January 29, 1998
Dear Everyone:
Corruption...corruption...everywhere you look,
corruption. No, I’m not
talking about the latest
White House
Scandal; I’m talking about the Versatile
database, which
crashed three weekends ago.
The past two weeks have not been happy ones.
At first, we thought the damage was relatively
mild. But, as time passed,
we began to realize that there was more to it than immediately met the
eye. We thought we had it
fixed, until the lead warehouse guy came to me and said, “We’re
corrupted,” not the sort of thing you expect a married man to say to
you. (Actually, he tried to
run a certain report and got a “file
corrupted” error message.)
And the more we looked into it, the worse things
seemed to get. Then, right
in the middle of the whole mess, I had to jet off to
Denver on some silly
old business trip, leaving “Wilbur” and “Jerry” to deal with unhappy
users and unhelpful technical support.
By the time I got back into the office last Thursday, they were
pretty fed up with the whole situation.
The technical support person at
Zasio simply said, “Restore
from backup,” meaning, go back to a previous copy of the database, thus
wiping out whole weeks worth of work on the part of hundreds of people.
We’d already gone back a week from the day of the crash.
And, because of some “technical difficulties”, the next available
backup wasn’t until December 13th, which would mean setting
us back an entire month.
We decided to start over from scratch, beginning
with the latest backup we could use.
Then I ran a Database Integrity Check against the whole database
and found five corrupted files, only one of which the Integrity Check
was capable of restoring.
Zasio’s technical support would have said, “Restore from backup” because
that’s the easiest way to fix a corrupted file.
Simply replace it with an older model before the corruption
occurred.
But I had discovered another way of dealing with a
single corrupted file. You
could copy the data out of the file into a temporary file.
When the copy hits the corrupted
record, it can’t handle it, so it just skips over it.
Then you “clone”
the file’s structure and copy the data back in, minus the bad record.
Granted, you’re now missing a single record; but when you have
over 600,000 of them, who’s going to miss just one?
The odds were in my favor.
I started “cloning” files at 7:30 Sunday morning
and finally went home at 8:00 that night, while the last file was slowly
rebuilding itself. When you
go into or out of the “Livermore” facility on a weekend, you have to
call Security at Company Park so they know why the motion detector is
responding and don’t call the “Livermore” police to investigate a
possible break in. By the
time I was ready to leave, the guy on the Security Desk just
automatically said, “Hi, ‘A’” whenever the “hot-line” rang.
All this has simply enhanced my (well-deserved)
reputation for dogged determination (a.k.a. pig-headedness) and tendency
to overwork. After all, how
could Security know that I’d spent the last two hours watching
Daniel Day-Lewis
rescue Madeleine
Stowe from the dreaded
Huron
Indians (again!) in
The Last of the
Mohicans?
Nevertheless, my attempts at elective surgery
appear to have been successful.
The patient survived the night (actually, it finished loading the
last file less than two hours after I’d left) and the system seems to be
doing fine now.
And I even managed to fit in a movie with “Jeannie”
on Saturday, in between Database Integrity Checks.
In
Wag the
Dog, the
President of the United States (name and specific party never
divulged) has committed a bit of a
faux pas and his
staff have frantically sent for the world’s best spin doctor, played by
Robert De Niro.
Right off the bat, he tells them to start denying any knowledge
of a particular kind of aircraft.
The staff are perplexed.
That aircraft doesn’t exist.
“That’s right,” he tells them.
“Keep denying it.”
Sure enough, in next to no time, the media are trying to find out about
this aircraft, forgetting the real story while they search in the coal
bin at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there, convinced that White
House staff members must be covering something up.
The more you deny, the more you must be trying to hide.
It’s classic sleight of hand, directing the eye to
the right hand while the left hand is doing something else entirely.
Next the spin doctor brings in a
Hollywood
producer (Dustin
Hoffman) to enhance the “story” and before you know it, they’re
ad-libbing a war, complete with faked news footage of an actress who
thinks she’s making a commercial for corn chips.
This is a wonderful, and cynical, send up of both
Hollywood and
Washington,
and of the unique ability of Americans to turn any silly old thing into
a fad overnight.
They keep dragging in every cliché in the book and the very fact
that they are clichés make
them that much funnier.
Mother would love it. Dad
would hate it.
And now “Jeannie”, having seen how easy it is to
manipulate the media and the public, is convinced that the whole mess
with Bill Clinton
and his aide
was really planted by Robert De Niro (who is an executive producer of
the movie) to boost ticket sales for
Wag the Dog, which is not
doing as well as say, Titanic.
You be the judge.
Love, as always,
Pete
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