White teeth and efficient code

Long ago I were an adventurous eater and loved my eat-breaks. My heart goes weak for cakes and other bakes. A thing that annoyed me though was my slightly yellowish teeth. I did not have enough internet smarts to find what is wrong with the teeth and what can i do about it.

Took the plunge, after i could no longer bear the dirty colour, and checked with a dentist (it was a junior dentist that attended me though). After inspections & X-Rays got a long lecture about the cavities & tooth problems i have, the complicated process to fix them; at an astronomical cost. Bewildered i asked what is the first step from there and without asking much went for the tooth scaling.

Well, it got me to one hell of time at the dental chair and to the end of my food love :-(

Some of my gums got scaled off and i joined the sad club of 'Sensitive Toothed' forever.

Then couple of years later at work i were fixing a bug in a 5 years old java application and noticed a strange code. The application has to archive files (move files to a folder) and was reading the file byte-by-byte, wrote to a new file in archive folder and deleted the original. Grrrr... what a lame way to move files. I slept over my intended code change for 2 days and could no longer bear to see this convoluted and over designed file move process. The original app was written for Java 1.3 (holy legacy) and all i could think was the developer has never heard of java.io.File.renameTo() API.

Armed with the zeal for efficiency, zapped the messy 'copy file bits & erase original' code to File.renameTo(), tested and moved to production systems thumping my chest. And man i were so wrong and let down badly by my eagerness to fix the mess. The File.renameTo() consistently failed in production systems :-(

Hard way to learn that the source files are in an NFS mounted folder and the archive folder is in a local disk mount on the production servers and that the File.renameTo() does not work between file systems. Many people had asked Sun to fix this problem in the past (since August 1997) but no dice. All i could think now was the original developer was smart to figure this out and wrote a long winded process to get the file 'moved', but was not smart enough to predict the future of his uncommented code.

All in the game, and after throwing in my vulgarities at Sun and uncommenting developers, reverted the 'archive files' code to the older revision and rolled the application to production. The file move to archive is going on happily ever after, again.

Not all the things end as 'happily ever after]. I wish i heard this dentist joke long before and took it literally :-P

Patient: Doctor, I have yellow teeth, what do I do?

Dentist: Wear a brown tie...