Prophecy 2006

"Software rot" is a term I made up years ago; if you leave software unused for six months and attempt to run it, the software almost inevitably fails. There's no known cure other than rigorous control over every piece of hardware and software and all the networking that ties them together. (In other words, there's no known cure.)

I've just tried to run a program on the premises and hosted versions of Prophecy, and ended up fighting software rot for hours and hours. Most of the problems stemmed from configurations: the Avahi DNS service, the /etc/hosts file, and similar rigamarole. I also had to be reminded by Voxeo support that the software, written years ago, was in Voxeo's early version of the CCXML language and not in the W3 1.0 release. Another reason to use DOCTYPE when it's available, I suppose.

However, I did stumble across an odd and subtle problem. In the past, the result of a CCXML.start was a "success" returned by the server. Now the result of a CCXML.start is a "success" and a carriage return. I don't know if that's because of a change in Prophecy, in the underlying parsing software that I use (Python), or something else — but it's another reminder to check your strings carefully and strip off unnecessary whitespace.