteries of a antiaircraft battalion, through RL-431 antennas. Part of it was being written during an actual full-scale military exercise; re-writting parts of it as the exercise went on for 5 days.
Sitting on a closed toilet seat in a college bathroom where someone decided to install the Cisco router I needed to do unnatural things to with a Perl script.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
With the beta 1 c# compiler in 1999 hiding from customs agents because I was on the ship without a passport in international water.
The most unusual circumstance that I can recall is having to describe a manually typed in hotfix over a radio-phone link to a researcher at sea.
Working on HVAC Teletrol programming. I could connect to a terminal with a laptop and totally avoid my asshat boss.
Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
Just last week I had to make a few (emergency) bash scripts while sitting in my car ... parked in Ikeas parking area.
1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from?
Underneath a theatrical stage
2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program?
Same place with a raccoon staring at me.
No knife, but I think I would have been less scared if had one like the 'possums in this skit . At least the knife won't have rabies
3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
The "Whole Hog" Lighting console.
4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?"
not an application per se but programming the lighting cycles for a penguin exhibit. Not difficult at all but the need for accuracy was vital.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, at the UN base. Inside a 2x2x2m GSM basestation with just enough space for a chair and a table made of stacks of donated mobile phones. It was the only place with working AC (cooling for the RBSs) - so it was a nice break from the heat and general chaos. Aftershocks would rattle the equipment sometimes, but it was better to stay inside then go outside and risk having things fall from the radio tower. Wrote mainly statistics processing scripts.
While in HS, the school's rock band, QP (Quater Pound) wanted special effects for their performances. With some of us AV geeks, we got an early data projector (LCD screen that went on a overlay projector) and me and another guy wrote a program in QBASIC to rotate and scale a pot leaf (1bpp bitmap, converted to a list a vertices - by software we also wrote) using a ASM library based on the values of the SoundBlaster 16 card. Some of the programming was done while drunk, of course.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Got notification that something broke when I arrived from Canada on a two-week tour of Scotland and England. Found an internet kiosk and fortunately had my SecureID token with me so I could log in and fix it.
A lottery pick program in Basic for a TRS-80, it had to be under 64k memory. Wrote it in my head, the scary thing is it actually worked good when I typed it in the TRS-80.
first location, Sandusky, Ohio, at Cedar Point amusement park. in 1993, I was working for a company building atm-like machines to sell tickets at venues like Cedar Point. I had to do some emergency maintenance, so I was inside the machine with the monitor turned around so I could use the internal computer. In this configuration, it looked a little like a trash can, and I would routinely have stuff thrown in on me. Worst was a half-eaten ice cram cone landing in my lap.
Second location, the Tito Barracks in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1996, just after the war ended. I was working as a contractor for the U.S. State Department, and we were setting up a system to keep track of the progress removing landmines - a process still going on today. We were still writing the system as the hardware (and trailers) were being set up in the barracks courtyard, with landmines surrounding us! I spent a total of two months there over two trips. I wrote about it and posted pics a while back on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/bokma...
When we adopted my daughter, we were not allowed to leave the hotel grounds for 2 weeks, until some specific paperwork went through (or else it was considered felony kidnapping).
The bank I was working for had this horrible transaction system that had a whole bunch of bugs and was written in a dead language (VB6, oh the humanity). I already had a Java stack running another newer arm of the application. When I landed, I learned that the whole time I was flying out there, I had been getting panicked emails from the higher-ups about how the whole world was finally falling down with this old VB6 horrorshow.
I rewrote the whole thing. From top to bottom, replaced nearly a million lines of legacy code, in a 2 week feverpitch of sleepless nights and rocking a 2 day old baby in my arms while running unit tests.
I worked with that application for 6 more years after that... and never had to change a single line of that "Adoption hostage" code. I'm actually shocked it went so well, looking back on it.
I got deployed to Djibouti while working on my masters degree. Can't get a masters in math without programming. Can't put any unauthorized software on government computers. VBA in excel was my programming language. It was horrible, but it made me learn.
A couple of decades ago I was in a twin engine aircraft over the Amazon with some scientists who were collecting atmospheric data including distribution of smoke particle sizes, CO2, CO, humidity, temperature, Hg, etc. when it became apparent that some code I wrote wasn't working well with the interface on the aircraft (supposedly identical to the one in my lab). I was able to devise a fix on my (luggable) notebook, compile, link, and install it in flight and the rather bumpy mission continued. This was also been the only time in my life that a pilot has taxied an aircraft that I was on into the hanger at the end of the mission.
Nate
When I started programming in PHP 12 years ago, I was still living in Belize. Talk about a place ill-suited to programming. I hear it's better now, but a lot of places barely had electricity back then.
In other news, I've apparently been doing PHP for 12 years. I need to reevaluate my life.
Caught some wi-fi and fixed a production problem while sitting in the middle of the desert at 3 AM, while wearing a kilt and not much else.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
One day, I decided to go program in the great outdoors so I drove up to the cliffs of Palos Verdes, CA overlooking the ocean. That day I was working on a tool for simulating flocking behavior. As I was testing it out, bees decided to swarm. :-O It was a Matrix-like moment several years before The Matrix came out.
but I did fix a kernel panic in a gentoo install at a racetrack (road course) over the weekend.
How is it that slashdot gets manipulated into posting this self promoting crap? This is just some sleazebag SAS guy trying to Guru certify himself. What's next, used car salesmen asking what is the funniest car you ever drove to work? Real-estate agents saying, what's the funniest house you've bought in the valley?
We can moderate this stuff up and down but we really need to be able to moderate a pile of steaming excrement like this off the front page.
The client had a separate network off the Internet hence physical presence was required to access the contents needed to build/deploy that particular internal site. Machines were loud, even behind the closed door. Naturally the place was completely filled with coffee beans of all kinds in all stages of processing, and just after an afternoon there both my boss and I smelled like coffee - the scent was transferred to his car so it still smelled like coffee the next day I stepped into that car.
What's more unusual is that it was running a rather old Red Hat distro (for its time even; Fedora was already out for nearly two years at that point) and they only gave me the root account. No XFree86, so a 80x25 terminal on a 13" CRT screen, and of course no way to install anything else aside from what's there (Apache/PHP and vi (not vim) for editing). I can't even remember how I got the skeleton project files onto that machine, might have been a 3.5" floppy, I really forgot about that part.
At that time I felt like I was thrown back a few years back, but thinking about this now it would have been a stranger experience today.
Please direct all bug reports to
While working over the weekend for a customer in Ireland I was given the key to the front door. When I showed up early the next day there was no front door. The computer in the back room still booted up and the bugs were still there.
Sitting in the cab of a Garbage truck, writing code for the trash loader arm,
In the largest industrial vehicle junkyard in Germany
Guarded by Dobermans --- I had to call the watchman to lock them up so I could leave in the evening. At least there was a vending machine with beer in it.
Doesn't these polls usually go:
"Where's the Most Unusual Place You've had sex?"
I win.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As far as the place, I'd say sitting on the side of a beautiful mountain in northeast afghan with a toughbook. I was hired initially as a DBA for a large biometric management database, largely because o had used it in the military and I knew what SQL meant. When I arrived initially I was told I would serve as the new tech lead based on my interview. The existing 'DBAs' were 3 former Intel analysts who knew how to use MS Enterprise Manager to manually edit individual rows as if the database were a large excel spreadsheet. The database was filled with records on various criminals and locals who wanted to be enrolled because the cards we printed were a valid national ID. It was also referenced by various other agencies and border crossings to keep bad guys out.
Records were entered with a transliteration of Arabic names as interpreted by whichever soldier enrolled the individual in question, which means records existed for every permutation of Ahmad, Ahmed, Ahmeed, Ahmid, and Ahmud. Forget the tribal names and places of origin. Most of the people creating records were average Joe infantrymen to boot (pun intended).
One of the first scripts I wrote was in perl via activeperl on win server 2k3, that would walk the database looking for known permutations and replacing them with the approved standard, it made around 5000 changes in a few minutes, where the DBAs would have otherwise only edited records as they were found.
Of note is that many of the systems which referenced and cross referenced this data without any sort of abstract search like soundex since it was determined to create too many false positives. After I left, the script basically sat since there was nobody else there who wanted to learn how to run it. I'm sure in my system there has been some solution to this, as the problem was identified when I left in 2k9, but as the years pass I've heard many many stories about bad guys who slipped through the cracks because a name somewhere was misspelled and a watchlist record didn't match. This was the case with at least one of the Boston bombers as well. Oh well, I tried.
I was out hiking and I couldn't get couldn't get a coding problem that I was having out of my head. When the solution finally came to me I was in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a patch of sand and a stick. I wrote out my code as clearly as possible and took a picture with my camera...this was pre-cell phone days, so I had to wait for the film to get developed before I could see my code.
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
A tetris clone alongside my art history notes during lectures. Had to type them into the computer after class though...
Was at 11,000 feet altitude, in full camouflage on an elk hunting trip.
Had climbed to the nearest peak in an attempt to see if my wife had left any "must hear" voice mails when I noticed a high priority email.
Ended up writing a perl script to do archival retrieval for a high needs customer; on my blackberry (BBSSH) via VPN over a 2g network.
No elk were harmed in the making of that quick scripting.
I just wrote on the bathroom stall wall "A program from?" hope that is an unusual place for you
Ha, that's awesome. Oh I can remember those days too
Someone had to say it
Obligitary reference.
On a Bendix axle plant production line. On an Altair. Hardness tester. Test hardness. Spray red or green paint.
Project got dropped in my lap, no software had been written. Ship date had arrived. Boss told a white lie and sent me and a technician to "install the equipment, and make some final adjustments".
The "final adjustments" were writing the software.
Oh. He told one more white lie. As far as the plant personnel were concerned, we were three days late. We didn't know we were three days late. They started yelling at us as soon as we arrived.
They found me a table and chair, and I set-up the Altair next to the inspection line. The line was down (no pressure!) but it's still damn noisy in there!
Plus: the two machine operators were there, twiddling their thumbs. I got to ask questions like "how would you like this button to work?" (WHAT design?)
Plus Two: The Middlesex Diner.
Inside a small submersible, pier side, while snow was falling on me though the open hatch in February. The target system was a network of ~260 Transputer T805s.
Its really weird here
The owner of a food place started a small startup below the stairs to the place. it was a good startup and the owner was a cool guy.
*shrug* I wrote several programs for my Tandy PC-2* inside a nuclear submarine (mumble) feet beneath your keel. I also diddled around with BASIC on the IBM-PC clone that Squadron bought and provided to the boats.
* Obtained from my housemate in exchange for paying up his share of the rent. J. actually one of the best housemates I ever had other than his habit of occasionally blowing his paycheck on some new shiny.
At Microsoft Redwest, vendors don't have office space. I saw many people working on the floor in halls. Others in the lunch room. You were expected to work from home. Some like me were good enough that they would make office space. Sometimes vendors would gather on the floor in their lead's office.
On a long drive from LA to Portland I was the driver and I was bored, so I wrote a simple moon lander game (modeled from one I'd seen written in BASIC) for my new HP-25 programmable calculator by dictating instructions to the guy riding in the shotgun seat. The display showed your altitude on one side of the decimal place, velocity on the other side (and with the +/- sign) and remaining fuel in the exponent. After each iteration you entered how much fuel to burn on the next step and pushed R/S (Run/Stop) to continue. If you got down to zero altitude (or below) with a velocity less than some maximum value then you had made a successful landing. Otherwise you crashed.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
She's not the most punctual lady so i got some work done while picking her up from work
Around the time WiFi was becoming available, I made a semi-autonomous boat out of a pair of laptops, some engineering-sample wifi cards, a power controller, two trolling motors, a GPS, and a deep cycle battery. I wrote most of the code for it in my living room, but I did a fair amount of debugging standing in Lake Washington.
In a crawl space 30 inches tall beneath an exhibtion stand using a programable calculator to come up with some fudge factors to include in a demonstration so that that the equipment appeared to work much better than it did in reality. The program was nearly 1K lines long by the time the exhibition opened. The equipment I was fudging was already in that crawl space...
I've been stupid/wise/strange enough to programming a mile off the New Zealand coast in 1 Sunburst, and also on the 139 Night Bus in London.
I have also been tempted to do some coding on the golf course, but my companions suggested that I think of the damage their clubs would suffer if they had to beat me.
India and Sri Lanka about 4000 LoC on some pieces of paper.
After I punched the code into a computer there were only 2 compiler errors but the algorithm worked!
This experience taught me the value of really thinking something through before starting to hack away.
Began a Wizardry clone in Common Lisp on one of the Shinkansen to Kyoto years ago.
Still working on it to this day because I can't write a scenario I'm happy with.
In a basalt mine, the veins of basalt are thin and deep, so the corridors are long and the company I worked for used conveyors to move the material. The automation line running the materials to the elevators failed in a tragic and non-recoverable way, so I ended up debugging and rewriting some of it using an old Dell laptop on a steel table used for housing the hemispherical diamond drilling tips. The cover of my laptop was forever scratched up and I still have nightmares about the sounds from the corridors long after all of the miners had left the tunnels. I don't recommend sleeping underground, the lack of sunlight is a problem...
most of the best code i've produced has been the stuff i wrote in my head when i could not get near a terminal.
programming in the Visual C IDE was the weirdest of all though, first and only time i tried to write code inside a BUG.
I wrote a program from an inner room with no windows in a office building in Chicago. (ok, not that weird) I was creating Perl scripts to format German Legal Documents. (getting stranger), I had not previously programmed in Perl (everyone has to start somewhere I guess), I do not speak or read German. (makes the requirements a little weird)
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
Actually, I just fixed a bug in the invoice printing routine.
I'm usually around the place for bigger events for general troubleshooting, which does include fixing bugs. In this particular case, I was subbing in for the real cash register personnel to give them a little break when I noticed a printing error on an invoice I just printed for a customer who wanted to pay his stuff.
I asked him whether he had 2 minutes? I'll fix that." He goes, he doesn't actually mind the error, but he'll wait two minutes.
So I dive into good old Turbo Pascal and fix the error, recompile, cancel the bad invoice and reprint: Voila, bug fixed.
For more relevance I do usually code at that place back to back with the cash register personnel, and they'll suggest improvements.
There was a robotics competition I participated in the middle of the sand dunes outside of Alamosa, Colorado. We had pretty decent code running, but then the hardware guy decided to swap in some new, higher voltage batteries the night before. The motor controller got fried (should've seen it coming), but thankfully, we cobbled together enough parts to get a basic bot together in about 45 minutes the next morning, all while squatting in the middle of the desert. Learned a lot on that trip - including discovering proportional control, and why you shouldn't put your magnetometers too close to your drive motors. Imagine a tank having a seizure and you can picture what the result was.
Second up was a rocket experiment I worked on as an undergrad - we needed to get to Virginia for the launch, and decided taking a 70's Winnebago was a good way to do it. It actually worked pretty well (despite the thing catching on fire somewhere in Kansas) and we got a lot of final testing/integration done en route. It makes me want to have a mobile workstation again... parking outside of the radio shack and hacking away was surprisingly effective, because any parts we needed were right outside our door.
3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
In order to write a BASIC interpreter, we needed an assembler. So my dad wrote one in GW-BASIC. Once our interpreter was sophisticated and stable enough, we rewrote the assembler in our own language (based on Acorn BBC Basic). Eventually we splashed out on a copy of MASM once we had a computer that was PC-compatible enough to run it (the Sanyo MBC 550 wasn't quite up to it, IIRC).
I do industrial automation programming for a living. Usually I am just troubleshooting if I am in a weird area - but sometimes I have to write a whole new routine in an area that you'd never expect a guy with a laptop.
For example, I worked on an energy savings project on the Queen Victoria. I was in the engine room next to the noisy diesel generators while we were at sail for a lot of the time. I just put in my custom ear buds (blocks most of the sound) and over-the-ear muffs and I was in my own little world listening to music while banging away at my laptop and sweating bullets since the warmer I made it in the room, the more energy we saved. The crewmen had no clue I was the reason it was now 5 degC warmer in there than normal and it's usually already warm.
Also, while on the Ventura, we had ridiculously rough weather off the coast of Portugal for a whole day - the day I realized the specs I received and what was installed were very different. So, I spent the day in my crew cabin, somewhat sea sick, rewriting my program.
Right now, I sit in a power plant's MCC room waiting for a server to update. An office is nice - but it gets boring. I like what I do.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
As a tech support guy in 1998, my company supported software made by company X. One thing I had to do periodically was "decrypt" (glorified rot-13, really) company X licenses to see what customer they were assigned to. It turns out that company X's licenses were designed by someone who had long since quit, and they had lost the code to do that. Their CEO told my CEO they wanted to buy the script I wrote. When my CEO asked me what I wanted for it, I said, "I dunno, would they give me a keg of beer?" Their CEO flew out and bought me a keg of beer.
I interviewed a guy who worked for Schlumberger (provide a lot of tech to oil and gas industries)... Anyway, he was describing something to me in a thick accent and it finally dawned on me what he was saying... Shocked, I leaned forward and said: "You were transmitting data via mud?" and he said yes.
See, when you're drilling very deep.... radio waves can't get down to the drill head... but you can put a computer down there to detect what kind of material you are drilling in... You also have to pump this mud stuff down and out to get the material the drill breaks free out of the hole.... their solution was to vibrate a pattern into the mud and then have another computer that optically read the pattern from the mud at the surface! He then proceeded to tell me the bitrate he achieved on this "network".
hard core geek-ware
1. Most unusual place: squatting in the corner of a tiny room filled with optics, cables, and instrumentation, riding on the back of a huge, high-frequency radio telescope.
(My coworkers have me beat, though. They've had to do a bit of coding within spitting distance of the coldest recorded place on earth. http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/12/10/1921246/coldest-spot-on-planet-earth-identified)
1. Most unusual place: squatting in the corner of a little room full of optics, cables, and instrumentation, riding on the back of a huge, high-frequency radio telescope.
(A few of my coworkers have me beat, though...they've had to do a bit of coding within spitting distance of the coldest recorded place on earth. http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/12/10/1921246/coldest-spot-on-planet-earth-identified)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Does this count? In bed at 3:00 AM, walking a nighttime operator through opening a script in VI and reading the code to me, (I hadn't written it) spotting the bug, and walking him through correcting the code. He had never written a program before, and I'm pretty sure he had never used VI before. It takes a lot of patience and someone who can listen and follow directions, but it's definitely doable.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'd love to hear some stories of coding triumphs... Stories where a bug fix, patch, or hack saves the day or gets it done right..
Does anyone have any fond memories they'd like to share?
Back in 1999 I was on an evening boat cruise on the River Thames with a load of work colleagues. Unfortunately I was on support, and inevitably after a couple of hours and several beers I got called out. Fortunately I was carrying my Nokia 9000 Communicator - so I got to work telnetting in from my mobile (unheard of at the time!) A bit of investigation later I found the issue was with another system. I looked up and saw the developer for that system propping up the bar a few feet away, so the Communicator got passed across to him and he started hacking. 20 minutes and 3 developers later the issue was fixed - all from the middle of the river!
I really miss my Communicator - sure it was as big as a brick and the screen was a bit dubious, but it was my first real glimpse of what a smartphone could be.
I'm one of those people to whom ideas come at the weirdest times/in the weirdest places. I used to work for a top-20 website (won't say who but one almost everyone uses) and we had recently launched our twitter integration. long story short there was a bug in a system that received the twitter feed, filtered/processed it before forwarding to website which its owners refused to acknowledge much less fix. we had just taken off for my nephew's bar mitzvah when it donned on me how I could trick their system into working correctly by modifying my downstream code so out came the air, onto go-go/vpn, couple hundred lines of perl later commit, publish & voila!
I remember thinking as I did it: wow, I'm writing & deploying production code to such_n_such.com from 36k' - that's both insanely cool & terrifying at the same time...
I wrote player tracking software while on a cruise ship based out of Galveston, TX. The casino manager was eager to keep me happy so everything at the bar was comp'd. From all of the Wild Turkey I drank, I don't know if it was rough seas or just me.
Obtaining and then maintaining that perfect level of inebriation results in very creative output!
1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from? 2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program? 3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from? 4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?"
1. In an electronically shielded windowless room. Also, in a telephone switching room (different place)
2. The telephone switching room.
3. CP/M on a TEMPEST machine. Think of what you saw in the last episode of The Americans. That.
4. The above. You're not cleared to know that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This was over 15 years ago now but the company didn't have any place to put me so it ended up being an unused closet with no air conditioning (but heat) a small desk/chair and a LAN cable. It also happened to be beside the fitting room where they test wear prototype garments. Suffice to say they eventually forgot that I was working in there a couple of times and I had a pretty good view of a couple of models changing clothes, no nudity (just down to underwear). Because I was around the company so much I guess they figured that I was an employee or something and not a contractor so the models would always shrug it off and never complain.
Waiting on a stand with a Dell Inspiron 7500, the biggest, heaviest beast of a laptop I've ever owned. Months later I was accused of programming while driving the taxi, which never occurred to me but, it occurs to me, would have been texting-while-driving before it was (un)cool to do so.
The oddest thing I've written - code that crashed, deliberately, in different ways based on use selection.
I was working a project where we built atop an "abstraction layer" designed to insulate us from OS changes (this was the 90s, such things were in vogue). The team doing the abstraction layer, at another site, rolled out a new version. The best I can say of it is, it compiled.
Different parts of my code started exploding. Almost literally - I had one test case cause a kernel panic in AIX, which was no small challenge. Of course, it was all blamed on my "bad code practices" and couldn't POSSIBLY be flaws in their update.
Over the course of two weeks of core dump analysis, discussion with the AIX team at IBM, and heated exchanges going up the chain of command, I crafted a 200-line program which three different options to crash the system. Pick your choice, guaranteed crash, including the kernel panic. Once I delivered THAT through channels, they got silent quick. It took them another month to fix their internal bugs and re-deliver. The memory leak I found in that version required another "prove it!" program, but my management had my back by then.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
I spent a few seasons writing code in a tent on Ross Island, Antarctica. It was in C for a platform that was running an embedded version of a 386. The system was used to monitor and track Adelie penguins. The tent was pitched in the middle of the colony of several hundred thousand birds on top of many hundreds of years of guano. I was writing on an HP omnibook 425 laptop with an early solid state disk powered off a truck battery that was solar charged. It was a fun project.
At work is the most unusual place that I do my development. The usual place is at home, after hours, because I can't actually do it during the day due to all of the interruptions. Unfortunately, it has gotten to the point where I have to schedule which evenings I need to have off because I have been working every weekend for at least a few months now, and I have not had time to do bills or balance my checkbook. I took a day off two weeks back and they insisted I had to use a PTO day even though I was already well past 40 hours for the week, then they texted me while I was out that day to ask me questions and I had to work that evening as well. But the PTO day is gone now and can't be recovered.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I had a programing friend that was coding on his boat in the virgin islands via aircard. I was very jealous.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
At San Jose Family Camp in the middle of the Tuolumne River writing a Perl/CGI script to generate sendmail.cf files.
Was working on some avionics software. Decided to take a sabbatical for spiritual growth. Finished the software remotely. Its flying on many commercial aircraft now. Part of the work involved a shared memory analysis program to ensure that the many tasks behaved - written in VAX DCL. Fixed bugs in website scripts on a "smart" mp3 player.
I once had to debug a program at the edge of an Olympic sized swimming pool. Unfortunately it was only an indoor swimming pool and we couldn't wear shorts, let alone swimming trunks. Very hot and very humid so we were sweating all over in no time (even more so since the customer check up on us about every 10 minutes), but once the job was done we could get a quick dip in the pool.
For a different project my (now ex-)boss was flying to China to start the first production run of a new electronics product. During that flight he had to debug the product as well as write the code for the production tester, so he was sitting in his chair with his laptop, a JTAG debugger, the product and the benchtop production tester. (Now that I think of it, he mus have had some UPS or battery for the production tester as well.)
10 meter below the sea surface, inside one of the legs of a semi-submersible drilling platform in the North Sea in winter (Dec 1981).
About 98% relative humidity, 10+ C, water dripping everywhere, including a pulsing spigot from the 10 cm long crack we were down there monitoring.
We had lowered a full lab worth of expensive HP gear into that environment and I did on-site programming (digital signal analysis) on an 8-bit HP-87 microcomputer.
The software worked and all the gear survived, even if we had to unpack it from the shipping boxes in order throw a rope around each unit and first lower them and then afterwards pull them back up the narrow manhole inspection ladders.
Later in the same decade I wrote what might be the ultimate executable ascii generator while on a skiing vacation in a mountain log cabin (no computers, just a notebook and a hex dump of all the x86 16-bit opcodes.
My version ran using only the 70+ chars that MIME specifies as not needing any form of encoding.
It used the minimum possible amount of self-modification in the bootstrap loader ( a single two-byte backwards branch).
It survived most common forms of reformatting, i.e. changing line terminators from CRLF to just LF (unix) or just CR (Mac), or merging all lines in a paragraph into one.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I've done a bit of coding on a slightly larger yacht (45', in the Caribbean and crossing the Pacific) but I think the actually weirdest one was something I hacked together at around 3970m (13000') in the Khumbu (Everest region) of Nepal, specifically in the village of Khumjung. Nepal has a weird timezone and only some of our digital cameras supported it, so some of our photos were being created with EXIF data that was off by a bit from the others. So I pulled out my seriously-underpowered-and-lightweight-for-the-time laptop and hacked together something to fix the affected photos so they would line up correctly with the rest.
These days there are tools that I could have used to script this, but they either didn't exist or I'd never heard of them back then. It's not like we had Internet access in the guest house (excruciatingly slow satellite links could be used to get email, for way too much money, in a place across the village from where we stayed). In fact, we were lucky to have electricity.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Waist high in saw dust.
Probably at latitude 81N. I also did a bunch of linux system administration work over a satellite link from there to southern California :)
I once wrote a program to extract video from an IRIG datastream while sitting in an aircraft hanger and trying to hear myself think over the electronics on an apache helicopter being run from ground power.
My little brother and I wrote a casino emulator on my TI calculator while riding in the back of a car. Could choose from blackjack, roulette, or slots. Never got craps working, though.
It's pretty weird here.
The weirdest has to be last year. I was suffering from a severe (10/10 pain level) migraine. It took two lortabs to ameliorate the pain. I was still in bed, which happened to be a futon, around 3 am. I just pulled out my laptop and coded some. Believe it or not, but through all the pain and everything my brain just really wanted to program and thinking about the problem helped get me through the misery.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
lay'n in bed with a ghetto funk laptop back in '95 run'n linux which took 24hrs to compile the kernel for...
it was my 'creative program' assignment when learning loops... good times!
They had free refills on Mt.Dew in addition to some nice distractions when I get stuck and need to clear my head for a bit.
Manager forwarded me an email asking to see how we could shrink binaries for release, more as a side project. I was sick at home and running a fever, and spent the day writing a script to strip binaries/libraries in various ways and produce a side-by-side report comparing the resultant ELF files section-by-section, listing the unstripped section size/item count, +/- delta, and stripped section size/item count.
When I get back in the office, my manager said he hadn't wanted me to spend so much effort on it. However, the script produced the needed reports. Six months later, and then again a couple years later, I reviewed the code. It has 4-5 level deep data structures, is structured and commented cleanly, and I can't make heads or tails of it. Still works fine, though.
Sitting on curb in tomorrow land using an iPad ssh session to server
It was just a bit of shell scripting but it had to be done immediately for client
I rewrote the whole thing. From top to bottom, replaced nearly a million lines of legacy code, in a 2 week feverpitch of sleepless nights and rocking a 2 day old baby in my arms while running unit tests.
And for this amazing feat, in addition tor fixing an emergency they caused by knowingly letting a bad buggy system slide for years, you were of course greatly rewarded. Perhaps a big raise, promotion, a big one-time award a sizable % of the money you saved them, etc..
(Yes, I'm shooting for +5 funny on this one)
Many years ago, another programmer and I were put on a super priority project. The company didn't have any office space so we were put into an empty warehouse nearby that had some tables moved in. We didn't have a phone, but the company gave us a CB walkie talkie. The CEO's secretary had the other one in case we needed anything. When we needed a break, we'd race RC cars around the place.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
I once wrote Ruby in a Burger King bathroom.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I was on a business t trip with colleages and we stayed at a rural hotel overnight. They said they would pick me up at 7am. I had no alarm clock, I had no watch, I did not trust a wake up call. But I had my Windows 98 computer. So between eight and nine p.m. I wrote "nalika", a program to display the current time on the screen in large digits and ring an alarm according to the paramer. Big digits; the computer had to sit across the room from the bed. In one hour; a DOS program running in a Windows 98 DOS window.
I am still running that program today under Ubuntu Linux 14.04 so my family and I can see the time all night long.
I was working on an oceanographic experiment off the coast of Delaware back in the late 90s, trying to finish writing some data processing software before we pulled the equipment out of the water. Waves were causing the ship to pitch back and forth about +/- 7 degrees. My computer was secured with bungee cords and duct tape and occasionally I had to prop up the monitor during high waves. It wasn't possible to see the horizon from where I was working, so it was very easy to get seasick. On top of this the ship's cook had served spicy stuffed bell peppers for lunch, so I had indigestion even before we were dealing with waves.
1. I had to fix a script to unattended write a CD of data every day. The script was being run on a computer literally in the middle of a gold mine in Papua New Guinea. I wrote the script in the same location, which was a small (1mx2m) hut plonked right in the middle of the gold mine, with the acquisition system and 2x computers (one linux file server, one MS-DOS acquisition controller) running off a generator. This was for a system designed mid-late 90's and deployed in this instance in 2004.
2. We had borrowed a different acquisition system to acquire some data for a research project in an underground coal mine in NSW, Australia. We had some of the data in the supplied format we'd taken that day, I gave it to my boss and he then started to convert it into the format he could use for analysis. However, it was taking a minute to process each file using the supplied dos-based utility to convert the data, but each conversion needed a user to type the input file name, output file name, file type etc. Then wait for the conversion to run. Note that we had in the hundreds of files, so it would have taken hours to convert the data manually. I wrote a bash script to generate a keystroke-input file which I fed into a keyboard simulator running under dosbox to convert the files in one process. It worked first time, so instead of sitting there feeding the conversion program with input, my boss was able to go out to dinner instead...
3&4. Probably not so unusual, but the above was a strange combination: writing a bash script under linux to write a program to run under a keyboard-emulator in dosbox.
Wrote a php script using vim on my web server. I was at a bar at the time, logged in using an SSH client on my nokia nGage. Took about an hour to write like 10 lines of code. Most of that time was spent trying to find special characters, like parentheses and square brackets. It would have been much quicker to drive to the office and do it there, but logging into our server from a phone was new and cool.
On a dare, while receiving a blowjob. Posted as ac so as to not incriminate the other party.
Though not particularly unusual, I once received a bug report by email and proceeded to debug, fix, deploy (to test server), test and deploy (to production server) a fix for a non-profit group on the train on my way to work.
I started work as desktop support/remote support/all-around-"my computer is brokeee, fix it naooooo"-guy at a small-mid-sized company (200 seats) a few months ago...since we only have 3 guys in our IT department we pretty much have to cover everything.
My question to you is this, why is ALL financial software antiquated and disgusting! Bahhhhh hum(bugs, bugs everywhere!)
This comment was laboriously planned and extremely well thought out by Mike Donaghy @ http://mikedonaghy.org
Wrote a monitoring suite for an ecommerce site from the reading room waiting to be summoned to sit on a jury. Never was called
The most unusual place I worked was in the coffee shops/pubs of a very dead, but lovely and touristic city, near their spa, summer time. I was working for a local cable ISP as a consultant, and often took my netbook, an internet usb card, and went to work outside to get some fresh hair. Ordered a coffee and a pint, and stayed there for a while. Luck me it was summer time, would have hated to be there in winter.
During the sermon at a Sunday service in Worcester Cathedral. I was forced to go to these services on a Sunday, but fortunately I had one of those Casio pocket computers. While the priest droned on about something irrelevant, fictional and boring, I could make good use of the time writing some bit of code on my pocket computer.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
financial software has this horrible habit of being surrounded by tons of oversight, process, and compliance issues.
In my experience, enterprise level financial software is at least mostly comprised of components that were written during deregulation in some form or another. In order to write anything that significantly changes the way things work, it has to pass millions of dollars worth of audits and approvals and federal oversight.
If your software is part of a Federal Savings Bank (FSB) it is subject to all kinds of stuff around disaster recovery, uptime, transparency, etc etc... unless it already existed with the same functionality before the bank entered into an FSB Charter, of course.
So the software that does a lot of the lifting is "grandfathered" in. There is so much crappy Bush Sr and Clinton Era code behind every credit card swipe and check deposit, you don't even want to know.
I have debugged in the hallway of a gastroenterology clinic. Fun times.
When I was a kid in the early 1980s, I used to hand-write BASIC programs in my journal, while living on my Dad's commercial fishing boat off the cost of Alaska. Yeah, I was computer-deprived. Making up for it now.
Jonboat (metal dinghy) heading to a tug for a software patch to its navigation system.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
While doing my final year of PhD, short draft Matlab routine for classifier combination ...On the plastic pad we use in scuba diving for marking air consumption, nav turns and stuff.
A moment of revelation, a few days of blissful coding and running experiments next.
"Abashed the Devil stood, and felt how awful goodness is..."
I had fun programming the Tandy PC-6.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from?
I was once visiting a client site at a small town library (Victor Harbor in South Australia) and needed to fix some of our code. I flipped open my laptop on the main desk and started working away, not realizing that I'd sat under the sign that said "Inquiries". Soon people started coming up to me asking me library questions that I had no hope of answering - I mumbled and pointed at actual librarians.
2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program?
I was in my apartment with a Lady Visitor. She asked me what I did for a living, so in a pathetic attempt to impress her, I opened up Visual Studio and wrote a WinForms app with one button on it. When the button was clicked, it popped up a dialog with the Ladies name in it! Surprisingly, she was actually impressed...
3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
An extremely old Vax (I think) running Fortran. Fortran is weird.
4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?
A website designed to help people track their constipation. It included pictures of various stool types - look up the Bristol Scale if you're really curious. We referred to it internally as "poo shooter".
1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from?
A coffee shop in Estes Park, where I wrote code that had to be modemed back to Minnesota using an old 4-prong phone connection (had to find a converter from the new-fangled RJ14 plug).
2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program?
Using an HP9825 to emulate a TI59 so I could more quickly develop the program.
3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
Probably that same HP9825, a calculator with a card reader, a pen plotter and an 80-character display (that's right, one line of code visible at a time).
4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?
Not really an application, but I once wrote a Monte Carlo simulation to answer the question, "how long after a [specified] nuclear attack would it be until the radiation on the ground would have dropped far enought to allow the Russians to force workers at gunpoint to enter the area if they only needed the workers to function for 15 minutes?" Had to do that one on an HP41C.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
A Thailand coalmine
My wife is in a cover band that gigs several days a week. As I've heard the music many many times (I enjoy it, just used to it), I don't drink or dance, and I've never been much of one for watching a band, I end up doing work on my laptop. So this means I'm often working at a bar, club, restaurant, wedding, or on a large boat/yacht (such as for the Eastbound & Down wrap party last year). As long as I'm able to find wifi or otherwise tether on my phone, I'm surprisingly productive considering the venues :-)
To avoid annoying venue patrons w/ bright light in dark room, I tend to find a place out-of-direct-view, ideally w/ laptop light hitting a wall, and brightness turned way down. If I'm close enough to the sound guy, people often then I'm running sound or lights :-D
Wrote a program to control a small steam boiler on a Commodore 64. Used the user port to measure conductivity, then it would determine how much Molly to add to the condensate tank.
4. I once had to write a program to search the Entire Network (Including workstations) to search for a file and change the date modified date..... Job done..... Never mess w/ a programmer who has time and motive! You WILL be proven wrong.
The weirdest place was in a closet which was being used as a computer room while I was growing up, the platform was a Franklin Ace 1200 Apple compatible. which was the last Apple compatible ever built. The program was one of my first ever that came in a programming magazine. It was a 15 second game of Santa Claus dodging chimneys written entirely in Assembly. Those were the days...
In a fab. Fortunately not the part where you have to wear the bunny suit, but in a paper jumpsuit wearing gloves and a facemask.
In September, 1989 I was shot by a home invader in the pelvis. I was on my laptop the next working on our next release. That earned me the title of world's toughest programmer.
I was a crewmember on the USS Baton Route (SSN-689) and we were given a Tektronix 4051 computer to assist with SONAR range of the day predictions and whatnot. Since there was no place in SONAR to keep it, it was strapped down up forward in the SONAR Equipment Space. I spent many hours learning BASIC from the language reference manual and taught myself how to code the worlds ugliest spaghetti code ever. I did learn to write some usable programs over time that weren't so fugly and were even fairly useful.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
It's a place, so ...From Where...
It was kinda cool. I wrote a Java program to display a window on every screen of the space station requiring a Java update and reboot every morning.
1. In a small hut in the jungle of Malaysia, programming an Electronic Health Records System for a government mobile clinic. The electricity was provided by a petrol generator set that ran out of fuel around midnight. I had to tap power by joining to the wires of the lights. My laptop was also literally full of bugs, since the insects were attracted by the only source of light in the jungle.
2. Fixing software bugs in server using SSH on a Nokia E71 handphone, inside a moving taxi in rural Sri Lanka.