In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

Without looking up from his console, Max answered. "I have
checked everything. The floppies are copies. The originals, I have in the
bag, so I can take them back. I have copied all the CD's, they are all
ready to go. The originals of those are also in the bag. The labels are all
mine, over by you. If you want to see the original labels, look over
there, in the corner by Jimmy, the bag is there. The DVD's on top of
the two cassettes are the originals, I don't have a functioning DVD
copier for the new, so called 'protected', ones. And the cassettes are the
originals. I will have to use Maia's machine to copy them, it works
better."
She ran through the finished, marketed products first. Most of
the originals were labeled in Cyrillic, and were of passable quality
Ukrainian black market labels, but Max didn't read Russian, so he just
numbered them as he went through. The betas, originally in Ng's, angry
magic marker scrawl, were also illegible to copy down, so Max had
numbered them, like the others. She looked into the floppies first.
From the general to the particular was better, but this was where the
truth lay.
The code was a mess, it was redundant, full of garbage, would
take weeks to decipher.
"Which one are you looking at?" Max asked.
"Some code."
"You write code?"
"I can read most code, I haven't done a whole lotta
programming but I can tell the difference between elegant code and
crap. This is crap."
She highlighted about twenty lines of it.
"See all these brackets and strings of symbols, like it's a
mathematical theorem, if x = y then q, etcetera, for twenty lines?
Redundant. But I see a pattern, how this could be edited down to
maybe two lines, using Java. Lean and mean. Curly brackets, coupla
colons, info. Even better! I could do it in Perl..." Ratatatat, she typed it
in at the speed of light,
"Voila! You see? Same thing, one line of code. But it's from
seeing the patterns in music that I can spot something like this when
some hot shot programmer might not. Guess I won't go hungry if the
music doesn't pan out. Anyway, these disks are done by several
different guys just as incompetent as this one, so it'll take like weeks to
sort it all out."
"Is that why the video freezes up?"
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