Papa Plover is on patrol. He struts about in square circles guarding the nest. I am pleased to say he is a thoroughly modern parent and takes a turn in sitting on the eggs while Mama stretches her legs.
We are currently under attack by Garden Services. Three gentlemen are whizzing about on motorised mowers, several others are making the airwaves noxious with industrial strength "Weed Eaters", a twostroke engine attached to teeth on a pole. The local vegetation is being razed to the earth.
Why do we bother to mow such a large area you may ask? In a word, Ticks.
After the good rains, the little yellow wildflowers have sprung up and the grass stalks are about six inches long. This is ideal for ticks. Said tick waddles to the top of a grass stalk and waits. Some innocent four or two legs wanders past, the predator springs and attaches itself to the host. Ticks at this stage of development are tiny, you can barely see them.
The problem with African ticks is that they deliver some really bad diseases when they bite you or your animals. So there is real danger to domestic animals and even to humans.
I remember when I was farming garlic just north of Hartebeestpoort Dam, near Brits, a few years ago. I had this dear old Labrador who would go walkabout in the bush for days at a time. One time he was away a long time and came back in very bad shape. He had huge gaping holes in his armpits. He had been bitten by what they call in the vernacular a "Bontpoot" tick. The bite is toxic to the extent that the tissue becomes necrotic, instant gangrene. The poor old fellow lasted a while under the ministrations of the Vet and spent a considerable time in the animal hospital, but eventually succumbed to renal failure.
So you have to take ticks seriously.
Which of course reminds me of the fact that we are not taking Y2k seriously at all.
I have spent some time recently looking at some of the "solutions" which are being perpetrated on an unwary world.
I suspect that one of the most serious legacies of current Y2k "remediation" is that it is, by and large, an unplanned, uncoordinated and undesigned process. It seems that we are locked forever into a cycle of repeating the mistakes of the past.
Knee jerk reactions, panic and false economies are producing a disparate range of "quick fixes" that will probably cost more in the long run than doing the job properly.
There has been no allowance in the cost estimates for Rework. We may find that our brilliant cheap, quick and dirty solutions are going to backfire and we will have to rework large amounts of code at the last minute. Remember that this is where you heard it first.
One of the things that I am really having difficulty in swallowing is the reactions of otherwise fairly serious and competent software developers.
We already have, by and large, hardware that can support 4 digit years. In other words, the hardware in many cases has the potential to work up until 31st December 9999. But "Designers" and "Implementers" have shot themselves in the foot by limiting these systems by "saving" space in shoddy ways. One the main shoddinesses is in the design of disk directories.
Let me give a simple example of some of these idiocies.
Since the arrival of the AT, the 286 machine, PC's have had a facility to save a "century byte". This a one character binary field, which currently contains binary '19', in two years time it will hopefully contain '20'. Now, by its very nature, a one byte field can contain values in the range 0 thru 255. So this one byte extends the capacity of the date range potentially to the 254th century. But do we use this byte? Oh no. NT for example, does not even maintain it.
Some of the solutions we are coding TODAY just add 1900 to a two digit year field. And we fool ourselves into thinking that this is progress.
I suggest that modern computer people are suffering from tunnel vision myopia. And suspect that very few have ever been on a basic Analysis and Design course. They are very quick to point fingers at the "bad" programmers in the past who saved two bytes of storage, but I suggest that what they are doing now is even worse.
Could we not sit down and THINK (not a registered trademark) about these solutions before we dash off and code wildly.
One of the less heartening stories I heard recently is that one of the big agencies is training students on a COBOL crash course and letting them loose. This is not in itself bad, but some of the systems code needs special care and handling. Please let this otherwise admirable scheme not backfire.
Ignorance, compounded by PHM stupidity, lack of imagination, and an inability to use common sense will account for many expensive pratfalls in the future.
I always seem to end up as the clown who remarks that the Emperor is Buck Naked. But what I am seeing around me horrifies me. We are jumping from the frying pan into the fire. And our Vendors and Manufacturers are rushing about pouring inflammable liquids on the process.
I suffer from terminal long-term vision, but people just do not seem to understand what I am saying.
Let me go and find some earmuffs, Garden Services is approaching my domain.