Posts by Admiral Grace Hopper

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

That might depend on how often your employer makes you redundant, or makes a change to your T&Cs so fuckwitted that you walk out the door.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

We used to call that sort of person a "Custard".

Re: "You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"

GPWM

Ancient memory dredged up from the murk

All of sudden I am reminded of the VME order code 33552 - UM_HO_HUM_NOTHING_TO_DO which indicated that there was no instruction waiting to be processed.

"You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"

Reaching the end of an error reporting trap that printed a message for each foreseeable error I put in a message for anything unforeseen, which was of course, to my mind, an empty set. The code went live and I thought nothing more of it for a decade or so, until a colleague that I hadn't worked with for may years sidled up to my desk with a handful of piano-lined listing paper containing this message. "Did you write this? We thought you'd like to know that it happened last night".

Failed disc sector. Never forget the hardware.

Apple's AirPods Pro 3 are still chuck-and-buy-again specials

Earrings

I don't buy expensive earbuds for the same reason that I don't buy expensive earrings, which is my fine collection of single earrings.

JetBrains wants to train AI models on your code snippets

No

See title.

Dell enters the earbud market with kit you can control from the cloud

Shorted

Whenever I hear the name "Dell" the first thing that springs to mind is "Capacitor 27". That was the capacitor on the disk controller board that had to be shorted so that it would reboot correctly after a power down, otherwise it would just sit there blinking insolently.

Microsoft cuts off Azure phone surveillance support for Israeli military

Re: Moving 8,000 TB

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

cookie != biscuit

A cookie is a fine thing in and of its own right, but it is not a biscuit. Nor is it a cake, which might complicate things yet further. I will need tea and biscuits, with perhaps a cookie or a Jaffa Cake (tm) or two while I consider matters.

Cybercrooks ripped the wheels off at Jaguar Land Rover. Here's how not to get taken for a ride

My father worked for GKN Automotive Fasteners, which did not survive the decline in the UK car industry in the early 80s. If the order for the miniMetro had arrived sic weeks earlier it might have saved the factory and several hundred jobs.

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

Other balls are available

A ball made of rubber bands will also shatter the reel for a 1/2" mag tape drive when the person who should have caught it ducks out of the way rather than fielding it.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Obligatory XKCD

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Yeah, that tracks.

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: Excellent

There are times when someone says "cloud" and I have a mental image of a cloud with "X25" written in it.

It still works

The systems written in COBOL that are still running are still running because they're still running. They were rigorously designed and implemented and are still doing the job for which they were designed. If there are too few people who know COBOL these days then it's a simple matter of training people to use a clear, consistent and robust language.

Breathe easy: Apple Watch can read your oxygen levels again

Re: Hugely inaccurate

My Fitbit reads 2 percentage points below the finger pulse oximeter which I keep at home. I assume that most wearables are calibrated with a similar latitude. For accurate measurement you need to use an accurately calibrated device.

Re: not presenting the blood oxygen measurement on the Watch

I see zero utility for it in healthy people.

Quite so. For those with normal pulmonary and cardiac function it is irrelevant. For those with such conditions it is on great interest and very useful to have an always-on device on your wrist to monitor things to supplement the pulse oximeter you are likely to have at home. It's a feature I looked for when buying a FitBit as it had become relevant since I last bought a wearable monitoring device.

Icon: everything is monitored for your benefit.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

The books

At a recent job interview I talked about "sitting down with the books" when talking about something with which I was passingly familiar but keen to learn about. It only doing the post-interview mental review as I drove home afterwards that I started to wonder when I last sat down with an physical book in my hands, probably from O'Reilly.

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

Re: Lawsuit culture

With you all the way, right until I bought my last car which rather than being run for 150,000 miles like most of the ones that I've had has been sold at 90,000 as all the fancy stuff that allows it produce 140bhp/litre fails and needs to replaced piecemeal and expensively. The new car is a Toyota.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

"Hi, this is networks"

"I don't mind the team building session, but can you stop firing the fucking chain gun?"

That was when I bought the hub on expenses.

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Stop doing this

Every time Simon seems to be transcribing a meeting/shitstorming session that I have sat through I get a crick in my neck from nodding along. The older I get, the more it hurts.

808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

Still the best keyboard I used in my career. Not sad at all.

Re: Science Museum

I do much the same whenever I go the TNMoC at Bletchley. I was only one interview away from working on one of the actual machines still running there.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

On a job very early in my career I was driving a van, delivering meat products and picking up stuff for the factory. Having driving from the factory in the West Midlands to a warehouse in Bolton, I checked in with the boss on the warehouse's landline (mobile phones only being found in the boss' Jag in those days, rather than a Transit van).

"I've made the drop, I'm on my way back now".

"Can you do a pick up on the way back?".

"Sure, where is it?"

"Poole".

"The one in Dorset?"

"Yes".

"I'll need a stopover. Do you want me to wave as I drive past?"

"Eh? What do you mean?"

"Get the map out, Dave".

"Oh".

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Nuclear power is so highly regulated in the 2020s because of the move fast and leak nucleotides phase of the 1950s.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Re: According to Pete Hegseth...

I enjoyed the description of him as a DUI hire.

Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales

Ah, Ace Ventura

Having worked on a project that had to interface with another system delivered (well, sorta kinda) and supported (well, sorta kinda) by Accenture my sympathy is rather constrained.

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

Mmmmmmm ... chips

I fancy a portion of chips right now. With gravy.

SpaceX has an explanation for the Falcon 9 bits that hit Poland

We've been here before

Someone else with a penchant for a Roman salute lobbed projectiles into Poland in the C20th.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

C is the new COBOL

I assume you mean that it will underpin more of the world of finance, banking, transport and government than you image for many decades to come and provide employment for many grey-haired code-slingers in the West and fresh-faced young programmers in India for as long as it does so.

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Re: Feh!

The 10th March this year is Bob's 30th birthday.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: The Power of Fear!

One of the best testers I ever worked with had this skill. We called him, "Entropy's Little Buddy". There was nothing he could not break.

Re: Bluffing

Same here.

"So what language was it in the end?"

"No idea. It had curly brackets though".

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

Wait for the business' response when your colleague's code spins up an extra million or so instances due to a mistyped bounding condition. All of a sudden the management overhead that stops that sort of thing looks like money well spent. Ask me (or better still, my colleague) how I (we) know.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

MS Guru

Many years ago, when SQL Server 6 was US and Canada only and we were definitely not supposed to be developing on that version in the UK, we found an issue with the database that we were creating. We called Microsoft and after going through several layers of tech support they decided that it was beyond their ability to fix over the phone (this was many years ago, after all) so they would despatch a human being to investigate.

The next day a giant of a bearded man with poor personal hygiene arrived from Seattle to stare at our database and our code. After three days of staring, occasionally typing and even less occasionally grunting or asking for coffee, he said, "Got it, I'll send a fix". He flew back to Seattle and a fix was emailed to us a day later. Our stinking, silent, staring guru had fixed things and all was well. We went live before the UK & Europe embargo expired.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

The same techies that put the Shut Down command on the Start menu?

Test, test, then test again.

I'm explaining the value of testing to a bunch of wanna-be junior techies this week and the CrowdStrike shenanigans have been an excellent example.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Self inflicted

While working for a Large Government Department in the 1980s when the IRA used explosive methods of making their political point, there was much excitement when a large, unexpected parcel arrived. Procedures were followed - alarms, evacuation, bomb disposal squad, the full works. After being safely destroyed the parcel was found to contain a consignment of leaflets on how to deal with suspicious packages.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

My physics teacher's complexion underwent a swift (and fortunately non-permanent) change after he welded the petrol tank on his Peugeot.

And that's 3 recalls for Tesla Cybertruck in as many months

As my father used to call the company - Joe Lucas, Prince of Darkness.

(When the electrics fail on your 1950s motorbike it will still run as long as the magneto spins, but the lights won't light)

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

Re: Keep your feet warm

I remember querying the spec for a database server used for development. The dev lead told me that he had poor circulation and that the extra processors were more about keeping his feet warm than handling DB queries. He got his extra processors.

O, wad some power the Giftie gie us

The team prankster learnt how we saw him at his leaving drinks when we gave him a 20 foot aluminium ladder as a leaving gift. Ever seen a drunk man getting a 20 foot ladder onto a train? Highly entertaining

The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows' best screensaver

Re: My main memory of these ...

Came here to post this. We couldn't work out why one processor on a lightly-loaded database server was permanently maxed out until we went and looked at it and realised that all those pipes didn't draw themself. Our bad, at least it was quickly resolved.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

Re: It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it

I remember the feeling of surprise I felt while dissecting a washing machine when I found a 6502 processor sitting there. I spent many happy hours of my youth writing assembler for that chip, but only after (back on topic) cutting my teeth learning the base instructions for the Z80 chip on a ZX81.

BOFH: Smells like Teams spirit

Work stuff

"Welcome on board. We use Slack for work stuff and Teams for management shit".

I knew I was going to get on with my new team.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Never assume, always check

When introducing people to new input devices or screen artefacts it's always good to remember that we aren't born knowing this stuff if someone doesn't grok it immediately then more often than not it's the explanation that is lacking. That being said, given that an architect works in a world of spatial relationships I might have been biting my lip to point of drawing blood in this instance.

Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why

2000 AD

Zarjaz!

Fujitsu's 30-year-old UK customs system just keeps hanging on

IDMS(X)

Another of the last systems standing using IDMS(X) retires gracefully long after its planned life expectancy.