I’ve been working a lot lately, scrambling to catch up with some application programming work. Part of this is a result of being behind the technological curve in terms of the particular programming environment I’m working in (J2EE/WebSphere/Hibernate/Spring). Suffice it to say I’ve been working some overtime.
At about 2:45 AM this morning I was finishing up for the day. I had been making progress for about 14 hours straight, and hadn’t recently checked my work into our version control system (CVS) at the office. Our cat Iris came strutting into my work area, announced her presence, and when I didn’t completely focus on her, started to bump against me. When that didn’t work, she started climbing over the obstacles on my desk and bumped against my hand- this netted her a couple of pets, but I still was busy trying to wrap things up for the day. So she decided to take a walk across my keyboard.
I can’t exactly tell you how she did it, but in two or three little dainty steps she somehow managed to:
- turn off EJB interface decorations in Rational Software Architect/Eclipse
- make my entire EJB project (one of five active in my workspace at the time) disappear
Anyone who knows Iris…
… would realize that I haven’t a hope of getting angry at her. But there I was, thinking that 14 hours of difficult labour was instantly and irrevocably gone…with this little kitten (a bit bigger now than in the picture, but not much) kneading and purring and bumping against my arm as I tried to fix things.
Fortunately, I soon discovered that the missing EJB project had just been removed from the workspace- it was still actually there. Of course, I had to re-run my unit tests and stuff, but I had everything back in order about an hour later…at 3:45 AM.
Well, not completely back in order. I still haven’t figured out what happened to my EJB interface decorations. They are little iconic characters that appear next to methods to tell you whether they’ve been promoted to the EJB interface classes or not. If you see them lying around on the floor*, send them back please- my kitten didn’t mean to lose them.
* I’m kidding, of course: this is a software feature you turn off and on- I just haven’t figured out how she turned them off or how to turn it back on yet…