(no subject)

[plonq]

One would think I'd have learned after the "I fart in your general direction" incident, but my puerile nature snuck through again when I wrote another program a few years ago.

"Plonq, we need you to write a program to track if we're humping overloaded cars."

"Hee hee.  You said humping."

"Bear in mind that the hump scale is not certified for liquids."

"So you only want dry humping?  Hee hee.  Humping."

It's only natural in a program of this kind that the functions and subs would send back return codes with flags like, "Oh baby!" and "Is it in yet?"  Likewise you'll find lots of variables with names like Yiff and Boink.

Of course four years later they come to me asking for the source code so that they can compare it with some changes they are implementing on the mainframe.

*le sigh

There's nothing outrageously offencive in this source code, but we have some people around this company with awfully thin skins.  Looks like my next couple of hours are going to be spent "purifying" some source code.  Bleah.

Comments

[fetlock.livejournal.com]

LOL, well i do like it but YA, there is people that try to do the im better then you and point out all things . Just to feel like there alive.

-Fetlock

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Find-and-replace is your friend. And done right, it doesn't change the binary file.

[funos.livejournal.com]

I presume tamper checks prevent editing the binary directly? (not that it matters in this case...)

(ah. The days of hex editing the teacher's DOS disk to return rude error messages...)

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Fortunately it's an interpreted language rather than a compiled one. Also I'm the one who maintains the server that it's stored on, so I get to go in and modify it any way that I like (how do you think those things got in there in the first place? ;)

[mwalimu.livejournal.com]

Brings to mind a conversation I had with my oldest a while back.

"Do you remember when we stopped at Bailey Yard and watched them humping railroad cars?"

"Dad! That's gross!"

"No, really, that's what it's called. Humping."

"Well that's just... wrong."

I must admit, however, that the term has given me some interesting mental images. Ones that make me wonder what happened to the cars that are stenciled with "Do Not Hump".

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I had been working here for a couple of years before I learned what it meant to hump a car. I'd seen some of the cars stenciled with "do not hump", and I'd seen some cars with a "do not hump" switch message in the computer, but beyond being mildly amused, I had no idea what it meant.

Later somebody enlightened me on the difference between humping and flat-switching. I'd only know about flat-switching up to that point.

[aeto.livejournal.com]

OK, Fine... I'll be the one to ask...

What DOES it mean when you "hump" a rail car?

(Oh, and I'd likely have just left the code as is. But I'm evil.)

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

When a frieght train enters a large frieght yard, it enters a recieving track. After the waybills enter the yard office, (in the computer age, I may be dating myself) a switch crew will couple on to the cars, and take them up a hill, (the hump) and send the cars down into a maze of switches, where they will be put on tracks making up a new train, and new destinations. A train from one city usualy has cars with different destinations, so the next city, will break up that train and get the cars going to the final destination. Using gravity, and squeezing the wheels with stationary brakes next to the rails called retarders, so they won't hit the next car too hard. It is faster than flat switching.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Faster than flat switching, but also a lot louder. The retarders emit a fearsome squeal of metal on metal - especially in cold weather. That's one of the reasons why many of our yards in urban areas have been converted over to flat switching.

Your technology is a bit dated in the explanation above (no more waybills, cars are tracked by RFID tags, switching and humping is done by radio-controlled robots), but the mechanics haven't changed a bit.

A hump yard in use.

[smrgol-t-kirin.livejournal.com]

In the center of the picture, just to the right of the trees, is a train being pushed over the hump. The cars are uncoupled one at a time or in groups of two or three. There's a group of three tank cars rolling into the switches, and a single tank car just ahead of them.

Those dark rectangles just after the hump on each of the tracks are the retarders, they slow down the car(s).

So the cars get taken from the arrival tracks to the rear of the picture, pushed over the hump hill by a locomotive, uncoupled at the top and are then switched to the proper track and slowed by retarders. The switching is done from that tower in the center of the picture.

The groups of cars are then collected from the yard tracks to be made up into new trains for local delivery or to be sent on further.

The full size image is here: http://www.railimages.com/albums/album11/aac.jpg