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workaholica
Tuesday, March 20 2001
On two separate occasions today wet-blanket banks of clouds drifted inland off the Pacific. Between these, strangely enough, it was yet another sunny beautiful day, the sort which have been rare in the latter half of this passing winter.
But I was indoors all day, struggling alternately between work on the UK site and work on this other project which is supposed to be my primary focus; its unrealistic deadline is tomorrow of course.
When I realized that the cAsE of some of the XML that my tools have been writing was improper for the front end, I was very happy that I'd gone through the bother of writing all my XML parsers myself, since it was a simple matter to make them suddenly start behaving in a case-insensitive manner. But sometimes, working entirely with your own code is a scary business, like walking on high wire without a net. When something goes wrong, you are the only (and let me further emphasize only) one who knows how to fix it. I had a major freak out this evening when I realized that my parser was doing a split on the equal sign to get the parameter name and parameter value in an XML tag (for example to parse out the fact that there is something called graphicURL which is equal to something called http://www.vodkatea.com/spiral.jpg in the XML tag <HEADERGRAPHIC graphicURL="http://www.vodkatea.com/spiral.jpg"/>). This split on equal sign is all well and good until it encounters a URL that itself contains an equal sign, such as http://www.vodkatea.com/b.asp?i=111. In those cases it actually nukes a fragment of the URL as well. So I had to go back and write a character by character parser and slide it into three different functions: the main parser, the node deleter and the node appender. And naturally enough, this patch contained its own bug, one subtle enough to cause me a good 20 minutes of frustration.
My work day stretched from 6am until 9pm, but one of the things I did during that time was write the bulk of the entry of March 17th. I also fielded a call by recruiter asking if I wanted to work down in Torrence. Unless it's for 200K, I don't.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010320 feedback
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