Wasting time

Sometimes I do things which relate to my work that I am sure is wasting time, but I work so damned hard at it that it doesn't feel like wasting time at all. In the end I come out with something productive but it isn't the core business of what we do here. I still feel pleased with myself.

Somebody asks me about images available on our server. I mention that there are a lot of people who have left and all their files have been moved to an old server that has plenty of storage space and isn't doing much in particular. They are very interested in gaining access to these images. Unfortunately the images are all over the place. Buried deep down in folders. What to do? I could easily create a batch file with ROBOCOPY to copy the image files only out of the server and into a structure somewhere else. You would still have to drill down to get the images but at least you know there will be images at the end of the drilling. Too much navigation.

I create a quick program to scan the whole directory structure, find and move the images to a folder, renaming them if they are duplicated. But you can't tell where they came from.

So I write a program to scan the whole directory structure, then create a web page with all the images in it. The page is too big and kills any web browser trying to look at it. So I dolly up some of my old javascript and have a selectable list of images. Thinking this has solved my problems, as it tests well on a small directory structure, I test it on the fill 40,000 images on the server. Firefox and Internet Explorer complain that there are too many constructors in the array (that holds the image names). Damn them. Opera just falls in a giggling heap of dribbling code. I alter the code to reduce the detail and things seem to work OK in Firebird :)

Fun. Pleasing. The task was work of sorts but I really should be solving some project problems rather than departmental indexing of ancient images.