Lots of Messing Around, but All-told, Not a Bad Day
Today has been a lot of messing around. I'm in the middle of adding a few new features to the app I'm inheriting from another developer and it's been a bit of a challenge. Over the last two days I've been adding the code and the unit tests to the codebase, and today it was time to get it all loaded up into the test server(s) and see how it runs. Things took a little longer than I'd have hoped, but all in all, it's understandable given that I haven't used these servers before today.
A few bumps in the road, but at least they had my favorite cereal in the kitchen this morning. It's amazing how something as simple as what you have for breakfast can really change your mood. There's got to be studies based on developers/creative types where they look at the effect of a new pad of paper, or a clean set of editor colors, or a new font - or cereal, has on your mood and how, in turn, that effects your productivity. In any case, it was a bit of a rough start, made smoother by those wonderful squares of goodness.
So I finally got things running and it came time time to compare the numbers between the code we added, and the application where we're getting the raw numbers. This application also does the aggregation of the raw numbers and that's what we're comparing. Did they match? Some. Never a good result.
I worked the rest of the day trying to get 29West working between a server of data and my app... didn't have a lot of luck, but did find out that speed/duplex problems are rampant even here, and my linux box was plugged into a switch that was improperly configured for auto/auto operation. That was fixed and helped a lot of things on my box, but not the 29West issues.
The data matching tests revealed that the formula I was using for the normalization of the values was wrong, and the right formula was a single factor different - not too bad, really. I fixed that up in the code and fixed the jUnit tests and things started to look better. But still not perfect.
Then the 29West guys noticed that it wasn't my box, but the sender's box that was having problems. So hopefully they'll get on that box and fix things up so he can send around the network. We'll have to see tomorrow.
Finally, my co-worker did the exhaustive testing of taking the raw data and using Excel manually aggregate it and compare it to the data in the app. There's only one problem with one instrument. It was just sprinkled throughout the portfolios so as to make it appear that there was more of a problem than there was. This was good news, but the day was over.
I'm sure glad I had those Mini Wheats.