Posts by Admiral Grace Hopper 952 posts • joined 7 Oct 2008
The built-in keyboard is for travelling. When you're travelling you use your Travel Scrabble set, when you're in a more stable environment you use the full-size, "proper", Scrabble set. I use the same principle with keyboards (Keychron K8, Gateron Brown switches).
In the early days of SQL Server 6 (when it was much the same as Sybase 4.2) we sent in a question to MS that must have been better than we suspected as within two days we had a stinking god of programming sent over from Seattle to see what we were doing. I pity his neighbours on the aeroplane, his physical hygiene really was deficient.
I was surprised at the difficulty of the problem as we weren't trying to do anything complicated - we couldn't, it was our first time playing with relational databases and we were still bashing the rocks together.
After three days staring at the screen, grunting occasionally and honking out the office, there was a particularly loud grunt, a flurry of typing and he said, "Got it. I'm going back".
Three days later we had a patch and all was well with our database.
Rule 34.
A management type had a rude introduction to his when he was a trying to find a pony club where his daughter could learn to ride a pony. He immediately called to explain what he'd clicked on, why he'd clicked on the link and why this was definitely not what he was looking for in his lunch hour on a work machine.
If you're really lucky, there's a member of the board handy when you find something interesting.
I always enjoyed explaining access and audit logs to people hitherto unaware of their role or indeed their existence.
I once had a very effective visit to the end users as we diagnosed a problem that was only manifesting itself in the wild (described here). We did good work and made many friends, only to see it all undone by a field tech two days later. I've seen things you people would find all too easy to believe.
My Dad did the numbers and bought me a Dragon 32 too. I loved it and it made the woman I am today. For games, however, there was much more available for other platforms and it was the Spectrum and the BBC Model B that had the best. Manic Miner is still the game I've played most down the years.
You need a cardboard colleague. Often the simple act of calling a colleague over explaining the problem to them provides sufficient space and time to reorganise your thinking enough to see what you need to do to fix it. You could just as usefully used a cardboard cutout rather than an actual colleague. One benefit of a human colleague over the cardboard one is that you can then suggest going for a coffee to celebrate your progress.
For me it was Lightroom (the installed app, not the subscription cloudy thing). I bought a Mac and binned the Windows machine (because Vista).
My Linux machines still provide a playground for more work related things. One day there may be one desktop to rule them all, but I doubt it. There will always be a choice to be made of the best tool for the job.
straight-forward as AD
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
I never seen a forest as cursed as the AD Frankensteined together from bloody chunks of ADs cobbled together by psychotic and sociopathic admins who never even listen to themselves, let alone others or indeed reason itself, as it was at my previous employer.
Hell is AD.
There is long established precedent in the industry for this. I was convinced that the two-day very expensive performance uplift to ICL 2900 series mainframes was 1 3/4 days of the white-coated technician eating his sarnies, half an hour taking the side panel off, 10 seconds with the tin snips to cut the wire to the performance-slugging circuit, 10 minutes to put the panel back on and half an hour to do the paperwork.
9 or 10 IFs down the error trap I thought the code had reached the point where the only thing that could cause it would be a bad hard disk and that something or someone else would have picked that up before my code did.
"If you ever see this message, RUN TO THE HILLS! The only thing that cause this is Hell boiling over, the sky falling on out heads or those idiots finally pressing the button. Don't stop to kiss your arse goodbye, just run!".
Ten years later a former colleague rocks up my desk with a hand full of music-ruled fanfold which by now was a long since forgotten thing. "Did you write this?". Turned out that a bad sector on the disc would knock out the database but not the whole ICL EDS drive.
In 1992 we wrote a quick stop-gap to cover the 9 months before the delivery of the final all-singing all-dancing product to be delivered by a third-party supplier. In retrospect it was some of the best code I ever wrote - compact, efficient, did what it needed to do with no frippery and did it reliably. The third-party was still delivering progress updates but no product when I moved on. I assume that they never actually delivered as I know that our stop-gap was still running in Production in 2015 by which time the building in which it was written had been demolished.
While not a defence in law, this is precisely the approach that is often needed in IT.
The best tester I ever worked would come up to us and say, "When I do [THIS], then [THIS], then [THIS], it goes kaboom". We would ask, "Why would you even try to do that combination", to which he would reasonably answer, "Because it allowed me to". We would then either make it impossible to so do, unless it was a safe combination and should have worked in which case we would fix it.
Thank you Gordon, you truly were Entropy's Little Buddy.
An unguarded prompt is the same opportunity (or temptation). What can I do with this? What could possibly go wrong?
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