Today is my third day at the new job at the Library of the Technical University of Delft. The first day though that I'm actually working at a computer. The first day was full of introductions, meeting people, drinking lots of coffee and getting a basic idea of what I will be working on.
Second day was something like one large tutorial learning how the system they use for all cataloging, ordering and administration of borrowing books works (they use ALEPH here....never heard of it...), seeing how the Oracle database is set up, and reading some Perl scripts they wrote themselves. They are quite modest about what they do, but it's not that bad at all. Lots of stuff is poorly documented though and as they say themselves not much is done about errorchecking, but as long as there is room for improvement (and there is), there is plenty of work for me :)
I was quite shocked that on the productionserver they are still working with Perl version 5.00404 (!!). But it looks like they finally convinced the systemadministrators that they need a newer version (which will probably be 5.6.1). The testserver already has 5.6.0, which I could not recommend....
Looks like I'll have plenty to do here the coming year...
