Posts by Richard Pennington 1

In the old days

In the old days, the hospital would take the patient's temperature. Now...

I've got it...

Now I know what the KB stands for in all these update issues. Known Bork number (whatever).

Hive branching out?

I hear that Hive is also a ransomware gang. Are they branching out, or are there two separate Hive minds? And which does more damage?

The first Mac I came across ...

... was in my first post-University job (1985-1987). It had no hard drive (but two floppy drives, one of which was for the operating system), and it had MacWrite, which we used to produce documentation ... well, sort of. It performed fine until it got to the bottom of the second page, then ran out of memory.

At least that was an improvement on what went before. The office boasted its own typing pool. I sent one - and only one - document down there for typing. It came back with more than a hundred typos on the first page, at which point I stopped counting. The combination of technical content (including mathematical formulae) and my handwriting essentially transformed the entire document to version 0.1 of the infinite-monkey edition of Shakespeare. Plonking that (and my annotations to the first page) in front of my manager was what had prompted the purchase of the Macs in the first place.

Many years ago (before I retired) ...

... I was called on to write a set of Security Operating Procedures for the <ahem> system at <redacted>. These procedures went through - line by line, in mind-numbing detail - every operation available to a user or to an administrator (at any level) in the system. In terms of structure, there was a main document, and annexes A, B, C, ... up to about M, and finally Z.

Annex Z was so titled, so that it would always be the last annex, and could be pulled off the rest of the document and issued separately. It contained a summary of the rest of the document, filleted so as to include only those instructions relevant to users without specific security or system-administrator responsibilities.

Ouija 10 is obsolete ...

... but most existing boards do not satisfy the hardware requirements for Ouija 11.

Have you ever seen a Ouija board with an "Intel Inside" sticker attached?

Everything in its season ...

Or in the case of Vivaldi, four seasons.

Legendary quality control

Where quality control is in the land of myth and legend, a fable from the long-distant past, a tale which may once have had some basis in a historical event ... in other words, fabulous.

The Tragedy of the Commons

"The Tragedy of the Commons" - look it up.

I'm retired now, but ...

Of my eight (previous) employers, three provided real horror stories with their performance reviews,

One previous employer used its performance review process as an exercise in ritual humiliation (for everybody), and used the results as an excuse not to award pay rises below Director level.

Another (let's call them TLA as they were generally known by a Three Letter Acronym) seem to have copied their management handbook (including the section on performance reviews) verbatim from a Dilbert book [but with no overt acknowledgment to Dilbert author Scott Adams].

The third went in for management "fads" and produced a set of performance objectives which had nothing to do with doing my job. I was an out-and-out techie, and the objectives were all about being a bouncy (and loud) extrovert. There was no technical content, and I tend towards the far-introvert end of the spectrum. I refused to sign up to those objectives, causing all sorts of fireworks at the ensuing performance review.

Years ago ...

... perhaps some time round about the mid-80s ... I read a report about a fire at Thomas Cook in Peterborough. After the local fire service had serviced the fire, the damage report noted that they had got off remarkably lightly.

The UPS was not so Uninterruptible any more. It was the only casualty.

WAY back in the day ...

... I did A-level physics a long time ago (I'm retired now). For the practical exam, one of the tests was to identify an electronic component in "black box" mode (i.e. it had been boxed and wrapped so that the component itself could not be seen, but there were visible connectors). A group of us went round the room from component to component, performed various simple tests, and wrote down our results.

About the seventh box in, I came across a box with two terminals, which appeared to be completely open-circuit. Several other students got the same result, and one of them mentioned it to the teacher who was invigilating. We were all called back in to repeat the tests on a replacement box.

It was a light-bulb, and it had blown during testing by one of the earlier students.

[For those millennials and Gen-Zers who don't know, old-style incandescent bulbs had a resistance which rose as the voltage, and hence the filament temperature, went up. In this case, a student had probably given it a significant excess voltage, causing the resistance to go to infinity and stay there.]

Not the first, probably won't be the last ...

A few years ago, before I retired, I was involved in a safety-critical exercise in code verification.

One of the modules involved a series of values and a quick-and-dirty checksum for integrity. The checksum was simply the sum of the values of the rest of the array (ignoring overflows).

Meanwhile, another procedure would, under certain circumstances, wipe the whole array by overwriting it with zeroes.

Somebody pointed out that the integrity checksum algorithm was so poor that the integrity check would still show "OK" even after the array had been zeroed out ...

In the UK, the longest month of the year

... is October (an hour longer than the others with 31 days).

Incidentally, the USA runs a research station at the South Pole. Can anyone tell me which time zone it is in? (and does it have Daylight Saving Time?) ... given that in the southern summer they have 24-hour daylight.

In the other hand ...

I know several ladies with explicit curves...

Dropbox got there before any of them...

Dropbox is now on version 142. It went past 100 a while ago...

Interesting ...

I have an old Canon A3 printer which has just achieved end-of-life (persistent and repeated paper jams). But before I perform the experiment to find out whether WEEE really is the sound of an A3 printer dropped from several tens of metres until just before it hits a hard surface, I need to source a replacement.

A3 printers aren't standard consumer fare ... the choices are limited and the prices are (with a few exceptions) high. At the moment the leader is one by Brother.

Any other suggestions?