Or maybe I'm just going nuts.
Dr. Science and his crew want to compare the Hamsters with the pre-Hamster system. In order to do that, they want to be able to take Hamster files and dump them into the same software they've been using to analyze data collected by the pre-Hamster system. All quite reasonable except that the Hamsters generate data in a different (better) format. Consequently we've been stuck with creating a program that will take Hamster data and convert it to the pre-Hamster format.
Which is easy, theoretically. Except for the slight matter of how no one actually knows what's in the files generated by the old system. Or at least, that's what you'd think given how difficult it's been to get that information out of them. In defense of Dr. Science et al., the old system was built twenty years ago and the people who developed the software are long gone.
Today I finally dug through all the files they've been sending and found some answers. Ratso's mostly got the conversion software working. Now it's a matter of having the Hamster system generate a little extra data for Ratso's software to add in to the file it generates. One of the things we need is the start time and end time of the data collection session. It only takes five minutes to add a feature to the Hamster system so it will write out a file with the requisite time stamps. We hook up the Hamsters, have them collect data for a few minutes, then check the time stamps.
Oddly enough, the end time is earlier than the start time.
I know that time travel is not a Hamster feature. (We won't mention that to Dr. Science, because he'll get nanotubes involved and we'll get the kind of spec creep that haunts my nightmares.)
Hunched behind a monitor, Ratso says, "I think we should just let them worry about it."
"Yeah." I leave the Hamsters to run overnight to see if this happens when the start and end times are hours apart instead of only minutes.
351 words | February 21, 2005 11:32 AM | Ivory tower