* Posts by Admiral Grace Hopper

1011 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2008

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Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Admiral Grace Hopper

Laundering

On the death of a washing machine, the quickest way to get a replacement was to buy one from a someone selling one locally on eBay and go and pick it up. The seller, who reminded me of a chatty Silent Bob, helped me load it in my car. When I got the first load of washing out it seemed to smell strongly of Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. Checking the machine over, I found a very soggy packet of shredded, strongly perfumed leaves in the washing powder hopper. I didn't bother telling non-Silent Bob that I'd found his stash as it seemed to be long past capable of combustion.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: I see what you did there!!!

Oh, but surely we all reach for the words of Edmund Blackadder from time to time?

"Whatever it was, I’m sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?".

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

Admiral Grace Hopper

Well, it was on him. Quite literally.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

Admiral Grace Hopper

No Giugiaro

I'm a fan of the 1970s folded paper school of car design, but my word, that is an ugly vehicle.

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Boat

Might work best as a boat anchor.

Politicos demand full list of Fujitsu's public sector contract wins in wake of Post Office scandal

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: "what processes the department has in place to measure the performance of any contracts"

I have been wondering who signed off the releases. Every time I sent something off to production I knew that I was on the hook if it turned to crap.

Admiral Grace Hopper

Bullet dodged

Imagine the sense of relief / scuttling around burning evidence [delete as appropriate] going on at Capita/CapGemini/Atos etc. while Fujitsu are quite rightly in the firing line.

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Why Fujitsu

The ICL mainframes were very nice to work on indeed, designed and developed by people who knew what they were doing.

The ICL Wikipedia entry is quite good on the corporate history without delving into the in-fighting that went along with the various shenanigans, but there are colourful accounts from combatants in that internecine war to found on the internet.

Remember when enterprise administration was more than just a browser dashboard?

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Sad times!

I was very happy to be able to run my fingers over the keys of a DRS20 once more. That keyboard had a lovely feel and action.

Admiral Grace Hopper

Hmmmmmmmmaaaaaaaahhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhmmmmmmmm

A highlight of being the room with the 2900 while it was running reminded me of how you could tell what was going on by the noise that it made as it ran the loaded programme. Of course modern processors generate sound too, but at frequencies that are beyond my ears and probably those of bats too.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Admiral Grace Hopper

The last project delivered by the Inland Revenue's internal IT division before it was privatised. All function points delivered working and tested, on time, under budget.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: The Crown Prosecution Service bares equal culpability

CPS weren't involved in the prosecutions. The Post Office used their own powers of prosecution to bring the cases to court.

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

Admiral Grace Hopper

I guess the truth hurts.

Excel is just a glorified calculator.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Admiral Grace Hopper

Fizzzzzzzzzzz!

If it wasn't for all the lithium and the way it plays nicely with water I am sure that it would make a very good boat anchor.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Admiral Grace Hopper

GEORGE (the OS) and George the man.

I had the pleasure of working on GEORGE 3 but I never met the man himself. I worked with his son, which was a good experience with him being a fine fellow and an excellent programmer.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Have they tried

In my internal monologue I still, "key the box".

I was lucky enough to be invited to IPL the ICL 2900 at Bletchley Park on my last visit. Felt quite like old times.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Admiral Grace Hopper

The Three Most Beautiful Words In The English Language

Cover Your Arse.

I was introduced to the CYA file at the start of my career and it has been of use as recently as yesterday. Today isn't over yet.

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Admiral Grace Hopper

We've all made that call.

"It's not working, I need a new one".

"Is it definitely broken? It might still be repairable"

"I'll just check"

* pushing/sliding/falling/hard landing/breaking noises *

"No, it's definitely broken beyond repair".

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Admiral Grace Hopper

Ah, "the bonus situation"

Doing live support deep into the dark hours of the morning seemed to incline many of us to channel Stanton and Parker. Happy memories of the good ship Nostromo.

Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

Admiral Grace Hopper

We're currently working on Project Gold. I'm keeping my expectations low.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Admiral Grace Hopper

Ideal platform

It sounds like the ideal platform for performing fuzzy logic.

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Who, me?

Perfect, thank you.

Admiral Grace Hopper

Who, me?

"Our heroine, who we'll Regomize as "Buzz", was performing field maintenance on behalf of her employer, NASA, when she noticed that her tool kit was moving increasingly out of reach".

Digital Millennium Copyright Act celebrates a quarter century of takedown notices

Admiral Grace Hopper
Windows

25 years?

I feel so, so old.

Microsoft's 11-year itch: The uncelebrated anniversary of Windows 8

Admiral Grace Hopper

s/unforgettable/unforgiveable/

I was a huge fan of Windows NT and its progeny for a long while, but between Vista and 8 I started to suspect that there were folk in Microsoft who really didn't like me. Win 10 worked fine, but I was always suspicious that they might go all 8 on me again. I haven't had cause to use Windows for a few years now and I can't say that I miss it.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Admiral Grace Hopper

"oh yeah ... that"

Back in the times of mainframes and driving to the Ops room when called out, I came in one morning to find that the team that sat next to us were all wearing frowny faces, bar the one angry and tired face and the guy with a face full of shame. Tired And Angry had been called out the previous night to discover that Shamefaced has been called out for the underlying problem the week before, fixed the problem by commenting out a loop with the intention of fixing it properly before the next weekly run and then forgetting all about it because beer. Without the loop the next run fell over in a bigger and better mess at the next run. Never underestimate the power of taking notes and holding proper handover meetings/stand ups.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Admiral Grace Hopper

Buttocks Of Power

Rooting around the temperamental disc controller on the only rack of Dell gear on the estate for the umpteenth time, I bent low to stare angrily the same bloody capacitor that had to be shorted so that we could could get the disc array booted up again. I hadn't noticed the doors on the racks behind me had been removed for reasons unknown to me. Capacitor shorted, I moved back to return the controller to its operational position. I felt something against my right buttock then heard the unmistakable sound of a hefty bank of discs powering down. My backside had found the power switch and switched off the discs in the rack behind me. I waited for the box to reach quiescence then hit the switch (wiping it to remove finger prints), waited for everything to turn green, locked my own rack doors, then went back and checked which system I had just given an unscheduled DR test. DEV - phew! No harm done. Since then, like when I drive, I always check behind me before pulling out.

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

Admiral Grace Hopper

Mama needs a new phone

I upgraded to a 13 two years ago so that I could pass the XR to my Mum so that she could stop using the 6 that I gave her before that.

Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: "craters at the Moon's south pole"

I'm also keen to see the design for the flying apparatus for carrying the ground penetrating radar to multiple sites. The solar-powered solutions rely on an atmosphere in which to fly and a rocket powered one is intrinsically disposable.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Admiral Grace Hopper

Assumption

Never assume anything, not even that you and your interlocutor are talking about the same app.

Obligatory XKCD

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

Admiral Grace Hopper

Design Matters

I hope that the accommodation resembles the Hilton Hotel on Space Station Five

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: John Bull presents Little Englander Nuclear

I'm sure there must be a John Bull printing set lying around somewhere we can use to knock up the PR materials.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Don't let that guy work without supervision

Someone has to save our skins. Into the garbage chute, fly boy.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Training?

Even proper training is sometimes not enough. Let us rewind to the 1980s ....

A mainframe system had been developed which replaced a hitherto manual writing and stored-paper based workflow. This was a major culture change for a workforce that has Always Done Things This Way so off site training was arranged to introduce all the staff to the new way of working. Hotels and booze were always a good way to inculcate a positive feeling about the new terminals and the death of pen on paper

All went well and the workforce whizzed through work like a hot knife through butter. We were delighted that the system performed well against all metrics, including a sub-second response time which was a metric that was always smashed, except in one office, where the response times were truly dismal.

This office sat at the end of a CO3 line which should have been more than adequate. Stats were gathered, traces were put in place. All the underlying figures looked good but the traffic was unexpectedly spiky. A visit was planned to the office to check out the local installation of the comms kit. Back came our comms guy with a huge smile on his face.

All the staff had been on the same training course. As they sat in the class room they would fill in the TP screen with data, then, on the instruction of the trainer, hit the "Enter" button at the same time. This was what they trained to do and this is what they took back to the office with them. As the worked they would fill their screen then check with all their colleagues to see if they has a screen-full too - "Are you ready Carol? Brian? Kate? Colin?" - and when they all had a screen full, and only then, they all hit "Enter" at the same time.

The CO3 line which had been polling with no return for several minutes was now flooded with data and did what it could but didn't do it very quickly.

"But it's how we did it in training ...".

Response times soon normalised and an anecdote was born.

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Recycle Bin is not permanent storage

Calling it a recycle bin is just Microsoft stupidity.

Or just the best they could come up that wasn't "Trash", "Bin", or anything else used by OSes that got there first. I agree that is an open door to Mr. and Mrs. Cockup and all of their children.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Admiral Grace Hopper

Different keystrokes for different folks

I found a Turkish keyboard easier to use than an AZERTY one.

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

Admiral Grace Hopper

"Alexa ..."

"Tell me the clauses in the contract about invasion of privacy".

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Marital Status: British

It wasn't you was it? SQL Server 6, VB front end, 6 month contract, mid-90s? The guy we did hire was amusing to watch but became the first person I ever had to fire. Fun times!

Admiral Grace Hopper

Attention to detail

It matters. If you can't get the simple stuff right then I won't assume that you can do the difficult things.

I once rejected a CV with the entry:

Marital Status: British

While that might have been exactly what they meant to write, it made me wonder what their SQL would look like but unwilling to find out in our own codebase.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Admiral Grace Hopper

Clothing corallary

If you ever buy a shirt/t-shirt/pair of trousers/pair of jeans/jacket that fits perfectly and feels great, go back and buy another one or two of them. By the time the original is worn out you won't be able to find them again.

Twitter Spaces groans under weight of Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk's egos

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: What amazing technology

Saturday is the only day of the week on which The Archers is not broadcast (12 minute episode at 19:03 Sunday - Friday, omnibus repeat 10:00 Sunday morning).

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Bridge technologies

A part of my brain that hasn't been disturbed for a quarter of a century just said, "People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms", to my subconscious. I doubt that this will ever happen again.

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Regomiser needs help this week

He deserves the full privileges of Ring 0.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Admiral Grace Hopper

Ah, architects

We were due to be moved to a new, purpose-built office, designed for the modern Data Processing* development practices of the early 1990s. Rather than a regular office full of desks with terminals and PCs on, this was to be a development space. There was a presentation in which we were introduced to the ideas that drove the design - flow! flexible partitioning with Nightingale boards! communal spaces! break-out rooms! configurable powerpoints and networking! smoking rooms! (it was the 90s). Much was made of the lighting. There were no ceiling lights, rather, "the use of a coffered ceiling and uplighters releases us from the fenestrated perimeter and allows flexible provision of general and task lighting". What this meant was that outside of the lit corridors everyone wandered around in semi-gloom like confused mole rats.

* IT hadn't fully become IT yet, it was still DP, but not for long

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Admiral Grace Hopper

Some times there's a reason

While scouring the data centre for kit that could be taken off charge I came across a machine, still powered up, of great antiquity with dust on its keyboard. It turned out that it held data for a now-obsolete system that needed to be retained for 12 years for legal reasons. The software which used the data was so tightly bound to the NT4 OS it was still running that it hadn't been possible to dump it onto a VM so here it was, spinning away in case the machine didn't reboot if it was restarted. It wasn't on any network (not even a network card) and there was another 4 years to go until it could be wiped with no legal blowback. I found a couple of hard drives that matched the ones in that box, cloned the machine onto them and stacked them next to the holy relic and left it to live out the rest of its life in peace.

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: NMOC

Ahem. Both of them are South of my current location. (Both of them are well worth a visit).

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: Those are rookie numbers

And if you get it wrong, more quickly than you might find comfortable.

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: The 5th of November

We know it's inflatable because it's always let down by the pricks in it.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: No surprise here

I've seen a Centronics printer cable plugged in upside down, which is no mean feat. Didn't work, obviously.

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