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Dani was asked to replace a shopping system (that had been developed by a Highly Paid Consultant) with a better one. Dani expected to find high quality, well organized code that would be easy to modify. Undoubtedly, there would be some database housing all of the data.
Dani searched the code for the database connection to know where to connect and found this in a file named: shop$db.asp:
E. T. wrote to tell us of a support tale from days long gone by at a company long since acquired by a much larger behemoth. A customer had called in, entered all of his information, but hung up before a human got on the line. The support system generated a nameless ticket which got randomly assigned to one of the support folks. Then the customer called back, entered all of his information again, and got E. T.
The customer wanted to delete slice 0 on his system. For those of you not familiar with this, in *nix, slice 0 is the root of the file system and basically points to where everything on the disk is located. Deleting slice 0 is the equivalent of deleting everything on the entire hard disk. While there are the occasional disk corruptions that require this action, they are exceedingly rare, and once done, you are forced to reinitialize and re-install the operating system.
Dates are complicated things. There are many different ways of storing them, and even more ways to present them. Converting them from one format to another always seems to challenge certain individuals. For this reason, the designers of most modern language libraries have taken it as part of their task to provide date handling utilities to deal with the nitty gritty of this task.
Most people appreciate the help and gladly use the built-in tools.
Jan 14