Well, I've been doing "Batch Script Programming" for a Command Line Based (16 bit) Windows 2000 program for the last couple of hours and my brain is about to melt. . .
I just needed to get away from work and a little bit and try to get the throbbing in my head to lessen some so, I thought I'd ask you guys (and gals of course) what you do for a job.
Are you working your way through college? Are you still in high school? Are you a corporate exec who gets paid fifty billion a year to play Solitaire in your cooshy office?
Me, I work for a local Web Hosting company called
Datility Networks, Inc. Although I have an actual job title (two of 'em in fact!), I'm basically a general, if it needs to be done, do it guy.
I spend most of my time managing a small data warehouse for about a hundred fast food restaurants on antiquated systems running SCO UNIX (*shudder*) with 13 year old, barely functioning software. In any single day, I have to call about a quarter of the stores and troubleshoot their systems because we haven't received their previous day's data.
When I'm not working on that I spend my time typically doing basic system maintenance on one of our FTP servers and writing PHP/MySQL programs for clients.
Today, however, I'm trying to write a workaround for our 13 year old, DOS based data polling software to try and make it a little more reliable.
What's that you say? Why, yes I DID say that the data warehousing servers use SCO UNIX! And yes, I did also say that our polling software runs on DOS (well, it was written for DOS. We've managed to get it running on Windows 2000 too though). Because of this little. . . eccentricity, we've had to run a DOS emulator on our UNIX servers to get them to poll the data!
Anyway, we're getting tired of using these systems so I've set up a Windows 2000 box and (as stated just a bit ago) managed to get the polling software running on it. Right now I'm writing a batch file that will look at the dialing queue of this program, see which store was dialed last, and check to see if we actually got all the files we were supposed to. If we didn't, it'll throw that store back into the queue and try and poll just the files we're missing.
Normally, this would be rather simple.
But NOOOOOOO! I can't use any real programming languages! I have to use straight Windows 2000 Command Line Batch Scripting! :evil:
Well. . . now that I've been able to rant a little and partially relieve the blinding pain in my skull, I shall return you to your regularly scheduled post. . .