SCOTTS VALLEY - July 14, 2000 -- Borland® and KylixTM help Legoland® score a World Record Story by Anders Ohlsson® (Click on the individual pictures to see them full size and in color) Download the MPEG of our presentation at BorCon 2000! (Warning: It's 19MB!)

During our 11th annual conference (this year in San Diego, CA), some of the night lab staff went to Legoland® in Carlsbad, CA to check out the latest and greatest technology in component building and code reuse. As the team arrived to the park, we saw that just outside there was a World Record attempt in progress. The goal was to build the longest Lego® Millipede in history.	This is not a bumper sticker. It's real Lego®. Each letter is 5x3 bytes. Each byte is 4 bits.
Partial integration is done. The Web and Kylix front-ends are completed.	A real Borlander® never turns down a tough challenge, so since our iCEO Dale Fuller had just launched the "Made in Borland®" bumper sticker campaign we decided to build a "Made in Borland®" segment, and help Legoland® achieve their goal of beating the Danes at the same time... (Of course, that just means the Danes will beat us again next year, right?) Little did we know it would take 2.5 hours to finish, so we'll have to go see the 5,000 creations and 30 million Lego® pieces in the park itself another time...
Next year, it's all about this stuff. We'll beat the pants off this years record holders... We'll come up with a way of building a RAD tool for Lego® builders! I'm talking about an automated programmable Lego® building machine, not just a printer to make a hardcopy of your code... (Obligatory 2001 joke - "Sorry Dave, I can't do that...") OK, enough about next year...	The web front-end fully supports XML, XDR, DTD, SOAP and any other BuzzcronymTM you could possibly imagine.
The proud development team with the finished product.	The toughest part with this challenge was to build all the lettering. Of course we all started out thinking we knew exactly what we were doing. How hard can it be to put pixels in a dot matrix anyway? We finished all three lettering protypes at the same time, and all of us figured out really fast that we'd built the lettering the wrong way. It wouldn't fit into the template without throwing EConstraintErrors all over the place...
So we quickly scratched the whole thing, and re-linked everything from scratch using a combination of hybrid 4, 8 and 16 bit components. Once all the lettering was finished we had to integrate it all into the rest of our millipede body segment. What a gnarly job!	Our product has LEGS!
It's all about the NET!	It core dumped quite a few times throught the integration process, and small quick and dirty patches had to be put in several strategic places. [The written spec as well as part of the construction template can be seen on the table (see the team picture two pictures above, yes I know, I had to fix up the text, so the reference ended up here, OK...)]
We knew from the start that our finished product had to withstand some heavy-duty Quality Assurance by Legoland® staff members (Sara, Lori and Karsten) armed with rubber mallets to check for compiler and linker errors (interlocking of the Legos®). We looked over the written specification (see picture above) one last time after finishing the whole segment, and got the surprise of our lives. One side was off by one!	2.5 hours later. The load-balanced and fully multi-tasking team from left to right - Sparky, Fraz, David, Marty (the team's legal counsel), and myself.
The millipede is enjoying our solid middleware. There would have been no World Record without Borland®. It's a lot longer than you can see in this picture. It should be around 660 segments.	After all of us finished blaming eachother we consulted the Legoland® staffers. They confirmed that there was a bug in the spec! *Phew*! No need to rebuild. The Legoland® staffers started checking for stop ship bugs as well as regression bugs. Being hardcore Borlanders®, we passed with flying colors! We could finally ship our product! And on time at that! No schedule slippage here...
Darn, that meant we had to go back and work in the lab again, earlier than we thought. ;-) The finished millipede ended up breaking the old record by 6 yards. It is 667 yards long, consists of 465 body segments, 930 feet (the ones you walk on, not the unit) and 1600 tail links.	We're piece number #307.
We're the glue that makes this thing work!	Being a numbers freak, I figured out that the total 1.6 million pieces would cost roughly $225,000 if you buy them in bulk. Thanks to Jonna Rae at Legoland® for the final measurements and numbers. Thanks to Legoland® we had a great team building experience, and it certainly beat sticking "Made in Borland®" stickers to anything at Legoland® or Sea World! ;-)

Speaking of Sea World... If anybody took pictures of our debugger team next to the big 25 foot penguins... Our legal department needs them... Just kidding... ;-) Send them to aohlsson@borland.com. Please!