And by "a cardboard bowl of Canadian poutine" I trust that you meant REAL poutine, bought from a guy out of the side of an old blue school bus, parked at the side of a side road in backwoods Quebec.
None of that bogus shopping mall "poutine" for me.
What makes it a joke here in France (and Canada, I suppose, since that's where it comes from) is that "Poutine" is how the French spell "Putin". Plenty of opportunity to pun on the Russian despot being like a pile of chips covered in cheese and gravy.
Because that's how I feel when I have to intervene an old do-it-all macro, coded by someone who left the company (and indeed probably their mortal coil) decades ago
Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
We've had a user who, over the years, moved a lot within the company and that, in every department he was in, left MS Access applications full of garbled macros and external links that all became business critical. He long gone and, over the years, we've been porting every one we find into our internal platform, but they seem to still keep popping up wherever you look! I swear at them.
This sort of thing can be fun though. A couple of years ago I had to look at a project in our company that I'd never heard of before, because some parts were outright failing and others were hideously slow. It was an Access beast that wound up producing a handful of Excel files on a daily basis, which it took over 2 hours to do. Nobody else had (or at any rate would admit to) much Access experience, and the project hadn't been updated in at least 10 years, so I was tapped for it. In a couple of weeks I managed to fix the broken parts, redo the "recent changes" logic so it worked correctly, and reduce the running time to about 15 minutes. It's still a hideous mess of nested queries and so on, and we have a backlog project to get rid of it altogether and put the underlying logic into sensible ETL tables, but it was still interesting to work on and I'd have loved to have another month to really get into it and have something neatly designed that ran in about 2 minutes.
Did anyone else ever think it was funny to set up Macro tennis? A process fires Macro 1, which fires Macro 2, which fires Macro 1 ad infinitum. Each macro adding something to a log file, such as "thwap!" or "thunk!" or something equally onomatopoeic which would bring a tear to Adam Wests eye? Either that or two email boxes which only forward emails to each other.
Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
Infinite loops are really fun, when you are out of them: Not talking about macros, but rather email avalanches.
One such avalanche, the one capable of taking the whole email infrastructure of a Fortune 500 company for the best part of 3 days, is truly one of the most marvelous spectacles of nature, something that only Sir David Attenborough is fit to narrate.
(obviously when you are NOT tasked with cleaning it)
Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
Back in the 90s a manager where I worked built an entire purchase order system in 123 for dos. Not sure who it survived the start of the windows era but it it was still working somehow when I left the company in 97 a couple of years after he had left.
It was macro hell why they didn’t just buy an off the shelf system in the first place I don’t understand. But it did actually work and managed to track orders, stock and provide details to accounts.
Mind you I moved companies to a bigger organisation and they kept using multipart paper forms to order stuff for the next 10 years (at least)
After many happy years working 5 days on and 2 off in the NHS, I retired and came back part time - 2 on and 5 off!
This keeps me aware of what day of the week it is. I paid everything off with part of my pension lump sum and I should have about the same money coming to me each month.
Instead if learning the latest offerings from Microsith, I am learning Ukrainian. There must be something in common with that and COBOL!
PS if I was less close to hoping to be comatose soon I'm sure that could be improved, maybe at a little cost? Instead I'll just create a new pseudo language in which this works
Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
While I can appreciate your time spent with Lotus 123 - A project I was involved with had a new XT with 2MB of ram on long expansion boards - so Lotus could process viewer ratings of TV shows back in the early '80's.. I reckon Power BI is going to be the next Access/Excel Macro/ VB/Clipper/Foxpro all into one! Users can currently download and use it for free!.. Users are given the ability to upload anything, process and format it just the way they want it : - or the way they think looks prettiest anyhow. Some organisations I have done work for in the past had 1000 + Access databases essential .. How many desktop PowerBI's are going to be essential for reporting to shareholders and top tier management? Data Quality, Management and Business Intelligence disciplines will not apply, of course.
And by "a cardboard bowl of Canadian poutine" I trust that you meant REAL poutine, bought from a guy out of the side of an old blue school bus, parked at the side of a side road in backwoods Quebec.
None of that bogus shopping mall "poutine" for me.
You can never be sure in English whether someone is making a constructive comment or taking the piss.
'Poutine' was a new word to me, having looked it up I'm still not sure if someone is taking the pee....
What makes it a joke here in France (and Canada, I suppose, since that's where it comes from) is that "Poutine" is how the French spell "Putin". Plenty of opportunity to pun on the Russian despot being like a pile of chips covered in cheese and gravy.
And as I'm sure your erudite readers already know, in Italian, the similar-sounding 'puttane' is a person of ill-repute.
Nominative determinism?
I just assumed it was street food ...
I feel vindicated. Half of our IT processes are based on elaborate VBA macros running in Excel. Written by yours truly
Hopefully your code starts with the comment
'Abandon all Hope, ye who enter to update it
Because that's how I feel when I have to intervene an old do-it-all macro, coded by someone who left the company (and indeed probably their mortal coil) decades ago
Actually, that is a nice idea. Putting that comment in, obviously :-) My current comments are rather descriptive without too much swearing
We've had a user who, over the years, moved a lot within the company and that, in every department he was in, left MS Access applications full of garbled macros and external links that all became business critical. He long gone and, over the years, we've been porting every one we find into our internal platform, but they seem to still keep popping up wherever you look! I swear at them.
Sounds familiar, was it me ???
This sort of thing can be fun though. A couple of years ago I had to look at a project in our company that I'd never heard of before, because some parts were outright failing and others were hideously slow. It was an Access beast that wound up producing a handful of Excel files on a daily basis, which it took over 2 hours to do. Nobody else had (or at any rate would admit to) much Access experience, and the project hadn't been updated in at least 10 years, so I was tapped for it. In a couple of weeks I managed to fix the broken parts, redo the "recent changes" logic so it worked correctly, and reduce the running time to about 15 minutes. It's still a hideous mess of nested queries and so on, and we have a backlog project to get rid of it altogether and put the underlying logic into sensible ETL tables, but it was still interesting to work on and I'd have loved to have another month to really get into it and have something neatly designed that ran in about 2 minutes.
Access VBA is still weird though.
Sadly many of ours are (plus Access). In the immortal words of the cinema mafiosi "they pulled me back in".
Did anyone else ever think it was funny to set up Macro tennis? A process fires Macro 1, which fires Macro 2, which fires Macro 1 ad infinitum. Each macro adding something to a log file, such as "thwap!" or "thunk!" or something equally onomatopoeic which would bring a tear to Adam Wests eye? Either that or two email boxes which only forward emails to each other.
You call it "infinite loops", I call it good fun.
Infinite loops are really fun, when you are out of them: Not talking about macros, but rather email avalanches.
One such avalanche, the one capable of taking the whole email infrastructure of a Fortune 500 company for the best part of 3 days, is truly one of the most marvelous spectacles of nature, something that only Sir David Attenborough is fit to narrate.
(obviously when you are NOT tasked with cleaning it)
Back in the 90s a manager where I worked built an entire purchase order system in 123 for dos. Not sure who it survived the start of the windows era but it it was still working somehow when I left the company in 97 a couple of years after he had left.
It was macro hell why they didn’t just buy an off the shelf system in the first place I don’t understand. But it did actually work and managed to track orders, stock and provide details to accounts.
Mind you I moved companies to a bigger organisation and they kept using multipart paper forms to order stuff for the next 10 years (at least)
After many happy years working 5 days on and 2 off in the NHS, I retired and came back part time - 2 on and 5 off!
This keeps me aware of what day of the week it is. I paid everything off with part of my pension lump sum and I should have about the same money coming to me each month.
Instead if learning the latest offerings from Microsith, I am learning Ukrainian. There must be something in common with that and COBOL!
Well I'm about as old school as you, so yeah, that classic
10 PRINT "hello"
20 GOTO 10
was my first triumph.
Of course these days I'd be all modem and eschew the evil GOTO...
While TRUE
Print "Brian is not the Messiah'
End
PS if I was less close to hoping to be comatose soon I'm sure that could be improved, maybe at a little cost? Instead I'll just create a new pseudo language in which this works
On Break
Print "he's a very naughty boy!"
While I can appreciate your time spent with Lotus 123 - A project I was involved with had a new XT with 2MB of ram on long expansion boards - so Lotus could process viewer ratings of TV shows back in the early '80's.. I reckon Power BI is going to be the next Access/Excel Macro/ VB/Clipper/Foxpro all into one! Users can currently download and use it for free!.. Users are given the ability to upload anything, process and format it just the way they want it : - or the way they think looks prettiest anyhow. Some organisations I have done work for in the past had 1000 + Access databases essential .. How many desktop PowerBI's are going to be essential for reporting to shareholders and top tier management? Data Quality, Management and Business Intelligence disciplines will not apply, of course.
Going to be ? It already is 😂
Telling them it needs a data model, database even behind it, same story it's ever been with this kind of stuff.
It's ok there's a "data repository" ( a workspace in SPOL).
Ignorance really is bliss!