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Back in the salt mines

Wow - the customers! The Sales! The overflow of Tech support from success!

Which means that this week I've been given the additional task of being the Tech Support guy. This isn't something I've done in nearly 10 years! But with so many customers spending so much, it's important that we provide them the level of support that they require. If that means that I have to take overflow support requests, I can deal with that.

Up until last week my memories of tech support were a bit vague on the details of the day-to-day job. They were more focused on the elation when I moved out of that to become a programmer.

Now that I'm doing it again - the memories are hitting me like a movie quality vietnam flashback. Not that I was ever there, but most people give blank stares when you say post traumatic stress syndrome.

I know I'll be able to do it - but in what condition will I be in by the end of the week ;-)

Where did the roof(er) go?

For the last few months we've been trying to get the roofer to come out and fix the flat roof that covers our garage. You see, like all flat roofs - it tends to leak if water is allowed to stand.
We were last told that he was going to come out at the beginning of the month and as such we schedualed the window guy to come out this Friday (That's TOMORROW) after the roofer was done so that he could install the custom ordered french doors that have been in our garage for the last 5 weeks.
Our roofer BTW promises that he'll have it all done in plenty of time for the door installers to do their work on FRIDAY MORNING.

Now on to the pic. On Tuesday I came home to find that the roofer removed the little half roof. And I thought "good, this may get done yet".
Wednesday however came and gone without site of the roofer.
Thursday (today) is his last day to get the roof done.
Bren's playing phone tag with everyone as I write this.

I just hope that that the roof looks a little more finished when I get home

Need a better mnemonic

One thing that I've been made painfully aware of by working with both windows and linux concurrently is the confusion over line endings.

Line endings?

Yes, the end of a line of text in a plain text file.

I'll be honest, I've been writing dos/windows code for years - and I've never understood why lines needed BOTH 0xD (CR, \r) and 0xA (LF, \n). It just always seemed like a strange forced compatibility with line printers. Was it ever realy important to print things like "Hello\nThere" as
Hello</br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There

instead of explicitly adding the requisite spaces? I don't really know.
But that legacy just continues on and on and it looks as if it will never leave the dos/win world.
Linux seems to have learned from this - and I'm sure that there are plenty of pages out there that go into this historical implementation detail with typical fanboy zeal.

Buy why bring it up?
Well, I've noticed on quite a few occasions now that some applications (on both win and linux sides) screw up the line endings when saving back and forth. The most common effect is the sudden appearance of \r\n\n or \r\r\n in my text files.
So I would open up my hex editor to see what got fouled up and I would immediatly reminded I completely forgot the proper order of these TWO control characters! 0xA 0xD 0xD - they doesn't sound anything like newline, \r or anything. This would be followed by a "You know, I need a mnemonic for this"

For the record, here is the proper order for DOS/WIN
\r \n
0xD 0xA
CR LF
Linux doesn't do the \r 0xD CR

But wait, you said two - I see six?
That's my problem - there are two, but there are 3 names for each!
My current mnemonic choices are
"RNDA" or "Our N.D.A." for Non-Disclosure Agreement"
"R.egisterd N.urse, D.istrict A.torney"
and of course "RDNA" (Recombinant DNA), which to my dyslexic eyes sees as RNDA
But neither include CR LF - and I need one that has all of them.

....Sigh....

But maybe writing this entry will be all I need to fix the proper order in my mind once and for all. I'll see.