Posts by Daedalus

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

Institutional inertia

This happens a lot. I was once a 'victim'. On a contract I was given a SparcStation that used to slow down a lot. It turned out it was being used to run distributed builds. The script compiled a list of units with spare capacity and then used them to do the build. Problem was, the list was only compiled once, and if you were unlucky you got piled on for a long time. There were better SparcStations around but they didn't always get used by the build.

Nobody really seemed to care about this. Except me.

So I rewrote the build script to keep up to date info on units with spare CPU and take account of the type. Life got a lot better after that. Most of the engineers were just following process and not caring much, especially if they had better equipment, unlike us contractors who got the leftovers. It also helped that they didn't lock down the script, of course.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: What is it with managers and training costs?

Now that's a different kind of "Severance".

Re: What is it with managers and training costs?

Well, EDS was owned by a billionaire, and he didn't get where he was by being loose with money.

Thank God he didn't get elected President.

Lenovo puts the 'cloud' in cloud computing, proposes mid-air datacenters

Subterranean data centres?

Yes, put them in unused Tube stations. Which one? I'm sorry, I haven't a clue what it might be.

Ah yes!

Mornington Crescent.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Ah, contracting.

Companies that hire contractors generally have problems that have nothing to do with lack of people.

I was expecting this story to be the usual "nobody actually wanted things to get better and were very offended when they did". Instead it was a landmine story. These can be quite varied as no two minefields are alike. The typical mine involves a manager who gets politely told not to interfere, or a suit who doesn't think things were explained with enough respect. My last landmine involved using a feature I had not been told not to use. Thankfully it was a long time ago.

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

Strange

One wonders what the police were expecting their detectives to be doing at home anyway. Obviously not Gathering Evidence, or Reading Forensic Reports, or Interviewing Witnesses. Writing reports? In that case, were those reports delivered on time?

If anyone ever suspected that police forces have degenerated into bureaucracies obsessed with desk work and remote surveillance, rather than basic community policing, this does nothing to dispel those suspicions.

I'll add that in the US insurance industry in the late 20th century, offsite activities such as damage inspection and evaluation, tended to become "drinking beer on the porch while writing entirely fictitious reports". The move to digital photos with location info from GPS at least took care of that form of skiving.

Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with . . . groceries

Great for the old fogies

I can see these contraptions working in those gated retirement communities that are springing up all over the place in the USA these days. With nothing bigger than a golf cart to contend with, no kids and few pets larger than a Chihuahua, these bots will have no trouble dropping off sanitary supplies and even medications to the Zimmer frame crowd. They could even double as security, as if having a camera on every lamp post isn't enough.

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Unfortunately that doesn't change the likelihood of it being run by idiots and skinflints. Sometimes its worse because the top people can be more political or narcissistic and less savvy about money.

Good luck with that. Experience shows that the people who want to sell internet connected stuff don't understand software, networks or security. They just want it developed and sold in minimum time at maximum profit. They don't even care if the software adds no real user value at all. They just want bells and whistles.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

That's all very well, but...

Giving orders is easy. Getting people to follow them is another thing. That's why Trump's threat to not leave office is an empty one. At the stroke of midnight nobody has to listen to him, his signature is worthless, and the officer with the launch codes moves to the next incumbent. Sure we could have a brain or an AI for a leader, but who would want to listen? The real power is in the people who can enforce orders. That's why the Roman Army was the real power, not the Emperor.

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Gin sodden taxi drivers

Long ago, this advice was given to people looking to interest investors:

"Write on one side of the paper only. Use simple words and short sentences. Pretend your audience are a collection of gin sodden taxi drivers."

As for the poor guy who fixed the problem here: I'm willing to bet he really annoyed some people and suffered some setbacks on account of his hubris.

Laravel inventor tells devs to quit writing 'cathedrals of complexity'

So glad I'm out of it

In my experience there are two kinds of software documentation.

First: "This is what it is, this is what it does, this is how it does it."

Second (and regrettably common): "Look how smart we are."

Also remembering endless discussions with clients about how the requirements document should not contain details of design, implementation, methodology, or code.

Not to mention all those times the marketeers and sales droids did design work, the design team did coding, and the devs had to figure out what the thing was actually supposed to do.

UK unveils plans to 'transform' the consumer smart meter experience

Sting in the tail

Whenever I see "old" tech being booted in favour of "new dynamic thrusting white-heat" tech, I feel like saying (and sometimes say). "You'll be replacing all of this in five years, ten at the most. And by the way, some components these things use will be end of life even sooner."

So far I've got a "smart" electricity meter behind the house (this is the USA), a "smartened" gas meter in front of the house (it still has a mechanical readout), and a "semi-smart" water meter in the basement (it responds to RF queries from passing vans). The smarter stuff seems to talk to thingamajigs on utility poles nearby. I do know that there is a massive microwave network locally, thanks to a short contract at a local company.

That being said, while the water meter is now comparatively old, the electric and gas meters are still on probation. At least they can be read manually. Way back when we hired a sparky to relocate the old electricity meter outside the house, we had to leave handwritten signs out for the meter reader, who hadn't been told by the company that he needed to go around back.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

No signpost

"an internationally important top-secret control bunker, buried deep under the UK countryside."

I'm guessing this wasn't one of the Secret Nuclear Bunkers signposted on roundabouts at two locations in the UK.

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

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

Blast from the past

I suspect that "hung" etc. date from the days of electro- or even steam-driven-mechanical user devices such as the gloriously noisy Teletype and its zippy replacement the DecWriter. How fondly I remember the way output would come to a dead stop and leave us, er, hanging. Sudden silence, dead keys. Oh yes.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

The White Button

Somehow DEC never got the memo that the power switch could use a little protection to prevent accidental or impulsive shutdowns. One team of testers I had the misfortune to encounter, would push that white button on a microVAX after any error at all, resulting in a lot of locked files whose status they helpfully added to the report of the original problem. They also had a habit of extending bug reports after any incident that they, in their ignorance, felt was related to the original.

So any fix that went in often was rejected because the bug report contained extra stuff added while the fix was in progress.

Of course, the large internationally famous company they worked for is now a pale shadow of its former self.

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: Hot temps...

Who needs lock picks when you have a paper clip and a screwdriver?

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Now it's clear

I've been seeing stuff about this for a while, wondering why anyone would be complaining about a code freeze being ignored, when nobody who uses Git or anything similar needs to worry about that. Well, now I know why. Just some guy calling himself an entrepreneur who fell foul of a hallucinating AI.

FAFO

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Two possibilities

There are generally two reasons for an American plug to have an absent ground pin. First it just came off and is stuck in a socket somewhere. Cheap stuff will do that. Second, someone removed it to fit the plug into one of the many sockets in the country that take only a hot and neutral pin. The second one suggests shenanigans of the worst kind given the location.

Incidentally, I've long expected ultra-secure establishments to go to "nothing in, nothing out" procedures where people are expected to leave everything, including outer clothes, in an outer locker room, proceed to an inner room in their skivvies, and then dress for the job. So many places just let the cleaners in and out with whatever they can carry or even put on a cart.

And to parody Douglas Adams, in some NSA location one might expect that "the difference between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete will be surgically removed from your body mass when you leave".

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Re: Thankless task

I knew a guy who did "decision consulting" and wrote books on the subject. He was called in to fix some organizational problem, and walked into a stormy meeting where everyone was upset. He figured out the whole problem was that someone didn't get a promotion, and it involved the very role he had accepted. He gave a quick presentation and ran like the house was burning down.

Thankless task

Helen eventually became a consultant who specializes in fixing technical crises caused by teams who find themselves out of their depth.

"I get it straightened out, upgraded, expanded, and thoroughly documented," she told Who, Me?

This sounds great until you realize it involves stepping on a lot of toes, offending a lot of egos, and generally making you a pariah. Depending on how long the fiasco has been going on, there are often people involved who like it that way, thank you very much.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: "so that US companies can dominate supersonic flight once again"

"They banned Concorde on noise grounds until BA and Air France proved that Concorde was quieter on approach and departure than PANY made it out to be"

If that's true I'd hate to know how noisy they made it out to be. Back in 1980 the Concorde would be seen relatively low in the skies east of Heathrow, and once I was under the flight path, possibly near Richmond or Kew, when it came in on final approach. Well, it was like an earthquake and a hurricane arrived together. Unbelievable noise.

It was a beautiful plane to see banking over Norbiton, but I'd have hated to have lived under the path where it took off.

Chinese snoops tried to break into US city utilities, says Talos

Next stop : Workday

With this appalling fiasco of an application being pushed everywhere just so HR can have a self-inflicted pat on the back, and pretend they're not pawning their work off on everyone else, it's only a matter of time before malware gets in and sets traps ready to go off, crippling industry or education or even government.

It was once said of American schools that, if their organization and working methods had been created by a foreign power, it would have been considered an act of war. Well, yet again, America has shot itself in the foot, with the added frisson that most of the software almost certainly was created in a foreign country, with all the implications of that.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Plumbing

"Because many coding tasks involve routine implementation of plumbing, myriad libraries and automation tools exist to make sure developers don’t have to re-invent the wheel every day."

Oh yes. Whether coding at a high level, or down to bare metal, coding is mostly taking data from here and putting it there. Even Interrupt Service Routines are in that business, mostly servicing a queue of one form or another. Sophisticated Algorithms? Mostly double talk to make the drones think we're geniuses. Genii? I mean we're pretty bright and all that, but brilliance in coding mostly amounts to Keeping It Simple. Which is how I know code was not written by a bright person: it's a bloody mess.

I wonder if AI's will be spaghetti monsters too.

Re: The Great Replacement

"Translating vague requirements into usable specs."

And Rick Deckard got clues from a random photograph by saying "Enhance" over and over.

You can't uncover information that isn't there to start with. You can invent things out of whole cloth, and so can an AI (let's face it, with these current AI's, confabulation is all too likely) but you know a little more about the client/end-user (for now, anyway). With human intelligence, your feedback from the client goes into the next round of guesses. With an AI, you may start from zero every time unless the AI is feeding off some kind of record.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: The best keyboard...

I have to admit of fond memories of the Teletype ASR33 keyboard, which resembled nothing so much as the chord buttons on an accordion. Something about the bounceback that helped your fingers jump to the next key. Although I should admit that at that point I was a one finger on each hand typist.

As for noise: seriously, clacky keys are a problem? Try working where the PA is blaring, the sales droids are yakking, Loud Howard in on speakerphone (yes, I did encounter a real version of the Dilbert character), and the idiot in the next cube is talking all around the point while the people on the other end of the call are seething. And old style telephone bells, and even their electronic replacements. Eee, these modern youngsters don't know when they're well off.

Of course, IBM would have the best keyboard, having created that marvel, the Selectric typewriter. Probably my wife learned on that, because even with a flat Mac keyboard she can still be heard hammering away. It's not the keyboard, it's the fingers that make the noise.

Thanks to the confusion caused by the lockdown, the vacation of the office premises etc., I came into possession of a couple of good Dell keyboards, which I intend to use until my mentis is no longer compos, which may not be far off.

Till then,

Farewell IBM PS/2 keyboard

You live on in our memories

While we still have them

(E.J. Thribb, 13 3/4)

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

On the other hand if you're in a smallish motorboat you can easily exceed hull speed and wind up riding the front edge of your wave, commonly known as "planing". It's all fun and games until you cut the throttle and the back half of the wave hits the stern and pitches the whole boat forward, as I found out the time a friend let me pilot his boat. After that it was "ease off gently".

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Neasden beckons

I'm reminded of one of Le Carre's novels where they are considering the difference between what they could offer a defecting Russian General compared to what he might have already. "A dacha by the Black Sea, and what do we have? A semi-detached in Neasden?"

Also, having glimpsed the luxurious flat of an American professor while at Uni in the UK, I toyed with the idea of using my relative wealth to enjoy similar facilities, if only for a while, back in Blighty. However, with the sky high cost of living in the UK now, compared to where I live in the USA, there was no way I actually wanted to do it. I'm pretty sure that any American landing in the UK would feel the same way. I mean, there was that astronomically priced former bus shelter of legend. At least it had a view.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Hindsight

Ah, the days of early interactive computer use. Compared to the steam-driven Teletype machines I started on (writing BASIC to a PDP-11 fronting for an ICL 4130) the appearance in select areas of campus of DECwriter II's and even VDU's was revolutionary. And of course, an opportunity to waste time playing STRTRK on the new DECsystem 10.

Being of the "I might need it later" persuasion, I may even have some of those 50-year-old dot matrix printouts squirreled away somewhere. And let's face it, without the opportunity presented by all that tech, I might never have had a software development career to retire from, shuffling instead through the stinks of chemistry.

Re: Have you hired kids and regretted it?

It'll be in BOFH first. Given the horror stories I'm surprised that there hasn't already been some threatened defenestration.

Virgin Atlantic is piloting an OpenAI agent in to help with the 'customer journey'

A world of pure imagination

I can't wait to see all those imaginary flights to imaginary places leaving from nonexistent gates on invisible aircraft.

With fake references to made-up court cases and pleadings. of course.

AI does speak truth sometimes, of course. Unfortunately what it says about Musk and Trump is what we already knew.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Gone fission

There's an old story about the days of above ground nuclear testing in the Nevada desert.

Everybody was in place, Far Far Away, for a test. When the time came, nothing happened (but it happened suddenly!).

After much wailing, gnashing and drawing of lots, a couple of intrepid engineers drove to the test site, aware that they could be ionized vapour in an instant, to find out what went wrong. Telemetry was not a thing then, so nobody had a clue as to the condition of the Gadget.

Long story short, they found that, after thoroughly testing all the electronics and pronouncing them sound, the engineers had disconnected all their test equipment, which had in fact been putting a load on the system. Prompt removal of the load caused some kind of spike, and a breaker popped.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Like looking through a hole in a fence

That's how I used to describe the view from a CRT screen, even a larger one at decent resolution. If the engineers want hard copy, give it to them. Depending on what era we're talking about, this could be A4 paper or even A3 if the printer can handle it. And plotters, however expensive, pale in comparison to the money thrown around on engineering projects. This sounds like corporate penny-pinching at its worst, hobbling themselves to keep the bean counters happy.

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

Slight case of IT Aura?

This was yesterday. I had gone to the main desk at the gym to inform them that, contrary to expectation, I could not use my NFC tagged wristband to log in to their elliptical exercisers. Not one of them, I thought. Error message: No internet available, try again later. One of the desk people took my name and cell number and told me they'd call the responsible person.

I was on one of the machines, not logged in, when a charming young lady asked if I was the person complaining and what was the problem. I took my wristband, placed it on the machine she was standing near, and lordy lordy it worked! I jokingly suggested she had IT Aura, that etheric fluid that causes problems to disappear when the possessor is near the machine.

Long story short, I did get the problem to occur on another machine, and she immediately went into diagnostic screens I would love to know how to access. The machines are all on WiFi, and any cables you might see are power and television. Yes, you can watch soap opera, sorry, daytime drama while you sweat. Me, I just enjoy virtual hikes through scenery I might never visit.

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Unnatural selection

Forcing RTO out of paranoia or to shake out the people you "don't want" (but maybe really need) is a good way to ensure that your in-office staff will just be sales droids, schmoozers, climbers etc. Which is fine if you can out-source the real work to Asia, but then you've basically got a hybrid environment anyway, just with the remote people being cheaper (for now) but less reliable.

It looks good on paper to manglers, Unfortunately it takes a while for the bill to come due, and often the perpetrators have moved on by that time.

Google thinks the grid can't support AI, so it's spending on solar for future datacenters

Get that sky scorcher ready

When AI threatens our existence, running on solar power, it'll be Matrix time. Be ready to become a power cell.

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: Remember the Watergate Scandal?

Let's remember that any halfway decent alarm system will get very annoyed and start calling in reinforcements if a door is detected as being held open for more than, say, a minute.

But of course, halfway decent is entirely too expensive for the tastes of modern management. It's a wonder they don't just put up phony alarm boxes on the outside, as I hear is now the fashion in the UK.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Sadder tales...

A now much happier redditor told of many quick fixes in his job. Unfortunately, the way he got to do those fixes was to be uprooted from his current assignment, frog-marched through the corridors, and thrown into the room where the fault occurred, whereupon he usually diagnosed the typical not-plugged-in, not-turned-on, and lens-cap-still-on faults that bedevilled the cut-rate educators working the establishment.

Since the uprooting was usually done by someone in an official uniform that tended to induce obedience, he had little choice in the matter. Also his real work was rarely acknowledged despite keeping a woefully poor setup working. He has now moved on to better things and the institution that treated him so cruelly is hopefully flailing.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Dirk Gently link?

Maybe Douglas Adams knew of this publisher, for he created the character Michael Wenton-Weeks, fondly nicknamed Michael Wednesday-Week, who always promised publication of his rather esoteric quarterly a week on Wednesday, but never followed through, preferring to continue using the money for lavish lunches etc.

Fittingly when the BBC did a radio serialisation of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", he was played by Michael Fenton-Stevens.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: No good deed …

aka "You touch it, you own it."

Never touch anything you aren't specifically told to touch, and get it in writing if possible.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

"Golf" prank

So there was this Golf program written in Basic back in a time when you could write anything to anywhere without it being traced back. And I took a dislike to it because reasons.

So I edited a line or two to detect when the file's "owner" was using it. Just asking for UserID, and springing the trap if it was him.

Whereupon a message appeared saying he'd been "sent down" as we artlessly put it in those days. Various shenanigans then erased all traces of the trap while sending a message that it had, indeed, hunted and caught the Snark.

Well, I got the message and observed him later staring disconsolately at a printout. Never did let on to him.

Another time during a course where we all had terminals and the ID's popped up on the trainer's screen as we logged in, we decided we didn't like the boring default names and substituted our own. However the list cut off at 6 names or so. Borrowing a tip from Ender's Game, I started prefixing my ID with a space so it would pop up at the top. The final time was when the trainer came in sporting a very loud tie. I changed my ID to " A Nice Tie, Dan"

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

1 MB? Luxury! Try living with 64K on RSX-11 when every page of Pascal generates 0.5k of object code. Wrangling overlays was the art of the day, but most people had no clue, especially when they coded great globs of "common" code that just sat in RAM. If I say so myself, I came up with some neat ways of dealing with that. Moving to the VAX was like sloughing off a strait-jacket.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

It was one of those "white heat of technology" things in the 1960's. There was coverage in Tomorrow's World from James Twerp et al showing two pieces of metal welded perfectly after a whizz bang cleaned off all that surface stuff and brought the two pieces together. Like things such as fluidized sand reactors, it faded from view although I'm sure they're all very important somewhere.

Meanwhile British industry kept on adding go-faster stripes to everything.

You touch it, you own it

So be careful what you touch.

Really, what was our brave engineer thinking? Even a perfect job leaves the window open for repercussions if anything, even something unrelated, goes wrong in the immediate vicinity. Printer on the fritz? Too bad, buy a new one.

Treat anything client related as radioactive, only touch if ordered to do so, in writing.

OpenAI to buy electricity from CEO Sam Altman's nuclear fusion side hustle

There's a slight issue here

Sure fusion power is more or less infinite in fuel supply, even if you're restricted to deuterium, but note the following:

At the core of the Sun, energy is generated at a rate of less than 100W per cubic meter. For comparison your body does about 10 times that just sitting around. A compost heap does about the same without needing a temperature of 10 MK and a density thousands of times greater than water.

An internal combustion engine generates power in the cylinders at roughly 50 MW per cubic meter, or 50 kW/litre.

So your fusion technique needs to be 500,000 times better than the Sun to be comparable to fossil fuels. Or you could have a reaction chamber that's 100m square and 50m high.

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

A not entirely unrelated example of uber-secrecy

The Polaroid SX-70 instant camera was revolutionary even by the standards of Polaroid. Apart from its much better optics, it boasted the ability to deliver a picture in 10 seconds without the need to peel off and discard icky chemical film.

It came to pass that someone was contracted to produce a certain part for the camera. However, in order to do that the person was given no access to cameras and when the time finally came to do a test installation, they were only allowed to fumble inside a black bag that contained the camera hardware. This came as quite a surprise, but fortunately the part fitted and the contract was fulfilled.

Re: Debug by research and guess

At a recent contract, and one might say, a career ending one because I finally retired, many TLA's were being thrown around and black/red was definitely in play. In order to get up to speed with the technobabble going by in meetings, I asked if perhaps there was a glossary being maintained somewhere.

The answer was, appropriately, a TLA. That is to say, TIO - There Isn't One.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Xeeted?

Well, there's an opportunity that Elon missed. If he'd felt a bit more masculine when renaming Twitter, he could have hijacked a bit of the current nasdat for his own purposes.

NE1 4A Yeet?

I'll yeet myself out.

Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy

Re: High tech farming

Joker goes on the lamb

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

The cheaper option

After all, hiring competent cyber security people is expensive. As certain online tales demonstrate, the problem of security is really one of ego, incompetence and bureaucracy.