2009-10-13

Spirit Sol 277

I was out sick yesterday, so Ashitey asks me, "Are you better?"

"So much better."

"Good," interjects Craig Leff, "because we didn't like you the old way."

Ouch.

The day itself seems to take my revenge on Craig, though. He's got a relatively simple job to do, mostly delivering a couple of small NAVCAM panoramas. But they're supposed to be doing this in a new way: instead of building the sequences by hand, they're picking them from a huge library of thousands of sequences recently created by Justin Maki. This is supposed to simplify the process for the more lightly staffed extended-extended mission. Only Craig seems not to know how to go about figuring out which two of the thousands of available sequences he needs, and throughout the day there's an increasingly voluble and creative stream of profanity issuing from his vicinity.

I have my own tool problems to deal with. We're gearing up for another delivery of RSVP, and the various developers have been delivering different bits and pieces into their home directories for testing. Running RSVP now is like ordering at a Chinese restaurant -- combine pieces from here with pieces from over there, and hope the meal stays down. Something in the combination of pieces I've been using suddenly (perhaps because of a recent behind-the-scenes update to one of them) exposes a bug: HyperDrive hangs whenever you try to simulate the sequence.

Ashitey tells me Chris saw this same problem yesterday and, frustrated, resorted to using his (Ashitey's) favorite combination of pieces instead. I decide to learn from Chris's example and order Ashitey's combination plate, which works fine.

It's enough to make a person believe in configuration management, I find myself thinking. I must not be entirely well yet.

No comments: