* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Hate e-scooters? Join the club of the pals of 190 riders in Austin TX who ended up in hospital

Stevie

Bah!

Two observations:

20 per 100,000 = 1 per 5000 or .02%, which is a very low risk factor from where I sit.

Missing were any questions along the lines of:

Were you operating a GoPro during the accident?

Did you begin your accident on a standard thoroughfare, or was it more like the railings of a concrete staircase or perhaps the roof of a garage or shed?

Were the wheels of the scooter on the ground immediately before the accident or were they above the footboard, in mid-air, during an attempted loop-de-loop?

Were you the sole occupant of the scooter at the time of the accident, or was your cameraman/camerawoman taken to a different hospital under an assumed name?

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

Stevie

Re: A personal favourite: deleting from a database

ROLLBACK;

Stevie

Re: Anyone who says they have not done this is lying

I've never done that.

I did write a deletion script for another department which escaped its playpen and wreaked nagasaki across a wide swath of production, high-volume directories.

I was able to put on a horrified look and say "Who changed my code?" before we got to the Blame Allocation Phase, fortunately.

Cheque out my mad metal frisbee skillz... oops. Lights out!

Stevie

Re: Proper Meters

Avo for the win.

Cool 'joke', bro, you could have killed someone: Epilepsy Foundation sics cops on sick flashing-light Twitter trolls

Stevie

Obvious Troll ...

... is Obvious.

Do Not Feed.

Stevie

Bah!

Lump hammer.

Hands.

Happy Artemis Day everybody! NASA preps its monster rocket for testing

Stevie

100%

Hahaha. Good one.

Nope, it has to do with the nominal designed working <whatever> of <whatever>, and engineers designing stuff to work outside that safety envelope for a bit (guv). In the case of the shuttle, it would be the rated thrust specification.

Hence "Take the reactor to 110% Mr Christian and be quick about it or we'll never catch the Red October".

Or so I'm told. My original thought was that it was due to the problems of using calculators that work in metric but that once they've had the mode changed, no-one can figure out how to put them back in Imperial Units because the inch-thick manual has been lost for yonks.

Stevie

Bah!

Wait, Artemis gets a day named for it because it is being tested?

Fuck that. I declare today "Annoying perl thing I dreamed up to be thoroughly useful but which keeps crashing thanks to some stupid only-onna-Tuesday bug in a library file" day.

When it flies, *then* the rocket can have its day.

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Stevie

Re: Much harder with an alternator

You don't swap the whole car, just the radio, cassette player, and other "polarized" electronic gizmos. One gets good at quickly assessing the shimming needed.

Stevie

"Does polarity matter?

Pfft! I owned a '64 Mini Traveller*.

All reversed polarity means is you have to reverse *all* the polarities back to the breakers. Easy peasy, volts up the fingers. Aggleaggleaggle.

Of course, if the polarity is reversed on the drop from the pole pig, life gets a bit more pyrotechnic.

Aggleaggleaggle.

* Positive ground electrics - something to do with corrosion resistance. Wiring accessories like radios was "fun". Also had a genny, so those accessories had better not be too thirsty.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

It was an IT office. Pretty much all day coffee and cheap fridge compressor with outbreaks of kettle boiling. I wouldn't have been surprised to find a steam iron and hair-dryer ganged in too.

Stevie

Bah!

Some years ago working in NY I was walking past our coffee point when the secretary/departmental PA gave a shriek and announced to the world she'd just been electrocuted while moving "a wire".

I took a look as the guilty ones gathered around.

"hmm, let's see: The kettle and the coffee machine are plugged into this half melted white extension cord intended for running three lamp-type devices. So is the fridge You idiots could have killed someone".

"How could we have known the cord would melt?" asked the UK contractors gathering sheepishly around me.

"How could you not?" I demanded. "You all have 'A' level education and above. The cord is clearly labelled as having a maximum capacity of 15 amperes at 110 volts nominal. Let's have a look at all the crap you've plugged in: Kettle - 1 kilowatt. That's around 9 amps right there. Coffee machine: .8 kilowatt for another 7 amps in change. And the pie-ace de resistance? You plugged the bloody fridge into that too. The compressor on that bugger draws 10 amps on it's own. Boil the tea while the fridge door is open and I'm surprised you couldn't smell the technology melting. You can think yourselves luck you didn't kill someone."

Naturally someone argued with me. She pointed out that the coffee machine drew *no* amps around 50% of the time because the thermostat turned it off. I just told the secretary to have this rocket scientist do the cable moving from now on.

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Stevie

Re: scram button!

In what situation , in a server room, would the "instantly cut power to everything" button be used?

Electrocution in progress?

Stevie

Re: Dont have your machine room at the top of a building

"Plumbers grease?"

When I go a-plumbing I carry a tin box full of stuff including a blowtorch, squeezy flint lighter thingy, solder, emery cloth, wire brushes, a bunch of copper pip and fittings, a tin of flux and a brush for same in a little jar.

There is no grease. I'm not sure in what capacity it would ever be called for. You certainly wouldn't want it contaminating any lines you had just carefully soldered together.

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Stevie

Bah!

For a proper treatment of how to deal with shaken cans of fizz, read Penn and Teller's excellent "How To Play With Your Food".

You are looking for the trick "The God of Carbonation".

No so-called "scientists" need apply, as a full explanation of How The Trick Is Done is given.

And then there were two: HMS Prince of Wales joins Royal Navy

Stevie

Re: Fundamentally arrogant and racist

I'm sorry - are you equating the nationalistic fervour that fuels the will to go to war with the sadistic culture evinced by the Japanese toward their captives and the Nazis toward "undesirables"?

*My* point was that I wasn't going to give arguments such as yours any weight in the "we should feel bad for what we did in WWII - especially the Little Boy and Fat Man events" debate.

For all the stories you can dredge up of bad behaviour by Allied occupation troops, no-one was herded into cattle cars for a Xylon-B shower or starved and beaten to death during forced labour. Dresden burned? So did large parts of London and Coventry. Hiroshima? The Batan Death March and the events in China.

Save your sympathy for those that deserved it.

As for the sadism in Japanese Culture, it predates contact with "WASP" Europe (actually Catholic Spain but let's not split hairs).

But I'll readily concede that many times in the past Britain - England really, hasn't covered its reputation in glory, and that America has a past it would today rather hadn't happened the way it did.

Stevie

Re: Fundamentally arrogant and racist

During wartime *everyone* is arrogant and racist. The term "cheese scarfing surrender monkeys" was coined on a comedy show, but was soon being bandied about by anyone in the US with strong feelings about the French holding back from Operation Democratic Freedom of Democracy.

And the Senate really did have their French Fries renamed Freedom Fries in the canteen.

By my calculations at the time this meant that the despised French were now the only native speakers of Freedom (formerly thought to be the prerogative of American Blowhard Politicians on The Make).

That aside, I cannot feel sorry about "racism" against WWII era Japan. I saw firsthand what the cost of a stay in a Japanese prisoner of war camp would be like - a neighbour's wounds hadn't properly healed by the end of the 1950s. I believe myself that the Axis nations led the world in Xenophobia.

Why so many are bound and determined to have another go at implementing those views is a source of bewilderment to me. Just think: this time the bad guys are *us*, and we'll know it when it all comes to a sorry end.

Oh well.

Stevie

Carrier/No Carrier

The question of the importance of having a carrier present during the events of 1944, South China Sea, Battleships 'n' Dreadnoughts the sinking of, are of little interest as they include no tanks whatsoever. What good a superdreadnought class ship absent the mighty Cromwell, doubty Churchill or the redoubtable Panther ausf G?

Stevie

Re: And All Who Sail In Her

Nonono dear boy, the bell wasn't attacked by thieves, the wreck was.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Stevie

Re: AKA Libertarians

Arizona is in the USA.

Whoooooa, this node is on fire! Forget Ceph, try the forgotten OpenStack storage release 'Crispy'

Stevie

Re: Sometimes like a toddler

Luckily, chances are that if the pink one is in the wash, everything is pink now.

Stevie

Re: two factor authentication

Our place has set this up using a Microsoft product.

It does not challenge on activating outlook.

It does not challenge on remotely accessing the system.

It does not challenge when connecting a phone to the mail system.

It DOES challenge randomly about once every three weeks while I am in the middle of my turn at covering the servicenow tickets. If I don't respond on my cell phone (in my pocket and tangled with my keys etc) in thirty seconds it shuts down my email server connection and getting it to come back up is a journey of discovery involving clicking on links, randomly shutting down and restarting outlook and on one particularly desperate occasion clearing off a *very* busy desktop and rebooting the workstation.

The wonderful chaos that ensues when my password needs changing is a thing of beauty too, as the email is configured to demand a change (by silently disconnecting from the server and hanging) in the middle of the day, whereas the network wants it doing at my convenience but nags me for two weeks. Password aging is the cowpat in the field of computer security. A bread and circuses approach that just makes for people gaming the password vetting algorithm and database.

Where's the Tylenol?

Two can play that game: China orders ban on US computers and software

Stevie

Bah!

I can't see this transparent ploy working for long.

The Chinese can't possibly afford much investment now they are paying all those tariffs on their exports like wot OPOTUS says they are.

What?

You're drinking morning coffee in 2019. These eggheads are in 2119 landing drones on their arms like robo-falconers

Stevie

Bah!

So scientists *can't* make a flying car or rocketboots with an altimeter in the heel, but they *can* waste hours making a virtual simulation of them?

What else is new?

Layabouts!

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Stevie

I had a routine called 'Call ambulance'

Bah!

As a protest against my full of himself new boss and his idiotic "standards" which only I was told to follow ("as a pilot of the idea") I wrote an entire Cobol program that read as a narrative of an attempt to seduce Debby Harry in the backseat of a car.

It got verified *9* times (the narrative was a good 'un but totally PG when all was read and typed, more boddice-ripper than porn) and the head of the punch room stood over me flexing her biceps while I ran it to prove it was a real program and not just time-wasting. Only program I ever got back with zero punch transcription errors. I got smirked at by every one of the punch girls too. Result.

Later, while sharing that story over a pint with some Sperry consultant bods who had let slip they worked at that shop too, one of them exploded that he had worked on that program, assumed it was a joke, added some comments of his own and sent it back to the head of programming - and damn near lost his job.

Not sorry. It was a simple program. If he was so damn lazy as to not bother desk checking it or, more importantly, not bother checking the schedule for it - it ran weekly per my memory - then he deserved to be dinged.

Stevie

Re: True multitasking didn't exist ...

Not unless they are all scribbling different parts of the same entry in the same ledger it ain't.

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

Stevie

Bah!

The act of handing money to Apple is a much better user experience than handing it to any other person or business. That's just facts.

Apple's stated goal is to maximize the user experience via their products.

QE2

Royal Bank of Scotland IT contractor ban sparks murmurs of legal action

Stevie

Re: Never mind

Well, carelessness in use of such a short snippet of English might send a shiver up the spine of anyone expecting to be reading code written by the same hand presumably with the same attention to detail.

I'd make a similar observation about documentation, but no-one writes it any more.

Stevie

it's offering them a 20% pay

The temptation to throw back comments made to me by commentards when I've had the nerve to complain about my job in these pages is overpowering so I won't restrain myself:

"If you don't like the terms of employment, work somewhere else".

NASA spanks $34bn on a disposable rocket – likely to top $50bn by 2024 moon landing

Stevie

Re: "But the money needed is serious, and the stream of it needs to be long-term."

Development costs of aircraft, especially those which will be sold to Govt, are supported by tax money "subsidies" if not outright tax money paid-for development programs.

Even Musk gets tax dollars to defer the costs. Consider, NASA *gave* him a pre-built, fully tested and working launch pad.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just that the Administrative Will is still a major factor.

Without funding from the public purse it all still comes down around everyone's ears.

Stevie

Bah!

Funding is scarce, politicians think in terms of payoffs within their terms of office and spaceflight is expensive and hard to get right. Next up: The ocean turns out to be wet.

Kudos for the KSC pix. I will probably be there again in January. Love that place, me.

Even if the astronauts on site make me feel sad because of the loss of vision at the highest levels for their hard work.

The US will go back to space in a big way the moment it looks like the other contenders look likely to become the primary presence. China would be my guess. No American president will want to be the one who "Lost Space to the <insert other nation>".

I'd love to see another consortium of nations get serious about going into the business of manned space stations, moon landings etc. But the money needed is serious, and the stream of it needs to be long-term.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Stevie

Bah!

Back door ... ?

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Stevie

how a failure can be expensive and irreparable

When it is a replacement prospect.

You did spot the cost attached to this thing, right?

What a load of bollards! Object of bloke's street furniture romp run over

Stevie

Bah!

"oblivious ... on a crowded street"

"no-one about"

Something here doesn't work.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

Stevie

eBay

I had a colleague who would tease our Sun engineer into apoplexy in hardware provisioning meetings by suggesting that we buy switches on eBay.

He would have cost comparisons, printouts etc and could do the sincere suggestion thing with an absolutely straight face.

Poor old Max (name changed) would melt down every time.

Stevie

Re: used the wrong serial cable

See your UPS serial cable and raise you a box of visually identical but mutually incompatibly wired Sun SPARC null modem cables.

None labelled.

Every flippin' time remote console access was required there was a ten minute mix-n-match cable to server fiasco. Nearly drove me nuts. I offered to label the cables and was told in no uncertain terms not to do so "in case the labels caused confusion".

Same crew kept the departmental dry erase markers in a ziplock baggie with permanent markers. Every presentation started with a ten minute shout fest as eveyone warned everyone else in the room about the pens while the one who wanted to draw a f*cking diagram madly searched for the one usable dry erase in a bag of unfit-for-purpose.

I eventually bought my own pens (4 bux from Staples) and an eraser (about the same) and my next visual presentation was given to an incredulous repeating chorus of "you bought your own pens????" that drowned out my narrative.

All Unix SAs of course, regarded themselves as the bees knees but were seen by everyone else as the Laurel and Hardy of the enterprise. I never met a less agile or more reactionary team.

They achieved new highs of "popularity" when they informed the Grand High Muckety Muck that they could not shut down our Unix server farm "by application, in a rolling fashion" because "that was a windows server methodology". Truth was no a single person on that team had the faintest idea of who was running what applications on each server since they never did any kind of assay when provisioning a new server.

All changed now. New brooms at the top levels (along with that impossible rolling shutdown debacle) enforced more control and monitoring. You probably heard the wailing on the other side of the Atlantic.

Stevie

Re: Wrong Server Back Panel

So many racked $$$$ servers.

So few $ label printers.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

Stevie

Re: George 2+

There's a Wikipedia page on George/Exec? In the name of ICL, why? Do they have "DA ERROR [" listed?

Somewhere I still have my Apps Manager Programmer's Card. It is pink.

Stevie

Re: George 2+

GO #ABCD 20 - start the job with paper tape input

GO #ABCD 21 - Start the job with punch card input

GO #ABCD 25 & 27 ibid

GO #ABCD 29 - abort the job (usually) - yes, under George II+ you had to type GO when you wanted things to STOP.

The number after the program name was the address of the starting command in the compiled program.

Some programs had a "go type entry block" so you only ever typed GO #ABCD. I've never found out why.

On the 1900 series OU #ABCD 8 was useful too, as word 8 was the program counter. Good for finding forever loops (if the speaker warble wasn't indicative).

Though all those commands were actually EXEC commands as I remember them. George was a set of modules you could load (or not) to get a job done with minimal interference from the operators. The "steering lines" (aka JCL) were a drop-through action list. Dead simps. So you operator would type something like:

FI#XKYE#GEOG 1 (find the input spooler in file GEOG and assign it to unit number 1)

blahblahblah

INPA R WAS XKYE

XKYE HALTED TR 1 FIX (the spooler had renamed itself and stopped pending the loading of a paper tape and the operator pressing the green button on the reader)

GO#INPA 20

blahblahblah

INPA HALTED HH (the spooler has finished and is ready for the next job)

FI#GEMA#GEOG (load the central control module from file GEOG - ours was called GEMA after someone's girlfriend)

GO#GEMA

ABCD R WAS GEMA (your ABCD program is now running)

ABCD HALTED HH (and it just finished)

FI#XKZE#GEOG 3 (Load the output spooler and assign it to unit 3 - the line printer in this case)

blahblahblah

OUTA R WAS XKZE

OUTA HALTED LP3 FIX (operator loads paper and presses the green button on the printer)

GO OUTA 25 (I think, it has been over 40 years since I did this for real)

(EARSPLITTING BANGBANGBANG NOISES FROM THE BARREL PRINTER)

OUTA HALTED HH (the print run is finished and the operator, ears bleeding, can tear off the report)

If you needed more room for ABCD you would DE#INPA before you GO#GEMA'd. There was something of an art to juggling the memory. I remember one consultant we had who would lobotomize EXEC on the fly from the console so they could finish in only 3/4 the memory they needed.

Ah the happy sound of the print drum of the console Westrex slamming into its lid so it snapped like and angry crocodile when the machine "went illegal" because someone had typed DE#ABCD when there was less than two kilowords of core memory unused. Ah the happy sounds of the cursing operator typing like mad when a stupid compilation mistake did the same from a program test run.

Worse days.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Stevie

Re:I take it you missed the part about this being before the windows ME days?

"this might have been okay in 1995 but it sure as hell aint now."

I think the aggrieved commentor was reacting to the slew of "Right on, I do this!" responses.

I agree with him. If your users are writing everything to My Documents there should be a policy and procedure to automatically move that stuff where the IT Crowd want it to be upon Log On.

If it is a proper delta backup, the IT bods can still have fun explaining that the two hour sign-on will be a lot shorter if people just save to the network etc etc etc. Maintaining the bespoke system will also be a slot you can fit the departmental plodders into, an easy job that doesn't change much over time.

IT departments that get reputations as unhelpful gits will eventually find themselves outsourced. Won't solve the users' problems, but will add a whole new level of pain for no real benefit.

Think of it like the domestic electricity supply. You don't have to understand how three phase distribution networks work to use it, and you have to be willfully thick to make it dangerous. All the fixable stuff has been fixed for the uneducated masses needing to make toast or watch Come Dancing.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

Stevie

Bah!

All these intrusion stories.

It's almost as though people never use those latches every US hotel and motel room comes equipped with ...

Leeds IT bloke pleads guilty to hacking Jet2 CEO's email account

Stevie

Re: Setting Up

I wish you'd said sooner. Now I'll have to spend weeks redacting "correctbatteryhorsestaple" from about half a hundred webpages.

Stevie

Re: Setting Up Generic

The cost of access on the net.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

Stevie

Bah!

I'll just scan this sample of cranberry sauce for tox ... what the hell? No reading????

I'll recalibrate on this smear of strawberry jam ... no reading???

It's almost as though the (infra) red frequencies are being absorbed by something ...

8o)

IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

Stevie
Stevie

Re: Overtime

I'm a salaried employee in the USA and I get paid overtime. Has to be approved using Vogon Firelighter Protocols, but I get it.

*Managers* don't.

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

Stevie

Bah!

Everyone is banging on about the best way to use the Amazon payment system, but to me the thing that is ringing WAY out of tune is the fact that there can be devices attached to an Amazon account that the owner of the account cannot see, and administer out of existence.

This is the key factor in the whole sorry story (it is a mark of how inured we've become to such things that I don't say the original unauthorized access is the key factor - though it should be of course).

Why devices attached to accounts are not announced in the dashboard, and why they take such effort to be rid of is the real story.

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

Stevie

Re: Lost in translation

My (American) wife fell about laughing hysterically after asking me what I had found (about something long forgotten) and I replied glumly "Not a sausage!"

Microsoft explains self-serve Power platform's bypassing of Office 365 admins to cries of 'are you completely insane?'

Stevie

Re: Many moons ago

All these stories of MS Access apps becoming Mission Critical in the enterprise ought to say something to the IT bods complaining about the remediation needed, but apparently it isn't getting through.

If people can craft applications so useful from MS Access without IT's help, why aren't there processes in place to intercept the requirement and do the job "properly" *before* someone else does the job?

Having worked in IT for decades, and in DBA for most of those, I can probably answer for the majority: That by the time IT got back with an answer, the question didn't matter any more.

And yes, MS Access can easily be pushed beyond it's capabilities before a developer knows it, but as a prototyping tool it is phenomenal. In the MS world it could be argued that it occupies the same sort of place in the database application development path as shell script was supposed to when Unix was fresh and shiny.

"Prototype ideas in shell, then write the finished application in C". Lightly paraphrased from several of my umpteen Unix text books.

I've used it for just that - a proof of concept that I ran off in about three hours (with the help of ER Win) and was then ported into SQL server after the hard bits and gotchas were spotted and worked into the answer.

Stevie
Pint

Re: "Microsoft will provide standard support for self-service purchasers."

Oh yeah.