Posts by Custard Fridge

The West will have this chance only once...

Information is, as has been said to me several times over 30 years in IT, the new utility that we cannot do without.

Having the ability to reduce the opposition's major companies to their knees is indeed a very new & powerful tool indeed.

Cutting off multiple industries from their primary / secondary systems for production, monitoring, HR, payroll, sales, purchasing, design - it's as if the West suddenly realises it has keys to most of the virtual filing cabinets in Russia. It can lock them shut, or indeed incinerate the contents.

This will only happen once.

5-10 years from now, China will have those keys.

Almost time to hit the big red button

Only once in my 27 years of IT have I had that 'do I power off the ops room or not' decision to make.

One afternoon in sunny Surrey our cleaner spotted something shining through the air con vents of the raised flooring and asked me as the IBM Mainframe Operator on duty to take a look.

Looking down I realised there was a pond of water there instead of the usual bone dry concrete, with the air con still happily blowing away above it.

Rather than lift floor tiles to see how far up the sloped room the water had got - and I was thinking of those four-bars that were stashed under the AIX / Token Ring cabinets... - I did consider powering down the Ops room entirely via the big red button. However as I stood there I realised nothing had stopped working, nobody was dead, nothing was on fire etc., so I legged it up the corridor to pull my boss out of the monthly IT meeting. I'd never seen his eyebrows raised as high as when he looked through the same vent. When we did lift the tiles shortly afterward we had less than a foot to go before the four-bars would have been flooded. The IBM engineer said it was an impressive amount of water for a pin-hole sized water leak...

Sleepy Dorking

Dorking has been sleepy ever since Ollie Reed left...

Can you hear it?

That’s the sound of the world slowing down...

Do any really large companies rip it all out and start again?

I'd love to hear examples of really large companies that wrip-out their IT and start again to get genuine resilience back after x years of smooth operating.

I'd be willing to bet the only time this is gotten close too is if a government or parent company forces them to do so.

Thoughts?

Boots on the ground

Once the dust settles I would see this as a victory for UK based IT workers - however much you outsource abroad, when it hits the fan, and blimey it looks like it has here, you need those boots on the ground in the data centre/s as fast as possible.

A small army of knowledgable people who between then designed / built / installed / maintain it, will be able to get it started quicker than equally talented people who did none of those things and who are based thousands of miles away.

Also - If someone cut through a mains supply (or three) quite that powerful why aren't we reading about it as a news event itself?

I can't quite believe this is a cover-up for something more sinister - unless there are a lot of police cars / black transit vans around the data centres and nobody has spotted them yet...

Fingerprint readers

I suggest fingerprint readers that enable & encrypt this level of data owner by owner.

No live finger print - no apps.

There would be a service / valet key as required - but apps / settings would only be enabled by the fingerprint reader. Perhaps the ignition key does what it does now, and the fingerprint does the rest.

The reader scans several fingers for each driver as part of the setup in case of chopping board injuries, and scans for a pulse to make sure someone hasn't done something gruesome.

Those who want to avoid apps on their car entirely, seeing apps as truly the work of the devil, only use the service key and never the fingerprint reader. This turns the object into a car again.

The majority, who will want apps, use the fingerprint reader.

Something will need to evolve because once the driver has bags of time because the car drives, they will want connections / apps to do work / leisure in the car. Those who only use the valet key will install a library shelf for books to read during traffic jams.

When you sell the car & key you can wipe your settings / fingerprint entirely (perhaps with combined use of the service key and your fingerprints) or trust that the encryption level will be good enough to keep hackers out. Those with a different mind-set will not think about it anyway and still get the same result.

By the time the iPhone 100 can hack the encryption level of your one-time car, you should have changed passwords anyway, or indeed be dead and not caring as much.

The Register Annual 2017 - you read it here first

I wonder if all these 'On-call' Friday stories are either -

Made up - 15 minutes to explain a PC box layout?

or

Supposed to be a bit crap but able to generate lots of better stories that will be published in The Register Annual 2017?

Bonus scheme

From the outside looking in the major problems for government IT seem to be -

Mission creep

Change of management due to election

Stupidly wide project scope

Arse covering due to previous points

Why not put everyone in the department onto a bonus scheme that depends on fixed project trargets, fixed budgets and fixed go-live dates? Pull together as a team, stop adding more caveats and deliver it on time. Oh, and still be there 12 months after go-live to collect.

Or am I moving too far towards the Lenin school of project management via a 5 year plan / gun to the head?

Wot no Picard?

As a teenager of the 1980's whilst I watched the original series repeats with my dad, it was The Next Generation that really rocked it for me, and for him.

Space Opera AND Science Fiction - TNG was a stronger combination of both which is why it worked so well.

Or maybe it was me being a teenager. Ahhh... easy days...

Is there a Part 2 coming about TNG? Pleeease say there is...

Pleeease...

Why didn't Virgin ask Corbyn if they could release the video?

I think the golden nosed 747 caused this to come out now.

Otherwise Corbyn could have been put on the spot by being asked if Virgin could release the video - he'd have had to say yes, wouldn't he? Perhaps a 'friendly bet' with the money going to charity? Too late now...

Short URLs

I have never clicked on a short URL. They always look suspcious to me.

Meh.

Zen FTTC was down, Zen leased line was up

And no, I don't just use Zen, for just this reason.

Oh the irony of the BT FTTC line staying up, for once, whist Zen's was down.

And as for my recently cancelled Daisy 4-line Bonded ADSL... never again...

Reboot Europe?

Brexit would not reboot Europe - it would probably break it.

Rebooting Europe now would be like pulling the power out of the server whist the RAID array is still rebuilding itself and the second PSU is probably faulty.

Don't bloody risk it.

If you must reboot Europe, do it when Europe can cope - right now it cannot.

Greece, Spain and even Italy teeter on the brink of democratic collapse with mass youth unemployment and pressure from migrant populations stuck with nowhere to go.

Democracy can quickly be swept away by desperate people ready to listen to the fascists and communists of old - FFS don't go there...

Tax codes still generated on a 56 year old mainframe

All of a sudden I feel yong again...

Planning, testing, replacing, relaxing.

I worked for a house builders way back then, and we replaced the old database that couldn't do the year 2000 in 1998. Of the 300 PCs I tested, just 1 was too old for the year 2000, so I replaced it in September 1999.

I got paid two day's money over New Year's just in case, but I tested everything from home without incident. No drama, no worries.

Holy underpants

Look, it's Friday afternoon, I've had a week of SAP training and this is simply too much. My. Brain. Hurts.

Foot squek

I used to support a user who operated the mouse with their right foot.

Remote support worked well enough as he'd not changed the settings.

However a hot summer forced him to change to the more traditional mouse method, but he span the mouse round and used him palm to click. That was an interesting remote support session for the first 30 seconds or so whilst he explained this, and helpfully put the settings for me back to 'foot' mode.

And he wasn't doing any of this to deliberately wind me up either. Nice bloke. Smelly feet though.

Christmas is coming

Top Health Tip - add a bottle of Tia Maria to the Christmas shopping list...

Talk Talk Techies - are you out there?

Any TalkTalk IT people care to comment on all this? Or are you all outsourced?

In other news - Sainsbury has large proper jars of Marmite on sale again, which is nice.

Brainspace full

Academics are well known for lacking IT skills - it's not their specialist area. They use their brainspace for that and not IT.

I always used to operate the overhead projector for the head of Theology at my college during lectures because he'd never learnt how to do it. He wasn't lazy, it just wasn't for him. Doctorates all over the shop, used to work for the Pope etc. OHP? Fail. Someone else will solve that.

Doctors - the more senior, the more 'right' they have to be all the time to save lives.

However thinking that you are right on a topic you no little about is, as we know, common for IT.

Teachers - married to one - works with IT all day long, but lacks the IT support required.

Schools spend the money on the sparkling new equipment. Having worked in hundreds of schools the majority had some kit in that nobody could fix, and often had no support contract to ask someone who could. The IT staff they had where overworked and always underpaid, and where managed by IT Teachers who had usually been teachers all their careers and so not IT people. With the best will in the world it won't work as well as having IT people manage them.

We live in a world of specialisms. Get used to it. It keeps us in work anyway.

Walk around the block and avoid the cheese in the fridge

I worked from home when the company got too big for the offices, and then stayed at home whilst the company was merged 100 miles north.

The fridge was a major distraction - as Mayor Boris commented the temptation is always to nibble at the bit of cheese therein.

Did I feel cut-off? Yes, despite being on the phone over half the day. I ended up going in to the office one day a week to compensate.

The commute had been an hour each way so I did an hour extra when at home - seemed fair at the time.

Not commuting also blurs the break between home and work - I had to walk around the block after working at home otherwise I stayed in work mode all evening!