"Cheer up, things could be worse . . .

 

. . . So you cheer up, and sure enough, things get worse." Ask any Sailor, Soldier, Airman, or Marine. Instilled as early as basic training, this inevitable truth might as well have been chiseled into the Military Code of Conduct.
 

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On Friday, March 28, 2008, I was sitting in a Las Vegas hotel room trying hard not to cheer up. That morning, spammers had managed to slow the Morning Flight Forum to a crawl. By afternoon, armed only with a laptop but with luck on my side (we're talking Vegas, after all), I had managed to shut the whole thing down. CPR would have to wait until I got back to New York.

That incident became a wake-up call. Here was a treasure trove of information, years of questions and answers and solutions, all at the mercy of a bunch of moronic low lives. As it turned out, the near-miss was a blessing in disguise. Although I had backed up the forum regularly, restoring it would have required the original database to be present, uncorrupted, on the original server. Fat chance! Memo to forum developers: Would it kill you to write a simple database-to-PDF conversion utility to safeguard the contents of thousands of forums?

It took us nearly a month to manually copy and paste and format the first three years of the Morning Flight Forum into a secure PDF manual. And then a funny thing happened, not on the way to the forum, but revisiting it. I found the bright spot, a consequence never intended by the spammers. I realized how far, and why, the program had evolved.

Good software can be written, but great software gets to be that way because it is shaped and refined by the people using it. Thanks to untold contributions from printing professionals throughout the world, Morning Flight had come of age. For that, I am deeply grateful.

Hal Heindel
Unitac International Inc.