Posts by Richard Pennington 1 443 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
That reminds me of one of my late father's stories. Back in the 1970s, he was a school headmaster in the city of Leicester [UK]. At that time the school system was run by local education authorities, of which two were relevant: one covered the city of Leicester, and the other covered the county of Leicestershire. And then they were merged.
One result of the merger was that school supplies to City schools were now handled by the County system. The old City system consisted of a lady with a notebook, who could look up exactly what a school had spent, how much they had committed, and how much was still available in the year's budget. The County system involved the central computer at County Hall. [So there is an IT angle!]
Of course, the transition wasn't entirely smooth. City schools used to order pencils by the number of boxes, while County schools ordered pencils by the number of individual pencils. Similarly City schools ordered paper by the number of sheets, while County schools ordered paper by the number of reams.
Of course, the inevitable happened. A City school put in an order to the County system without carefully reading the instructions. And nobody sanity-checked the order. So the school duly took delivery of a hall full of paper and a single pencil.
One of my hobbies is Family History. When the Family History Centre in Clerkenwell (London) was open, I used to go there about once a month to look up entries in the birth/marriage/death indexes held there. And I kept running into the same young lady there. OK, she was a spectacular blonde. It turned out that she worked for a firm of lawyers and was tasked with tracing the families of the recently deceased.
My hobby was her job. And because I kept running into her, I guess she was there effectively full-time.
I once had an H&S person doing ergonomic assessments of the positioning of monitors on the desks. Apparently some of the staff (mostly the female ones) needed their chairs lowering so that they had the right viewing angle for their monitors, and so that they could reach the floor from a sitting position.
I am over 6 feet tall. For some reason H&S didn't take my suggestion that the monitor should be sitting on a pile of books to get it up to a sensible height, and that they should dig a hole in the floor so my legs would fit under the desk.
Back in the 1980s, I was a graduate student and a member of the university astronomy society.
Their constitution was set to music (Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" from his 9th Symphony, no less), specifically to prevent bad actors (or bad singers) from introducing malicious changes.
The constitution was ceremonially sung every year at the AGM.
I'm retired now, but at one previous employment my boss was (among other things) the Keeper of the Acronyms. His "public" collection of on-project acronyms ran to 130 pages (including many cases where the same abbreviation had multiple meanings [e.g. PM = afternoon = Project Manager = Prime Minister]. His private collection ran to 1300 pages...
It was ever thus. I'm retired now, but (back in the day) I used to do security evaluations, and much the same applies.
It [ISO9000 etc.] won't prevent the next disaster, but it will make sure the next disaster is fully documented, and that the documented procedures were correctly followed.
UK, mid-late 1980s.
My first job out of University was at a software company which still had a typing pool and a mainframe (the latter housed in a dedicated room with environmental controls for humidity and temperature). The local rumour was that by proper (i.e. highly improper) settings on the environmental switches (probably something along the lines of "humidity right up, temperature right down") it was possible to cause it to snow in in the machine room.
I don't know whether this theory was ever tested.
Penguins because they like snow.
I was recently on a course where the instructor was explaining something using a fancy big display/touchscreen setup, when suddenly all the lights went out, including the display. A few seconds later, the power cut back in, but the display was no longer working. The class was treated to my observation "Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?".
It turned out that it needed the instructor to log in again and to restart the sequence from the top.
Not just the Pepys library. The main Cambridge University library also arranges books on shelves in size order.
It does mean that to find any particular book, you need first to navigate the library's indexing system (admittedly much easier to do since it went online).
Back in the day, when I was a student, I got my University Library card, and made the mistake of showing up in a red sweater when I had the photo taken. The background was also red, so my undergraduate Library card showed a disembodied head.
Just yesterday (in the UK) I noticed something odd about an Amazon delivery van parked outside my house (but delivering to another address in the street). When the driver returned to the van, I told him that his rear number plate ["license plate" for left-pondians] was missing. When he queried that statement, I invited him to walk round the van and have a look.
I then said that if I tell him, it's a friendly warning. If the police tell him, it's a bit different.
Unfortunately the blog is not clearly written at the point where it mentions the Centauri "pointers".
The "pointers" in Centaurus are not Alpha and Proxima (as the blog points out, Proxima is too faint to be seen with the naked eye) but Alpha Centauri (aka Rigil Kentaurus) and Beta Centauri (aka Hadar).
Mozilla has been sending the begging bowl around - several times recently - citing (among other things) the less-friendly aspects of US technology policy.
I am not from the USA, and I feel that it is inappropriate to intrude on the USA's (very public) private grief. I have therefore declined to contribute.
If Mozilla does not like the way the US administration is behaving, perhaps they should move their HQ to somewhere friendlier ... perhaps in Europe.
There is a rule in IT security called "the principle of least privilege" ... i.e. you give only such privileges and permissions to a person or process as are needed for them to do their job.
Some of the managements I have seen seemed to operate on a "privilege of least principle". At least according to their observable actions.
