Posts by Richard Pennington 1 355 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
I'm retired now, but at one of my previous employments the boss operated his desk by the "deep litter" principle. The assorted paperwork on his desk gave a sort of "crown green" effect, with the paper depth approaching 50cm in the centre of the desk surface, and tapering off towards the edges.
The boss had been a chef in an earlier incarnation, and he had invited the team over to his house for a meal / celebration, and had left the office to make preparations. I habitually worked late, and thus I was the only staff member in the office when the phone call came in. It was the boss, asking me to go into his office and see if his wallet was there. The best I could manage in short time was to say "not obviously".
It turned out that when the boss went home to do the meal preparations, he discovered an intruder inside the house, and his wallet was missing. The intruder escaped. A couple of weeks later, the intruder was caught ... he had used the boss's credit card at a Chinese restaurant, and when he went back to another similar establishment, they called the police and caught him red-handed. Surprise! - the Chinese restaurant community talk to each other.
It is being reported that the outage was due to a genuine data problem: a submitted flight plan included transit via two identically-named waypoint markers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66723586
So, if the reporting is correct, there are actually two problems:
[1] There should not have been two identically-named waypoint markers, and so at least one waypoint marker needs to be renamed.
[2] The NATS software responded incorrectly: it should have thrown out the offending flight plan, with a human-intelligible note stating why it was being thrown out. [Like a human would have done].
Incidentally, was the NATS software running in the cloud?
The problem is that a few years ago they pushed out all the older IT staff, and they have been whining about skills shortages ever since. I'm 64, retired and never going back.
Also, at my age, I don't have a degree in Computer Science. There weren't any. I do have a hatful of STEM degrees up to and including a PhD. But my collection of qualifications is so wildly nonstandard that HR droids would typically throw me out in the first pass, because I don't fit their pattern (or indeed any pattern). And since it was a while since I was pushed out for being "too old", I have no recent experience on my CV.
I once had a H&S team come round with a pile of forms to fill in about ergonomics. They were worried about some of the shorter members of staff (principally the ladies) not being able to reach the floor with their feet while sitting on their chairs, and getting their monitors arranged so that they were at the correct viewing angle. They supplied boxes to go under the tables so that the shorter staffers' feet could rest on a solid surface.
I am over six feet tall. They didn't take kindly to my suggestions of [1] balancing the monitor on a pile of books to get it up to a sensible height, and [2] digging a hole in the floor for my feet.
There was a story a few months ago about a wild boar in one of the parks around Berlin, which stole a gentleman's laptop. He was caught on film rushing after the animal, trying to retrieve it ... minus clothes, as he was au naturel at the time.
If the wild boars have taken to using laptops, then *something* is causing them to evolve more rapidly than usual.
If they are using the cloud as primary storage, then they have another vulnerability. Any loss of connectivity (e.g. the man in the JCB digging up the road outside and slicing through their cables) means they cannot see their data.
If they have primary storage held locally, they can at least continue to operate (locally) and do the reconciliation and synchronisation later when the connectivity is restored.
Or if I see blue flashing lights in ANY direction, or if I hear a siren, I am immediately on my guard, and I need to figure out where it is and where it's going.
I need to be prepared for:
[a] a hazard which has attracted the attention of the emergency services (and which may be too far ahead to be immediately visible),
[b] an emergency services vehicle needing to get past me at high speed, and/or
[c] other vehicles reacting to [a] and/or [b].
Just before COVID, I asked my doctor a query which required a search way back in the records. I asked whether I was eligible to give blood.
The issue was that, as a child, I had had hepatitis. Some forms of hepatitis would disqualify me as a blood donor. So I gave my GP as much detail as I could remember, and she took it as a challenge.
And sure enough, she found it: a brief entry: "Infectious hepatitis", in December 1965. It was before they defined Hepatitis A, B, C, D or E. They would probably call it Hepatitis A these days (certainly the theory at the time was that it came from a stream which ran through the grounds of my infant/junior schools; Hepatitis A is usually water-borne). And Hepatitis A is not a disqualifying factor, especially with over 50 years of time passed since the infection.
Better than shooting it down ...
If I were the US military, I would be interesting in capturing the balloon intact, rather than shooting it down. The intelligence is clearer if you don't have to do the jigsaw first.
[My comment posted on 3rd February when the story first broke.]
There is another product with a similar logo. Titanium Software produces a system administration product (useful for tweaking the system internals, and for troubleshooting) for Apple systems. The product is called OnyX and the logo is a letter X with the same thin-stroke + thick stroke scheme. With OnyX, there is a different version corresponding to the version of Apple system it administers, and the logo colour (and, to some extent, the style) is different for each new version.
Back in the day (early-mid 1980s), I was doing a PhD in astronomy in a venerable university in the Fenlands. There were two systems: the University computer, connected to the nationwide academic network JANET, and a dedicated inter-University astronomy network called STARLINK.
To get data from one to the other, there were two methods available:
[1] From the University computer, hop on the JANET link to a rival university (on the Thames wearing the wrong shade of blue), hop across their link to STARLINK, and then come back to the Fenlands over the STARLINK network. Or, going the other way, reverse all the steps.
[2] At the University computer site in the centre of town, put your data onto magnetic tape, load it onto a motorbike and have it delivered to the satellite [appropriately...] site where we were working and where the STARLINK terminals were.
The two methods transferred data at about the same bit rate.
I am now retired, which means that I am old enough that he original radio series of HHGTTG was broadcast when I was a student. And I dutifully recorded it onto cassette tape (since superseded by a legitimately-purchased box-set of CDs, and expanded with the later series).
One of my student colleagues (JM) - now a prominent astrophysicist in the USA - also recorded a set of cassette tapes, and took it along to an event where Douglas Adams (of blessed memory) was speaking at the university's SF society. Having asked Douglas Adams for his autograph, JM became the proud possessor of a set of pirate cassette tapes autographed with the legend "What about my mortgage repayments then? - Douglas Adams".
I should also point out that both JM and I are the proud possessors of a degree in maths and another in astrophysics...
Collations and indexing can cause unexpected effects.
One example was a handbook for missionaries sent to faraway countries. The index included the following:
Lead - kindly light
- poisoning.
Another appeared in a humorous chess book "Soft Pawn", by Bill Hartston. The index included f1, f2, f4 (squares on a chessboard) and f5.6 (a camera stop). Also the following:
C, B. B.: See BBC.
I have a 12-volume set of "Duden", which is the official definition of the German language. The letter "ß" causes all sorts of confusion:
[1] Duden was written by three experts, one each from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The letter "ß" is not used at all in Switzerland.
[2] The rules for using "ß" have changed since I learned German about 50 years ago; there was a spelling reform about 15 years ago. Of the three types of occasion for using "ß" (the end of a [part of a] word; before "t"; after a long vowel or diphthong), only the last is still in use. Duden points out that there is not (or wasn't in my copy, which is about 10 years old) a capital "ß", and suggests SZ as a capitalised version where confusion may otherwise arise. Duden also points out that STRASSER (Strasser, with a short "a") and STRASZER (Straßer, with a long "a") are both common German-language surnames.
Many years ago, i was working on a project with particular sensitivities, so that information had to be suitably protected (in a spooky sense). This project was a European collaboration (incidentally, one of the "benefits" of Brexit was that the British were bounced out of the project - but I was long gone by then). This particular event concerned a meeting of the international partners, held in France.
The project language was English, and the discussions were held entirely in English. A member of the English team acted as scribe, and took minutes of the meeting "live" on a laptop provided by the hosts, and the minutes were projected onto a screen so that all participants could see the minutes as they were written. So far, so good. But the Englishman typing the minutes had all sorts of problems adjusting to the French AZERTY keyboard.
Many years ago (1980s), I was at an otherwise forgettable meeting presided over by my (then) employer's management. There was one memorable line delivered that day:
Do you know how to acquire a small software company? Buy a large one.
Nearly 40 years ago, and still true.
I'm retired now (one layoff too many) but I made it a rule throughout my career that I would never be a customer of any company which had laid me off. Whether that be as a client (B2B) or as a customer (outside any former employment). So there are certain firms with which I will never do business ... in a couple of cases, for over 30 years and counting.
It's the same principle as never going back to an ex-girlfriend.
Indeed it is not a novel idea. I am reminded of two stories I was told when on a course for new PhD students (which times the telling of the stories in the summer of 1982):
[1] An infra-red telescope was launched in a balloon just as a thunderstorm hit the area (which should have caused the launch to be aborted). There are two special features about infra-red observing: [a] the Earth's atmosphere absorbs strongly in the infra-red, which is why the balloon launch was required, and [b] the telescope has to be cooled with a liquid helium jacket (because otherwise most of the infra-red radiation observed is heat radiated from the telescope itself).
Inevitably, the balloon was struck by lightning, and the canopy deflated. This meant that the basket and the telescope were dropped from a great height. Now, if the liquid helium jacket cracks and the coolant escapes, there is then contact between the air and liquid helium with boiling point of about 4 Kelvin, which would cause the helium to boil rapidly. There is a name for a device which generates a lot of gas quickly; it is called a bomb.
The next slide showed how the basket and contents landed. The basket fell into a wooded area, and the telescope and jacket stripped out the branches of three trees, coming to rest - intact - about 3 metres from the ground.
[2] Another event was a manned launch in France: there were three men in the basket with the telescope [by the early 1980s, all three held distinguished positions at various UK universities; however this particular event happened in their younger days]. The observations were taken as planned, but there was a a substantial wind which carried the balloon far across the landscape. They had a couple of chase cars (Land Rovers or similar) whose job it was to keep up with the balloon and collect the balloon, passengers and equipment when the balloon landed. As the time for landing approached, the passengers noticed a large mansion with a large expanse of grassland - an apparently good landing site, so they decided to put down there ... only immediately to be surrounded by several gendarmes. They then had to explain why they had landed a balloon in the grounds of the official country residence of the Vice-President of France.
About 30 years ago, I was working on the sort of collaborative project where there was a librarian who signed out parcels of work to the techie types (myself included), and signed in the work packages when complete. The librarian's account was privileged to the extent that it could be used to change access rights to parcels of work in various states of completion.
The operating system was VMS.
On one occasion, I was working a weekend shift with not many people around, and the librarian came across to my desk, wearing a puzzled expression. She had tried to login to the system, and instead of the expected system response, the printer had jumped into life and had produced ... a single line of text. Or, to be more precise, more than one line of text, overprinted to appear as a single line. She showed me this page, thinking that - as the sole techie present at the time - I might be able to figure out what was going on.
Disentangling the overprinted text, I realised that there were in fact two lines (as I mentioned, overprinted). And they could indeed be disentangled character by character, and I could make intelligent guesses as to which characters belonged to which line. At which point ...
[Myself:] "You do realise what you have just done?"
[Librarian:] <confused>
[Myself:] "You have just given me your password."
[Librarian:] "You know my password?"
[Myself:] "I do now".
I then showed her how the two lines of overprinted text could be separated into a plausible userid for a librarian, overprinted with other characters which could reasonably be a password. So now there were two pieces of paper with the password: the original print and the piece of scrap I had used for the demonstration.
[Myself:] "I suggest you do two things: change the password, and destroy those two pieces of paper".
I still don't know how she accidentally subverted the system so as to get it to print out her userid and password. It never happened again.
The thing about algorithms is that they can be subverted.
As a thought experiment, what would happen if:
[1] you created an account which spoofed the identity of <politician> (not necessarily from your own country);
[2] you created a bot which used the account from [1] to watch YouTube continuously, creating clicks as it went, and deliberately chose the most disgusting and illegal content available;
[3] You timed how long it took for <politician> to get the message.
I am one of the admins for the LinkedIn "Mathematical Olympiads" subgroup. One of the members fed a (relatively) simple mathematical question to ChatGPT. It started reasonably well, then made a series of mathematical and arithmetical howlers, failing several sanity checks on the way through.
ChatGPT is not good at mathematics.
One of my student colleagues in the early 1980s - who now holds a responsible position at a College in Cambridge - told me about some of the more disreputable members of her family. Apparently at some point there had been a challenge between them to find an implement with which it was not possible to break into a Ford Cortina. It was suggested that a banana might fit the bill. But nobody was sure.
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