2012-01-21

Spirit Sol 1085

Ah, brilliant. We've been working on releasing a new RSVP version to go with the new Linux version we're moving to. And they decided that today would be a good day to upgrade one of the RP workstations. (Not, say, yesterday, when there was no planning on Spirit and we would have had the whole day to work out any problems.)

And, of course, we're doing a whole lot of crap today. We're doing the first RAT daisy we've done for hundreds of sols, with the usual extensive MI followup.

Yay ....

It turns out right away that something about the new installation has major problems. Applications are crashing more or less randomly, including RSVP, sometimes within seconds of being launched. It looks like some kind of weird problem with the video driver, though why this didn't show up on our development machine is a mystery for now. But the bottom line is that the newly upgraded machine is useless for real work, and we have to switch to a backup. This isn't too bad, just irritating and time-consuming.

But we get through the day, as we always do. We discover late in the game -- fortunately not too late -- that due to a silly editing mistake, I'd screwed up the calls to some of our helper sequences. So I fix that before delivering, but I feel the need to go back and obsessively check everything before we can go on. "Sorry," I say, "it's just my OCD."

"That's OK," Cindy Oda says, "I like it better when the RPs have a little bit of OCD."

"In that respect, Scott's one of the best," says Ashley.

I get no respect around here.

[Next post: sol 1087 (Opportunity sol 1066), January 23.]

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