Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

A sinking feeling?

The mention of a sinkhole seemed very much foreboding the demise of the little white van. I was not disappointed

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

Brilliant episode!

"I THOUGHT YOU WERE BLOODY JOKING ABOUT THAT TOILET THING!" the Boss rants.

Oh yeah. But on the building PA system.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Tea-on-keyboard incident registered

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

They thought it was all over

and but for George's excellent save it would have been

I'd better be going. It has been a long week

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

Sounds like a battlefield promotion is in order

Lee did not need to marshal his deep technical acumen to defeat General Failure

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'd better be going. It's been that kind of week

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

This somehow reminds me of various exploits of the BOFH about the Way of the Hammer.

BOFH: Amnesty means never having to say you're sorry

Incendiary episode

The "portable diesel backup generator that you accidentally filled with petrol after taking it camping" is a sweet touch

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Primary case of injelititis, it seems

C. Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson's Law fame) coined the term "injelititis" as a disease afflicting bureaucratic institutions, when people combining high levels of jealousy and incompetence have risen to positions of power. They feel seriously threatened by anybody showing the slightest degree of competence. They therefore only appoint persons of lower competence in any vacancy they have any say over. By correcting the script, Terry inadvertently made such a person in the sysop team feel threatened, both by showing up their incompetence, and by his incursion into THEIR domain. They then sent a complaint up the chain of command, safe in the knowledge that their like-minded superiors would have their backs, and Terry was reprimanded.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: Did Merlin use a spell checker?

Alternatively, does HEX have a spell checker?

When installing MS-Word on HEX I assume we would get an error message

+++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR +++

+++ REINSTALL UNIVERSE +++

+++ REDO FROM START +++

I'd better be going. Doffs hat (genuine Panama today) to the late, great sir Terry Pratchett.

Mouse working in reverse mode

I had one user who claimed my software was on the fritz, because when she moved the mouse left, the cursor went to the right, when moving the mouse up, the cursor went down, etc. I pointed out the "tail" of the mouse should be pointing away from her (this was in olden days, when mice had tails to connect them to the computer). In her defense mce were relatively new, and she did turn quite a fetching shade of scarlet in embarrassment.

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

This is clearly some strange new use of the term "14 inch tablet" that I was not previously aware of

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: Beware of BOFHs bearing "gifts"

The firewall does keep the infection nicely contained within the usurper's section

Beware of BOFHs bearing "gifts"

Simon would never hand over a shiny new machine to some newcomer who is usurping part of the BOFH's network without it being a trap.

Hilarious episode

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

At least the message wasn't "I think you ought to know I am feeling very depressed" or a complaint about the pain in all the diodes down its left side.

I'd better be going

Yes! It's true! Windows 11 is an agentic platform

"Autopilot, an omniscient, omnipresent trickster god of an agent"

Not something I would want. As sir Terry Pratchett wrote "tricksters have the robust sense of humour that puts a landmine under a seat cushion for a laugh."

Doffs hat (grey Tilley once more) to the late, great sir Terry Pratchett.

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Neat escape

One might call Evan's approach a plan so cunning if you gave it a tail you would call it a weasel. Reporting the data loss as a bug is of course quite plausible, given the complexity of the kind of software stacks found in the wild these days, and especially with SaaS in the mix (which allowed Evan's client to pass the blame to the provider of said SaaS, most likely).

definitely a case of all's well that ends well.

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

Interesting times for Solomon

Worst that happened at work here was theft of my laptop. Inconvenient but not scary. Rincewind is right: boring is nice and safe

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

I once was pulled up by the beancounters for having spent too much on drinks at a conference late one afternoon before dinner. I reminded them that I had declared the cost of just one pint, and had the receipt to prove it, but Stockholm prices were outrageous. I got the refund. On a similar note, they complained about the cost of a hotel at a conference in Samara, Russia (long ago). I countered that this was just the conference hotel, and that taking any other hotel would mean transportation costs through Russian traffic, with an added risk of some gun violence (there was some gang rivalry going on, and the conference hotel was surrounded by a wall, and had armed guards). They conceded this was a good reason to go for the more expensive conference hotel.

Russian oligarch's financial network crashed thanks to a crank and a cleaner

Swearing fluently in three languages?

All well and good, but it is much more fun to be able to raise a glass and say "cheers" in as many different languages as possible (hence icon).

Currently my count is 28

Can't wait till it's beer o'clock

Iechyd da!

BOFH: Vibe-coded solutions arrive for problems nobody has

Faulty window latches?

The first mention immediately spelled doom for the boss.

"It's got AI in it!"

"So have the words failure, and painful, and brainless"

Hilarious, I must use that the next time anyone says "It's got AI in it!"

Great episode once more.

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

"... opportunity to show how unaware senior people were of their own pet projects"

This is a strategy that can carry a risk. Quite a few senior people bear grudges against those who (even tactfully) point out their mistakes. The fact that Hamish didn't suffer any such consequences suggests the senior people may have been partially clueless, but at least weren't complete planks.

Simon and the PFY no doubt would have gone for a bonus for doing nothing at all. They would probably state they used advanced AI tools to detect the user's phone, haircut, and sundry preferences to specifically tailor the user's payment experience.

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Re: Words that strike terror in the heart of anyone oncall

Equally terrifying:

"We didn't touch or change a thing. Honest!!"

You just know they have been tinkering, and messed something up, but you also know they won't admit it.

Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch

Radiation hazards are often overblown.

When I was working on quantitative fluorescence analysis of bacterial images, we obtained a circular disk of uranyl glass from the Dutch Zeiss Microscopy distributor, mounted in an aluminium cylinder, to be used as a fluorescence calibration device. The tiny (depleted) uranium content, with its 3.9 billion year half life barely registered any excess clicks over background, rendering it completely harmless (actually, a bog-standard ceramic sink was FAR more radioactive, as measured by our Geiger counter). This glass did have almost the identical excitation and emission spectra as our most commonly used fluorescent stain, so it provided an excellent calibration source. A few years later, we decided we would like a second such calibration source. The distributor said they did not supply such uranyl glass discs, and never had. They did look a bit shifty when I produced the purchase order and receipt for the old one, complete with product numbers, but they kept denying they sold these dangerous, radioactive materials. I suggested they might want to avoid the ceramic sinks in the lab, as these had more than ten times the radioactivity of the "dangerous" material they denied ever having sold.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Is it just me?

Bit of a cliffhanger here. I was expecting a "KZZEEERRRT" moment involving the boss at any time.

Maybe next episode?

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Re: I wonder ....

Classic comedy! Thanks for the reminder

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

"That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case"

You never know when that iomega zip-drive complete with several zip disks, or that 8" 128 kB floppy disk labelled CP/M 2.0 will come in handy

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Maths

The good old Sieve of Erastothenes. This must be used in so many introductory computer science courses, if only to show that the notion of an algorithm predates any programming language or digital computer by millennia. I am not sure whether mathematics courses use this as often. Still quite surprising the maths teacher didn't know it.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

That's my recipe as well oil -> washing-up-liquid -> soap -> water.

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

I also use Habaneros. A bit sweeter indeed. Haven't used Scotch Bonnets yet

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

Certainly. Quite tasty, I find. Half a teaspoon of the sambal setan (or devil sauce) I make with Madame Jeanette peppers on a full plate of food suffices, as a rule.

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

This is exactly why I am always extremely careful about using rubber gloves when handling the likes of Madame Jeanette peppers, and even then wash my hands very thoroughly, and still take a lot of care not to touch any sensitive bits of the anatomy, to avoid any, let's say, eye-watering results.

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Pile drivers, cameras, and microscopes don't mix

When I was working as lead (actually: only) developer for a digital image processing system for microscopy at the university hospital, we encountered problems due to the construction going on at the hospital. Whole new buildings were being set up. Just as a lab technician had readied a set of slides for analysis using quantitative fluorescence microscopy using my code, the builders started driving piles into the ground. Obviously, this rather scuppered the attempts to get sharp fluorescence images at about 1000x magnification, especially when using a couple of seconds of exposure time. Needless to say we were not amused. We managed to contact the foreman, who was very helpful, and agreed to schedule pile driving around our data acquisition times (he already scheduled it around the more delicate forms of surgery, for obvious reasons). When all pile driving was done, they builders actually brought cake for the entire lab to compensate for all the trouble they had caused us (which in the end, was very little).

A very nice resolution of the problem, I thought.

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

I started using a (very nice) trackball (Focus 2000, if memory serves) instead of a mouse, because the trackball stayed put, whereas mice tended to (a) escape under various piles of papers, sundry tools, and books on my desk, and (b) when found, did not really have enough clear real estate on the desk to quickly go from one side of the screen to the next.

I have bettered my ways since then (although the missus might say otherwise)

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

It does ring a bell

I'm sorry. couldn't resist. I'll let myself out

IT manager approved downtime over lunch, but made a meal of it

Murphy's Laws in action

"No good deed ever goes unpunished" is the most applicable one here

I vibe coded a feed reading web app. It was enlightening and uncomfortable

"One of the knocks against relying on AI is that you don't learn anything. "

This is one I tell my (computer science) students. Yes, you can hand in a vibe-coded response to an assignment. Yes, it will probably pass all automated code checks. No, you will not have learnt anything about codig, unless you, very carefully check and study that code yourself. You will have practiced feeding the right kind of prompts to an AI system, but not how to code yourself. After all, the aim of the exercises is not to deliver a piece of code, the aim is to learn how to solve (initially simple) programming problems, so you can tackle seriously difficult ones later.

At the exam, however, you will not be able to access these tools, and you will fail miserably, unless you have acquired real programming skills in some other way.

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

My mum to a tee. She would always crank up the thermostat to the heart of Kilauea when she felt a bit cold, then complain that the room became uncomfortably hot, and set the thermostat to arctic conditions. I cannot count the times I told her the meaning of the word thermostat, but to no avail.

Artemis II blasts off on first crewed lunar mission since Apollo

Brings back fond memories of the Apollo period

I was glued to our B&W TV way back then. It was probably one of the main reasons I studied astronomy at uni

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Staggering incompetence

Well deserved dismissal

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Absolutely! Had me in stitches

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: Short cuts make long delays, but at least nothing shorted out

Exactly, hence the "could", rather than "would"

Short cuts make long delays, but at least nothing shorted out

I would guess the power draw of even a modest robot would require some sizeable capacitors to store sufficient charge and keep everything running during such a hot swap of batteries. Personally, I would only hot-swap batteries if the robot had two. In that case, swapping them one at a time could be safe. The junior member was very lucky nothing got damaged and that the investors were generous enough to give the team a second chance.

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

Re: "You have my word for it"

You can moor boats on my handshake. Trust me

"You have my word for it"

That phrase sets off the same warning bells as 'Trust me!'*, and 'Honest, guv!'

Neat return of the chicken at the end.

* except when it's Moist Von Lipwig saying it **

** I'll get me coat. The one with "Going Postal" in the pocket, please

Norway's Consumer Council takes aim at enshittification

Re: Brilliant

Almost sounds something the BOFH might have cooked up

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

"... impertinent and discourteous"

What an incredibly nice way of saying "they're trying to screw us. Again"

Bloatware as a Disservice

I like that, might well start using it

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Re: "panic spreads faster than Wi-Fi"

I doubt it travels merely at the speed of a sheep in vacuum. Must be a lot faster

I'll get me coat

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Reset buttons should be VERY well recessed

I was once showing a group of international students around our high performance computing centre at the university. When we came to the Cray J932, with its impressive large green rectangular power led, and beneath it a red, very well recessed reset button, one of the students asked what would happen if he pressed that button. I stated a small metal claw would emerge and snip his finger off, and if that failed, I would remove the offending digit with pliers.

He decided not to test this.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Ah, the old "rm -rf *" command

Very much the nuclear option (hence the icon). I always triple check whether I am logged into the right machine, and in the right directory, and have a back-up of said directory, before hitting the nuke button. And even then I feel nervous about pressing it.