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File: RageInducingSystemImplementation

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----
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----
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----
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********
!! Just a quick rant ...

I'm about to go on an extended business trip, so I'm making note
of broadcast TV programs that I want to record, and making sure
there is enough space on the recorder. I have a large external HDD
attached, so I've been transferring programs to that to make space
on the internal HDD.  All was going well.  There's still 240 hours
of space on the external HDD, so no problems anticipated.

So I set up the next batch of transfers to the external HDD and
pressed "Go", and got a new message, one I'd never seen before:

********> width="10%"
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"This operation will exceed the permitted number of titles on the
destination medium."
******** width="10%"
********<

So there is an undocumented limit on how many programs you can have
on the external HDD.

Seriously?  This feels like 1991 all over again.

Let me explain.

Between 1990 and 1993 I worked at the University of Liverpool in
the Computer Laboratory.  My semi-research task was to make the
cutting edge parallel machines - the Parsys SuperNode and others -
usable by non-specialists.  This was effectively impossible, but
as with all impossible tasks you start by identifying one thing
you can do, you do it, and what you've learned can then make other,
previously impossible tasks, possible.

Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

[[[>50 In case you're wondering (which most people won't be) ...

The machine was connected to the network for file transfers, but
remote logins weren't possible.  So you could transfer files to
and from the machine, but if you wanted to use it, you had to be
in the room. ]]]
So I was porting the NAG serial ForTran library to the SuperNode,
and pretty much every day I brought the system down.  One time in
particular I not only crashed my node, and crashed the machine,
but I even over-wrote the entire disk, requiring the full system
to be restored from backup.  It got to the point where whenever
people saw me coming they would backup their work over the network
and logoff, because they knew there was a chance I'd bring down the
entire system.

How did I do this?  Still not sure, but the command I ran was the
shell "ls" command.

You see, the operating system was a special version of a Unix clone,
and the system utilities had been written from scratch.  After all,
why bother using someone else's complicated code when the job was
simple enough, let's just knock out a simple, elegant version.
Except that the "ls" code had a fixed size array to store the file
details, and they had never anticipated 100 thousand files in one
directory.

Cue over-writing memory in, as it turned out, a spectacularly
unfortunate way.

So of course people learn from this sort of thing.  Except, of
course, they don't.  When in Melbourne they were implementing a
new ticketing system for the trains, why bother copying  or buying
in a known working, successful system from somewhere else?  Why
bother copying London's Oyster Card system? Or Singapore's system?
Or Atlanta's system?  No, instead let's build our own from scratch,
because we are smarter, and can learn from everyone else's mistakes.

Cue one project that's years late, millions of dollars over budget,
and still didn't work properly.

So of course my PVR has implemented its own disk filing system, and
of course, it has an undocumented limit that renders it significantly
less useful than it could be.

It's RISIBLE:

* Rage Inducing System Implementation Being Laughably Execrable

Well, you have to laugh ...
----

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