Unfinished business
This a continuation of a previous post, Starting up.
The next day at work I told them I was quitting and gave them my two weeks notice. Since the guy they had brought in to help out with the dev. tasks hadn’t signed any contract, they were a bit more than worried. They offered him my position and salary, he accepted, and I filled him on my duties.
A week later most of the projects I had worked on were already in the hands of the new guy, and all the new tasks were already being assigned to him, burying him under a mountain of tasks. I was almost idle, answering to my successor’s occasional questions about what projects where hosted were, credentials, the usual stuff that never gets documented properly. I thought drawing a few diagrams of the services and gathering all the scattered logins and passwords into a single file would be something worth doing, so I got started.
The owner came through the door, straight to us: “I need something done as quick as possible”. I looked at my co-worker, who looked liked at me begging for help. I bit the bullet: “Alright, let’s do it”.
Mario, the owner and his wife shared another business, a silver jewellery store located in the hottest spot of the (then) hottest mall in the city, Meridiano. They had a really beautiful website, which had been commissioned to a different marketing agency than the one I was working for. Their website featured a catalogue with their merchandise, which was available to resellers only. They wanted to make their catalogue available to the public and display a beautiful gallery, including some highlights carousel and add a shopping cart.
The first problem was that they didn’t have a shopping cart implementation for their resellers. They only had a listing, the resellers would order by phone and pay when the merchandise was delivered. Implementing a full fledged shopping cart and checkout system in the ASP backend in a freaking week was out of the question.
Browsing the listing they had for their resellers I could only see rows of names and prices. there were no pictures. When I asked the owners, they insisted that they photographed every piece and saved it along with the info. When I asked to see how they did that, the owner’s wife took me to a different building, where the office for their other company was.
We sat at a really old computer running Windows 98 and she fired up an inventory software that looked roughly like it was a pure Excel Forms implementation. I would soon find out how close I was. That computer was the most important thing for this company. Their website was being served from there, and it used the inventory software’s single database file as a source for the listing. It also controlled the door to a giant movie-like walk-in safe that was right beside it.
After fiddling with the database file, I found out it was a MS Access 97 file. Looking for the pictures, I found the table hosting the items in the listing, which had a column name “image” in BLOB format. Awesome, embedded images. After fighting for a good hour trying to decode the binary data and get a JPG, PNG, GIF or even a BMP, I was out of luck. That stream of bytes was not an image format I could recognise. Then it hit me. I decoded the binary HEX as ASCII, and there it was, pretty ASCII string containing the path to the image file. I wanted to track down whoever came up with that and give him a piece of my mind.
I went back to my office so I could start updating their website only to find out my final week was about to get even more interesting.
To be continued, again…
