* Posts by HumPet

5 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Nov 2022

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

HumPet

R.I.P. Mr. Wirth!

And thank you, The Register!

Your obituary inspired me to contemplate about how N. Wirth influenced our company and our real-time application server Ipesoft D2000 used for SCADA/MES/EMS systems. Here is my result:

https://d2000.ipesoft.com/blog/r-i-p-niklaus-wirth

HumPet

Re: od ... do

Which caused us some trouble when migrating DB from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Oracle had no problem with "od" and "do" columns, however, in PostgreSQL, "do" was a keyword. So we had to perform some column renaming (we didn't want to use quotes which was one way around the keyword).

Boeing to pay SEC $200m to settle charges it misled investors over 737 MAX safety

HumPet

There were people on these planes, you know.

There was Danica Olexová - a Slovak 42-year old project manager working for a charitable organization Dobra Novina (Good News) who helped poor people in Kenya and Tanzania (building schools, water wells, providing micro-loans to individuals to start their small businesses).

[ https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sk&tl=en&hl=en&u=https://www.dobranovina.sk/projektova-manazerka-danica-olexova&client=webapp ]

There was a whole family of Slovak member of parliament, Antona Hrnko - he lost a wife, a daughter and a son.

[ https://www1-pluska-sk.translate.goog/soubiznis/domaci-soubiznis/tragedia-zmenila-antona-hrnka-nepoznanie-divaci-sprav-svedkom-toho-ako-polrok-vychudol?_x_tr_sl=sk&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp ]

R.I.P.

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

HumPet

Re: Many years ago...

I've been a part of a SCADA technology development team since 2003; I'm mostly into communication protocols, databases, and archiving (historian).

Our systems are used in industry, energy control (electricity, gas), chemical factories, and transport (railroads). They are often built as redundant 2 or 3-node systems, so they are meant to go 24/7/365. The planned outages during patching are 0, the outages during upgrades are counted in minutes (see https://d2000.ipesoft.com/blog/dispatch-control-system-upgrade-scada).

We (developers & application specialists) acknowledge we are human and we make mistakes. When we do, we analyze them, correct them and learn from them. Btw, we are using Ada language that helps us to make fewer mistakes and find them faster (by features like strict typing, runtime checks, and high readability).

Also our customers are technically-oriented, so they acknowledge the new version may have issues that escaped testing, but as long as we can correct them within hours since being reported, they are satisfied.

University of Edinburgh staff paid late due to Oracle ERP troubles

HumPet

Migration

In the spring of this year, we migrated the customer's database from Oracle (2 node RAC + 1 remote node ADG, all on Windows) to PostgreSQL (2-node Corosync/Pacemaker redundancy + 1 remote node replication, all on RedHat). Preparations took almost 1/2 year, there were several test migrations (to verify time parameters, the functionality of the new system, etc).

The migration itself was performed between Friday 16:00 and Saturday evening (during which customer's employees couldn't work with the system). After that, only the new system existed.

The customer is an energy-producing & trading company; the database had a bit less than 1 TB and it contained a mix of real-time data, customer information, invoices, trading data, and such.

Btw, we are working for this specific customer since 2001-2002 and every few years there's an upgrade of both HW and our system. So was this one; moreover it included the above-mentioned database migration.