Today we had a
fire alarm. So everybody has to leave the building, but the alarms
never seem to ring on the 9th floor. I've heard it's because only the
adjacent floors to the fire alarm go to full alert. Other floors have
the fire doors close and the lights flash. Dude, if you want us out of
the building ring the alarm too! That thing is freaking loud.
Anyway, Prasad finally walks around telling everyone we have to go
downstairs. Usually I take my PowerBook since if it were a real fire
I'd rather take my computer. This time I just took my iPod since at
least that has a backup of all my data. We were close to the last ones
out of the building and the stairs were clear of people.
Then there's the 30 minute wait until the firefighters check it out and
say it's ok to return, plus everybody going back at the same time.
Luckily it's a three-day week so not too many people are around. And it
was lunch time so Prasad and I had lunch at the 300 building. I had my
usual Chicken Caesar Salad with the soup of the day, Tomato Basil.
Prasad had some kind of vegetarian lasagna. We talked a bit and then
went back to work.
After that we had our 14:00 Tuesday meeting which Simon started a
couple of weeks ago. Basically it's just a "what do we need other
people to do" sort of meeting to coordinate and make sure that people
aren't waiting for other people to finish something. I only have like
one big thing which I have to get started on soon.
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After the
meeting we had another meeting to discuss the schema for the new CAPS.
Not sure what CAPS stands for. Basically it's a generic server that
runs a specific server, multiple CAPS distributing server processes
among themselves. It's not that much different conceptually than the
current architecture if you changed each specific server into a CAPS
instance.
Because it's pretty much the same architecture Prasad wants the team to
try to reuse the current schema. I can see having a whole new set of
tables which makes the separation cleaner. But it makes migration
harder. It may be cleaner to reuse the same tables and add necessary
columns. So we talked about that.
Writing this up the big problem I see is that the existing schema has
tables and columns with specific names. The CAPS schema uses totally
different generic terms. As a general rule, you'd like the schema names
to match the English interface since it makes it easier for external
parties to look at your tables. We already have minor problems by using
table columns in different ways as our architecture has changed.
That's pretty much all I did at work today. The rest of the time I was
watching videos and just working on personal things. Tomorrow I'll be
working from home because Stephanie and I are leaving early for
Sacramento.
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