No Longer A Valid Excuse

Storytime...

A long time ago I was a co-op student and was selected for a four month term at the Ministry of Natural Resources in Ottawa. The department I was working in did some transformation programs on old mainframes that took recorded field data and turned them into grids and stuff for maps. Well, it turns out that one of their main programs suddenly stopped working and they thought they would inflict it upon the co-op student to see if he could fix it.

Was the program written in C++ or Java or something else contemporary to the time?

No, it was written in Fortran 77. About 3000 - 4000 lines of Fortran 77. And debugging it required me making changes, compile it, load it on the mainframe, and run it there.

After a month and a half of learning the language, learning the massive program, and figuring out the problem (turns out the input data format changed from 6 digits to 5) I was finally able to solve the issue and deploy the fix. And promptly spent the next two and a half months mastering Minesweeper.

OK, how does this relate to EVE?

Given a working environment, all code can be deciphered and understood with enough effort. Wrong language? Learn it. Convoluted logic? Map it. Weird behaviour? Understand it. Computers work logicially and programmers have the ability to untangle that logic and understand code given enough time and intelligence. No code understanding problem is intractable.

Its been years since we first heard that the underlying POS management code is a terrifying mess of poorly understood source. And I can understand that, I've been knee deep in esoteric corners of confounding code before and I know the terror that comes from being faced with the thought that a change may occur. Ramp up the estimates, increase the doomsday rhetoric, and give other less terrifying options.

But eventually, that excuse is no longer valid. Sooner or later, if you have a festering sore in your code base its your duty as a programmer to clean and excise the infection. If you have a massive tangle of sphaghetti code in a language no one understands anymore, you decode it.

CCP, you've had enough time to address the problem that is the POS infrastructure code. You have not done so, instead putting it off with the same tired excuse we've heard so many times before. Its no longer acceptable and reflects a lack of managerial will and developer fortitude to deal with the problem, and as a result you are letting down your users who are stuck using that code day in and day out.

No more excuses.

To Anchor A Tower

With the promotion out of the way, I have the standings I need to anchor a high sec POS again but I first need to transfer them to a corporation as its the corp's standings. The question is, what corporation?

The first choice would be to just stay in Katana Securities Incorporated as its standings should equal mine own, right? Well, no. I let a friend join the corp so he could partake in Factional Warfare when he logged in and his standings are not high enough to join the militia directly. So my 5.16 is averaged with his 0.39... needless to say that is not resulting over 5.0 for the corp. And do I want to consolidate my industrial characters into the same corp as my combat character? Somehow it seems unattractive.

My next obvious choice to to go over to Razor Technologies and bump its standings up. The downside to that plan is that Derranna would have to leave because she has a minuscule Minmatar standing from when she was running research agent missions and got a storyline once. Although the storyline was for Caldari the small derived standing decrease of 0.01 is enough to make her count against the overall corp average. Very annoying, but doable.

Third choice is to have Kirith jump into Insisto Oblivium corp. No one would have to leave and it would take only the time to raise the corp average to over 5. But that corp is for my long term alliance plans and not an industrial corp. The name is pseudo latin for "To Make Destroyed", not a good name for an indy corp.

The last choice is to make a whole new corp and transfer into it once the standings are complete. This is most attractive to me because Razor Tech is a bought corp and not my own invention; a new corp could have the standings quickly and the name I desire. So this is what I'm going to do.

Now to determine a good name and ticker...

Coming Together

Things are really starting to come together for Strife Mercenaries. To wit:

- POS is up and running and this week I'll anchor the mobile labs to get R&D&I going.

- Corp mining night was held last night with good turnout and lots of asteroids raped

- Plans for Tech 1 cruiser operations are getting support from the corp members and seeing some action

- Recruitment is continuing and we are swelling our numbers slowly but surely.

It may be another few weeks before we are ready for 0.0 action again, but we I can feel we are gelling as a team and when we do hit the big time we'll have a great core of infrastructure and pilots to get us there.

* * * * * *

Side story: on the weekend I was using Kirith and Derranna to setup and fuel the new POS called Strife Prime. After dropping off a week's worth of fuel Derranna was heading back to Nonni with the empty Mastadon (Tech 2 Minmatar Hauler). I hadn't experienced any problem with gate camps in the low sec blip that is called the Aunenen system but sure enough this time I jumped in without a scout and ran into a pilot camping the gate.

Now I had one warp stab which would get my away from some pirates, but this guy was in a Gallente Phobos Heavy Interdictor which meant that if he had a Warp Disruption Field Generator like my Onyx boasts, nothing could get away from him. Sure enough, I was warp scrambled and looking to be in trouble.

He opened fire and I watched as my shields slowly went down, all the time spamming the Warp button in the vague hopes he would turn off the disruptor. At about 30% shields I got the "Warping" message and after what seemed forever due to the slowness of the Deep Space Transport ship I was flying, I warped off.

How did I escape? Well, I speculate that he was trying to do three things: warp scram me, fire his weapons, and tank the sentries. For whatever reason, I think he lacked the capacitor to do all three and hoped I might not realize the scram was off. No excuse for it though, with 4 mid slots and no need for a warp disruptor in them he could have easily fit a cap injector and had enough cap to deal with me.

Ah well, his loss. To cap the story off a corpmate reported seeing his frozen corpse at a gate later in the day. Heh, fail.

Razor Secondus Up And Running

Last night I got a good amount of time to play so I powered through and set up the R&D POS in 0.0 space for the corp. It required hauling stuff from Molden Heath to Derelik, four carrier jumps, and three different characters to pull off, but I did it.

Razor Technologies will be going into hibernation and invention efforts will be renewed in 0.0 with extreme prejudice as we try and produce ships for the corporation and the alliance.

In other news, I'm going to try out writing for the Eve Tribune, a weekly news production put out by players. We'll see how it goes.

Two Minutes

Last night I didn't get on to Eve until near bedtime. I logged in to check some sales and saw 48 messages about low POS fuel. OH CRAP! I rushed into my hauler and ran out to the tower with another week of fuel. I got there with two minutes to spare until it ran out. Whew!

Real life is crazy this week as we are painting a nursery at home so Eve time has been limited. Friday should be free so I hope to get some good PvP then.