Wednesday, March 21, 2007

To Err is Human

To really fuck it up, you need a computer :)

Well, we got a new job at MOCCIS Trading (Malay Officers Cooperative Credit And Investment Society). But, it's not the kinda job I had in mind. The previous developer, Meridian Diversified, which provided a Java solution for day-to-day operation at MOCCIS decided to pull out two weeks ago and refused to hand over the source codes properly. However, the biggest problem isn't the source codes, but the complex month-end back-end reporting services executed via scripts which sat on one of their workstations. And the workstation was taken away.

Hmm. So, Covalent was called in to solve these problems by performing some miracles. Reverse engineering in less than 15 days? Yeah right. Whatever source codes that they left were not documented. The codes really suck. And, I freakin' don't understand their naming convention. Some LF_SHIT, SF_SHIT, what the heck is LF? SF? The connection strings and schema names were hardcoded which have to be changed and recompiled every single month. And guess what, they're still using Corba, and IBM DB2! Oh geez, it couldn't get any worse. Tell me, how do you truncate a table in IBM DB2? You can do it easily in MS SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Just one sql statement "TRUNCATE " or "TRUNCATE TABLE " would do. Oh wait, IBM DB2 doesn't support this. We have to drop and re-create the table or load it with an empty fuckin' dummy file. IBM DB2 costs around RM 50K, and it can't even do a simple truncate function. Fuckin' hell.Do you know how much this Meridian Diversified which apparently doesn't even have a website charged MOCCIS Trading? RM 50K a month since 2004, just to execute some silly back-end services that they refused to automate. And the development work? I heard a fuckin' RM 3 Million for such a lowsy java solution (with hardcoded connection strings, fuckin' stupid developer) using IBM DB2.

And how much would Covalent charge? Well, we're going to charge 'em, let's see, hmm... RM 15K a month for performing miracles, and redeveloping the whole thing using ASP.NET. Cheap eh? Yeah, we are cheap mofos ;)

If anyone of you out there thinks that I haven't done enough community or national service, well, think again!

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