Posts by Paul Cooper

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

It's not just hardware!

I used to manage and act as in-house technical support for a complex commercial software package. Users often had to follow a chain of operations to get the required result. The number of times I got "Paul, it isn't working - what's wrong?" but it worked perfectly when I sat next to them and guided them through the procedure was astronomical! And funnily enough, it was usually the same people. I think that there are users who simply don't quite "get" that EVERY step in a procedure is important - that if you miss one, it won't work!

Fly me to the Moon: NASA reshuffles the Artemis card deck

It's a dead end

They're using SMEs, which I understand are no longer made. So after Artemis IV, there's nothing. How is this a sustainable project?

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Hazing = abuse

I too worked in a place with large cold rooms, and also did field work in the Polar regions. Because of that, I had a three-day first aid course, which included treatment for hypothermia. The good thing is that the mantra "You're not dead until you're warm and dead" is true - but the down side is that warming a hypothermic person up is a difficult and dangerous procedure, with a high probability of heart attacks if the body warms up too rapidly. Also, hypothermic people become irrational, and often feel too hot despite being actually too cold, resulting in paradoxical undressing. You DON'T mess around with walk in freezers of cold rooms!

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Americans

I'm currently in Hong Kong, and despite its reputation as an urban jungle, lots of it is real jungle. Wild boars, monkeys and cattle are fairly common; I encountered a boar on a walk in close proximity to a heavily built-up area not long ago. And that boar was a) bigger than me and b) equipped with nasty-looking tusks. Monkeys are ten a penny in country parks; although smaller than humans (about the size of a toddler), they are quite capable of causing damage to a human. The walk was a popular one with a maintained path; I encountered several other people walking on the same path.

Despite the presence of large and potentially dangerous wildlife, no one in HK carries firearms; I think that possession of them is even more heavily regulated than in the UK, though they are sold fairly widely. Further, wildlife is generally protected; initiatives to keep them from urban areas take the form of discouraging people from feeding them and ensuring that food remains are disposed of so they are inaccessible to wildlife. Of course, a significant proportion of the population is Buddhist, and their beliefs make them unwilling to harm living creatures.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: "Steven" is lucky he's still alive

But less flexible in the event of being widowed! I have been widowed twice and now wear both wedding rings on my right hand as a memorial rather than on my left hand. And of course, if a wedding breaks down for other reasons, a permanent wedding ring might not be so good!

I once saw someone who nearly had a serious injury from handling heavy oil drums; his wedding ring caught, and he very nearly had a degloving accident - as it was, it tore the flesh but came unstuck before he lost a finger. I would be cautious about rings and heavy lifting as well as the electrical accident mentioned by most!

Re: #Where's me Jumper?#

As I found out when stuff (nothing important!) stopped working after my new puppy decided the wires looked tasty!

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: software dev asking to borrow a screwdriver

I have several ratchet screwdrivers with replaceable bits. Most have every bit under the sun included in the set. They are cheap and widely available. They aren't the best tools around, but using unusual screws is not going to work when tools like that are easily and cheaply available.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Intellect and destructive tendencies are not mutually exclusive!

One of my former colleagues was a world leader in his subject, with multiple awards and honours. No one would doubt that he is a very bright guy indeed! But he was renowned for destroying equipment, sometimes quite dramatically!

Hong Kong’s newest anti-scam technology is over-the-counter banking

Banking in Hong Kong

I have an account in Hong Kong, and my experience is that even before this, banking in HK is the most nitpicking, bureaucratic system in the world. Some things are easy, but anything slightly unusual requires you to jump through hoops. It has, for example, taken me more than 4 years to get my late wife';s bank account released to me, her executor, and it HAD to go through a lawyer as her UK probate had to be rubber-stamped by the HK High Court. In the UK, I just walked into the relevant branches with the death certificate and probate, and walked out with the relevant funds transferred!

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Well, in the 1980s I was working with prototype electronics (including a small Z80 processor) that was mounted in an aircraft - a DH Twin Otter, and they vibrate, not forgetting landing shock! The equipment included many vibration and shock-sensitive components, including various vacuum tubes (there was, for example, at least one CRT oscilloscope, and I THINK the radar system had a tube in it), mechanical recording devices (various generations of cassette and reel-to-reel tapes) and a thermal printer. We protected it from the environment with shock-absorbing mounts, with varying responses - soft ones with a long throw on the whole rack for landing shocks, and others tuned for the in-flight vibration on individual pieces of kit. It all worked, so I imagine that a similar system would be effective in a car.

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Olds

The concept is hardly new - Gerard O'Neill put forward power beaming (using microwaves) as a justification for space habitats, back in the 1970s. I recall that that part of the concept was regarded as uncontroversial, even with 1970s technology!

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Me too - I did Cambridge to London via an acoustic coupler for a few months. CMC Reality (a version of Pick) system at the other end.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

You ain't heard nothing until you've heard Hong Kong's take on traditional Christmas music, which plays in all the malls. It usually takes me a while to work out what the tune is supposed to be!

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Re: "Feral menace"

Over complicated. Haven't had cats in my garden since we had a dog!

Heinlein got there first

Robert Heinlein used the idea of a company that would ONLY fund projects that didn't have an immediate return; it's in "Time for the Stars" and (I think) "Farmer in the Sky" - perhaps others. In the books, it turned out that several blue-sky ideas turned out to be very profitable!

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Hows that!

The most lethal workplace drinks machine I came across was a coffee machine located a couple of metres from the desk I was working at! It made VERY good espresso coffee, and I started to more or less chain drink it (it was free). I stopped when I realised my hands were shaking!

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Re: Seen it done at a hardware level

I first worked on machines with memory measured in kilobytes - even large, powerful (by the standards of the times) ones had maybe a few hundred kilobytes. And disc storage was megabytes at most. We COULDN'T have replicates of systems - there wasn't room!

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

Scholarship questions

When I did my A-levels, back around 1970, there was an extra level called S-levels. I also did the Cambridge Entrance examinations. All three examined the same syllabus, but with different question styles and expectations. The A-level was firmly based on factual knowledge and understanding of the principles set out in the syllabus; you could get 100% by demonstrating knowledge of the syllabus and ability to use the techniques it incorporated. The S-level and Entrance examinations expected you to be able to build on that knowledge and produce insights and understanding at a higher level.

It strikes me that assessing LLM results against the second set of criteria (ability to expand on subject material and demonstrate insights) would be more reliable.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Re: Familial tech support is still like this

Cows regard seismic data cables as edible. I once spent an afternoon in a field driving a herd of heifers away from our expensive cable!

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: Locks only keep honest people out

"When I was a grad student decades ago, you were not considered "human" by the other grad students until you could demonstrate that you could (1) make a set of lock picking tools which these days you can just buy on Amazon (2) pick the crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets in under 30 seconds using a paper clip & screw driver, (3) pick the institutions door locks in under an hour with your self-made tools and (4) you have made a skeleton/master key for the institution's door locks. God only knows where my picks and master key ended up, but opening crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets is a skill that comes in handy once or twice a decade."

Your name is Richard Feynmann and I claim my £5!

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

In the post-war years, my father qualified as a Master Grocer. This included a wide range of management skills, and I don't think the accountants ever found a single thing wrong with his bookkeeping (when it became apparent that the traditional Master Grocer skills were becoming less useful, Dad went into business as a self-employed manufacturer's agent). His skills - gained through his training as a Master Grocer - included things like advertising, and creating shop displays in the days before suppliers provided their own material. So I think that being a UK Master in a trade would give the same skills as the German equivalent. However, that kind of Master's qualification has long since fallen by the wayside.

Got an idea for dealing with space waste? NASA wants to hear from you

The starting point should be ensuring that NOTHING is sent up that is not recyclable. Packaging should be chosen from a short list of recyclable alternatives; and so on.

Actually, I think they're looking at the problem the wrong way on. They should ask "What can we recycle and how?" and only then say "Nothing goes on the rocket that isn't in that list"

OpenAI's latest o1 model family tries to emulate 'reasoning' – tho might overthink things a bit

Actually, explainability is a requirement when AI is used to solve complex physical problems. It's been around for a while.

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

2 Samuel 6:6-7 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel%206%3A6-7&version=NIV) might be more appropriate

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Re: Is that California…

Or a bus stop in Gomersal, West Yorkshire? It was my daily commute when I had a temporary job before starting University!

Been there, done that! We bought two new Disc drives for our Vaxstations (a whole Gigabyte, no less!), plugged them in and saw the magic blue smoke escaping, accompanied by appropriate sound effects! Exactly the same situation - they had been supplied set to 120V rather than 240V. Fortunately, the supplier acknowledged it was their mistake and replaced them! And while not a fly-by-night outfit, they had got the contract on the basis of being cheaper than DEC.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Still a thing!

RFI is still a problem, and 12V LED lighting is a frequent problem on boats, where it can interfere with VHF radios. Cheap LEDs use a low-cost circuit to drop the voltage from 12V to the 3V (or whatever!) voltage required by the LEDs. Many people have reported this - LEDs with decent dropper circuits are fine, but some aren't!

NASA mulls using SpaceX in 2025 to rescue Starliner pilots stuck on space station

Re: Yay ... I won the Internet !!! :)

Never mind that - have they done their Tax returns? Jack Swigert had a problem with that on Apollo 13!

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: super thread drift.. but..

Of course, you're correct about the recommendation, but my EV doesn't HAVE a handbrake! At least, it does but engaging it switches the car off - it's entirely "fly by wire", and it assumes that pressing the park button means you're all done. That said, once you're stationary, it remains stationary, unlike an automatic car.

Far more upmarket than that - and UK based.

Nothing the public try on when it comes to trying to return goods surprises me. My late first wife worked first in a Consumer Advice bureau, then in debt collection at a major energy supplier and finally in the Customer service desk of a major High Street store. While she had her share of very satisfied customers who gave her nice presents (we saw the live recording of a Maureen Lipmann comedy show courtesy of one client!), she also had her share of customers like that in the story (the Consumer Advice Bureau was in SE London). Fortunately, none resorted to actual violence, but threats happened - at that point, a large male member of staff usually turned up!

One thing that really annoyed her in the last job at the High Street store was that she was directed to let people get away with things that she knew weren't legitimate, in the name of customer relations. She knew they were trying it on, her manager knew they were trying it on, but company policy... She was especially annoyed because she knew the law better than her managers!

Of course, stories about "Karens" abounded in our home.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Anyone who was active during the 70s and 80s in the UK will remember innumerable bomb scares - the vast majority hoaxes, with just enough real ones to make people take them seriously. The IRA used that tactic to waste police resources and, of course, upset a large number of people. I was evacuated a couple of times when a bomb warning was received for concerts; my sister-in-law was in a London mainline station when one of the real ones went off - fortunately, she wasn't near the blast.

More recently, the 7 July 2005 bus bombings happened when there was a conference being hosted by my organization in Cambridge. Large numbers of attendees were unable to return home as public transport through London was disrupted.

Evidence for Moon caves emerges as humans hunt for hospitable hideaway under lunar surface

Re: H G Wells : "First Men in the Moon" (1901)

I recall that Jules Verne was rather scathing about Cavorite! Paraphrasing wildly from a dime memory, he said something like "I can show you a gun, shells and gun-cotton, but you can't show me Cavorite!"

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

H&S Rules!

My employer had a rule that you were not allowed to drive to or from the airport if flying. We were allowed to get a private hire car (with driver) for the journey; this was routine and my employer had a contract with a local company providing airport taxi services. This was always described as an H&S issue, but I'd be interested to know whether driving while on company business is covered by rules similar to those for HGV drivers, with time in the aircraft counting as work hours. I suspect the whole thing is a legal can of worms! Even if not covered by law, I'd imagine the HGV rules would provide context for any ruling on H&S issues in the event of an accident.

As others have said, I think the real situation has been "improved" to make a good story - the police officer judged that he was too tired to drive safely and OFFERED him a bed in a cell! And as I know of at least one RTA that was caused by fatigue (a nurse coming off a long shift), I think the officer behaved correctly.

A police officer also once told me that very few vehicles - even brand new ones straight off the dealer's forecourt - were completely legal; there was almost always some tiny thing that would allow them to take it off the road. It's little things like numberplates that do it (in the UK there are strict rules about the size and shape of the letters and numerals, as well as rules regarding obstruction by fixings).

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: Been there, done that

60" WIDE; it was roll-fed, so potentially as long as you liked (PostScript rendering capability was the main constraint). A0 is only 33.1 inches x 46.8 inches!

Been there, done that

In our case, a 60" inkjet plotter. 60" was the paper width; the plotter was considerably wider; well over two metres (sorry - mixed units!). The door to the room it was being installed in opened onto a corridor just wide enough for two people to pass if they were polite about it! There was JUST enough room to turn it after we'd taken the door off its hinges!

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Re: Earthquakes...

In the distant past, I was involved in mounting electronics in aircraft. The electronics included tape drives, at least one thermionic valve in the ice-sounding radar and a hard copy device. The whole lot was fixed in a rack. The rack itself was mounted on shock mounts and the individual items were mounted on shock mountings on the rack. AFAIR (it was a long time ago!) the shock mounts were chosen with different properties - one lot to absorb landing shocks; the other to absorb vibration (this was a Twin Otter; the air mech on secondment from the RAF described it as "a bit agricultural"; it certainly vibrated!)

Re: Those dot-matrix printers really could shake up a storm

Large format inkjet printers also shake like mad. In fact the stands are designed to absorb some of the momentum as the head changes direction at the end of each row, and the whole printer visibly moves sideways a few centimetres.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

From 1983 to 1987 I spent many hours writing, maintaining and adapting data logging software written for a Z80 S100 bus single-card computer. I wrote in assembler, and my development system was an Osborne 1 with Wordstar for an editor and ASM and LINK to create executables. The executable was then burnt onto an EPROM for testing and deployment. My development cycles was hours long!

Main lesson was how much you could do with so little; I am left with an abiding dislike of bloated software! My code fitted into a 2k EPROM without any difficulty, and I understood how every part of it worked; no libraries, and given the nature of the editor, I needed to keep a lot of code in my head as well as on listings.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Not a hotel, but...

I once organised and ran an IT course for an International audience in the Palacio San Martin in Buenos Aires. I didn't choose the venue - it was my colleagues - but it must have been the grandest possible venue for a nuts and bolts course on Web Mapping and GIS!

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Mart%C3%ADn_Palace

Re: So, a nice week-end then

Given the nature of the contract, I'd imagine that£15k would be a very small item in the overall bill!

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Hong Kong was OK with in-person ordering

The screens were dark at my local Hong Kong branch yesterday; but even given the language difficulties (I speak little Cantonese), I was able to place my order and get it much quicker than I expected - just long enough to move from the ordering point to the collection point!

NASA warns as huge solar flare threatens comms, maybe astronauts too

I note that none of the ones in the list come close to the Carrington Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event)

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

A bit more seriously

It's slightly sad for me - I'm now well and truly retired, but back in the late 80s and early 90s I was a very minor part of the UK science team to design data processing algorithms for the UK processing facility for ERS-1 and 2.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

But is Dark Matter real?

There seems to be a fundamental assumption in Gianotti's statement that Dark Matter actually exists. While the consensus is that it does, there is a significant minority view that it's our understanding of Gravity that is incomplete, and recently that view has gained strength. There is the persistent gap between different estimates of the Hubble Constant from different methodologies, and the difference exceeds the experimental error of either technique. I may be garbling things, but I am a geologist and data nerd, not a cosmologist! But surely it would make more sense to work on investigations like the LISA probe and astrometric measurements than try to bang things together harder when we don't have a theoretical basis for doing so.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Re: I guess this is data storage!

I think there was a wall ibelow

I guess this is data storage!

The unit I worked for had a very large library collection of maps stored flat in map presses, which were steel cabinets with large, shallow drawers to store maps, each press was about 4' wide, 4' deep and 4 ' high. The cabinets on their own were impressively heavy; when filled with maps they were immovable. We had a group of 6 of these arranged as an island in the middle of the room..

Originally our map library was on the ground floor, but the unit moved to an upper floor. We moved the map presses (or rather, a removal company did so), and all was well - until I noticed that presses that were in contact at floor level had an inch-wide gap between them at the upper surface! I made a hasty phone call to the people responsible for building services, which got a VERY long considering pause! It turned out that the floor was strong enough, but the weight of the map presses was enough to deflect the floor slightly. But I think it gave the Building Services people a bad few minutes!

As the top of the map cabinets was used as a working space (you need lots of flat surfaces when working on maps) rearranging them next to the walls wasn't an option. They were still OK when I retired, about 20 years later!

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: The RJ family...

I did computing in the dark ages, working on prototype systems (there only ever was one!) based on Z80s (an S100 bus single card computer), with many interconnections with external equipment. Most external stuff was either RS232 or (rarely) IEEE-488. The latter was easy; it just worked. But I don't think I ever came across two RS232 connections that were the same! The good old break-out box was an essential tool. That and trying to work out whether it was 8 bit, 8 bit + parity , occasionally 7 bit and 7 bit plus parity, hard or soft handshaking, and MANY more combinations!

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

Anyone professionally involved in map-making should be well aware of the political sensitivities attached to it! The number of places around the world where the wrong name will get you into hot water is enormous. Google fudges the issue in some places (e.g. Falklands/Malvinas) but of course, that's only one of many similar issues. Antarctica is a special case with many different (and equally authoritative) naming authorities (see https://www.scar.org/data-products/place-names/) - and although territorial claims are "held in abeyance", they still exist!

Making maps of a territory is one of the ways that nations assert their sovereignty, and Foreign Offices are notoriously sensitive to such things. It's one of the very few issues where I have had to toe a political line!

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

Was that the good old Course Tavor, learning French?