Posts by Mike Lewis 202 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2009
In 1984, I wrote a BBS for a Commodore Vic-20 with multiple rooms (message areas), email and an online game. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. It was very popular with users spending an average of 70 minutes on it.
One of my users got me my first job as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can wrte a BBS for a Vic can program!" Thirty-five years later, that same guy now wants me to work with him at Google.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
From "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
My backup drives are different sizes or, if the same size, different manufacturers to reduce the probablity of two failing at the same time. I have three copies of everything with the disks connected to my computer only when I update them. I also have a USB stick on my keyring with my absolutely must not lose data (1963 audio recording of my family members, old photos).
I've always been of the opinion that backups are not done unless I do them. That turned out to be fortunate at one company when the sysadmin deleted all my work while I was on holiday. He said he thought I had left the company. Fortunately, I had backups on computers in other states that he didn't know about. At another company, doing my own email backups was fortuitous when the email server crashed, taking all its data with it, and the backup tapes didn't work.
Fun times were had when a team of software engineers kept getting corrupted backups on a Sony DAT (remember those?) so off to the repair shop it went. The shop couldn't find anything wrong but the team's backups were still being corrupted so the DAT, cable and controller card were bundled up and sent off. No errors detected. Then they asked me to have a look at it and I spotted the problem right away. They had laid the cable connecting the controller card to the DAT across the top of a 21" CRT. Cable moved, problem solved.
> The important thing is to make a decision when you said you were going to make a decision.
That reminds me of "battle mode". The early targetting computers in the 1960s would occasionally lock up and not produce any results at all. The solution was to install a switch labelled "battle mode". That switch would produce an output - true, it was the wrong output - but it gave the artillery something to aim at.
Interesting. When I was writing software for the audio part of an air traffic control system, we had backup channels on each communications card, backup communications cards, backup racks and two generators. Four things would have had to go wrong at the same time for the air traffic controllers to even notice there was a problem.
When I started working at one company, I saw that they were storing half-empty paint tins in the same cupboard as the fuse box. That cupboard was located between our offices and the stairs, cutting off escape if it caught fire. I got my manager to move them.
A program I was using on a UNIX box was setuid root. It had a menu option to start a shell which turned out to be a root shell. I reported the security hole to the sysadmin and my manager and thought nothing more about it. One day, the sysadmin was away and we had four programmers starting. My manager asked me to break in and set up their home directories. I did so and told the sysadmin what I had done when he returned so he could check my work. He was fine about it but my manager was furious that I had told him, saying the sysadmin would fix the problem so we couldn't break in any more. That didn't happen. Every four to six weeks, I'd get a call from the sysadmin saying he had forgotten the root password and asking me to break in to reset it.
Someone on a Microsoft forum asked how to add Copy to Folder and Move to Folder to the context menu of File Explorer on Windows 10. The MVP advised them to reinstall Windows. I knew it was a registry edit in Windows 7 so I ran Windows 10 as a VM, made the changes, found that they worked and posted the results. The next thing I knew, I got a message from the MVP congratulating me on having solved my problem. WTF?
What worries me about the F-35 is that we're having so much trouble with them under ideal conditions. What happens during a war when local factories have been bombed and international trade is disrupted so we can no longer get parts? Cannibalising broken planes to make a working one can only go so far and 3D printing of parts made from exotic high-temperature materials is not yet possible.
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