This week is passing by rather more quickly than I had hoped.
Indeed, I had hoped by this time to have accomplished some significant progress on the software project I'm ostensibly leading. And much progress would've been made, were it not for the fact that the system on which the software runs is so unstable.
The better part of the week was spent merely attempting to get the software to run on the hardware platform, consisting of seventeen processor boards attached to a common VME bus. My developers have been complaining that the boards won't boot up correctly, that they seem to be interfering with one another as they are going through their initializations, so the net effect is that the "Master" processor crashes and the rest stop functioning.
After nearly a week of thrashing the system, I can now heartily agree. It will be impossible for us to continue in this manner unless we get some assistance from the low-level bus engineers. We have to find out why the boards are not cooperating.
Meanwhile, my efforts to review the code continue. It seems that most of the coding was done in a vacuum, in the dark, with two broken wrists and a sprained thumb. Or perhaps it was only that there was too much pressure to finish the software in too little time, because it is a ghastly mess of unorganized, slap-dash, oft-redundant functions and undocumented procedures which give the reviewer no idea of its purpose. Indeed, it is a miracle that the code even compiles, let alone running on hardware.
Ah! I need another week or two to finish this work, but the release is due Friday, and there will be much sadness if it is not ready to hand over to the testers on the following Tuesday.
1 comment:
just a note to say that you are on my prayer list. perhaps all will come out well.
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