Posts by Stevie

Re: battered?

Well done IAS. Laughed so hard I started making Mutley noises and crying.

On my morning train.

Your work is done.

Re: Bah!

Nope. Fluent in US English and not blind or color-blind (I edited out about two thirds of the questionnaire for brevity).

I've never figured it out.

I had another guy call me after I was relieved of ticket duty.

Him: "I need to speak to Consultant McQuitface"

Me: "I'm sorry, he no longer works here."

Him: "Well I need to speak to him about an urgent ticket."

Me: "Well, as I said, he no longer works here."

Him: "This ticket is urgent!"

Me: "Well, I haven't worked the ticket system myself for six months and he had a backlog of another six, so it can't have been that urgent"

Him: "I really need to speak to Consultant McQuitface"

Me: "He doesn't work here any more."

HIm: "I Really need to speak to him."

Me: "Mr Consultant McQuitface no longer works here. He quit. He walked offsite with no warning."

Him: "...are YOU Consultant McQuitface?"

I was so blindsided by this I completely neglected to do what I normally do in such situations and yell "YES! YES I AM AHAHAHAHAHAHA!" and slam down the phone. All I could do was hang up on yet another Call from the Twilight Zone.

Re: Children of the Resolution

Years ago I deployed a print workstation and browser solution to an enormous distributed enterprise. We managed things from the helpdesk using PC Anywhere, and I only got involved when there was Trouble Up At Mill.

I get a call from he helpdesk asking if I can have a word with the staff at a particular site who were changing the resolution of the desktop from whatever it was (I forget) to something they could presumably see with old eyeballs.

The problem was this meant that it was a nightmare trying to troubleshoot with PC anywhere because of dreadful resolution mismatch issues. This, combined with the slow network response to make life utterly miserable for the helpdesk staff.

So I called after hours one day when all my office colleagues had left and spoke to the two older ladies who were the entire workforce at that location. I told them I had trouble seeing the text myself, wondered if that was the reason they were altering the screen resolution, and that I could show them something that might make their lives very much easier.

I took control of the workstation from my desk and demonstrated the print browsers in-built "zoom" feature by zooming in until the screen held only a single, giant letter. Then I zoomed back out again until the print was too tiny to see (talking them through the process as they watched), and finally, I demonstrated the single hotkey "default size please" reset.

I did it again, giving the ladies time to write down the hotkeys, asked hem if this would be an acceptable way of making the print readable and was assured it was perfect.

They were delighted. Hotline staff were delighted. I went to drink beer. Everybody won.

Re: The other moral is that assholes are assholes.

I had a colleague who asked me to help him manage a system he'd put together in which reports were mailed to a server that used procmail to trigger a script that reformatted them and pidgeonholed them for display on a webserver - the pidgeonholes were how the dynamic stacked hyperlink index of documents was built. Crude, maybe, but hard-wearing and easy to administer.

There were three classes of report, but only two were being displayed as intended. The third had "some bug I never had the time to properly sort out - probably an OS patch needed or something". It had been broken for years.

I procured Martin McCarthy's excellent book on procmail from Amazon and two days (prime membership for the win) and a short read to get up to speed later I dug in and spotted the typo in the recipe almost immediately. New pair of eyes and all that.

I fixed the issue and asked if I might not take over that admin chore, as I could see a couple of new applications for the technique.

Within four hours the server passwords had been changed, locking me out. He didn't speak to me for a couple of weeks after that either.

So I guess the answer was "Thanks for fixing the problem but I don't think we need an admin for that specific application".

Re: Had similar call

Back before PCs I would get a call once every three weeks from "Bob" which would have he rest of the office howling with laughter as I ran the script.

<MODE=bob_newheart>

Ring ring

"Hello."

"Oh hello Bob."

"You can't log onto the system?"

"Can you see a poll indicator?"

"In the bottom right corner of the screen. The word "poll" flashing on and off."

"Pull the keyboard forward and look at the panel under the screen. Can you see any lights?"

"Do you see the rocker switch on the right hand side of the panel?"

"Good. Press the side of the switch marked 'on'."

"Can you see the word 'poll' flashing on and off?"

"Good. You're good to go."

"No problem Bob".

Word for word. Every three weeks. It was high comedy for the other buggers in the office.

Re: The right attitude 4 phuzz

Not only do you have to explain things well enough that even the least technically-savvy can understand, they also have to f**king listen to what you say.

Ha! Ask a specific question on any technical forum and get back witless answers from our own lot.

"I need to know how to do x on the new Raspberry Pi O/S. It apparently has changed since Wheezy" gets back "Check out the FAQ and you'll see that Wheezy has a widget for that".

"How do I do y on Oracle RAC running on Solaris?" gets back reams of useless information about configuration options that only exist on Linux.

"What options are available on package z on AIX" gets back dribble about package !z on Linux.

All drawn from real life. It would seem IT is rife with people who cannot read for comprehension. I love getting back an RTFM response when I point out that I wasn't asking the question they answered too.

Re: Bah!

All very good points, but everyone missed mine, which was that those who push their neighbours' buttons may find themselves sleeping in draughty cold houses with cardboard window panes at the start of the spring term if they hit home.

I never said *I* would break any windows. Then again, I never said I would draw things on my walls with fairy lights, things designed to get a rise out of my neighbours.

Because, well, where's the win?

Re: Terminology

The Pirhana Brothers only hit on that sceme on the third attempt.

Re: zfs snapshots

zfs? This is some new magic not available in solaris 9.

8o)

Re: Why use a revision control system? 4 phuzz

And I work with people like Wakeem who copy old versions to a new name.

Thing is, there are dozens of us and each has his own preferred naming convention. I hate the mess the filesystems become as a result and end up running a script to dump it all into a new directory called obsolete and zip them all down. Once a year I tar all the zips automagically into a yearly archive.

My director yelled that he wanted us to use a VC tool for this stuff, but refused me permission to deploy git in a hysterically funny and very annoying saga I already told, and the situation is still as it was pre-shoutyboss.

Re: 1970s?

Good of you to take the time to point that out AC.

Re: 1970s?

I remember there was a flood of young men at parties who would challenge others to scramble their rubik's cube and then attempt to get girls by unscrambling it in record time.

To increase the SAD factor I would, if asked to scramble, turn away from the cube's owner while scrambling madly, ignoring his smirk. Then, when he cuoldn't see what I was doing, I would give one slice a half-turn, so the middle cubes were over a corner. That done, using the pad of my thumb, I'd gently prise out one edge-middle cube (t'was easy) and invert it, popping it back into place. I'd give the cube another few pointless twists and return it to its owner.

Then I'd make myself scarce.

Re: I feel sorry for the USA with their super-slow internet!

Well, the upside is that our email works most of the time and the last time the internet went away it was due to a hurricane and teh webz came back when I fired up Start You F*cking Bastard, my generator.

Seems like my mum and dad never had a good word for Tellus, and every week we read of lucky gigabit users being hung out by non-functioning ISPs.

Swings and roundabouts I suppose.