BOFH: Don't be nervous, Mr Consultant. Come right this way … BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "Simon, Stephen, this is Gerard, Daniel, David and, uhhh, Karl." The Boss adds: "They're the implementation team for the new financial system rollout and just want to do some preliminary planning." "What new financial system?" I ask. "What rollout?" the PFY asks. "The financial system …
You want historical transactions available in your new system?
A rare and novel concept indeed!
Tell you what, we've had a talk with our techies and they can get the data loaded if you format the data into this CSV file with about 2600 columns. They have put useful column headings (limited to 8 characters) above each one so you will know what to put where.
Otherwise you will have to write a program which keys all of your transactions into our system via the pretty web interface..
Another great episode, and for me, timely.
Of if you have one of my more 'independent thinking' clients:
"Sage 100 for DOS is living on borrowed time and doesn't work properly with the latest version of Windows so we're going to upgrade to Sage 200"
<upgrade occurs>
<time passes>
"We've got a problem with Sage 100, we can't find a machine that it'll run on any more"
"But you've upgraded to Sage 200"
"We still need to run Sage 100 for the historic data as it would have cost too much to have it converted"
"I miss the columnists. It's not just same with only BOFH around."
So with all the others gone, how long can our BOFH last?
And if that is the case, will he nevertheless manage to outlast the no doubt imminent demise of Vulture Central and all who sail in her? I have noticed that the prices of quicklime and surplus carpet rolls are increasing sharply...
So with all the others gone, how long can our BOFH last?
On today's, on the go, up and coming El Reg? By my calculations, don't look for the BOFH in 2023... not here on El Reg, or should we be calling it Reg.com now?? Should Simon have the will to continue, perhaps he could join Dabbsy over at stubstack?
@Ozan: "I miss the columnists. It's not just same with only BOFH around."
Not just that. Am I the only one who connects El Reg's shift to Colonial spelling with a distinct lack of real action on the part of the BOFH and the PFY recently? As opposed to threats and innuendos, effective though they may be?
> As a very long time reader of the BoFH (even before el Reg)
Ah, the days of telling students to walk around while holding a floppy high in the air...
> I am wondering if its getting past time for the BoFH?
Do you have any particular reason for this musing?
I mean, it probably won't reduce the probability that there's now an old roll of carpet and some quicklime lined up for you, but it might act as a form of explanation...
> [*] As opposed to a Republican. They aren't all Trumpers :-)
They are. Through inaction and tolerance, they empower him.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Though I have no evidence of any good men anywhere in US politics, except perhaps Bernie.
I did downvote because, everyone is entitled to their opinion. And I've been following the BOFH since the mid 1990s. Don't even remember where I stumbled across him, it's been so long, other than I was working mids by myself in the wee hours.
If The Reg kicks Simon to the curb, I'll head to wherever he lands. He's the only reason I come to this site at all.
Why, though? I think it's aged well, with modern articles still being relevant and enjoyable. If you don't like it, I'm curious what you see as changed since you appear to have been a fan for quite a while. The most logical complaint I can guess is that it got repetitive, but I find that the articles are a lot less repetitive than certain comments advocate (those people who think someone needs to be killed in every episode, for example). I could see some ways it could be taken in a bad direction, but I don't think those have happened or are likely to as long as Simon remains in control. Your question implies that you have critiques, and I'd be interested to hear your views.
It's been mentioned here before, but I worked for a company which had a billing system almost literally made out of string and sellatape; it consisted of a dozen scripts of varying levels of robustness, with dependencies between several of them.
Which meant that if bits of this "process" fell over, then we had to stop everything and manually clean up the issues before being able to restart the process at whatever point it had gotten to.
For the most part though (and partly via some surreptitious patches sneaked past the overly risk-averse change-control board) things had gotten to a relatively stable point. Though there were also concerns that with ongoing growth of the customer base, that we'd eventually hit a point where the old system would be physically unable to complete all transactions within a single day.
So naturally, the billing team decided that it was time for a brand new billing system with all the bells and whistles. I even got told off at one point, for trying to make improvements to the old billing scripts which would improve performance, since by doing so, I was weakening the business case for the new system!
And so a project was launched, based on technology from one of the usual mega-corps, and which was to be built from scratch by an outsourced/offshore dev team with no prior experience of working on our legacy billing platform.
Oddly, things didn't quite go to plan.
They were still trying to get it up and running for a couple of years after I left that company - putting it at least 3 years behind the original schedule - and even when it shuddered into life, they still had to keep the old billing platform running alongside it for validation and backup purposes.
I was even told at one point that while they were trying to get the new system enabled, there was serious talk around dusting off some of the patches which I hadn't managed to get through the approval process, to try and keep the old system up and running.
A good two years after I'd left said company...
And of course if you've made any type of change in the standard ERP process flow to match how YOU do your billing, you're in for a world of hurt when it comes to upgrade to the next major version. Ouch, all those customization costs will come back in triplicate.
If you got the SAP/Oracle/whatever route, don't customize a damn thing besides the logo and address.
I still use the BofH standby of "put them all in a room with a sock and a half-brick each" explanation of how to deal with conflicting project managers to this day.
Nice to see that basics sch as bricks still feature. Too bad halon suppression is no longer a thing...
keyboard killer today..... but very grin worthy none the less
Also it gives me ideas about getting my PFY to sit in on meeetings with the latest tool salesperson to dare pass the dread portal(the front door of the factory)
Which also reminds me to see about getting a new carpet for the meeting room............. and my office for that matter....
I wonder if I should be worried....
Believe it or not, yes, there is the other side of that equation.
Imagine a sales team, if you will, that promises the customer an all inclusive solution.
And they then sign a contract to that effect.
And then you, the Devops people, sometimes a few, sometimes just one, have to make it happen.
You say that does not exist? search for the "real unicorns have curves" I dare you.
Yes, the grey one. That's it.
The eyes are the sales team.
The body is the look of the code of your software.
And you, you are the soles of those dainty feet.
The solution to this is to have the tech people from both sides do a preliminary examination of what will be needed. Don't let sales just write a contract without knowing what work needs to be done or what money needs to be paid.
It's an issue in either direction, although the example in the article is usually worse because it indicates that the business is one of those whose business plan is hiding charges from customers until it's too late to change course, which is justifiably hated. I presume there are contractors who use that as their business model (I've not had to run a transfer like this, fortunately for me), but I've certainly seen other businesses who take advantage of this tactic. The ones who quote you a price, and you find it acceptable, and the legal paperwork that you get to see doesn't mention other costs, but when you're just about done with that, they bring out the other fees.
Every business/org/whatever has millions of quids of servers'n'stuff or cloudiness'n'stuff invested and at the bum end, everything is held together by CSV files...
Just been through 3 weeks of AI, CI, AWS, <any product mentioned in the article>, yada yada and under it all is many CSV files lumbering about like incontinent dinosaurs.
It's getting embarrassing.
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