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Doin' it old-school style
29 comments- TAGS:ASCII, EBCDIC, EDI
- IT TOPICS:Enterprise Software & Services, Hardware, Management
This pilot fish has watched his IT shop grow from a single IBM minicomputer to dozens of servers connected to hundreds of PCs over the past 20 years.
"My background is general operations management, not IT," says fish. "But over the years I took various university IT courses including assembler, and did a fair amount of programming.
"Seven or eight years ago I turned the direct management of IT over to another, but occasionally I sit in on a department meeting. In one, they were discussing a problem with a recently installed EDI system."
Actually, everything is running smoothly except for one customer's orders, which fail about 25% of the time.
The IT department and the software vendor have worked on the problem for weeks, and they've narrowed it down to cases where one specific person uses a semicolon in the order -- but beyond that they're stumped.
Hmm, says fish, has anyone looked at the numeric value of that ASCII semicolon character, or the value after it has been translated to EBCDIC?
It takes a few minutes to round up a byte editor. But after that, it doesn't take long to check one of the problem orders. And sure enough, while the offending character is displaying as a semicolon, the incoming numeric value isn't ASCII value 59 -- a real semicolon -- but something over 128.
"When translated to EBCDIC it was displaying as a semicolon too, but the program was choking on the processing of this rogue character," fish says.
"Score one for the old guy who had a little experience with some of the old-school basics of character encoding!"
Encode your true tale of IT life for Sharky in ASCII and send it to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll snag a snazzy Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.
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