Tap It In With a Hex Hammer
Two incidents. Back in the days that PDPs roamed the land, I upgraded a customer from a 11-73 to an 11-84. Had everything loaded on the new system. Went in that night and moved live data. Happy customer in the morning so I went back the hotel and sedated myself at brunch. Next day, back at the office, customer is jumping through the phone. Turns out some lad had customized their application to handle 132 character reports and then built a handful. Instead of following protocol and deploying to the customer file structure, it was left in base code. On the system that had just had a bouncy ride across the state. I still had a copy of the new system on a staging server and knew where to find source. Digging through a collection of MACRO and FORTRAN led to one standard declaration to set line width at 80 characters. Building that locally, and dumping the object library gave me a handful of locations to fix with a zapfsl. Memory on those systems was tight and wasn't going back to build a new boot image, I made my edit on the customer disk, ran a utility to reload our objects and then called the customer. "Power your printer off and on please. Now run your report. It's working? No it wouldn't have been the new system, I moved all your custom configurations."
Second pass was on migration contract no so long ago. A large government agency was moving from outsourcing vendor S to outsourcing vendor N. That included moving the customer's servers from one data center to another. The new data center had it's own addressing ranges of course, and there were at least half a dozen applications that used TCP addreses hardcoded in the application with no source available. I mentioned that I corrected one of my application with Epsilon, an EMACS varient I keep in my toolbox. The next handful of apps went easy enough. But when I tried to follow change control and file source code (old executable) and installation (new executable), the Library Gnome wouldn't take my submission because an executable can't be source.
Grammer Nazi in memory of the Library Gnome
Biting the hand that feeds IT
