BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime Official BOFH logo (red rotary telephone with devil's tal and devil's horns) BOFH logo EPISODE 15: The Boss has popped into Mission Control to remind us to send him the numbers he needs for his monthly management report. Once's he's gone the PFY sighs, makes up a set of numbers, appends believable exponents, adds some …
An old greybeard who looked after our hardware in the server room once decided I needed to tell management "It was a virus!" when I stuffed up a deployment and he had to reboot everyhing. Mainly because he couldn't be arsed with me getting fired on a Friday night and what that would do to his weekend. "Tell 'em it's a virus - you're not getting fired today! Don't worry, I use that one all the time!"
One of my prouder career achievements was getting a design document approved containing the phrase "implemented in a Toblerone configuration" for a bunch of boxes wired up in a long line in the data centre. I had run out of ways to describe a long line of disc drives, back when each one occupied a washing machine's worth of floor space.
Why did you have to invent something? It already had a name. In Mainframe configurations, disks hung off of a disk controller using daisy-chained bus and tag cables were called a "String" of disks. I'm pretty sure I used that term with dasy-chained external SCSI devices as well.
I know Rutherford was good at his job, but I don't think he cracked time travel. For someone born in 1871, splitting the atom in the 1850s would have been a tad tricky - In 1932 the first controlled experiment to split the nucleus was performed by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, working under Rutherford's direction.
Archeologists are looking for evidence that Vikings brought heavy water to England from Norway. Eirikur Rauður's face can be seen carved upside down in the glacier where they did the mining. Hence the naming of Yorv1K where they brought it ashore. And not many people know that.
it's a deliberately nonsensical statement; Rutherford didn't "split" the atom either. The point is that PFY is spouting nonsese to make BOFH laugh (because of its wrongness - and the fact that th Bosses don't spot its wrongness) and to bamboozle the bosses... there's no such thing as a floptule either!
floptule — n. (unit) a floating point operation executed for no discernable reason producing no practical or useful output. Largely descriptive of the resources assigned to the attempted commercialisation LLM based AI. < flop + totally useless logical execution.
The Dictionary of Devilish Devices.
According to the the BOFH and co. young Ernest managed to split the neutron by monstering it with a nitrogen atom in the 1850s but I suppose his being a mere colonial (NZ) no one believed him although his not being born until 1871 probably posed a greater hindrance.
Duh. Don’t your history books tell you he met a guy called Spock who took him on a time-travel jaunt and accidentally split the atom while he was there? No? Perhaps you’re from a different time line then. Over here, everyone is driving Tesla’s and the 47th President got done for embezzlement.
You've missed a simple but crucial distinction. Read the article again. It never said that he split the atom. He split a neutron with a nitrogen atom, and the nitrogen atom made it through unharmed. As it happens, due to the muonic transferrence effect, you can do that retroactively, though you have to be careful because when Bohr tried to do it first in 1848 (from 1935), he failed because his experimental design did not obey the law of conservation of partial spin, only general spin, so his experiment ended up splitting a neutron in 1903, and he didn't even know that until researchers at CERN, while trying to detect nutrinos, ended up having to filter out a downstream effect of the 1903 neutron split from their data in 1992. I think we can agree that's much less impressive than what Rutherford did.
Many years ago, engineers at a subcontractor started to use the term Warp Factor to quantify warpage in the plastic mouldings they were making. All so they could get management talking about how things had improved since we had dropped from warp factor 6 to warp factor 3.
Sometimes you have to make your own fun at work.
Back sometime in the eighties (I think it was) we were instructed by senior CS manglement that we must create a weekly timesheet down to the nearest ten minutes of the things we did every day. When, as a team leader at the time, I asked whether I could be party to the input from my team members, I was told "no!"
So, there and then I constructed twelve, or was it thirteen, time sheets. All very vaguely correct, all totally made up.
And, for a year, I input those sheets every week varying their order constantly.
I was never found out, and it was only later, in a review, when the practice was ceased, that I gave the game away to my manager.
He just laughed, told me I was a naughty boy, and suspected that most others did the same.
I suspect he had done it too.
I love retirement.
All through the adventures in Afghanistan (Operation Land War in Asia2 - this time it's different) the hyper-dynamic data-driven internet-connected US DoD demanded weekly reports on the action.
These were analysed at a Monday morning meeting by the top brass in the Pentagon.
Obviously they needed time to read them and weren't going to work weekends so needed the reports on the Friday before.
So their aids needed them on Thursday to print them out and distribute them
So Army HQ needed them on Wednesday to collate and classify and reformat them
So theatre command needed the reports on Tuesday to collate and classify and reformat them before sending them to Army HQ
So individual company command needed the reports on Monday to remove all the profanities and add spelling and grammer
So the actual junior offices would write up a bunch of weekly reports in advance and randomly submit one every Monday, faithfully describing what they had achieved in the upcoming week.
we must create a weekly timesheet
You've just reminded me of another true story that happened aeons (~25 years) ago in a galaxy (oh, well - country) far, far away, and in which I was a participant.
A tiny startup - 3 guys in a rented flat - just got a bit of funding from the government's "innovation authority". Not much money, but on very good terms. In particular, no equity changes hands, the founders don't get diluted, and the rest of the conditions are not at all restrictive. The Head of said "authority" and a flunky of his are rounding up their due diligence over tea in the "executive boardroom" (the rented flat's sitting room) when the Head says, "Oh, by the way, there is a bit of a bother in the conditions: you'll have to submit monthly time sheets to my office."
The founders look at each other, and one of them asks, "Are you saying that we'll need to spend a chunk of the tiny amount of money you are giving us on a card-swiping system that will record IDs and entry/exit timestamps on a hosted server somewhere?" [A big expense in those days, mind you.]
The Head laughs, "Do you seriously think I care where you physically are at any given moment? It's a really old and really stupid regulation that says that if the government gives any money to a private outfit the time the private outfit spent on the project must be tracked to prevent those greedy capitalists from cheating the government. I choose my battles, and fighting this stupid thing is not worth it. What I need is a report every month, that's all."
The boldest of the founders decides to go technical. "Will an Excel spreadsheet sent by email be acceptable?" - "Yes, that would be fine." - And you don't care if the spreadsheet is created by a program?" - "That's fine, too, just take care not to use round hours every day, make them look a bit random, and slip in some vacation time here and there. You see, I don't need any trouble when my office is audited."
The program and a cron job to create and email the spreadsheet on the 1st of each month was ready by the end of the same day. Aside: the startup originally wanted to create AI agents (you didn't think it was a new idea, right?) using neural networks, though it pivoted to a NN-based classification engine pretty quickly. No agents or neural networks were hurt - or used - to generate the time sheets, it was a fairly straightforward pseudo-random number generation exercise, IIRC.
Should have done what we did when a similar (15 min segments) timesheet was unleashed by management at a place I worked ages ago.
There were codes for various activities.
We requested an additional code - a code to represent time spent related to filling in timesheets (as not just the filling in itself, though that was slow, but to cover associated record keeping of your time so you could fill timesheet 100% accurately .. as what would be the point if it was inaccurate?).
When management saw how much time was wasted on timesheet related activities, they rapidly binned the whole idea.
Malicious compliance for the win.
Back in the 80s(?), as part of the 'paperless office' the field guys were issued with Psion Organisers (P250? the 'industrial' version, with a custom ROMpak replacing the standard functions), which were 2x16 display, for job entry.
Naturally these were only used Thurs mornings in the office to enter the previous week's jobs. This was a round or two of entry, find the printer dongle, print off the results, edit the jobs because they didn't fit, reprint, edit, repeat until the times looked right.
The ROMpaks were then imported into the boss's Organiser, who then had to make corrections because there were still errors, finally printing off the results on yet another sheet of paper... which was then edited in red pen to correct more errors because they rarely added up
Ah, the 'paperless office'
At my first (1978) employer, a detailed expense report was required for business trips. I wrote a spreadsheet that took the total amount expended and divided it up in proportion to the allowable breakfast, lunch and dinner "no receipt required" limits, then adjusted each amount by a small random number (say 10% of the maximum allowable) so that every expense was below the limits and no two were the same amount.
I was not going to spend any time worrying about how much I spent on meals considering that it was always below the limits. Much easier to take the total amount and satisfy the beancounters. Likewise, no need to justify a couple of snacks or a tube of toothpaste.
We were told to do this in a support centre (to the nearest 15 minutes in our case, and it was to be booked against customer support case numbers), and I asked what we should book the time down to while creating the time sheets. Initially, they said lose it between the cases, but eventually, they allows us 30 minutes per week to collate the data and record it in the time sheet.
Must be a southern thing. Oop North the pie charts are just a picture of a single pie.
The type of pie shows you how the work is going.
From proper Balti pie (everything is great) through Pork Pie (bit worrying) to Tinned Fray Bentos dog food platter (project has gone to shit)
No idea what that was about.
Onion Johnnies didn't fit the bill.
Going to the Duck suggested it was Homer Simpson's father Abe which seemed right for the context and tied down with the final "Yellow ones, because of the war..."
You know you are in yellow onion territory when the Urban Dictionary looks like a foreign language.
Abe Simoson is exactly it, and "onions in our belts" is a signal for long, rambling stories that use a lot of words without imparting any knowledge and without any one sentence being related to the next. The reason was back during the war, Jerry was listening in to all conversations, so we had to have a way of passing information without Jerry picking it up. So we'd all go down to the pub for a game of darts when we wanted to have a secret briefing. Back then darts were made of wood with real feathers on the end and didn't fly as well as they do now. But that was all right because if you crashed there was always another plane waiting for you. But because of the war, all the metal was gone so you had to use a rock to keep your plane sharp and that made the wood come out lumpy. But then nobody cared if there were a few lumps in the peanut butter, except for Private Johnson because the lumps would get caught in the huge gap in his teeth.
Amen brother!
A truer word has not been said since Abraham Lincoln held the Yalta congress. However, it must be remembered that the Congress never voted straight unless there was a blue moon.
Still, once in a blue moon, the icicles will melt just like the heart of a Fishmonger.
Kudos on the Ali Dia reference, that's a name I've not heard in a very long time!
For the youngsters out there, he was a "football player". In the 1990s, a friend of his allegedly rang up the manager of Southampton football club (Graeme Souness) and pretended to be the legendary football player George Weah passing on a tip about his talented cousin called Ali Dia. Souness signed him with no due diligence and brought him on as a substitute in a Premier League game. He was so utterly crap he was subbed back off again later in the game. In short, a deeply embarrassing moment for Souness/Southampton and one of the worst players ever to play in the Premier League.
Most definitely a DUD player!
Worth noting that Ali Dia made it through at least a couple of training sessions before his brief appearance, so even though he was nothing like as good as a PL footballer, he must have been pretty good at football by any normal standard. Useful chap to have in the work 5 a side team, I'd have thought.
worthy episode (especially with the pie chart flip animation), just enough to take my mind off the bleak fortune awaiting me.....
Looks like I'm being demoted back to BoFH..... no not for that meeting where I called the customer a mindless jerk who'll be first up against the wall when the revolution happens, or the other meeting where I told the salesman that he's excellent at selling bullshit and should stick to it rather than expensive tools, or the other other meeting with the boss and the accountant where I started snoring loudly 3 mins in(to be fair the boss joined me after 3 mins 15 seconds.. a new record for us)
No our current BoFH had a meeting with HR (no not about the cattle prod..... or the making an operator stand in the corner for 4 hours with a dunce hat on).... and said that she'll be taking some leave in 5-6 months time.. yeah she's spawning... eeekkk .. and the first thing the boss said on finding out... put your feet up, take it easy.... we'll get boris to crawl under the robots again..... the bastard.
Revenge shall be mine... (and not on the BoFH either. I dont want to lay on the floor while 'lunk'(her other 1/2) jumps up and down on me)
Reminds of the my final year before retiring from the broadcast industry.....
We were all meant to undergo yearly interviews with our supervisors, who would then file a report for "them upstairs", never to see the light of day again. By this time, I was winding down, and my supervisor, bless her, probably hadn't been born when I entered the industry. She was deeply embarrassed to be interviewing me, and kept apologising profusely. I told her not to worry because nobody ever read any of these reports anyway. She really couldn't believe that, and kept insisting that it was a necessary part of her job. I made a light-hearted bet with her. I offered to write the report myself, using a well known bullshit generator for much of it. She seemed hesitant, but I eventually persuaded her.
The report was a work of art, containing language and phrases that would have put Gus Hedges to shame. (UK viewers who remember "Drop the Dead Donkey" will understand!). It was lengthy, wordy and utterly meaningless!
When I presented this masterpiece, she was again very hesitant, but buckled when I told her I would be deeply offended if she rejected it!
It was signed, sealed and delivered to "them upstairs", never to be heard of again - as predicted.
I kept asking her if there had been any reaction from upstairs, but there never was. And it remained so until I retired some months later.
My poor supervisor got quite depressed when she finally realised that all the hard work she had been doing to prepare these reports had been a waste of her - and everybody else's - time.
Perl.
Perl and SybPerl were the bees knees for a while when the interwebs were saris inc LiveScript which is now known as Javascript.
Sybase even adopted it and sold it as a product for sale as web.sql.
We actually used it along with my mods and Michael Poppler (speeelig) the sybperl guy ?
Anyway - Sybase, and its child - MS SQL Server is based on TDS.
Tabular data stream. It sits up on IP.
FreeTDS was released years ago.
I ve ported it to BeOS (BONE) back in the day and used FreeTDS at a high end bank to connect a Solais server to a MS SQL Server DB
oh those were the days.
Ptr
