Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4725253/...

So I didn't get the time to post an update this morning, so an afternoon post will have to do. Today's walk was just a little past 12km, giving us all some hope to get it done in a reasonable time. The first six or so kilometers were quite harsh with winds reaching speeds of at least 15 m/s, probably closer to 20. With the rain smattering like tiny bullets our morale was pretty low. What kept us going was the knowledge that just a few kilometers ahead lay a valley a few hundred meters below our current altitude, promising warmer air, and most importantly, less wind.

As we approached the valley we could see trees appearing over the horizon, a good sign as the Swedish Fjäll generally isn't very inviting to trees, and from this point on our walk became more and more pleasant. During lunch everyone could feel the feeling of achievement lingering between us, and another three kilometers later we arrived at our cabins.

So here I am, sitting in a couch in a cozy cabin. Most of us just left the sauna, and in an hour or so we'll have a great meal and probably some celebration. Tomorrow I think we'll just chill out, perhaps pick some mushrooms, and then head to the train to wake up the next day in Malmö, ready for another week of work. Who knows, perhaps I'll even have time to squeeze in another update.

Cheers, time for a nap.

This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.

The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...

Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.

The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.

It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.

There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.

The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.

They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.

Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.

So... our software is... really old. Part of it was built 20 years ago in Delphi 6 and is still used to this day. It's an automation tool, which supports some scripting... In WSH. Meaning, it only supports JScript (that's right, not javascript, just JScript, the 1998 version), VBScript, and through the use of activex, Python or Perl.

And even our *newer* software, built a couple years ago, just released an update where the HTML rendering engine was updated... to Gecko 38, the version from 3 years ago. And the JavaScript engine is Rhino, the "old" one now replaced by Nashorn a few years back, and barely updated since.

But... there is *some* light on the horizon. The very newest automation tool now has a new plugin, which is based in NodeJS. Having just installed this newer version, I looked in the files to find the nodejs.exe executable... to find that it's on version 8.9.4. Ok it's not precisely the "latest" version, but knowing the history of development for these things I almost expected node 0.10.

It's great news in all this ancient technology I have to deal with. When's the *last* time you made an HTTP request using this code?

var http = new ActiveXObject("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1");
http.open('GET', 'http://example.com/', false);

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