Yet another software project
Many years ago I was working as an IT contractor on a project for a large insurance institution that shall remain nameless (mainly because I had to sign things that forbid me from revealing the massive levels of mismanagement, money-wasting (not theirs) and general free-fire billing practices of the large Consultancy running the project.

We were running on a Novell NetWare network which for those of you old enough to remember would mean that about once a week everything would crash to a stop fro 3-4 hours and without the network we couldn't do project work.

Now I should mention that as contractors we were paid hourly on rates that were labyrinthine in their complexity, with bonus threshold if you put in a certain amount of money, and different rates for weekends evening and bank holidays, so trying to keep time sheets and produce weekly invoices for our agencies was a nightmare. So I asked my boss if I could knock up a quick time-sheet system to help us with this during the slack time.

So for a few hours every week for the next year I worked on this side project. First came the basic form structures. Then with more time we got a control panel, reporting, and by the end it would even play sounds as you hit certain targets for the week (as programmers we got the latest 'multimedia' computers). Come Thursday or Friday you'd hear the odd cock crow echoing across the office as somebody hit the 2k mark, on Sunday you'd get the cha-ching on 3k, you get the idea... When you minimised it it would sit on the task bar counting the money you'd earned for the week. All in all a perfect icon for the septic world I used to inhabit.

I treated it as an opensource project, and over the years I kept on bumping into my time sheet system on various sites in the City - for all I know it's still being used now. Most of the systems I worked on were transient wastes of time, but this little piece of software was the one thing that actually made me feel like a craftsman.
(strongp, Sat 19 Nov 2011, 11:13, 2 replies)

Don't dis Netware
Solid as a bloody rock if setup right. We ran several networks on Netware 3.12 and then 4.11 all with five nines reliability.
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Sat 19 Nov 2011, 11:57, closed)

Nope,
I agree with the OP, we were a netware house where I am now, crashed every week. You are right, it's solid if set up right but there are only 3 people on the planet who know the correct rites to do it. We had 94% uptime with NW, now we are MS we have 100%.

Fuck netware and the dead horse it's still flogging.
(Booce, Mon 21 Nov 2011, 16:30, closed)