The Lair

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

Archive for June, 2008

ws-* what?

June 2nd, 2008

Yeah, so new job. And I thought that my days of reading near-incomprehensible papers was at an end. Little did I know. I am currently suffering from acute brain hurt after reading tons of incomprehensible spec sheets (Web Services, WS-Addressing and WS-Policy among many others).

It’s fun stuff. As in grad school, I start with a vague idea about the thing, read the spec (paper) and emerge completely confused. Sometimes near suicidal. And then I get to make (hopefully) intelligent recommendations about how such things can be implemented in a crippled braindead and completely obsolete product used by the client. This is easier than you’d think because most often, the answer has been - “um. yeah. So we can’t do that with your product. Perhaps you’d like to move to some other product and save us the pain of going through these meetings?”.

Client responds with “Uh. No. We wants. Make happen. Here. Munniez.”

As a result, I’ve had nothing approaching a life for the past month or so while I’ve been trying to figure out how to uh… do the equivalent of bailing out the floods of Ratnapura with an ice cream cone. Yeah, one of those crunchy cones that goes soggy after a while.

But there is hope yet. During bouts of feverish reading of specifications, I have also started re-reading the Wheel of Time series. Confessor (read on Saturday) was, by the way, horrendous. I will now wait for the Terry Goodkind detractors to say “I told you so“.