as long as you don't catch Elm disease
Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
4245 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
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Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so
Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server
I have rarely had issues getting funding for hardware for a specific task, but I did once fail to get any funds for the purchase of a software library. This was in the early 90s, and I requested funds for the purchase of a UI-building toolbox for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, which at the time was a fairly pricey bit of code, but I argued that it would save tons of development time. Developing a toolbox myself would take months (and would lack the portability of the toolbox I wanted), and the cost of my salary over those months would far outstrip the cost of said software. Common sense did not prevail. One problem was that I had already developed a reasonable library for MS-DOS, but without the ease of use of a UI-editor etc., so I could hobble along and develop applications at a slower pace. General conclusion: hardware is sexy, software isn't.
'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city
Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions
BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again
Very neat episode, nice little cliff-hanger
Swapping various keys around reminds me of the ancient MS-DOS skullduggery of swapping font tables out for Cyrillic or mirrored fonts. That could cause some havoc (especially the Cyrillic) with people trying to change back to regular, or at least semi-readable fonts
Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO
Niall clearly had a lot to learn ...
before ever getting to true BOFH (or even PFY) level of abusive IT shenanigans. Sending an e-mail in the boss's name is one thing, but a proper BOFH would never have it traceable to himself.
Likewise, giving an intern admin rights over anything at all suggests there were no BOFH-level admins on site either.
Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is
They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut
I wouldn't trust Growler further than I could kick him. The only way I would have agreed to help in the sale of the kit was after Growler signed a contract that I would receive a hefty commission on any sale. Otherwise I would probably suggested him to go and suck a neutron star.
Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams
BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies
Dutch insurers demand nudes from breast cancer patients despite ban
Absolutely appalling
There should be serious consequences for those responsible. Dutch health insures have become complete control freaks, requiring huge written reports and intervention plans for even the simplest medical procedure (like for the physiotherapy needed for a sprained ankle (I kid you not)), ostensibly to ensure money isn't wasted, but in practice it drives costs up and increasing delays. This is just one of the worst excesses of this system.
'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand
BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment
Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it
This must rate as the most moronic management policy ...
EVER!
On second thoughts, there may be even more moronic management policies. I shudder at the thought, but never underestimate the ability of management to create clusterfucks of epic proportions.
Maybe there should be a Most Moronic Management Policy (M3P) award, to be awarded annually.
Square Kilometre Array prototype 'scope achieves first light
Wonderful stuff
Really excited about this progress. In our group, together with colleagues from the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, we are currently developing astronomical image processing software, which works neatly on optical data from various sources like the VLT or EUCLID, but still has issues in radio astronomy (we have worked on LOFAR and APERTIF data). We hope to start testing on MEERKAT data soon, but the aim is to hunt for faint structures in SKA data as well. I gather data cubes of some 800 giga-voxel will be used in a next challenge. Time will tell how well this will go.
One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic
Ouch!
I do remember one script I wrote to back up stuff getting into an infinite loop because someone had made a symlink loop in their directory structure. This resulted in loads of extra copies on the backup drive before I could stop it. Changed the script to ignore symlinks. Fairly harmless, but annoying as I had to clean up the back-up manually
Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?
The fact that there is no specific cybersecurity course (there are currently several in our curriculum) does not mean cybersecurity isn't taught as an integral part of programming and software engineering courses. Cybersecurity is not something you should tack on to an existing piece of code or system, it should really be integral to the design. Even in introductory courses on computer science, cybersecurity is discussed as an important topic. Over the decades, cybersecurity has become more and more important in our curriculum, as systems have become more complex and interconnected, which is why additional courses on the topic have been developed.
BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?
Hilarious episode, once again
"Unstable fasting" is a phrase to remember. That and a "cleaning alcohol" fund (Islay single malt, for preference).
What does puzzle me is that it is only the PFY contemplating the number of ways this could backfire, but maybe Simon was too busy contemplating the number of ways he could (ab)use the system to his advantage,
The title has such a nice "clippy" reference, too.
We put salt in our tea so you don't have to
I used to drink tea (Keemun China black tea for preference) with milk, (as a kid with sugar, later without). Living in a student house where milk could be "interesting" at times (nicked by someone else, or generally lumpy), I started drinking it without milk, and continue to this day (more of a Chinese way of making tea, and they invented the stuff, so I have several Imperial dynasties to back me up).
In my experience, Americans add FAR too much salt to EVERYTHING, so small wonder they want to put salt into their cuppa.
IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security
Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation
WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager
BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it
While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?
44-year-old Voyager 2 data sheds light on solar system's magnetic personalities
Fascinating stuff!
It goes to show what can be achieved by carefully sifting through existing, shared data, rather than making new observations or building new instruments. The insights gleaned can shape the form of new observations and the design of the inevitable new instruments we need as well. Open, shared data is the best way forward for science.
New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster
BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required
Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix
Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years
Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware
BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus
Half a century ago, NASA's Pioneer 10 visited Jupiter, then just kept going
I remember watching the Pioneer images of Jupiter in awe (in the National Geographic Magazine)
I was hooked by the Apollo programme, nagged my parent's to allow me to see Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon live (they allowed it, bless them), and later built my own Newtonian telescope (as a teenager). One of the most awesome sights is always Jupiter wit its ever-changing cloud belts, and the dance of the Galilean moons. I followed the Pioneer, Viking and Voyager programmes avidly, and now have the privilege of contributing to data analysis of EUCLID images. Sheer bliss.
Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds
Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully
Cleanliness can have its downsides
Reminds me of the reason I installed Windows NT 4.0 on our home machine. My wife tended to clean up things on disk, which is commendable in itself, but removing autoexec.bat, command.com, or config.sys can be unhelpful. After I installed NT 4.0 and didn't give her admin rights, things somehow ran much more smoothly. She was a bit ticked off at having to log in, but at least the thing would boot up properly.
Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system
Rather amateurish wannabe BOFH
The real BOFH knows so much better how to create real mayhem and get away with the sabotage, even when he is still in the building, as witnessed when he used his ether-killer.
Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos
Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater
Re: Three New Starships
This is immediately after AI detects an incoming giant mutant star goat by combining the first Square Kilometre Array data with EUCLID and JWT data. Later it turns out the neural networks had a nervous breakdown de to the power supply being overloaded, and hallucinated the goat.
IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups
BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?
>DUMMY MODE ON!<
Liked that, it has been a while. I thought I picked up the signs of bringing management stack theory into practice and wasn't disappointed. Extra thumbs up for making the boss think he has a cunning plan.
Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?
Didn't affect an entire network, but I do recall a scary experience with a computer that was controlling a 1.5m diameter IR telescope high up in the mountains of Switzerland. We we testing a new IR spectrograph, and one of the instructions I got from the engineer was that I should not move the telescope below -10 degrees declination, or else the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium might get poured out of the system, and various things might fail dramatically. The software controlling the telescope was, lets say, "interesting" in that an English language user interface was a late addition (afterthought is the correct phrase). It was very basic: it would prompt you for the coordinates of the object of interest, show the coordinates on the screen, and ask for confirmation by asking "Is this OK?".
At one point, I noticed I made a typo in the coordinates of the object of interest, entering -16 deg declination rather than -6 deg. At the prompt "Is this OK?" I dutifully entered "N" for no, just as I had successfully entered "Y" for yes previously. I was horrified to see the cheerful response I had seen so often before "Then I go!", and could hear the telescope motors start humming. There was no way to stop this before it pointed to this low position in the sky. Apparently, the user interface would consider any character input as a thumbs up, except for Cntrl-D (Unix EOF). We rushed upstairs expect all kinds of damage caused by this action. Luckily, the spectrograph survived this abuse, and worked fine for the rest of the session. I did suggest to our Italian hosts that they might want to update their UI and manuals.
Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years
Re: Déjà vu all over again
Some repressed memories are rearing their ugly heads at the mere mention of Clippy. What is it that makes artificial cheerfulness (AC) make me as a user feel the need to apply the 230 V kind of AC to various parts of a computer's anatomy that were never intended for it? Let's face it, Eddy the shipboard computer in the HHGTTG was far more annoying than Marvin the paranoid android ever could be.
Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support
Beijing reportedly asked Hikvision to identify fasting students in Muslim-majority province
Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician
Ouch!
Lucky the drill was sufficiently insulating to prevent a truly shocking experience. This is precisely why I like these little cable detection gimmicks, even if the plans of the building are available and show where the wires should be. I have encountered enough short-cuts and assorted wiring horrors (including a yellow/green wire carrying 220 V AC) that I don't trust anything. Measure twice, drill once, one might say.
BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown
Brilliant, just briliant
"Budget item 4857 rings less bells than an unemployed hunchback."
Some students passing by my office were rather startled by my hoot of laughter. I will just let them think I was grading exams, and I had just come across some of the more hilarious answers (like blithely stating that the square root of -4 equals -2, and happily suggesting that value ass a plausible focal length for a camera lens).