Hi Bob,

BV> Cripes, I have that problem with stuff I have written myself
BV> when I come back to it 6 months later.
BL> Do you come back to stuff you did a few years ago and think: "Jeese!
BL> I must have been a genius! This is really clever."

Nope. More often than not, I say to myself, "what the fuck does this do."
Or, "How the fuck does it do that."

I actually had a typical situation occur last night. Many many years
ago, I did a little bit of work on a Point of Sale system for a chain
of clothing stores. A friend of mine was writing most of the code and
I was simply helping in some areas. I didn't write much of the code
itself and didn't have the faintest idea of how the overall program
was structured. When it came to the inter-store communications, the
other blokes all spat the dummy and threw their hands into the air
in disgust. Needless to say, Brenton ended up writing the entire
communications sub-system. I knew that they wouldn't pay for me to
write everything, so I wrote some Telix scripts to actually handle
the communications and file-transfers, as it was a lot cheaper.

The _real_ clever stuff was in the scheduler and tosser I wrote. It
was an absolute work of art and it was doing all the real work and
only calling Telix to do the actual transfer. Not that dissimilar
to the way that we use Telix with the TinyPoint stuff. Anyway, the
chain store went broke and the other guy who was writing most of the
code didn't get paid for a large part of his work, etc.etc.etc. I
had been paid for my part, so I didn't bother about it and promptly
forgot all about it.

About a month ago, I get a call from a bloke who tells me that he
bought some stores from this chain before they went broke. He has
since registered the name etc and now trades using the same name.
Over the last 4 or 5 years, he has built it up and now has 4 stores,
3 of which are in Sydney, with another in Adelaide. His problem is
that he has been using the same software that was written all those
years ago and it isn't working properly. I told him that I only did
the communications and that another bloke wrote most of the program.
As he lives at Menai, he said that he would prefer me to look after
it as I was closer etc. I called my friend and he sent me what source
code he had with his best wishes.

When the bloke brought a machine around for me to look at, I couldn't
even recognise any of it. I didn't bother looking at any of the
communications stuff as he wasn't using it. However, I still had a
problem. The source code I received looked to be a year older than
the executable. I compiled the program and had a quick play with it
and it looks like the source code is in better shape than the actual
program this poor bugger is using. Hmmmm, I thought, "I wonder if
somewhere along the track, the blokes writing the stuff installed
old software in the expectation of not being paid." A bit more
playing and I am now thinking that this is what has happened. I had
a quick look at the communications stuff and I couldn't remember any
of it. There was no sign of my masterpiece. A bit bewildered, I had
a look at my archives from that period. Sure enough, I have all the
work, including my cleverly crafted stuff. None of which is in
either the source code sent to me or the executables this guy has.
So, what the fuck happened to it ? Buggered if I know. The _real_
problem I have now though is that if I want to resurrect any of it, I
will have a real problem. My stuff got right into the datafiles and
extracted all the transactions from the days trading, tokenised it
and prepared it for sending to the head office. At the head office
end, it got inside all the datafiles and once again tokenised it all
for sending to the stores. Buggered if I know how I did it or what I
was thinking of when I devised the token scheme. At the time it must
have made perfect sense, but since I haven't seen it for over 4 years,
it may as well be written in Swahili for all the sense it makes.

In short, I have a customer who has one version of the program, I
have the source code to another, but I know that there was another.
Obviously we have to start work from the current source code, but
the guy only knows what his problems are with the executable and I
don't remember any of it. It's gonna be fun :)

Regards, Brenton
@EOT:

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