Awarded to Me!!!
Today while I was doing some work, I made a small mistake while I was using ftp. Now not to put too fine a point on it, this protocol has been around from the beginning of computing. I have used it on many occasions and thought I was well up to speed with it’s function, which is just when these things tend to bite you on the Bum. That’s exactly what happened to me, bitten on the Bum, not by some nice flashy young thing – but by something probably older than me. I discovered that the command “ftp> ls -la file-name” doesn’t do what I thought it  did, for those of you who know ftp – suffice to say that the previous file that was ftp’d over was in fact “file-name”. It was an easy mistake to make, however on looking at the error messages generated when the environment of the user tried to source the file, I immediately leaped to the completely wrong conclusion and compounded the problem. After the dust settles and you look at things in the cold light of day, you wonder just how come you managed to be such a pratt.

On the upside I wasn’t the only person to manage the elevation from idiot to pratt, one of our more illustrious systems architect managed the same thing. He has still to correct the issue whereby he is recognised as a pratt, what he did was jump to a conclusion, based on lots of faulty information.

Now that the project is starting to ramp up, there are lots of interesting little problems creeping out to ambush us. With each one comes a flame war and normally after some time a grudging apology, so as a result I don’t feel as bad as I should. This would seem to be the way of the project at the moment, we’ll have to see if it maintains momentum or grinds to a halt having to be given a serious kicking to get it going again, Why don’t you just kill the offending parties I hear you say, well it’s because it’s not fair to dumb animals to do so.

On the up side, as is true with most days in the Unix world I have learned something new. I know that typing commands inside the ftp may not always work the way that you expect it too! So having learned my lesson for the day, I move on to pastures green I hope, I can’t help thinking how wonderful it is to be alive and still looking after the Muppet’s, as each day arrives I look forward to seeing an invitation to sort out some problem or other. Where there is something every day that  is useful to know, learning as you go, Something new every day!