Today on UA I wrote
OTOH, my company specialized in software for agriculture, and we have installations in many forsaken villages (*) where the electricity may vary :). The existing versions of the routine have always done the job so far and I really have no problems, except with some legacy software which we kind of maintain... and didn't add this.
(*) A footnote question: are there any villages in the USA (except Greenwich Village)? I've seen hundreds of north American movies, and I have literally never heard of any place smaller than "our little town", even with population below 1K.
The piece which relieved us on powerouts, the crashed tables resurrector, the rebfpt.prg, was now officially part of GenerAll. Don't quite remember whether we had to run it manually when we come to intervene, or was it somewhere in the maintenance menu, or did GenerAll recognize typical errors and offer to run it on the spot... well, probably in that historical order. It cost me a lot of nerve and concentration to write, but then saved me five times as much when it pulled out lost tables out of deep shit. And it happened to be necessary many times - specially this agriculture would often happen to have a seat in some old german mansion in the middle of the village, with ajnfor*, tall ceilings (or low, when the side pantries and storage were converted into office space), and such places were first electrified when the villages were, about 1948-1953. And the wires stayed as they were, suffering humidity in the walls, mice and sometimes fires. On top of that, in some places they stuck to the traditional layout with tables in the middle, so they had to use extension cords, which the secretary would yank when passing in high heels, or it was borrowed and returned in unknown condition. Lots of things happened, and the tables suffered.
In some places these extension cords were so bad, that there was significant voltage between the ground and zero wires, which meant we'd suffer a minor electric shock each time we touched the BNC connectors or terminators on the network cables, or even the PC's case. After a while we started carrying a multimeter, and started measuring. The worst offenders were the dairy plant and klaanca, where I measured 104V where it should have been 220V (zero to hot) and 67V or more between ground and zero. Told them the warranty will be off unless they provide proper cables. It's not that the building's wiring was bad - both were new - it's the extension cords. Everything was fine in the walls, as measured.
And it wasn't power each time, it was the network too. In kombinat's once workshop, now a separate company, the network crashed for various reasons. Once the director needed something done to his office, so the majstors simply cut the network cable, which passed through the window frame (which was HIS bright idea). Once someone was welding near the cable so the induction fried all four network cards, and once a truck too tall passed between the two buildings and yanked the cable. In zzzzz some laboratory machine was generating noise, but we never found which one was it. That network never worked right.
(this electrical discourse covers the last eight years, not a recent problem)
Speaking of zzzzz... at some point, this or the year before, I dropped by just to check how they were doing, routine. When I packed to go, dr Handžarević occupies me to stay a bit, she has a package that (... 39 words...) wine is packed in such boxes. I guessed it was a sample that they just give out to any guests, just like the tobacco factory did when dad worked there. Then we used to always have two or three such packages, with a pack of each of their products inside. I tied it on the backrack on my bike and took it home.
(... 78 words...), now you're trying to make it look she sold out for two liters of oil, fuck off.
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* car entrance in the middle of the house front, with roof and ceiling
5-IV-2020 - 31-X-2025