There's some curious bits of progress going on at work, other than my strange habit of continually getting there on time. The first is that after a lot of e-mails and phone calls to the company we need to deal with, we finally got the software development kit we needed to ever have the chance to accomplish anything. They say they had sent the relevant files months ago and suggest it was lost in e-mail filtration; I suppose that's possible, but I note that this is not unlike certain excuses I would use to squeeze an extra day or so out of my thesis advisor when I was completely unprepared. In the end, actually, they didn't mail us the kit they needed; instead, somebody posted the kit to that company's web site, so all we needed was a license. Ah, finally!
Well, what we got to was server errors. Something in Microsoft's IIS, which is an acronym that almost certainly stood for something at one point and maybe even still does, didn't like the software, but the company's web site offered no suggestions about what to do since if you just follow their instructions for installing there are no problems. Also they assume you're installing with an older version of IIS than we were running, and on a Windows XP server rather than Vista. But after a couple days of this I determined the problem was their software runs a 32-bit application and you have to turn on 32-bit applications specially in our Vista IIS Dilute Dilute OK thingy. Ah, finally!
Well, that got me to license errors. I could load up a page which fed out a user agreement, but if you did agree, you were put right to the Invalid License page. Mm. This took some further prodding around and investigating and eventually I just re-ran the setup and installation kit until the license error stopped happening. Don't ask me. But, finally ... ah ... we got to this thing where it was looking for a warehouse file, which is different from a database file in that it's called a warehouse file, which you will agree is a very different concept. But after finding out where they were I've finally advanced to the point that ... it's ... not ... actually doing anything, but there aren't any complaints on its part that anything should be installed that isn't.
To me, this is progress.
Trivia: In 1903 Bell Telephones claimed 1,514 main telephone exchanges with 1,278,000 subscribers. Independent telephone companies, not counting nonprofit rural cooperatives, claimed 6,150 exchanges and around two million subscribers. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.
Currently Reading: 1968: The Year That Rocked The World, Mark Kurlansky.