mdlbear | ...and Misty_Morning

Yes, I definitely seem to have fallen into a modern-day version of The Programmer and the Elves...

...still a lowly programmer -- and is now stuck for the foreseeable future maintaining this horrid crock of a Fortran program, written by elves! After all, nobody else can understand how it works. It has variables named Shamrock and Rainbow and Misty_Morning_Dew, and some of the most ferocious assembly language subroutines to be found outside the jungles of Borneo.

And the moral of the story is: Never do the impossible. People will expect you to do it forever after.

Well, maybe not quite that bad. But it's a horrid crock of a form and workflow system built on top of a beta version of Java that are both 10 years out of date... Somebody upgraded Java, and it broke.

So I commented out the one place where it was using the old, incompatible KeyStore class, and it's back to crashing a lot instead of every damned time. That's an improvement. Of course, now it's only pretending to create and verify DSA signatures. But since you can't fill in a form without logging in to the server with your Unix password, there was never any real reason for the digital signatures in the first place.

This still leaves the uncomfortable question of why a horrid crock of a research experiment written by two people a full decade ago is still better for our lab's workflow than anything we've been able to turn up in the open source world. Suggestions?

Or is there still some research left in that topic? Hmm.