I think I have finally located an issue that I have been dealing with for weeks. In the end the issue was outside my control, but I should have detected it earlier. You see, I have been getting a data stream from a supplier. Actually, I lie. I get two data streams. An over view in text format, and an XML detailed version. They should both work. SHOULD. Well, they do to an extent. But I found a strange artifact in the text version. The XML file might have ten items all timestamped. The text file should have a single timestamp with a single piece of data. And it does.

But what it does is takes the first piece of data from the file and lines it up with the last timestamp in the file. I think this is what we call a bug. Actually I am sure it is. Data like this is supposed to just line up. It is supposed to just ‘work’. I have also found that some of the data is ‘missing’ too. From other sources I know that there should be data but I just do not have it.

This all means that one more thing has been removed from my to-do list. WOW. One down. 100 to go 🙂 Write now I need to write a parser for a satellite ground station… I *HOPE* this is not too hard… It would be easy in ‘C’, but I will be using VB.NET.