
> That little fact meant that the tech team's amusement turned to fear that burly chaps carrying baseball bats
So he should have been called Babe Rufus...
Accidents will happen, and every Monday The Register celebrates them – and your escape from the consequences – in a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column that details the downside of working in tech. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rufus," who once worked for a midsized UK retail chain …
Oh, we right ponders do know what baseball and it related equipment is and some of us even play it, in spite of the rather insular view of the "World" in the "World Series" which is nothing like as broad as Soccer's World Cup.
And, TBH, anybody arriving at your location with only the tool for hitting a hard speherical object without the rest of the sport's paraphernalia is almost invariably bad news..
This old canard again? C'mon, people, this is TehIntraWebTubes. Could you at least attempt to learn your meme before commenting?
The name "World Series" is just a traditional name left over from turn of the last century advertising hype. The only people who believe that Yanks and Canucks think of it as truly a "World" series are folks from countries where American baseball isn't played.
I'm aware of the explanation you're alluding to- that the name is a remnant of its alleged sponsorship by the New York World newspaper.
I believed that too, but according to it's Wikipedia article, "this view is disputed".
The referenced article says
Several baseball blogs claim that the New York World newspaper was a sponsor of the game. They're in error, according to Eric Enders, head of Triple E Productions, a baseball research and consulting service.
"The truth is that at the time when it was first called World Series the two teams were really the best teams in the world," he said. "So they could semi-legitimately call that the World Series." But he conceded that today, with numerous other countries playing professional baseball, it might no longer be a legitimate claim.
That's "unfortunate countries where American [there's another kind?] baseball isn't played."
The fortunate ones include Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. Probably leaving off some I've forgotten. Oh, wait, there are 82 altogether: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-countries-play-baseball .
"...The only people who believe that Yanks and Canucks think of it as truly a "World" series are folks from countries where American baseball isn't played..."
This ^^^
Not that I don't appreciate the extra power that being underestimated brings, but in this here forum we use our powers for good :-D
@HorseflySteve
Back in the day when the first flush of youth (and sadly the 2nd, third, forth, and fifth) hadn't been flushed down the bog
baseball was called "rounders" and basketball was called "netball".
And now I'm going to get a few voddies. play a load of Tamla records and happily remember my youth. Thank you for waking my memories!!!
@amajadedcynicaloldfart wrote 'baseball was called "rounders" and basketball was called "netball".'
The interesting thing about that is that Baseball is thought to have developed from the British sport Rounders and Netball came from a British woman misinterpreting the rules of the American sport Basketball.
anybody arriving at your location with only the tool for hitting a hard speherical object without the rest of the sport's paraphernalia is almost invariably bad news..
Bad news usually for the person carrying said bat. The Old Bill take a very dim view of anyone being equipped thus.
True, but at my British school, well back in the last millenium, the teachers only allowed around half the population to play the game : girls.
So there is a "reason" for possible ignorance, at least among a certain demographic. Similar logic was applied to "British Basketball".
The culture has moved on a bit since then, fortunately.
The (probably apocryphal) story of the Brits versus the US on a UK base during the war. Both manly sides go out onto the grass for an afternoon playing sports with improvised baseball kit.
At the end, the US team team rejoices that they trounced the Brits, only for the other captain to reply that, no old bean, we won - didn't we say, we were playing rounders.
Rather sounds like someone committed fraud by selling a debt that didn't exist.
One wonders how much the debt collectors paid for it, whether they got a refund, and whether there were any consequences for the manager who sold it.
Of course, it happened because they just sold the results of an SQL query. One wonders how much "debt" is equally real.
For debt collection agencies, they don't even bother to buy it sometimes. For years I was getting calls from a variety of such companies demanding money for a fictional unpaid debt incurred by a non-existent person. The first company that had invented the debt sold it on to another company, and after that it was just a string of them each knowingly selling something that didn't exist to another scumbag.
Our sysadmin has a fanatical aversion to "accounts that arnt real people"
Machine accounts have to be rigorously documented and applied for with lots of TLA forms that amount to "massive deal"
A test account acting like a person has little to no chance of surviving the purge.
This can make testing some things rather tricky .
Reminds me of some ancient BOFH shenanigans where several people with names like Charles Omputer and Roger Amchip somehow drew pay for various obscure jobs.
The problem with the system in the story was that the test accounts were not appropriately processed (or appropriately trapped and not processed) in all parts of the system.
That easily can happen when business processes are ad-hoc and undocumented. Example from another poster: some manager runs a 30-60-90 report, or Crystal Reports report, against the database, and feeds the result into other ad-hoc business automation processes, perhaps a file given to a secretary to mail-merge into a letter or report sent to a collection bureau.
Ideally, human staff would see the in-arrears report on the account of Mr. Test User, and say, "Wait a minute ... what's this?", but not all human staff are up to that performance level. Further, automation frequently bypasses human review.
(Icon for the "stop processing this account" which never occurred.)
If you need to test the live system you have to use the live system for testing. Fortunately this proved to be a test of the testing process which should have involved correct processing - or non-processing - of the test's tests. The results demonstrated that more work was needed on the processing of the tests on the test accounts and once remediated further testing of the process for processing test orders through the test accounts will be needed. Quite simple really.
"If you need to test the live system" Nope.
The potential consequences of failure are why you have separate TEST and PROD systems (real or virtual).
IBM invented LPARs (Logical Partitions) in 1972.
VMware came onto the scene in the 1990s.
This isn't new technology. The test system must accurately reflect production system. Any manager or business owner whinging, "but a test environment is too expensive" is wrong, has the wrong techies, and/or has the wrong priorities.
If you truly can't afford a proper test system, then you're undercapitalised and can't afford to be in business.
"If you need to test the live system" Nope.
So why then at every place I have worked that there are functional tests done on the production systems after an upgrade over the weekend before production restarted the following Monday? Are you saying that all those people sacrificed their weekends for nothing and that tests on the TEST system were sufficient ????
@David Hicklin:
If-and-only-if your TEST environment accurately mirrors your PROD environment, then yes, you wasted your weekends.
DH: "Why then at every place I have worked..."
Because your managers (at multiple levels), in at least one aspect, sucked. What's the impact if your test version bjorks the system beyond usability?
(Imagined response) "We have backups!" Really? Verified backups? Verified, multiple backups? Verified, multiple backups and a verified-working-with-your-backups-backup tape drive?
(Imagined response) "We don't have to do all that..." You should. Ever see a tape drive eat a tape, and sufficiently-damage the tape drive internals such that a tape drive repair tech is required to fix the the drive? How soon will a tape drive tech get to your site, and how long will it take them to fix the drive?
Ever see a tape drive eat a tape, damage itself in the process, a backup tape drive pulled from stores and installed, and fail to read any of the backup tapes, because while the backup tape drive sat in stores, over time, the production tape drive's heads drifted out of alignment, and the backup tapes you wrote using the drive with the misaligned heads were unreadable by the drive with correctly-aligned heads?
A place I worked at had an expensive piece of medical research equipment, a micro-array scanner. This kit would simultaneously scan-and-find-matches on 432 DNA samples. They only had the one scanner. The application software update on its attached PC controller went fine. The firmware upgrade on scanner did not. It was bjorked. Much to-and-froing over the phone with the manufacturer; it took a couple days to resolve. Meanwhile, our jobs for the scanner were shuttled to/from another medical institution with which we had a pre-existing agreement with, to cover each other's scanning jobs if one of our scanners went down. Our scanning jobs were delayed, but not by unreasonably-much. You mitigate failures of unique/expensive equipment via hot-site agreements, rentals, or equipment-borrowing.
You don't need duplicate hardware for anything you can virtualise, and virtualisation is cheap. Expensive infrastructure, like big Cisco switches and SAN controllers, you can rent, or sometimes finagle short-term use of if you're an important customer.
When I worked in a diagnostic lab, we needed to use the live system for those specimens that had to go through the automated analysers (no-one has two sets of those, useful though it might have been.) Therefore my colleague in the lab upstairs (we shared a patient database) created a patient with a plausible sounding, but unlikely name with an unused Patient Index Number. (Nothing rude or questionable was allowed after a set of results were erroneously sent out to a GP surgery for an unfortunately-monikered test patient.)
We used Linda [lastname redacted] as a test patient for years until the trialling of a system that allowed lab results to be sent from reference labs to the home lab. The first thing that happened was that their IT department complained that Linda already existed on their system as a real person and could we please use their carefully chosen fake patient instead.
A test account acting like a person has little to no chance of surviving the purge.
Good for you - and your sysadmin. We have a case of an online gambling provider that operates in a jurisdiction where test accounts are not allowed in the production environment. The funny consequence is that the staff has to use their personal accounts and bet their own funds if they want to test a process end-to-end.
They wouldn't have to do that if they had a QA environment that was a direct clone of their production environment. I've seen places that work like that - they used BCVs (EMC disk mirrors) to create a mirror of the production environment, then you split the mirror and run a script to make a few changes to turn that mirror into the QA environment (primarily stuff like naming so you can tell the difference and restricting what communication happens with the outside world so nothing happens "for real") and then you make and test prospective production changes in that QA environment.
If it works, the identical changes are made to the production environment where further testing is not needed. I'm sure a few of you are reading that "not needed" and thinking something could go wrong but nothing did while I was consulting there and they didn't have any stories of anything ever going wrong. It was an investment bank, so they had very regimented processes and could afford to throw hardware like an entire QA environment 100% identical to their production environment at making sure "nothing ever goes wrong".
I would expect an online gambling provider could similarly both afford the duplicate environment and have the financial motivation to assure that nothing ever goes wrong.
That can be tricky. It's sadly common that a board receives a firmware change but is not assigned a new board part number. Equally-sadly, the firmware usually is not anything a purchaser can access so as to run a checksum (SHA-whatever) against to discover/prove the firmware is the same as in the other boards the purchaser had bought, which all have the same part number.
They do indeed have a QA environment which is virtually a copy of their production. Problem is end-to-end testing, which involves third parties such as the PRN provider, outcome verification, and payment services providers. Then it's for the developers and operators to literally put their money where their mouth is.
You didn't miss much. A friend of mine has no TV and has been ignoring these for years with no discernible effect.
The first year he was a good little boy and followed the instructions to declare that he didn't need a license.
The second year he sent a slightly snotty letter to say that he didn't have a TV, that he would tell them if he ever got one, and to please leave him alone until then.
Then he got a few escalating in tone from "please pay now" to "you're risking a £1,000 fine" to "we'll be in your area next Tuesday". He still gets one of those every so often, but has never had a knock on the door.
In a previous life I dealt with accounts payable for a large UK construction company. There were some locations where you "had" to use a local "company" to carry out site security works, particularly in large urban environments, otherwise things went very badly wrong very quickly. We had a site manager who'd set up an arrangement like this, but forgot to do the follow-up admin to ensure us to pay the invoices that arrived, despite chasing. I was at another site when I got a slightly frantic call from the head office receptionist who had four very large men arrive intent on collecting their payment. The smallest member of the AP team (about 4'10" tall and a size zero before it was fashionable) decided she would go downstairs and, despite barely being at waist height, managed to persuade them all to leave without issue on a promise of a cheque being sent out the next day.
Though she be but little, she is fierce....
We had two very large men arrive at our "Head Office" - a single room in an office complex, manned by one Developer, one day a week (we all work remotely and that Developer only goes into the office to distribute or onward send packages.) The very large men were on their 3rd visit, which happened to coincide with a day the Developer was in the office and so they were already in a bad mood.
Prior to Covid we had an Administrator and European HR Manager filling another 2 rooms in the complex and they dealt with all the day-to-day things that always need doing. Off-shore upper manglement got rid of these excellent people and now the Developer just forwards incoming mail to a remote office in Eastern Europe.
The Eastern Europe office did not understand the urgency of Business Rate demands, even the red ones!
It took a few hasty phone calls and the most senior person in the country to pay on his credit card, before the "NOTICE OF INTENT TO TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR GOODS" and the large men went away happy.
Anon. because the story shows how upper manglement decisions can make us sound like a tin-pot organisation, rather than an important multi-national!
There was a case in the UK where someone sued Tesco because their contaminated fuel damaged his van. He won the case and the court ordered them to pay compensation. When they failed to do so, the court sent bailiffs round to seize the alcohol aisle: https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/driver-sends-bailiffs-to-tesco-over-ps3-400-van-repair-bill-7219320.html.
There is a case here in NZ where a chap won a case for some very large damages against the local council, and when they refused to pay, he got the court to say he could start selling their assets
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/whangarei-district-council-to-appeal-contractors-61m-high-court-ordered-payout/ZX2SAAYAFRFALEVFR4HRLNXFXE/
I also remember working at a small office many years ago where the front desk phoned through to say there were serious looking bailiffs waiting in the entrance way.
The young lady who dealt with bookkeeping went downstairs and met them - she also was quite petite. She later described them as "polite but menacing".
After she asked to see the paperwork, she looked up, smiled sweetly and said, "I think you want next door - we're no 37, not 39". Next door was a residential property, not an office.
They left, apologising profusely and it all ended peacefully. It did however provide endless opportunities for speculation about the neighbours and debate as to what they could seize.
Back on topic - most of the test data I've used over the years has come from TV programmes -- you'd be surprised just how much commercial activity Dot Cotton, Phil Mitchell, Sharon Watts and Ian Beale have been involved with.
This reminds me of some TV stories (real, not scripted reality) where some Tazi (replace the obvious character here) neighbours regularly disturbed the neighbourhood. When the family had a party in their large open garden they came over just to disturb. And then the small old granny makes them calm down and leave, 'cause you don't go against small old peaceful grannies. Would have been different if the bouncer-type men would have tried to make them leave. Later the Tazis moved, 'cause they felt uncomfortable.
I used to use "NSY, Victoria Embankment ,Westminster, London SW1A 2JL, UK", "Donut Central, Hubble Rd, Cheltenham GL51 0EX, UK", etc.
I reckoned that might be the fastest way to find out if test data was in the wild, but it still had to get off the test server and into production first!
221b Baker St used to be the Abbey National building and they had a secretary to answer Sherlock's letters. It's now the official address of the SH museum round the corner.
We used to have a dummy record for the Bank of Mombasa, tel 01 246 8071, which was a recorded message about STIs... or does the 01 make that an STD?
I used to write software documentation that need sample information to illustrate basic parts of the product - people, goods, companies etc. I was using examples such as G. Costanza from Vandelay Industries selling rubber goods, or W E Coyote buying TNT from Acme Inc. When we got bought by IBM they had strict polices about demo examples and my documentation got rejected. No pretend fake data, it had to be real fake data.
There is a little farm in the middle of America that gets visited regularly by some 3 letter agency of state security.
It's exactly in the middle of America - so guess what coordinates a system returns when it tracks a cyber-naughty to USA but has no more information?
I want to picture a farm track of black Chevy suburbans full of men in dark glasses and different logo windbreakers all waiting their turn to raid the place.
As a new dev working in hospital IT, I was told we could use our own national health identifying number to test with, however I was warned that a previous employee had given himself a mental health diagnosis, which then updated his GP's system. When old mate went for his next check-up, he received some very awkward questions - denying the diagnosis was of course a key feature of the condition! Apparently all resolved after a few calls to the chief medical officer and head of IT, and a good warning to the rest of us.