Posts by Andy A 491 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2008
......Can't insist on everybody having the accelerator pedal on the right....
My vintage car has the accelerator in the middle, with the brake pedal on the right. It used to be very common back then. Ford's Model A had the accelerator on the right in the US, but the right-hand drive ones built at Trafford Park had it in the middle.
In one office a chap had a 24-inch monitor - a converted TV. It ran in 640 x 480 resolution with Windows 3.1.
It turned out that his eyesight really was that bad.
I had trouble using the PC, because the keyboard cable was not long enough for me to sit and read comfortably. I had to improve the resolution and then set it back after fixing things.
When glasses became a need, I went straight in with varifocals. Some people find them disconcerting at first, because objects seem to "move" as you move your head, but I found them fine. Bifocals work out a bit cheaper, but my left and right eyes need different prescriptions anyway. When driving I can read the road signs and the odometer equally easily.
The only problem with them is when attempting close work above head height - I can't tilt my head back far enough to see through the lower part of the lenses.
In my first job (all mainframes in those far off days) we had a subroutine which was included in hundreds of COBOL programs. It took a value, a transaction date and a code which indicated the type of VAT to be applied (standard, exempt, zero-rated, luxury goods) and returned the VAT applicable. Depending on the transaction date, it could even report the rate for "Purchase Tax", which predated VAT.
With Budget Day approaching, I was tasked with being ready to make a speedy update. I read the code and was amazed how inefficient the original author had made it.
A single variable was used to index into the tables of dates and applicable VAT rates. It was defined as "PIC S99".
Incrementing this variable meant converting to binary (taking notice of whether the first character was "+" or "-", adding one and then converting back to characters.
Changing this to "PIC 99 USAGE COMPUTATIONAL" (no sign, because the index could never be negative) caused the compiled size of the routine to reduce by 95%.
There was no change in the VAT rate that Budget Day, but we made certain that every possible recompilation used the new version. Time, memory and disk space all saved!
Then it was off to what was described on the office phone list as "Canteen (Duke of York)".
# This is a skanky hack
Reminds me of a comment I found in the ICL 2903 Executive (basically the low-level OS) listing. In the several inch thick folder of assembler code was:
# CAUTION - THIS CODE IS BASICALLY WRONG, BUT HAPPENS TO GIVE THE RIGHT ANSWER BECAUSE THE SPOOLFILE HAS 2-BLOCK BUCKETS
A4 paper is even cheaper and more readily available - a pad commonly has 80 sheets of plain and a single backing.
It mops up the gunge which commonly affects mice with balls.
You can make notes on it.
Because it is so cheap, you don't mind starting a fresh sheet when the old one starts to look gross.
I always tried to avoid the wasteful trips.
Once worked at a site where, as a side contract, we occasionally went across town to a railway depot and sorted out some unusual kit.
Because we had some experience of fixing it, we were the first call if a problem arose at a different railway depot.
The co-ordinators for the job queues were in Spain. Nice people, with a better standard of English than many UK dwellers, but UK geography was not their strong point. It doesn't help that railway depots commonly don't share the name of the big place they are in. Plymouth (found on a tourist map) contains Laira Depot (only seen on detailed maps).
Having to explain that a site with a problem was over 500 km away, and would require management to pre-approve the trip, caused consternation. We usually did a diagnosis on the balance of probabilities to allow the co-ordinators to pass the job to another queue so as not to fail their SLA. "We think it's the ADSL line. Pass it on to Comms."
In the late 90s, I supported a certain large metro system. One Easter, a large Power Event took out lots of kit. Being the customer's own power supply, the resulting repairs were officially "User Error", and so did not have to hit the SLA.
I headed out 20 miles to a site where the PSU for the network kit had died. I ordered a fresh one to be couriered in an sat down to twiddle my thumbs.
"What about the print server?" someone asked. Without a network it stood no chance of working, but I took a look anyway. It was dead. These things normally had an external power supply. Surprisingly it was not the usual welded-shut type, but had a screw at each corner. I opened it up and it revealed a glass cartridge fuse. The wire inside had not just melted. The inside of the glass was a mirror. I visited their stores and found an exact replacement. The box powered up! The only time the fuse blew so as to protect the equipment I've ever seen.
DAT was hated by the (US) recording industry. Because it could create recording copies IDENTICAL to the source, thus avoiding the need for people to buy yet another album when their previous copy wore out, they were a threat to the profit stream. Buying a DAT drive in the US became very difficult, and manufacturers found it difficult to get the benefits of large production quantities. The main users for DAT seem to have been the broadcast industry.
Indeed. "JCL" is a generic term.
Our company used a much-enhanced version of ICL's George 2, indeed enhanced from ICL Dataskil's "George 2+". I was the maintainer.
George 1 and 2, and their derivatives, took a JCL document and "compiled" it, producing a small encoded form to be interpreted at runtime. Jobs with obvious JCL errors could be rejected early on.
For enhancements to the JCL I would first write the documentation and pass it around. "If I did this would it be useful?".
Naturally I had already half-coded the thing in my head, :-)
My favourite supermarket chain (only 26 branches) trialled self checkout machines, but reverted to manned checkouts. Customers hated self checkout, and management took notice. We have people staffing tills who really seem to enjoy their jobs and their interactions with the public.
They still have the management who did a survey in my local store before reorganising things and included the question I've never seen in any other survey:
"What must we NOT change?"
In the late 90s, I was on a contract where we had an "on call" rota. In theory I could have had a pint in the pub in the evening, legally drive home, then be called out to a site. Customer had a "zero alcohol" policy, so I could have been breathalysed and be off the contract.
In practise, we did nothing outside contract hours before we had a charge form faxed through (faxes were still ordinary).
With the prospect of money coming out of their budget, its amazing how many problems could wait until morning, when they would be "free" again.
Call came in from a user unable to log in on his Win98 laptop. A popup from some driver was covering the logon box.
Rang the user explaining that the fix would only take him a couple of seconds, only to be told "It's your job to come down here and fix it."
So first task was to visit the break room and brew a hot beverage.
Second task was to sit around drinking said beverage while conversing about news and gossip.
Third task was to head outside - oh good, the rain has stopped and the sun is out - and walk the half mile to the building where the user's office was.
Knock on user's office door. User decides that he will take his two visitors to the office next door, As they enter that office, I am given permission to approach his laptop.
Alt-Tab, Esc
I knocked on the door of the user's fresh location and put my head around it before it had even closed.
"I told you it was a very quick job" I announced, smiling.
Both my parents spent time working at a large (originally government-owned) manufacturing site. Loads of people had nicknames. Some had real names known only to the payroll department.
One middle-management chap was known as "The Sherriff" because he regularly announced "I'm just shooting off to...". One chap was known as "Black Pudding" because he had once warmed up his lunch in the urn of hot water intended for brewing tea. The origins of "Spongecake" were anything but politically correct. My mum, it turned out, was known as "The Duchess of <building name>".
I do reasonably well in French, and have some basic German. I was once in German-speaking Switzerland, and ended up explaining to a French tourist that he was not mistaken, and that the fries/chips at a take-away really WERE that expensive. Neither of us made a purchase.
The /detectnow stopped working after Win7. The /reportnow still does something, though it can be quite a feat to work out what.
It always seemed strange that there was no /help option, and that there was never any error notification. /Slartibartfast produces exactly the same output as /reportnow.
"Safety shoes" were a requirement forced upon us at one place. I found a comfortable pair and rather than changing at work as most office staff did, wore them full time from leaving home each morning - I didn't see any point in wearing out personal footwear for the journeys to and fro. The cost went on expenses, and I then learned that there was an "allowance" for twice the price I had paid, so I got further pairs every six months.
By the time I left for pastures new, I had four pairs in reserve.
Back in Ye Olden Days, we had a data prep job which required multiple character set conversions. The final stage was to produce a non-standard magnetic tape on the last 7-track tape deck in the company. The tape would then be shipped off to the customer.
Unfortunately that tape deck was in Birmingham, so the data was sent down the leased line using RJE (Remote Job Entry).
Operators being what they are, they were in the habit of ignoring instructions. They would allocate a 9-track unit, or forget the Write Permit Ring.
I devised JCL which counted the number of stupidities, and produced more abusive comments. The job logs showed that one set of operators reached Level 6 before surrendering. Because I had control of the OS, I could suppress their ability to abandon the job, something which was kept secret from them.
Icon because the customer was a brewery, and I had to visit several times during testing! =============>
One place I worked instructed me to clear out a load of such ancient cabling under the machine room floor.
I spent my spare time over a fortnight extracting piles of electronic archaeological artefacts.
Then an early departure on Friday to officially dispose of all that wiring, complete with a management pass to get it past security. There's a lot of good quality copper in data cabling, and the proceeds were put to good use. ================>
In the days of 286 machines, one place I visited to do an upgrade mentioned that another machine had a fault.
It would not boot first thing in the morning, but having been left switched on, it would boot about 10:00.
It being only 9:15, I took the lid off it to look for obvious faults. I pushed down each of the socketed chips on the motherboard.
The processor went CLICK.
Apparently things expanded during the warm-up lap, and made contact for the rest of the day.
Yesterday evening I was doing a banking transaction for my aged aunt.
I inserted the card in the ATM and entered the PIN. As I keyed in the fourth digit of the PIN I was greeted by a familiar twirling circle and the "Restarting" text from a scheduled (or manually initiated) Windows 10 reboot.
Who the hell at Santander reboots an ATM with a transaction in progress? It was not the middle of the night, it was at 18:05.
Of course there is no method of retrieving the card. Being stuck in the machine, it is not handled by staff ever again. All I can do is sit on the phone for two hours to cancel the card and request a new one, which will be "in about 5 working days". That's a whole week for a 98-year-old to be without
Since the branch closed at 16:00, the mean time between reboots for Windows 10 on Santander ATM PCs must be in the order of 2 hours.
"While the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you're encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible."
And access to those settings will never be provided in the Settings app, because somebody with coloured pencils thinks they are "just too technical".
I had a site in the late 80s where one particular machine would get its drive (MFM in those days) scrambled. We would visit and run the low-level format on the drive, restore the software and all would be well for the next couple of weeks.
Then I was there on a different job when someone came out of their busy operations room and said "It's happened again".
So I got to see the PC in its normal environment rather than having it extracted to the quiet outer office.
On top of the processor box was an old-fashioned telephone with a loud bell. When it rang the magnetic field killed the contents of the rotating platter just beneath.
I nipped a hundred yards down the road and bought a new telephone handset complete with electronic squawk. It cost less than the fuel for a single trip to site, and we made more profit from the support contract after that!
My first car phone was a Motorola- a huge box bolted under the passenger seat.
On hols in Normandy (1984 D-Day anniversary), I was surprised to find I could use the cells in the Channel Islands from the Cotentin peninsula.
A couple of days later I was amazed to find that I had good reception round the northern beaches, using cells in the Isle of Wight.
My car's engine is idling in 3rd gear at 20 mph. That means I'm using twice the fuel (and hence producing twice as much pollution) as when idling in 6th gear at 40 mph. Most commercial vehicles will produce similar effects.
Just slapping a limit on because of "policy" rather than looking at the actual road conditions, seems rather stupid.
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