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ant tragedies
Saturday, September 8 2018
Ever since that storm came through on Thursday, temperatures have been cooler. Today the sky was overcast and temperatures topped out in the mid-60s. It was cool enough that Gretchen and I couldn't drink our Saturday morning coffee out on the east deck. We actually burned a small trash fire in the woodstove to improve conditions in the living room.
I'd brought my workplace computer home with me for the weekend so it could finish crunching through some data that would take hours to complete. I had access to the VPN, so even from home I could reach all the network resources it needed (by now, the project was bigger than just what I was hosting on that computer; it also needed to look at some data hosted in Microsoft SQL Server database).
At some point in the process, I was horrified to notice that the text file holding my Python script was now empty. It was as if I had selected all, hit delete, saved, and then quit the program. Had the program still been open, I could've undid whatever had happened, but it had closed. I didn't remember doing anything, though windows tend to jump around and otherwise animate so much in Windows 10 that it's possible doing something bad had been lost in all the visual noise. The Python script in question was still running, so for a time I had some hope that perhaps I could dump it out of memory into a file. I might only be able to recover a tokenized version, but there were ways to turn such code back into readable Python scripts. Unfortunately for me, though, I was using a Windows machine and all the instructions for doing this sort of thing applied to flavors of Unix. The biggest problem seemed to be identifying the running Python process; nothing useful could be found in the Task Manager. And then when the script finished running, it was no longer in memory. So I gave up on recovering it.
I've worked with computers since 1983 (that's 35 years), though I have almost no stories of actual data loss to report from that entire period. It's not that I back up religiously; on some level I've just been lucky, narrowly averting a few tragedies here and there along the way. In the grand arc of my computer career, this script loss ranked as perhaps the worst data loss ever. But it was relatively trivial; the script had only been about 100 lines of code. Having given up on recovering it, I set about the task of reconstructing it from memory.
After two relatively short bursts of coding (the first of which I did in the greenhouse), I managed to almost perfectly reconstruct the script. It was so similar to the one that had been lost that it constituted only a light refactoring. Doing so turned out to be a useful exercise; it revealed that most of the work of writing that script had been saved in my brain. Rewriting it, I had to re-lookup how to use a few Python libraries, and I had to consult some sources for things like field names and database access credentials. But all of that was relatively easy; the reality of what was possible was all in my brain, as were the specifics of what needed to be looked up. I had a new (and fully working) version of the script back in surprisingly short order. I hadn't intended to be working on the weekend, but accidentally deleting hard-won code was a fuckup that I couldn't blame on my new employer. I should say that after that incident, I'm being very careful to backup the new version of the Python script. Ideally, I'll be checking such things into Github in the near future.
I took advantage of my weekend to do a few important chores around the house. One of these was to adjust the new pressure switch I'd installed in the basement well pump system so that household water pressure was a bit higher than the pressure that switch was producing in its stock setting. I hadn't really noticed a problem, but Gretchen uses the kitchen sink more than I do, and she'd reported unusual delays when filling pots and such.
Another task I undertook today was to remove the hack I'd made on the oxygen sensor of the Subaru last summer. It turns out that I'd hacked the wrong one, and in so doing I'd done nothing but aggravate its automated emissions testing problems, the ones resulting in ODB2 420 errors (dude! 420!). It's possible I still need to hack the unhacked oxygen sensor, but I will drive the car around for awhile first to see if I get errors or not. It's possible the new exhaust system has fixed any actual underlying problems.
Yet another task I completed was the replacement of a Honeywell Powertrack electric valve in the solar hot water collection system. The valve itself wasn't the problem; the switch that detects the position of the valve had failed, causing the solar hydronic pump to run at odd hours at random. I'd originally outfitted the solar hydronic system with Powertrack valves because they were cheaper than other brands, but over the long term that has proved to have been a mistake. A normal (non-Powertrack) valve will work for well over 20 years without problems, and when problems happen, the part of the drive system and switch are modular and can be replaced. With Powertrack, the entire module that sits on the valve has to be replaced as a unit when any component of it fails.
Interspersed between the other chores, today I cut up and split (that is, processed) a fair amount of the unprocessed firewood languishing in front of the garage. As I did so, I listened to various podcasts, including old ones related to the Theranos debacle. As someone who believes in the inherent dignity of all animals, it made me sad to have to disrupt all the little invertebrates living beneath the chunks of wood I was processing today. One of the chunk of red oak was hollow and contained a large colony of big black ants. When I split the piece in half, hundreds of them tumbled out and began running around, immediately taking the actions that evolution has taught them to take. Within minutes, they'd all vanished. I later found them hiding beneath another log that was lying on its side, and this second disruption caused another frenzy of activity. You'd think they'd give up after a few of these massive tragedies (any one of which would outweigh a 9Eleven in our world), but they have their protocols for handling every level of crisis. There are also plenty of millipedes and pillbugs. There are usually only one or two of the former, so I usually relocate those. But as for the ants and pillbugs, the best I can do is blow them off the wood and hope they find their way to what is next in their little lives.
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