The Twilight Zone

I often compare software development to playing with Lego (hey ... Lego are good from 7 to 77 years old!) ... granted a must more advanced (and complex) set, but it's the same kind of fun, well at least for me (feel free to differ on that). When I said fun, I don't mean that it's fun all the time. Take last night for example: I am about to finish some weeks long ongoing work, which for me is a certain milestone ... I'm very close to it now, I can almost feel the satisfaction in a job well done just about to reach me ... but somehow things start the crumble, what I thought was working suddenly refuse to, and that darn compiler reject (the nerve!) my code from some obscure raisons that I can't just quiet figure out. All that sounds familar to you? Well then you also have reached the Twilight Zone! Oh yes, it does exists ... I have been in (and out ... or so I like to think) that zone. In the end (after many hours of cursing) I found the culprint in the form of an older version of a .LIB file that somehow ended-up at the wrong place, thus causing the linker to use it instead of the latest one ... ehence symbols going AWOL. It may sounds like a trivial issue which shouldn't take much long to figure out ... but it somewhat eluded me for a very frustrating while X-|

Anyway ... so (yeah let's get to the point of this post) I'm kinda back to where I was two weeks ago with my Orbiter's SDK, that is I can assemble the Soyuz Launch Vehicle and put it on its animated launch pad:

Sure this isn't particulary stunning, but I think it's cool nevertheless :P BTW, if you want to know more about the launch complexes used by the Russian Space Program, have a look this page from the pretty good Kosmonavtka site by Suzy McHale.

Next on my todo list? Get the damn thing off the pad! :-D That also may sounds like an easy job (afterall I already did it in the previous version of the SDK), but ...