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Sun Mar 27 12:55:48 AM EDT 2022
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In order to develop a deep understanding for their system,
I'm using it in a nonstandard way -- not outside the scope
of what it's designed to do, but outside how it's marketed.
Applying the tool to a real-world problem where I have some
personal interest? What could be a better driver?

Let's skip forward a bit: At some age, and on a date only
you will know, you may begin to consider that there are far
fewer days ahead of you than there are behind you. After
that date, you may find yourself more irrationally pissed
than you used to be at losing a day to bullshit. Today, a
prominent, high-dollar, proprietary software system filled
the bulk of its pretty UI to tell me that I'd encountered an
error that I had to resolve before proceeding. The error?
"Index out of range."

What index? What range? Who knows -- it didn't say. There
was no additional information. There was no stack trace.
There was no error code to search for or a link to follow.
Just "Index out of range." What was I doing? Well, funny
that: I was trying to export the work I had done on their
system and to import it into another system... Like
Microsoft Office into Open Office or the like? No. I was
trying to move my work from their system into an updated
version of that very same system. Using their own tools.
Following their own instructions.

For the deeper understanding, I dug a little deeper...
Alright, maybe also to cover my bases before the support
folks come back and tell me it's my own fault. After trying
to migrate the work to the target system, I tried migrating
it to another system -- different platform. I upgraded the
current system to the same system version as the target, and
then tried migrating to the different targets. In every
case, the same error. I looked for some known and some
hidden places where some error hints might be -- no luck. I
opened up the data package it had constructed -- nothing
obvious. In the end? I filled the support ticket.

But really in the end I lost one of those remaining days,
accomplishing nothing else but fucking around with this
proprietary nonsense.  My data is in there, as is the
workflow I developed to process it all. I can't even move it
to a more capable platform running their latest and
greatest. It's stuck until I hear back on the support
ticket.

So here's the deal: Sitting off on the side are a pair of
Raspberry Pis collecting and preprocessing some live data
streams for me. They're feeding this beast, sure, but the
original system -- the one this work was based on? It's
still just chugging along. It's bespoke to the work at hand,
written in nodejs, dumping to mongodb -- event loops that
take and process the data, kicking off other flows when
different conditions are met. Every time I was dealing with
a new hiccup on the fancy system, my old stuff never missed
a beat... Crazy, right?

Fortunately, I'll never waste a day trying to get my work
out of their system for my own use...

I have a lot to say about some of these proprietary things,
but I'm already well over my word count for these posts.

Next time.