Big Daddy?
Posts by J.G.Harston
3710 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009
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Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator
Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top
Re: What percentage?
And it has to be a proper power cycle. Turn power off. Wait several seconds for electrons to come to a halt. Turn power back on again. After replacing way too many PSUs killed by people flicFLIKflic-ing them, I screamed at one of them STOP KILLING THE ****ING COMPUTERS!!!! THERE IS *NO* REASON TO DO THAT OTHER THAN *DELIBERATELY* TRYING TO DESTROY IT. IF YOU DO IT AGAIN I WILL THROW YOU OUT OF THIS BUILDING.
WHY do some people think that the way to cycle an electrical device is to try and remove the power for a LITTLE time as possible?
aaaaaand breathe.....
Re: Had a similar thing happen
Piece of advice: keep a notebook. In loads of jobs I've built up quick-fix solutions by noting what fixed something last time. Eg:
"Zoom crashes - give up, reboot computer, don't bother trying get Zoom working, just kill the PC."
"Paper error XXYX: remove toner, there *will* be a sheet stuck inside."
"SystmOne *must* have a user's key-card inserted to allow Admin to configure system"
"If new installtion won't recognise keycard, just replace keyboard, don't bother fiddling with configs."
etc.
Re: Not Putting the Cart Before the Horse
I worked with a chap who couldn't grasp the concept of inertia and centre-of-gravity. Several times he loaded up one of those sorts of trollies, pushed it out of the lift by its highest edge, a wheel would hit the bump in the floor between the lift car and the corridor, and the whole stack of PCs would go flying off the trolley.
It seems to be a common brain defect. Think how many times you see people attempting to move furniture by pushing the *HIGHEST* part of it and being completely bemused that the damn thing falls over rather than moves.
Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'
Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk
Re: But I have a box of hollerith cards with my tax statements on them --- woe is me!
I remember in the early 2000s having to collect the electoral register on tape and send it off for processing to be returned on a CD-ROM. ;) I oversaw the project where everything was updated to Express (I think). In the process about 20,000 "ghosts" were cleaned from the system as well.
That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century
Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion
Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?
Re: Totally concur that security should be part of any computer oriented curriculum
That's because the real world reality is that "Computer Science" is not really part of IT. Computer Science != IT. Computer Science != Software Development. Software Development != IT. Yet, all too many people assume and insist that all are the same thing.
"You said you wanted a school job, I've got you a job cleaning toilets, hey why are you complaining, it's cleaning toilets IN! A! SCHOOL!"
Top-tier IT talent doesn't stick around in 'mid-market' organizations
Five ripped off IT giant with $7M+ in bogus work expenses, prosecutors claim
David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85
Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation
Re: Responsibility
"Rewind to your first experience...."
Well, for any normal human that will have been around the age of nine months when you extended an arm and positional feedback told your brain that gravity was a thing. If you didn't manage to get past that stage, you have a great deal more wrong with your life. YOU. DO. NOT. NEED. TO. BE. TAUGHT. HOW. TO. BREATHE.
Re: Tick-Box Lists ...
*Especially* where processes are sequentially dependent and/or there are time lags between steps, so you absolutely must have some form of documentation to tell you where you've got up to so you can do the next step.
* Create account, wait for it to propagate
* When propagated, do X, .... etc.
* When X completes, do Y, etc...
University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB
Re: OneDriving Me Up The Wall
I had a job *administering* the big red button system, and it was appalling how frequently a terminator order came through with zero evidence that it was incorrect, and the ones I caught only happened due to a missing contact address to send a courier to reclaim equipment.
IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security
40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes
At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form
Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi
"the choice between not having a PC at all or having a computer that has this huge back catalog of software"
The promblem is, something in the region of 386% of users want to get their priated version of Microsoft Office working on it. If it won't do Microsoft Office (no, not Libre Offce, not not Open Office, it's Microsoft Office at work, we're taught "Office" at school), it's not a computer.
I used to bang out hundreds of pages of documentation with View on my Beeb, and a colleague was nonplussed at how I could fit "all that" on a 400K disk. "What do you do when you run out of space?" ieurinoo? I've got about 80 reports on this disk, probably space for another 30 (*FREE, bit of mental arithmetic, yeah that looks right), then I'll get another disk out of the box. He couldn't understand that what I was using Was Not Word.
"If you took the Tube out would anybody care?"
YES!!!!! Me, and thousands like me. And the Tube wasn't even "in" the Beeb, it was just an exposed edge connector, barely anything more than the Spectrum's edge connector. Having it "in" or "out" had zero cost, because all the "Tube" was entirely external, but Just. Having. That. Edge. Connector just allowed so much stuff to happen IF YOU CHOSE TO.
The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128
Re: Maybe
"As such, I occasionally harbour a fantasy of Sinclair doing similar, and releasing a set of standardised designs for ZX Spectrum peripherals - here's the sound-chip we recommend, here's BIOS support for up to 128k of RAM, here's a standardised API for mass storage devices, etc."
Gawd, even just "Here's a standard API for *ANYTHING*...."
I want to output to the printer stream. Ok, roll dice and call....... 1601. I want to load a file. 4D16 gives me.... 0556, but even that's only for tape, no way to say "no, not tape, some other device", you have to lovingly hand-craft your own code to do something else to just. save. to. somewhere. else. And if there's an error, BANG! right back into Basic, so not even a roll of 4D16 to help you, you have to envelope that in yet more code.
Any.
Other.
System.
LD registers
CALL entryblock[n]
Half my coding on the Spectrum was just coding *around* the Spectrum. Oh well, I spent Christmas redocumenting and repackaging my Spectrum libraries to lay a solid path through the swamp for other people.
Re: "their substantial egos"
Most of the Hong Hong Stock Exchange was run on Beebs, and the Hong Kong Harbour Authority modelled water flows using a network of Beebs connected to monitoring equipment. And then all those factories where, under half an inch of oil, grime, and metal shavings, was a Beeb controlling the processes.
Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?
While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?
I had one job where I was brought in after the senior engineer had been fired, taking his knowledge with him. They had recruited a replacement, but he couldn't start for a couple of months. Nothing was documented, everything was in his head. I spent the time getting everything documented with backup printouts, and was confident that J. Random Stranger could walk in and take over and know how the system worked.
Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances
How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu
Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal
Re: The scary thing about this...
I have a vague memory of some old TV drama where this was exactly the denument. I'm sure it was black&white, and it involved bank staff and mechanical adding machines. Everybody was kept behind to find who had been diddling the accounts. At the last point, one character frustratedly said "It's a simple as two" punches in 2 on the calculator "plus two" punches in plus 2 and cranks the handle - which displays 5.
Re: So what was actually wrong?
More than that, you're thinking of transactions in a universe that functions differently to the one we live in. This is a well-known long-know problem, there is no way to know a message has not arrved at its destination. It's variously called The Two Generals Problem, or Caesar's Generals Problem. yes, understanding it is that old.
I wrote up this almost four years ago. While it is likely to not be the exact problem with Horizon, it is a near enough description to explain the problems:
In my understanding, what it was was:
Correct functioning:
PO sends ‘credit £x’
HQ receives ‘credit £x’
HQ credits account
HQ sends ‘acknowledge credit £x’
PO receives ‘acknowledge credit £x’
PO removes item from queue
Failed functioning:
PO sends ‘credit £x’
HQ receives ‘credit £x’
HQ credits account
HQ sends ‘acknowledge credit £x’
PO /doesn’t/ receive acknowledge
PO retries
PO sends ‘credit £x’
HQ receives ‘credit £x’
HQ credits account
HQ sends ‘acknowledge credit £x’
PO receives ‘acknowledge credit £x’
PO removes item from queue
PO now has one ‘credit £x’ recorded, but HQ has two ‘credit £x’ recorded.
It’s a classic network transaction confirmation problem. In fact, a Networking 001 problem. It’s not even undergraduate level concepts. How do you know where a failed message has failed? Has the message to HQ failed, or has the acknowledge failed? The solution is to either use a sequence chain, or *not* transfer ‘change’ messages, but transfer ‘updated balance’ messages:
PO sends ‘account balance is £x’
HQ receives ‘account balance is £x’
HQ updates account
HQ sends ‘acknowledge account balance is £x’
PO /doesn’t/ receive acknowledge
PO retries
PO sends ‘account balance is £x’
HQ receives ‘account balance is £x’
HQ updates account
HQ sends ‘acknowledge account balance is £x’
PO receives ‘acknowledge balance is £x’
PO removes item from queue
This results in the PO recording a balance update to £x and HQ recording a balance update to £x.
Of course, this has it’s own problems of multiple access/single resource (what happens if somebody else does a ‘balance is X’ between your retries) but is solid if you have exclusive access during the whole transaction. To do that you’d wrap it in ‘open for exclusive access’/’close for exclusive access’.
Tom Scott described it quite well here where it happened with ordering pizzas.
Not just Ed.
Margaret Beckett 1997 to 1998
Peter Mandelson 1998 to 1998
Stephen Byers 1998 to 2001
Patricia Hewitt 2001 to 2005
Alan Johnson 2005 to 2006
Alistair Darling 2006 to 2007
Pat McFadden 2007 to 2009
John Hutton 2007 to 2008
Peter Mandelson 2008 to 2009
Edward Davey 2010 to 2012
Norman Lamb 2012 to 2012
Jo Swinson 2012 to 2013
Jenny Willott 2013 to 2014
Jo Swinson 2014 to 2015
Anna Soubry 2015 to 2016
Margot James 2016 to 2018
Andrew Griffiths 2018 to 2018
Kelly Tolhurst 2018 to 2020
Paul Scully 2020 to 2022
Jane Hunt 2022 to 2022
Dean Russell 2022 to 2022
Kevin Hollinrake 2022
All have questions to answer.
New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster
That reminds me of the f***wits who don't understand "display sized to X" is not the same as "resize to X".
Last week I got an email with about three lines saying (paraphrased) "Thanks for the update. Bob." I wondered why it took ten seconds to open. I glanced at the inbox listing and wondered why it said (252M) at the end of the line. How TF is a three-line email 252M? Then I thought....uh oh.... There's a little image under the signiture line. Yep. Menu -> Display image. It was three times the width of my monitor, set to display in the email as 160 pixels wide.
UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims
Re: Remote Access
Almost a decade ago I had a contract replacing post office counter hardware, and digging out my backups, the installation documentation is full of:
"stay on the phone until the Network Operations Centre remotely configures...."
"If the NOC cannot remotely resolve the issue, escalate to...."
It's not in the documentation I've dug out, but the final test was (along the lines of):
Test the system by doing a dummy transaction. Print a system balance. Enter a transaction using "VOID ITEM" as the product. When completed, void the transaction by doing X, Y, Z... Print a system balance to confirm it has reverted to the previous balance. Note in sign-off sheet.
Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor
it's not not knowing about Open Office or Libre Office, but not being *able* to obtain Open Office or Libre Office. I've worked on some installations where any connection to the outside would was severed and without WordPad being already on the machine it was impossible to read anything other than plain text. Hell, I've had to (attempt to) do system admin on installations where my only access was a *user* account.