As a kid growing up, I have vivid memories of watching Tarzan movies after the Saturday morning cartoons were over. We only had three channels, so we didn’t waste a lot of time channel surfing. You watched what was on and you liked it. In about half of those Tarzan movies, you had the bumbling man wearing a French pith helmet or topi. This poor soul would be hacking his way through the jungle with an oversized, extremely sharp machete. Unknowingly, he was facing almost certain death via a lion or some other jungle-induced demise. A couple of badly sequenced movie cuts later and topi man would be dead. A required extermination, so a vine-swinging Tarzan could rescue the completely bewildered people who had been following the recently dispatched soul. As a kid, I remember feeling sorry for this man. He did all that work, and the people following him did nothing, yet his reward was death.The AdvancedTCA specification is a jungle filled with the words shall, should, and may. It is also a morass of things that I like to call gotchas. These gotchas are certainly not problems with the AdvancedTCA specification, but they are areas where mistakes are easily made and problems are often underestimated. Therefore, I will now don my helmet, raise my machete, and attempt to cut through some of the more obvious gotchas that are ahead in the AdvancedTCA jungle on our path to the prosperous Land of Revenue.
