Scandalised

I'm writing this in the early hours of the morning at the end of another very warm and very long day. As ever, before going live with software, all kinds of issues have come out of the woodwork. It's been very intense but I've got loads achieved and I think we're looking good - although we have put the date back a day because of some anomalies found in the data given to us by the client. I still haven't found time to catch up with the blog entries from Ireland. I'm forcing myself to write this entry for today because if I get any further behind it may well be all over. There are so many things I need to do that the things I merely want to do are getting sadly neglected. However, I did get out for half an hour on the moor this evening, just after some heavy showers passed through. It was great to be out in the air, but I can't ever remember struggling so much to reach the cairn. The legs feel so very heavy. I can only think it is symptomatic of both playing and working very hard indeed this last couple of weeks. I hope so, because I really can't imagine doing much more running if it's going to feel like that! At least I was rewarded with some incredibly dramatic views up the Wharfe valley, the sun forcing its way through some dramatic storm clouds.

Before falling into bed there is one thing that I have to note here. I found today the most outrageous bug in any piece of commercial software I have ever used - in over 30 years. I came across it using this same application that I have already been moaning about on this blog, and which has given me one hell of a lot of grief this last couple of weeks since upgrading. It shall be named: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. The horribly clumsy and ill-conceived interface apart, this is a different league of problem altogether that revealed itself today. Put as simply as I can, I just wanted to delete a row from a table. The row is highlighted and a message warns me that the deletion can't be undone. The change is permanent. That's not a problem because the row I want to remove is unambiguously marked and I definitely want to delete it. I hit "Yes" to confirm that I wish to go ahead - to which the application promptly responds by deleting the row below the one that is highlighted, leaving the row I actually want to delete worryingly intact. I don't even know what row I have actually deleted, with no way of finding out either because it is irrecoverable. It kindly warned me about that! It's completely outrageous. Once I had deleted one row I knew I had to recover the data from backup so I tried again and the bug was completely reproducible. I had to show one of my lads just as proof that I wasn't somehow imagining it and going completely mad. I well understand that all software is buggy to some extent, but this is nothing short of scandalous. At least it makes me feel better about the relatively trivial bugs that I'm gradually eliminating from my own software.