[Techtalk] Great Mistakes I Have Made

[Jenn Vesperman]

On Tue, 2002-01-29 at 00:44, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

> Anyone for a techtalk thread of "Great Mistakes I Made" (and what
> happened next, and how it could have been avoided)? Keeping only
> to what we've done, rather than pulling off the stories on the
> net, perhaps, since a lot of those come from the "The stupid
> user had typed..." perspective.

The stupid user - me - had typed....

... up the entire Issues FAQ. In all its glory, with all the care not to
alienate men yet explain the things I was sick of explaining and
re-explaining. In docbook. With all the markup.

It was in a file called 'issues'.

I hit 'sgmltools -bps issues' (from memory). It ploughed through the
file. It produced a file called .. issues.

Because it then started working from its own output file, it died
partway through. I lost the lot. I hadn't even made a backup!


That day I:
* requested a sourceforge project
* set my .vimrc to automatically make a backup of everything I edited.
* started over.



Jenn V.
-- 
    "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
        	you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.

jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au     http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/