* Posts by David Harper 1

248 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

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Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

David Harper 1

It's not only junior developers that commit this type of SNAFU

There's nothing more dangerous than an over-confident senior developer who has write access to the production daatabase.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

David Harper 1

Fond memories of networking in the days of X.25

As a Ph.D. student at Liverpool University in the mid 1980s, I tried to use the X.25 JANET FTP protocol to transfer a set of data files from a VAX at the Royal Greenwich Observstory (of blessed and glorious memory) at Herstmonceux to the IBM mainframe at Liverpool. It turned out to be a non-trivial task, and even when the head of operations at Liverpool got involved, he was unable to get it to work, and advised me to ask my collaborators at the RGO to put the files on tape and send it by Royal Mail.

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

David Harper 1

Not so much a canary, more a dead parrot

"Not all industries have the tightly integrated function and quality testing regimes of production code generation."

And some titans of the IT sector don't even have that ... https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/16/google_cloud_outage_incident_report/

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

David Harper 1

The ancient Babylonians had the right idea

There are Babylonian clay tablets containing cuneiform text that are almost 4,000 years old and still readable. Some of them contain records of solar eclipses and other astronomical events that are still being used by modern astronomers to investigate how the Earth's rotation rate has changed over the millennia. Now THAT is durable data storage!

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

David Harper 1

Mountains of AI-generated corporate BS!

If I were cynical, I might wonder whether this is simply a case of AI being used to generate greater volumes of the kind of corporate BS that blights the lives of the people who do the real work. I think readers of El Reg will know what I mean: emails, reports and presentations from HR, senior management and consultants, full of buzzwords but oddly devoid of any actual meaning. On the plus side, if I can toss these into Copilot and ask it for a one-line summary in language that a 7-year-old can understand, I'll save myself actually having to read all of the tedious crap and save myself a lot more than 26 minutes each day.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

David Harper 1

Re: This is what I keep saying

I really hope that none of your LLM-generated projects run on anything connected to nuclear power plants, civilian aviation or medical devices.

30 years of MySQL, the database that changed the world

David Harper 1

Re: No

Ah, you're talking about MyISAM, the bane of every MySQL DBA's life. Yes, legacy applications that rely on MyISAM are a world-class PITA. I used to work with a team that refused to switch to InnoDB because they liked to move entire schemas between instances using filesystem-level copying of the data files. You could (with care!) do that with MyISAM. The manual says that you can now do it with InnoDB using the "Transportable Tablespace" feature, but any user who comes to me and asks about that will get the Paddington Bear Hard Stare.

David Harper 1

Re: Currently exhibiting 'surprised pikachu face'

"MySQL broke this by supporting, but ignoring the syntax, and using table scans whenever tables were joined, causing many developers to think, not unreasonably, that JOINs were the problem."

I've read and re-read this several times, but I still don't understand what you're saying. MySQL has always used indexes to perform joins, if there are suitable indexes. Its query analyser may not always pick the best index for the job, but it does have the EXPLAIN command, and an experienced developer or DBA will always run a new JOIN query through EXPLAIN to find out what indexes the query analyser is planning to use. MySQL also has a handy extension called index hints, which allow you to say to MySQL "no, don't use that index, use this index instead", when EXPLAIN shows you that it's picking the wrong index itself.

Occasionally, the query analyser will determine that none of the available indexes will give better performance than a full table scan. That can happen if you have an index on a column that has only a couple of values, and the data are split 50:50 between them. That index is pretty useless, and a full table scan will in fact be faster. That's not MySQL's fault, of course, but trying to explain that to some developers is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to my cat. Pointless and annoying for both of us.

David Harper 1

Re: No

"It is a long time ago but I remember having to fix a website where a single user had two different ids… and the root cause was the lack of data integrity across tables that a FOREIGN KEY would have ensured."

I've seen this myself, back when Ruby-on-Rails was (briefly) the must-have framework that all the cool kids were using. I was told, by someone whose job title was "senior developer", that they had no need for foreign key constraints, because ActiveRecord (RoR's ORM layer) took care of data integrity. A couple of months later, the team leader asked me to look at the possibility of adding foreign keys. If you know MySQL, then you'll know that it won't allow you to add a foreign key if it would be violated by existing data. That was the case with several of the critical tables, so I had to tell the team leader that the data were already inconsistent and would need to be cleaned up first. Thankfully, that wasn't my problem.

And that's why, whenever I hear a developer say "MySQL has changed my data!", I roll my eyes.

David Harper 1

Re: No

Well, the developers *would* say that, wouldn't they. After all, every developer will tell you that their code is perfect, and if weird sh*t happens, it must be the database, right? :-)

Seriously, if there were a problem like the one you describe -- MySQL randomly changing data -- then support forums like Stack Overflow would be full of threads on this subject, and it would be front-page news here at The Register. Googling for reports of MySQL changing users' data unexpectedly, I found just one Stack Overflow thread (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49594025/mysql-loss-of-data) where a user claimed that MySQL was changing their data, and the leading reply was as skeptical of the claim as I am.

Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation is the most likely: the bug is in the application, not the database.

David Harper 1

Re: Currently exhibiting 'surprised pikachu face'

"PostgreSQL's backup facilities are to say the least primitive"

That may have been true ten years ago, but the pg_basebackup tool has been part of the standard PostgreSQL distribution for more than a decade now. It allows you to make hot backups of both local and remote PostgreSQL clusters, and re-building a working database cluster from the resulting backup fileset is so easy that even an intern could be trusted not to screw it up. The capability to backup a remote database cluster also makes pg_basebackup the perfect tool for setting up standby clusters quickly and easily. I'd hardly characterise those kinds of capabilities as "primitive".

David Harper 1

Re: Avoid If Possible

"I am speaking of experience with a database holding 3 million entities (a song metadata database). It would always lose records and never knew the exact number of songs."

Is it possible, do you suppose, that your software developers weren't very good at their jobs, and the reason why the records went missing is because the application was defective?

I ask because I've worked with MySQL for 25 years, as an application developer and as a DBA, supporting databases with tables holding hundreds of millions of rows, and I've never seen the kind of behaviour that you describe.

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

David Harper 1

Re: I won't believe none of it ...

Darn it, we were keeping the corpus of comments by amanfroMars1 as our secret weapon to destroy ChatGPT and its brethren if they became too strong!

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

David Harper 1

You can easily spot the mathematicians in the audience

We're the ones grinding our teeth in collective fury over yet another incorrect use of "exponential". There are few things that can move mathematicians to kill, but this is one of them.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

David Harper 1

Re: "My mouse is going the wrong way"

- Picks up mouse.

- Holds mouse close to mouth.

- Speaks clearly and loudly: "Computer! Oh, computer!"

[If you know, you know.]

Isar’s first orbital rocket crashes into sea – CEO calls it a 'great success'

David Harper 1

Have you watched "The Right Stuff" recently?

NASA had plenty of rapid unplanned disassemblies in the early days. In the movie "The Right Stuff", those clips of rockets exploding just seconds after lift-off are real NASA archive footage. The courage of the Mercury astronauts, especially Alan Shepard, cannot be overstated. Those guys watched rockets explode, then went ahead and sat atop one anyway.

Saturn runs rings around Jupiter

David Harper 1

Re: Should we Pluto some of them.

Well, the next General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union is in August 2027. That should be plenty of time to come up with a definition of "moon" that will satisfy half the planet and annoy the other half.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

David Harper 1

"25-year-old Marko Elez, who's now in charge of the US Treasury payment system"

You mean the guy who was forced resign from DOGE after journalists uncovered tweets by him that were so racist that even Elon Musk wasn't willing to defend them? That Marko Elez?

Privacy Commissioner warns the ‘John Smiths’ of the world can acquire ‘digital doppelgangers’

David Harper 1

Since we're sharing amusing stories ...

Around 30 years ago, I worked for a while at a large UK university. The HR department had a reputation for leaving people on the payroll after they had moved elsewhere, so in my last month, several memos were sent to HR to remind them to remove David Harper from the payroll. A few months later, I started getting mail forwarded to me from the university, but for a David Harper in a completely different department. I emailed him to let him know that I had his mail and would send it back at once. He wrote back to tell me that after I left, HR had stopped paying *him* too. The poor guy missed two months' salary before it was sorted out. Not funny for him at the time, obviously!

David Harper 1

The UK Home Office's e-visa system has the same problem

As reported back in September by the Open Rights Group and the3million (https://the3million.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Loss%20and%20Liability%20-%20Glitching%20immigration%20status%20as%20a%20feature%20of%20the%20British%20border%20after%20Brexit%20-%20Sep2024.pdf) and more recently in the Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/evisa-uk-immigration-status-help-b2678643.html).

The Home Office's euphemism for this is entanglement. It sounds almost quaint until you remember that it means that your personal data is being shown to a complete stranger, or a complete stranger's personal data is being used to deny you the right to return to your home in the UK.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

David Harper 1

Re: 886 cans of spam

That's only the width. Now imagine a stack of tinned Spam that's 886 cans wide, 886 cans deep, and 886 cans high. That's 695 million cans of Spam. Moving at 38,700 mph. Does anyone have Bruce Willis's telephone number?

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

David Harper 1

Re: Crashed an IBM 360 mainframe

You, sir, are a Real Programmer.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

David Harper 1

Today IS a good day to fix the printer config

And to find the petaQ who screwed it up!

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

David Harper 1

Re: PEOT? What's that?

I did that too, when I was a Ph.D. student using a VAX 11-750 as a visitor at a famous but now sadly defunct government research institute. I got a royal bollocking from the system administrator who had to fish the end of the tape out of the reservoir of the tape drive and painstakingly thread it back onto the reel. I only made that mistake once. Happy memories.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

David Harper 1

Re: I had one user...

And, alas, the Machine Spirit can only be placated by the sacrifice of a beancounter.

'Best job at JPL': What it's like to be an engineer on the Voyager project

David Harper 1

Now there's a real rocket scientist

I'm sure every one of us reading this article wishes they were Kareem Badaruddin. I know I do.

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

David Harper 1

The room/desk-booking system at my company now features an AI "assistant". I asked it to tell me the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, but it did not understand the question. It was also unable to tell me the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Clearly, its training data did not include any of the classics.

NHS to launch 'real-time surveillance system' to prevent future pandemics

David Harper 1

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

Knowing that there is a problem is the first and essential step to finding a solution.

David Harper 1

Give the negativity a rest, guys, this is pretty amazing stuff

I'm deeply disappointed by the knee-jerk negativity of the earlier comments. This is a major success story for British science. Fast DNA sequencing of clinical samples from patients during the pandemic allowed the UK to track mutations in the COVID-19 virus as new strains emerged, and that fed into the public health response, as well as enabling more effective versions of the vaccines to be developed within months, rather than years.

Even before the pandemic, rapid DNA sequencing of clinical samples in NHS hospitals, combined with techniques developed in British universities and research institutes, allowed doctors to more effectively control the spread of outbreaks of MRSA and other nasty bacteria in hospitals.

So instead of doing down some excellent British science which will benefit all of us, let's celebrate it.

Datacenter developer says power issues holding up new builds

David Harper 1

I'm old enough to remember when ...

... you had to write programs that used memory and CPU efficiently, because both were severely limited resources, even on a company mainframe. Perhaps it's time to teach people how to write memory- and CPU-efficient programs again. That would cut the need for bloated data centres.

AI's thirst for power keeps coal fires burning bright

David Harper 1

Oh great, now Oracle is getting nukes

Nuclear-powered Oracle ... that's a scary thought.

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

David Harper 1

Re: Hilarious

The numbers don't even have to be irrational or transcendental. Decimal 0.1 is neither, but it has no binary floating-point representation that is finite and exact, as anyone who cut their programming teeth on, say, FORTRAN 77 will attest: read 0.1 into a REAL variable and print it out, and you're not guaranteed to see 0.1 appear on the screen. You may have better luck with DOUBLE PRECISION, but it depends on the compiler, the run-time implementation of READ and WRITE, and possibly also the phase of the Moon.

Stargazing with the Beaverlab Finder TW2

David Harper 1

Ask an astronomer

And they'll tell you that this is far too small a telescope to expect a detailed view of Saturn. At that price, the optics are likely to be low-quality, so you're going to get a lot of chromatic aberration, and the image quality is going to deteriorate rapidly if you try to shift to higher magnifications. It's an unfortunate but unavoidable truth that if you want to take good pictures of objects like Saturn, you'll need to be prepared to spend well over a thousand pounds/dollars.

Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy

David Harper 1

The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan wrote presciently about the tidal wave of ignorance and superstition in his 1995 book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". But Sagan remained optimistic.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

David Harper 1

Remember the old joke?

"What on earth did they used to do before computerised luggage systems?"

Back in the day, BA used to advertise Concorde with the tagline "Breakfast in London. Lunch in New York."

Which prompted the inevitable addition of "Luggage in Rio."

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

David Harper 1

I only just got the hang of the sudoers file format

And now I'll have to learn how to use yet another arcane bolt-on to systemd. Bugger.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

David Harper 1

Re: > it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it's cracked up to be.

"The Manifesto is fine. The problem is how the methodology is sometimes applied."

The same has been said of Communism, of course.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

David Harper 1

They were probably Highly Prized

And Horrendously Priced. Also Hugely Practical, mainly because they used Reverse Polish Notation, which deterred mere mortals from stealing them.

The eight-bit Z80 is dead. Long live the 16-bit Z80!

David Harper 1

I learned to program on a Z80-based machine

The Research Machines 380Z, to be precise. It was the first computer that my school bought, back in 1980. I was allowed to use it in my free time, and I taught myself BASIC programming on it. The school later acquired a Commodore PET, which was easier to use, but I'll always have fond memories of the RM 380Z. It was the starting point for a 40+ year career in scientific computing.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

David Harper 1

This is why we ALWAYS test new procedures on a COPY of the production database

Even if we are old and grizzled DBAs. Because anyone can screw up.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

David Harper 1

Re: The owner has two Ferraris. They have that kind of money

Better by far to use the right tool for the job, than having to do jobs for a right tool.

Uncle Sam tells nosy nations to keep their hands off Americans' personal data

David Harper 1

Re: My irony meter just broke

No, this the Reporting of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts law, commonly known as FBAR. It is mandatory for any U.S. citizen who has a bank account in a non-US bank with a balance of $10,000 or more during each calendar year, and is independent of any liability to pay US income tax.

As for your 'life hack', the US government has made renunciation of citizenship extremely difficult. And in any case, why *should* a US citizen have to renounce their citizenship?

David Harper 1

My irony meter just broke

The hypocrisy of the U.S. government is breathtaking. If, like me, you're a non-American married to an ex-pat American, living outside the United States, then the U.S. Treasury Department demands access to details of any joint bank accounts that you and your American spouse hold in non-U.S. banks if the balance ever exceeds $10,000. Many non-American financial institutions now refuse to take on ex-pat Americans as customers, because the U.S. government threatens non-compliant banks with severe penalties.

Working from home never looked better: Leopard stalks around Infosys and TCS campuses

David Harper 1

I look forward to a leopard making a guest appearance in a BOFH episode very soon

I'm sure that he could be put to good use among the beancounters.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

David Harper 1

Lack of expertise in the Civil Service

Ian Dunt explains the underlying (and systemic) causes of the lack of technical expertise in the higher level of the Civil Service in chapter 6 of his recent book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't". I highly recommend Dunt's book. It will depress the hell out of you, but at least you'll understand why big government IT projects always end in failure.

Open source PostgreSQL named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines

David Harper 1

Re: SQLite

"The only things it’s missing have to do with multiuser access and replication, that kind of “enterprise-style” thingy."

Or real databases, as we DBAs like to call them.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

David Harper 1

Sometimes HR can be too efficient

Many years ago, I worked at a UK university for several years. When my fixed-term contract ended, I moved on, but after a couple of months, I started receiving forwarded letters and journals for another David Harper who still worked at the university, but in an entirely different department. I contacted him to let him know about the screw-up. He told me that wasn't the worst of it. When I left, they stopped paying his salary as well as mine. It seems the HR department had deleted all the David Harpers on the payroll, just to be on the safe side.

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

David Harper 1

Read chapter 6 of Ian Dunt's book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't"

Ian Dunt's new book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't" looks at the various parts of government, and explains why each of them is dysfunctional. In chapter 6, he examines the civil service, and concludes that it has an institutional bias against in-depth expertise, especially of a technical nature. Civil servants, especially those in Whitehall, gain promotion not by becoming experts, but by moving from one department to another every couple of years. Inevitably, then, any large project is going to be managed by a series of civil servants who come in knowing nothing about the project, and leave two years later taking any accumulated knowledge with them.

Sysadmin and IT ops jobs to slump, says IDC

David Harper 1

A generous helping of crispy crunchy word salad

QUOTE

IDG defines DataOps roles as using "a combination of technologies and methods with a focus on quality for consistent and continuous delivery of data value, combining integrated and process-oriented perspectives on data with automation and methods analogous to agile software engineering."

/QUOTE

Oh my, the folks at IDG have drunk deep from the Kool-Aid of corporate-speak. Or is ChatGPT writing their material these days?

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