HOSS

When we moved to one corner of the building to consolidate offices, we took a rather unusual democratic approach to office assignments. Each person wrote down their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for offices. We then ranked these choices to determine who got which office. Out of this first round, we managed to get three people assigned to offices: Jim selected the worst single office as his first choice and since nobody else wanted it, he got a single office. John Watkins and I both selected the best double office as our first choice, and since everybody else selected the better single offices, we got our choices.

Jim, JW, and I then watched the rest of the group argue over the one single office with a window for about 45 minutes before trying to sneak out. Kenlin didn't want us to leave, since they had to suffer through it, we did too.

The office that JW and I shared became rather infamous. It was the corner office under the corporate logo, and seemed to have a talent for collecting "stuff". At its peak, I believe we had:

The amazing thing is that the office was still comfortable. This place was huge. When it had previously been occupied by rwk, it had been known as the bowling alley.

Often we'd investigate problems and it would turn out to be a hardware problem. Often the hardware group would investigate problems it would turn out to be a software problem. This lead to a lot of feuding, so we decided to have a relay race around the Charles River basin against the hardware guys to determine if it was a hardware problem or a software problem.

It would appear that the hardware group was in better shape than HOSS, so therefore it was a software problem.

Anyone remember the Customer Service weekend meeting at Waterville Valley? Oh, what a scary weekend that was. We had to attend about 4 hours of meetings on a Friday afternoon but then got to play at the resort for the rest of the weekend. We got these navy blue t-shirts which said something about "Keeping the customer first."

I remember late one night a few HOSStages decided we wanted to go for a swim. The pool/jacuzzi area was closed for the evening however we found a little used door which was open (someone had to walk through the snow in their bare feet to get there, get inside and open the other door for the rest of us). There was a little problem, though, since Kenlin had forgotten her swimsuit. She said she would go in the hot tub in her underwear and new Customer Service T-shirt if the rest of the women would. So, we all agreed, especially since the T-shirts were all X-large and the lights would be out since we weren't supposed to be in the pool anyway, and wore our new navy blue t-shirts in the jacuzzi.

The next morning, when we passed by the pool area, we noticed that they were draining the jacuzzi because the water had turned a weird color blue. Our new t-shirts had run! We hadn't noticed it the previous night because the lights were off.

Later, one of the guys from hardware support was thrown out of the hotel (maybe even arrested? I can't remember.) for passing out drunk in the jacuzzi tub in his room with the water flowing. Apparently the tub overflowed and flooded his room and the room below.

I was in the room below. There was water pouring out of the ceiling heatlamp in the bathroom; this at 4am, too. Of course, I didn't retire until 3am (due to a killer game of "Oh Hell"), so it wasn't that bad (sleep-wise).

I remember that the clown had deadbolted the door, so that we couldn't break in and wake him up. I don't remember if he was arrested, or left voluntarily tho (after sobering up). I seem to remember being told that he had tried to hit on the Lady HOSStages, in his drunken stupor.

There was one crisis that both Jody and I had to deal with where a customer had been unable to get his graphics tablet to work. He'd had both the field hardware guy and the field software guy out to look at the problem, and nothing had been able to make it work. At this point, upper management was sweating about the problem, so Symbolics decided to send someone out from the home office.

Jody ran management interference while I studied the situation. Our field software guy wasn't here for this, but the hardware guy was here looking helpless. After careful investigation, I determined that there was both a bad cable and a namespace problem. What apparently happened was the software guy had a bad cable, and started monkeying with the namespace. Nothing he could do made any difference, so he gave up leaving things in a bad state. They then called in the hardware guy, who swapped cables and everything else and couldn't fix the problem due to the namespace problem. He then put the original cable back since taking it out didn't make things work. This took several hours, during which Jody had to keep the angry customer far enough away from me so I could think.

This was also the day that Jody's car broke down and we had to walk a mile in the rain.

It was actually the Naval Weapons Center. I suspect the reason the Navy's out in the middle of the Mojave desert is so they can blow things up and nobody cares; the surrounding landscape sure looked like the ass end of the moon...

So there was this luser out there, using VMS, and DNA on his lispms to talk to it, and he's perennially having problems; he gets a wierd error, his file transfer hangs, stuff just wedges up, whatever. Since I'm the DNA wizard, I end up talking to this guy, about every day or so for about a month. After talking to him a couple times, it becomes clear that he's a complete airhead; can't finish a sentence without haring off on some tangent; can't remember to save state so there's anything to debug; can't even play remote fingers for me. This goes on for a while, and his superiors are getting more and more upset that 'bolics can't get their guy winning again. Finally, I get the word that this is obviously such a hard technical problem that I have to get flown out there to debug it on site.

I get driven out there by the local sales types, who are telling me for the whole trip about how technically sharp these navy guys are, and how it's so vital that I debug this horrible bug, and like that. After surviving the FBI check to get into the place, we go into the lab, and meet this horde of navy guys, all wearing their best ferocious military expressions, and the research guy, who looks like a refugee from some university science lab. I say let's get started, where are the machines; turns out nothing's loaded or set up, so the research guy has to thrash around for a while getting software loaded into worlds etc. I go over to the side table where there's a pizza and grab a slice, just in time to get impaled by the expression on the faces of some more officer types who came around to corner, obviously not expecting to see me in my long hair, sneakers, and a blazing purple t-shirt with a picture of a fish on it.

The sales guys rescued me from that, and by then we were about done loading stuff, so I went to have a look at the bug. I sit down, and the navy guys; a sysadmin, a couple of officers on whatever program this was for, and some big shot with a lot of brass on his chest, all crowd around me with their notepads etc, to make dead sure they capture every detail of what the wizard from symbolics does to get them out of their jam. I ask the research guy to do whatever it is that provokes the bug. He reads a file into zmacs. That works ok. He modifies it and writes it back out. Bombs into the debugger. The error says Error code mumble mumble, use (DNA:DESCRIBE-ERROR) for more information, or some such. I type in the obligatory form. It says Error code mumble: Disk Quota Exceeded. I turn to the guy and say "It says you've exceeded your quota". "Really???" he says. "How could that happen?". I tell him to remote-login to that system. He does, and VMS immediately says Warning: Disk Quota Exceeded. Total elapsed time, about 1 minute.

At this point, I hear grumbles and groans behind me; the navy guys are throwing down their notepads and walking off in disgust. The sales guys are standing there with their mouths open. The sysadmin is bitching at the research guy "Don't you ever check your quota?" etc; the rest of the conversation went downhill from there.

Of course, since we'd scheduled all day, I had nothing to do for a while, so I had him try to do some of the other things that he thought were buggy, but of course none of them were real either. So to kill time, I showed the guy the documentation, and had him type in some of the examples from it etc, which of course worked, and convinced him that I really was a wizard.

The best part was telling the sales guys that I wasn't interested in staying around to rewrite this clown's application for him, and that they could pay for the hotel room they'd booked me into without telling me, as I was flying back on the next plane.

As I recall, we voted that guy luser of the month.

I did the macivory serial stuff, so when a guy at Lincoln Labs started having problems using a macivory to do data acquisition over a serial line to some random piece of hardware, I got dragged into the loop in short order.

I talked to the guy, and debugged over the phone a little, and came to the conclusion that (a) he didn't have much of a clue, and (b) there was a stupid bug in some low-level queue-handling code. I knocked together a patch and sent it off.

The next day he calls back, and he's not losing data any more, but "every once in a while" the whole machine hangs up, wedged solidly in Run state, not responsive to keyboard or anything else. It would do that for some number of seconds, and then start running again.

I did a lot of head-scratching over that, but couldn't come up with an explanation. Finally I went and found Greenwald, who'd written the (then) new scheduler, to ask him if I was doing something wrong. He looked at the code, and said it looked ok. Eventually the management said if we couldn't fix it over the phone, we should just go out there, so we drove over.

Met the guy (more military security checks) and got into the lab. Sure enough, the machine wedges up whenever it turns around. Mike digs around in the scheduler datastructures for a while, but can't find any explanation. After some FEP debugging, Mike says "I dunno, but it looks to me like it's just spending a lot of time in the interpreter". We look at each other. I ask the costomer "You loaded the patch I sent you, right?" "Yes." "Did you compile it first?"

He looks blankly at me. Mike and I look at each other again. I tell the guy "You have to compile it before you load it." "Really?? I never do that with my code." After discarding several other responses, I said "Just compile it and reload it and let's try it again". He goes off to compile it and save it into a world, we go get coffee and boggle and the level of lossage.

Now he's got his new world set up, so we go try again. No joy, it still wedges up. Thinking maybe we hadn't really fixed it, Mike digs around some more. After a while, "It still looks to me like it's spending a lot of time in the interpreter." I ask the customer "You compiled that, right?" "Yes" "and loaded it into this world, right?" "Yes". Grumble. Well maybe it didn't get saved where we thought it did. He saves a new world. Try again. Still wedges.

By now we're both stumped. Let's try it one last time. "You're sure you compiled it" "Sure I'm sure!" "And loaded the binary file into this world, right?" Blank look. "Binary file?"

The thing that really amazed me about the whole incident was what it said about genera robustness. We were running a fair-sized slab of code interpreted, at interrupt level, and it didn't croak anything.