Posts by David Robinson 1

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: At least they had a firedoor...

"Youngest (and lightest) engineers."

Because they'd yet to succumb to the effects of years of Friday liquid lunches?

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Although, with me, it's not a rubber duck I talk to but a non-programmer. I've lost count of the number of times I'd be explaining a knotty coding issue to someone when they'd notice the light coming on behind my eyes. "Gotta go!"

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

Re: Bargle nawdle zouss

Yeah, the Aldi and Lidl whiskies for £17.49 aren't bad for single malts. For when you fancy a whisky but don't want to break out the really good stuff.

Bargle nawdle zouss

Hmmm, sounds like a lot of the stuff you get in Aldi/Lidl. I've yet to see either store beat having a MIG welder as one of their weekly offers.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: me too

Been there, done that. A friend's daughters had received identical laptops for Christmas, could I call around and configure them for wi-fi access? First laptop, I got it onto their wi-fi no problem. Second one, just wouldn't. Went through a few cycles of driver installs and other diagnostic steps until I noticed a little slide switch on the front edge of the laptop. *Click* and the laptop could see the wi-fi.

A practical demonstration of the difference between 'resilient' and 'redundant'

Re: An SFW tale to share?

Not after it had bitten my sister.

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: Need to smash the hell out of that power brick

"SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain every now and then." -- John Woods

Only if they contain flux capacitors, story was from 25 years ago.

I'm guessing TSB

TSB were fond of reminding us in their adverts they were "The bank that likes to say 'Yes'."

I had to scurry off to Wikipedia to remind myself of when Lloyds and TSB merged. 1999 to save you a trip and 2013 when the two demerged back into their separate entities.

BOFH: Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can listen to you ... It keeps me stable for days

Re: Box Tickers Anonymous United .......

A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"...

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Font recommendations

And I don't mean the ones used for baptisms. Which monospaced fonts have you found offer the clearest distinction between lower 'el', upper 'eye' and number '1' and upper 'oh' and number '0'? And also look good at a range of sizes? Lucida Console (Windows) and Liberation Mono (Linux) are my go-tos, just wondering what else is out there.

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

A Story about Magic

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Don't be a fool, cover your tool: How IBM's mighty XT keyboard was felled by toxic atmosphere of the '80s

Re: keyboard condoms

One woman in our office managed to scratch an LCD panel with her fingernail while pointing at something on the screen. Fortunately it was the one on her desk. If she'd done it to mine, there would have been an after hours swap.

Re: keyboard condoms

Upvote for Ice Pirates reference.

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

"But I hardly use it."

My dad mainly uses his laptop these days, but in his study has a old tower PC I built for him. I recently got a call from him, "My PC won't turn on."

Me: "Well, it is quite old, it's probably given up the ghost."

Dad: "But I hardly use it."

Me: "Didn't you tell me that you never used to turn it off because it took too long to start up?"

The next time I was around my parents, I cracked open the side panel to see if I could spot anything obvious but nothing jumped out at me. Out of curiosity, I did a search for the motherboard model number. Released in 2004, so a 16 year old PC, most likely running XP.

Me: "Yeah, after 16 years, I think it owes you nothing at this point."

Fortunately I was able to pull the IDE(!) HDD and successfully copy his files to an external HDD.

BOFH: 7 jars of Marmite, a laptop and a good time

Hypnosis

Allegedly you cannot hypnotise someone and make them do something they wouldn't normally do. That the boss did strip naked and cover himself in Marmite says a lot about him.

Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

Mistakes are how we learn

I've done "rm -rf /usr" before. Fortunately it was on a personal Linux machine. For whatever reason I'd made a copy of /usr and then came time to remove it. Of course muscle memory kicked in and put the '/' before 'usr'.

Back to the title of my post. I got into Linux in the late 1990s. Back then, you learnt by scouring Usenet groups and using this up and coming search engine called 'Google'. (I wondered whatever happened to them?) You'd try something, break your system and work out how to put the pieces back together. Over the years I've noticed a trend for newer users not to experiment but want the answer spoon-fed to them.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

"We are sorry that we were caught out in a lie and won't let it happen again."

Freezing in Newcastle? You're not alone: For one lonesome creature, the world stopped on 31 Dec 2020

The last line says what is needed, Send Police Community Support Officer.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

CVS

Policy is that all text config files are held in CVS or similar. You check out the latest version and make changes to that. Should anything untoward happen on deployment of changes, it makes it easier to roll back.

Re: Doubtless with the assistance of a baseball bat peppered with rusty nails.

I prefer an IBM Model M keyboard. You can run them through a dishwasher to remove blood, allegedly.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Executives left in the dark

Many moons ago, my dad had the electrical maintenance contract for a local software company. One day he gets a call from the head of facilities.

"There's a big board meeting going on and the room's in darkness, can you get here ASAP and look into it?"

My dad drops his current task and hies himself to the software company. He gets escorted to the boardroom where his first diagnostic test is to flick the light switch, which had the effect of illuminating the room. My dad left shaking his head at the thought of all these people charged with running a company not thinking to check the light switch.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Upgraded Sneakernet

How much of a bandwidth upgrade is Rollernet over Sneakernet?

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

Re: Power!

So a binary search to find the break in the cable?

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

Re: With great power comes great incompatibility

There are many IT tales regarding random reboots due to cleaning staff or tradespeople unplugging kit. One would think they would have been told upfront not to unplug anything they did not plug in and if they do, it's instant dismissal.

Having different socket/plug configurations doesn't stop someone unplugging to only realise their plug won't fit.

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

Re: Adding a comment sometimes caused compile failure

An unexpected period or missed period can ruin your day, as most women know.

Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

Re: Cult?

Vi[m], because back when Unix had more flavours than Starbucks, vi was nearly always available. And I had to switch between a few different flavours of Unix back in the day.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Early optical rodents

The first couple of generations of optical mice had problems with certain colours. A chap I worked with had a mouse mat with a red-eyed green tree frog printed on it. He swapped from a ball mouse to an optical one and retained the mouse mat. Every time the optical sensor moved over the frog's eyes, the mouse pointer went crazy. It took him a while to figure that one out.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

I was with the story until the civilian in a fishing boat. Anyone care to chip in with a reason why the Navy wouldn't have cleared the area of non-essential personnel?

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: Varieties of rodent

I purchased my own rodent and keyboard for use in the office, whereas most others are content with the cheap shite supplied with the base units. If I'm using something 7+ hours a day, I want to make sure I'm comfortable with it. 16 year old MS IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0A, still going strong. Keyboard is one using Cherry MX Red switches, as I'm not allowed to use my Model M in the office. Something about Health & Safety and exceeding dB limits...

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Re: I'm pretty certain I've heard this solution before ...

Not an El Reg story, but from the Daily WTF. Even mentions using phone books to get the height right. I'm thinking this story may be in Urban Legend territory.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/ITAPPMONROBOT

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Excel hate?

In the 25 years or so I've had to interact with Excel, it's never given me any grief. Word, hell yes. When using Word my reflex was to Ctrl-S every five minutes. Then there was Word 6 and 9x tendency to muff up the documents by saving older edits, which rendered the file unable to be opened. We found that the Word document could be opened in OpenOffice and saved back out. That stripped all the old crap out of the file and allowed it to be opened in Word once more. Added benefit was it reduced the file size.

The only complaint I have about Excel is our customers using it to send us log files. "Let me get this straight. You had a perfectly serviceable text log file and you decided to paste it into an Excel spreadsheet before sending it to us?"

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

Re: How much?

Oh, you sweet summer child. You have no idea how the mind of a beancounter works.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

SCSI

If I remember correctly, you had to sacrifice a chicken over the terminator using a silver-bladed knife with a black pearl handle in order for it to work properly.

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

Re: Keyboards

16 years and still going for my Intellimouse. Sure there are spots where the silver has worn off, but no need to replace it.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

Progress

"The wonder-OS [NT4] needed at least 16MB (preferably a bit more) and a decent CPU while Windows 3.1 would toddle along with 1 or 2MB and a considerably lower class of CPU."

When I first started this job, those were the specs of the PC I was assigned. My current work laptop has 16GB RAM and a 6-core i7 with Windows 10 as the OS, all to run PuTTY.

BOFH: We must... have... beer! Only... cure... for... electromagnetic fields

Re: EM sensitivity is like UFOs

But which way does the shiny side face? Will supermarket own brand work as well as Bacofoil?

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

Pedant mode

Surely[*] the phone call would be at a slightly earlier/later time each day, depending upon heading towards/away a solstice?

[*] Yeah, yeah. Don't call me Shirley.

Time for another cuppa then? Tea-drinkers have better brains, say boffins with even better brains

Re: Cup of Brown Joy

"Long!"

Cup of Brown Joy

When I say "Herbal," you say "No, thanks!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA

Be still, our drinking hearts: Help Reg name whisky beast conjured by Swedish distillers and AI blendbot

Three Bit, because it's a bit better than two-bit rotgut.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: BAUD

Depending upon how long this conversation thread ends up, "bored".

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

Coding under the influence

In my younger days, I did some of my best coding on personal projects while under the influence of an alcohol buzz. There's even the obligatory XKCD cartoon for this: https://xkcd.com/323/

A Register reader turns the computer room into a socialist paradise

Re: Socialism

Go stick your head in a pig!

Great disturbance in the Force as Star Wars' 'big walking carpet' is laid to rest

*Pours some blue milk onto the ground*

College student with 'visions of writing super-cool scripts' almost wipes out faculty's entire system

For reasons lost in the mists of time, I'd made a copy of /usr on a system. Time came to remove the copy.

root@server # rm -rf /usr

Yep, absolute path not relative path.

There's the one rule we live by in our office: "No five-minute changes on a Friday afternoon." Violating this rule usually means you'll be staying back 3 hours to undo the chaos such a change visits upon the system.

Twilight of the sundials: Archaic timepiece dying out and millennials are to blame, reckons boffin

Using a sundial at night

It's easy, just use the torch function on your smartphone to provide illumination.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

Re: Does it even define what it means by "God"?

God is real, unless declared as an integer.

Sysadmin misses out on paycheck after student test runs amok

Re: Naming Schemes

We used characters from Lord of the Rings as our naming scheme. It was a Tolkien Ring network.

I'll get my cloak...