Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Heh.
I spent a couple of weeks in France in '78. At that time the rule was you had to yield to people entering the roundabout. Come 5pm, every city in France was filled with pretty star-shaped traffic jams courtesy of this witless law. Traffic helicopter footage was eagerly lapped up by the news program audiences.
Changed now to doing it the sensible way.
I once worked in a factory in which wooden desks could only be moved by carpenters and metal desks could only be moved by tinsmiths.
Came the day when we had to relocate to "temporary" office space in portacabins.
And they discovered we had a metal desk with wooden drawers.
Instant demarcation dispute.
Idiotic suggestion. Add cost for nebulous benefit over current solution.
And what about those times when Microsoft cannot authenticate over the internet?
I can't be the only one whose enterprise bought the MS spiel about cloud-based log-on, then couldn't get email or launch chrome for a day when heir server farm was "stressed"
I'm with the factory. Buy a second server if not there already and cluster-up. Don't forget your UPS.
Because I've sat through the 2004 blackout *and* the time some twillup cut a cable in the Fort McHenry Tunnel and took out internet for everyone northeast of Baltimore.
I use Reflections for my terminal sessions. Everyone else, younger and smarter than me, uses putty.
When I start a session I can pick from a palette of colour schemes I set up. Apparently, that is hard to do on putty. I wouldn't know.
So when, for example, I have sessions open to Dev, Training, UAT and Production they all get different bg/fg colours. Guess which one gets black on bright red.
I can also remap the keyboard if some very useful ways. our servers have a naming convention such that a name is a string made up of three character substrings. ssh is a four key op for me, with no yptos, and I have killer carpal tunnel issues. Yesyesyes I have to set up the certs on the servers to avoid needless password retyping but that takes a few minutes once in a blue moon.
Common file systems across servers means the need to zip all over the place during triage can be simplified. Single keystrokes to the rescue again.
I've just been informed that I may have to use putty in the future. The software installations guys cannot fathom the degree of pushback they are getting from one person in the department.
Maybe a little less focusing on replacing Cobol with the Language Du Jour and a bit more on the Lost Art of Systems Analysis would pull the trick off?
Couple of years ago I had to listen to some Armed Forces bigwig telling America that the reason soldiers were not being paid was "old-fashioned Cobol systems" when in reality the (four different) Cobol systems in use by each branch of the armed forces were working fine. The problems started when they threw out the Cobol and introduced a new "integrated" system that was supposedly All Things To All Forces but in fact turned out to be No Thing For Any Forces.
The rules haven't changed just because the jargon has:
1) There must be a better way of doing it
2) There was a damn good reason for doing it the way it is now
3) Leave it the fuck alone - until you *understand* #1 and #2.
I'm currently helping support a large application which had a new internet-enabled suite added on. Underlying design assumption: All the data needed by the new parts will be there when queried. This data is from a periodic asynchronous load set provided by an independent source over which we have no authority or control. What happens when the data *isn't* there? Headless Chicken Dancing and the dreaded Teams Meetings.
When did programmers-sorry-software architects stop working from "what happens when this isn't true?"
If I had provided anything like this as a trainee back before micro computers I'd have had my fingers broken by the Chief programmer.
Well, I may be a bluff old cove with a hairstyle you could hide a badger in but even I can figure a way of folding a rotor protection ring so it can fold flat for transit and spring open "reverse gin trap" style for deployment.
I own small helicopters. I reckon the fear is not unreasonable and let's not forget that there is no-one to step over and tip the thing upright if it should come down at speed and "trip".
Because we don't send people to Mars in the post Von Braun word, we send roombas.
8o)
I deployed a networked software solution that chopped several hours off a 27 hour day, and thus this became a popular product. My deputy at the time ran an embryonic intranet server, and I used this to document everything including the fact that the compression button broke everything and should never be used. In this documentation I built in step-by-step playbooks for all the problems I had encountered including the "transfers hang = compression turned on" one.
My deputy claimed I never showed him anything, played his face to his manager (we had different ones due to some truly imaginative org trees) who had me fired off the project on a trumped up "annoys the users" charge. To stop me from walking they gave me Mr Backstab's web server to manage along with all the other stuff I did anyway.
Two weeks in I walk in and the network techs beg me to take a look. Mr BS was out somewhere and nothing was working across a networked enterprise the size of England. I said I wasn't allowed to touch it, but the big boss came in and said "just do it" so I did. I walked into the network room and under the eyes of the network techs I unchecked the "compression" box, and everything woke up.
Then I went into the Big Boss's office and made him fire up the intranet site for the product.
"Go to the problem page. It's the fourth hyperlink in the four member list"
"OK"
"Now find the symptom we were seeing and click on that"
"OK"
"Now read off the fix"
"Uncheck the compression option"
"Now tell me I never showed Mr BS how to do anything."
This hero presided over several more uckfups with that product which Those In Charge asked me to fix, including deploying a new version of Unix untested (and so not knowing about the added step of authorizing the printer so it could be reached from a PC, locking the entire thing solid in front of some VIPs) and bricking half of the training room's PCs two weeks after loudly acquiring a Microsoft Certification.
He can't look me in the face to this day. Totally worth it.
1996, new (and first) PC with fax software and a voiceview modem sitting in home office.
Phone rings at too-damn-early on a Saturday and I get fax squeal when I pick up. And again. And again.
So I go downstairs boot PC and make tea while that happens. Then I start the fax software and out prints some poor woman's lab results with - as I'd hoped - a cover sheet with the phone number of the sender.
I call them, young woman answers and we fall down the rabbit hole:
"You are faxing the wrong number. Please check your machine."
"Impossible!"
"Okay. Let's review for a moment. You say you are faxing the right number. *I* say you are faxing the wrong one. What are the alternatives? Either I am right and you are sending - let me see - Mrs Elsie Zzzzzz's medical records to a private address, or you are right and I am a crank caller who has called you and accused you of sending a fax at exactly the same time as you actually did send a fax, and I have guessed randomly the exact details of the fax you are sending. You choose the more likely scenario."
"Okay. I'll re-check the number I dialed."
"Thank you. And I will shred the sensitive personal medical documents you sent to me, shall I?"
"Yes." Click.
Oh dear, someone is confusing "earned one's pension" (which people claiming them most certainly have absent any evidence of years of skiving off) and "funded one's pension" which works the way described.
The social contract was struck. One agreed to fund tomorrow's retirees if one's own pension was funded.
Breaking that contract should involve financial penalties and payments, just like in real life.
Nowt wrong with JET.
Nowt wrong with Access either. Have used it with great success for quite complex jobs.
Unless, of course, you develop either of them them into Humungo_Apps more suited for mainframe D/B tech.
If you go where No Man Was Meant To Go expect to see the error conditions No Man Was Meant To See.
Real aficionados grow the trees from saplings, log them by hand when they mature and mill them with a portable band sawmill.
*REAL* real aficionados build a rotary sawmill and power it with a restored traction engine of course, but that is going a bit far for a few planks IMO.
"I'm slightly sceptical as I would expect facilities management or whatever they're called to pay at least some attention to turning off the power in disused areas"
You might think so.
Story from my father, set around 10 years after WWII when rationing was a recent memory. The national power network was no longer being regionally blacked out on short notice due to infrastructure damage, but pennies were still being pinched at BTH in Coventry where dad was apprenticed.
Came the day when the old Anderson air-raid shelter was to be decommissioned. No-one had been in it in 10 years and space was at a premium.
Someone was dispatched with the key. The door was opened, and a blast of hot air hit that worthy in the face.
Glowing dimly in the deep, dark of the unlit shelter was a single-bar, one kilowatt electric fire.
Case in point. Every reference explained because someone thought everyone else was so shirt thick they needed help decoding the humor.
"The off-planet mention is of course a reference to seminal sci-fi flick 2001: A Space Odyssey, "
Is everyone in the world now so shirt thick they have to have every cultural reference explained in painful detail as soon as it is made?
Can't we leave this sort of stuff to the ritalin-deprived dweebs who edit pages on Wikipedia?
Names are chicken feed to what many UK web-programmers think addresses should look like, or what constitutes a "legal" phone number.
Why yes, I have done business with small manufacturers and local govt in the UK in the recent past. How did you guess?
One site I was just required to use first insisted that a legal phone number only have a certain number of digits (and naturally, the pattern was only legal for UK phone numbers despite the site being for the use of foreigners as well as Those Now Standing Alone Together). I complained about that, and it was fixed, but then the address accepted "USA" as a valid country but converted it to UK when the document was finalized.
Then there's the sites that insist I fill out the address, then tell me they have a better suggestion (usually involving the zip+4) and when I accept that the site generates an address format error.
Other sites trying to sell me stuff have address fields with regex guardians that don't believe anywhere outside the UK exist. I honestly think they'd be better off just dumping it all in a textbox feeding a CDATA parameter, and letting a human sort it out.
Then there are the idiots telling me they don't like my browser and want me to use umbongo, chrime or gooseygoosey (download here). That one usually garners a "LOST SALE" email to every email address I can find on the site on account of I have no nostalgia for 1997.
No, the cattle prod can be thought about for a few seconds but then what *needs* to happen is the IT guyzengalz need to figure out why the user cannot get their head around whatever is obvious-duh to IT.
Because elided thought processes are a common source of error in every damned facet of our business.
It is, for example, why in one shop I worked at with a frantic schedule I came up with the plan that if anyone had a code problem they had looked at for 15 minutes without seeing the problem they could and should grab the nearest colleague and make them sit through a line by line explanation of said code.
99 times out of 100 it went: "I do this, then this, then if that is true I do ... I see the problem".
(The other 1 was Fred not understanding that he had to test an error status after both the find *and* the get on Honeywell DML. "I find the record, get a good status returned, then the update errors!").
Sometimes it is simply a matter of a crib card with pictures. Say, you don't think the right switch could have been communicated to ghe librarian from the get-go do you?
Remember folks, "Users are too stoopid" never sold a single person on adopting Linux. Linux distros had to move toward the user. One to grow on.
My mother in law can't use a mouse because she hammers the buttons so hard the mouse moves an inch or more, performing an unwanted drag'n'drop instead of a click. We explained it, she still hammered the buttons and complained. So I bought her a trackball, which she loves because "it works".
I had to move toward her because she couldn't (for whatever reason) move toward me, and we both just wanted the problem to go away.
A certain Machine Tool Company. 1981. New Computer Equipment. New Factory Control Idiom: "Material Requirements Planning". New manufacturing software suite.
We spent ages loading data into the beast.
We ran the system over a weekend and made 15 boxes of fanfold stationery.
The reports said we were only making 67 machine tools that year. Nobody knew that. It looked like a lot more from the bits lying around the shop floor and the clipboards full of notes the progress chasers waved around.
"There must be some mistake!" declare management, and we do indeed discover data entry problems. Another weekend run was scheduled.
We make 15 more boxes of fanfold stationery.
Analyst in charge announces that we did indeed have the wrong number of builds in the last run.
Count is now 63 machine tools to be built next year.
Hugh and Cry wander around having a say.
It is pointed out that with 63 machine tools in the pipleline we do not need a 2 million quid computer to run the shop. One old bloke with a flat cap and a clipboard can do the job.
And thus a new career as a consultant was unveiled to me.
Working from home full time now. Manglement LOVES Teams.
When we do TEAMS, most people turn off the camera. I like to blip it on and off once in a blue moon, and I do so wearing some sort of ridiculous headgear* and I effect to be distracted by something off to one side. Then I turn off the camera and whip off the headgear. If anyone says anything I re-engage the camera and act puzzled about why they are obsessing about "hats".
* I have a small collection of Elope soft'n'squishy hats: A pith helmet, an artful dodger floppy top hat, a wizzard hat[stet], plague doctor mask c/w wide brim hat etc
I had a gift-wrapped Caithness Paperweight spotted on xray and identified as a possible grenade in Heathrow once, cops with submachine guns, the works.
A friend was asked to bring back Sparklets Soda Siphon parts for my boss, and his luggage was pulled off the plane when they showed up looking like 50 calibre bullets. Then he got a bollocking for putting them in the unpressurized hold.
I had my coat grabbed and searched in Ottowa because a gag bottle of "Northern Comfort" planted there by my sister was opaque to xrays. Turns out maple syrup is xray proof.
Not really like that and way off topic, but in the blissful oblivion department I have a royal flush in spades.
9/11, NYC. About three miles from WTC with direct line of sight. Both towers still up, but burning and obviously not long for the world. I sit in shock next to a phone, which rings.
It is head office in Albany.
"No-one is picking up for our weekly staff meeting!"
"We're all a bit distracted just now. I suggest you reschedule."
"But we HAVE to have our staff meeting!"
"No we bloody don't, not today, not now. Go and find someone with a bloody clue to tell you why" and I hung up.
True story, shortened, cleaned up a bit.
In the days before the plugs had insulated bits on them they kinda made sense as a safety measure*, and many older electric things in the UK did not have their own switches IIRC. Electric hair tongs for a start.
I never really thought about the why of it. Some sockets were switched and some weren't. In my parents' house we had five and fifteen amp wiring, so if the previous owner had gotten excited about the new "European pattern**" 13 amp plugs there was also the excitement of a fire risk.
*Of course, if you left them switched on all the time that was bollocks.
** As some called them at the time.
Works fine without any tool other than the source SQL used to set up the MS Access DB. I used an out-of-date copy of ERWin (an excellent tool that has been priced beyond reach of most now, but then was available in a desktop version for $250) to design the D/B and generate the SQL to build it, so once I had the design done in MS Access and had done the proof of concept I used the same SQL to build version 1.0 of the SQL Server database.
Of course, more MS SQLServer features were leveraged once the application was up and running, so a back-port wasn't possible, but it was ported to MySQL twice, once when the FS lobby said it would be ready for prime time (it wasn't, outside of hobby website purposes), and once when it was actually able to do the job, years later.
So prototyping in MS Access is one thing I think is actually a great idea. You can solve all the big problems like undocumented manual procedures by showing the prospective users a working model and letting *them* use it and critique it.
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