The Lair

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup

on the airwaves recently …

Yeah, so all the things I’ve found funny recently are of geek interest. Sue me.

I’m coordinating a programming effort where we’re using Soap. No, not the detergent; but the “protocol for exchanging messages across a network”. We’re doing Soap over HTTP; which is a fancy way of saying that we’re sending XML messages over the internets. We have a series of suppliers (with test servers) that we need to exchange said XML messages. One supplier, despite our best efforts, kept on throwing an error. So I got in touch with their tech support. After several hours of to-and-fro, during which we didn’t get any response from their server; I had the following conversation snippet.

drac: wooo
drac: we got our first error *shock and amazement*
support person: what?
drac: no SoapAction set .. that’s the first time there’s been a response body at all
drac: ok, I know how to fix that
support person [triumphantly]: i told u! soap action [to be fair, she did. But she also said that there would be an error message when, in fact, their server kept crashing and throwing an HTTP error code]
drac: let me tell them [the programmer types] and we’ll see if it works
drac: this is the FIRST time we got any error at all
support person: somehow programmers are always forgeting about soap action

*sniff* How rude. If you didn’t get the joke (to do with a stereotypical Loonix/Programmer hippie’s attention to hygiene), then never mind.

“on the airwaves recently …” has 7 comments

  1. Gravatar

    rastiadu karaya wrote:

    Is it wrong, that as soon as i read the line “I’m coordinating a programming effort where we’re using Soap” i thought you had jumped on the SoaP bandwagon? (As in Snakes on a Plane, for the uninitiated.) And then my heart sank a little bit.

    But I revived after realising it was some geek related thing which I don’t understand :)

    Those mother effin’ snakes, and Samuel L. Jackson’s ability to hijack pop culture have rendered me suspicious of everyone!

  2. Gravatar

    drac wrote:

    No, that’s absolutely right. There is a SoaP joke in there somewhere; but I haven’t had time to go see the movie yet.

    Actually, there were several other equally geeky jokes but somewhere in the middle of writing, I got distracted (happens all the time) and lost the plot.

    and the punchline too.

    Pray, is the SoaP bandwagon a bad one to inhabit? It’s just the sort of mindlessly bad looking movie that I could wholeheartedly endorse. Think of the potential for sequels, for instance… Snakes in a Theatre. Snakes in a Bus!. We might even go for the newage remakes… how about Snakes on the Titanic?

    No? Ok then. I will avoid the bandwagon as if there were … umm … snakes in it.

  3. Gravatar

    sage wrote:

    i couldn\’t read this entire comment \’cos your damn back-slashes are distracting.

    see?!

  4. Gravatar

    drac wrote:

    backslashes? which backslashes?

    *looks innocent*

  5. Gravatar

    sage wrote:

    bastid!

  6. Gravatar

    drac wrote:

    tsk, tsk… there you go with the nautical language again. Most unladylike *snigger*

  7. Gravatar

    Kermit wrote:

    ah soap. you know, i’ve had the privilege of having been in close proximity to one of the masters of soap (he’s a sri lankan — a well known name in the business). funny thing he said about soap. it’s supposed to mean “simple object access protocol”, yes? but it’s really not really about objects and it’s not really a protocol. come to think of it, it’s not really simple either…

Just say it

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