Posts by Daedalus

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: DIBOL

My first introduction to lex/yacc, and flex/bison, was in translating one CAD format file to another as part of a contract job. Apart from the mind-bending effect of using recursive BNF declarations, it proved to be so effective I went on to using it as a first resort in any remotely language-like application later. It didn't hurt that I'd been introduced to finite-state automatons earlier.

Long story short, somewhere out there, some translators for a medical device information protocol called LIS2A2 are, or more likely, were, chugging away while the competition, mired in C or C++ or even (really?) Pascal, were tossing out error after error.

And my thanks for all this? "It's too strict".

The protocol was well documented (although it's one of those non-standard standards, with lots of options for doing it "your way") and as far as I was concerned, it was easier for them to play by the rules than for me to add endless exceptions.

And no, I wouldn't dream of getting involved again, for any price. Software engineering is so much easier than people engineering.

Mine's a Sam Adams Boston Lager

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Re: ahh

I'm just surprised he didn't get nailed for any minor glitches that still happened. Engineers should only clean up their own messes, not ones above their pay grade. This is cynical, I know, but born of experience. You touch it, you own it.

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy

The usual suspects

Pwning marketeers has to be like shooting fish in a barrel. They're too busy thinking of new ways to waste other people's time.

Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

Re: Simon, are you there?

Well, he's still there. He's not a free man he's a number. Thank you, Chocolate Factory Search Engine.

https://www.theregister.com/author/2925085

So anyone bookmarking him to get to the weekend-adjacent servings of tech support derring-do or derring-don't should use the above link. Until that stops working, of course.

Simon, are you there?

Poor Simon Sharwood's author page at Vulture HQ has gone 404. Other author pages are still OK.

Is this a bad sign?

https://www.theregister.com/author/simon-sharwood

The big AI companies are going to see their margins disappear

Conglomerification, that's the ticket

If you can't make money competing with your rivals, you get together with them and form a cartel. That's where this is headed. It needn't even be obvious. A little bit of indirection, the way billionaires use shell companies now, and it will be nigh on impossible to prove collusion. Using AI to run the cartel makes it even easier.

US Army goes green-ish, wants soldiers munching on plant proteins

But what about the emissions?

"We have excess methane and sulphides wafting in from the east. Incoming!"

Re: Semi-camouflaged food

Yeah, make it from POW's!

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

What are the odds....

..that all the employees who told their bosses to tell their bosses that this would happen....are the ones who got sacked to free up the budget for AI.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: Very Large Magnet

In the early days of superconducting magnets I attended a talk by one of the pioneers in their use for the related field of NMR spectroscopy, which for those outside the field, requires an extremely stable RF signal.

After the exposition of How It All Worked the presenter recounted how an unfortunately placed metal chair flew across the lab and collided violently with the apparatus.

"At this point," he observed dryly, "we lost the frequency lock".

Re: ISO certification VS security

Just like they all announced CMM level 5 compliance back in 2000 AD. The worst part was that so many companies in the USA and elsewhere took that as gospel. In a world where Micro$oft had self assessed at level 3.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Sometimes a little human engineering is the key

I mean, if all the hardware fixes aren't dealing with the problem, maybe asking people what goes on around the issue could be the way to diagnose it.

Of course, asking people to connect two things together, or even remember that they happened, can be a bit much. We hear a lot about "xxxxx doesn't work" when what really happened was something popped up on the screen and was immediately dismissed without being read.

And then there's ego:

"What were you doing when it happened?"

"Are you accusing me of causing it?"

Soft skills, which are often deficient in your average techie, sometimes save the day.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

Good Lord, not even calling them 10p coins. I think we have a Methuselah here.

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

BBC news online just went behind a paywall. I can still see some stuff in a browser thanks to various script and ad suppressors, but the BBC app will stiff you every time. I guess I'm now an ex-expat.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Astrology Domine

Good thing the miscreant didn't go with "Mercury in retrograde". That nonsense is still wreaking havoc today.

Re: Power without responsibility

In the late 1960s BBC-2 used to run a short film about setting up colour TV. There wasn't much BBC-2 programming, but if you had Rediffusion they would rent you a 625-line capable telly so you could watch all that artsy content (and Spike Milligna!) in the evening in black and white. Us school kids got home early enough that we would watch anything, even those trial short films.

Evoluon anybody?

Colour Telly at home? Not at 500 pounds back then. That's easily 10,000 pounds today. If you wanted to see colour, you went to hang out at the department store. For some reason it was a really popular place at around 5pm on a Saturday in football season.

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Meet the new boss

I'm sure it will end up that Europe moves to its own cloud data managed by Indian engineers, instead of American cloud data managed by Indian engineers.

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

North of England? Weather?

I'm from the Northeast so I'll agree about the bad weather, but where is a company located such that weather can impact the ability of someone to get to it? Unless you're up in the hills or on the Coast of Inaccessibility (Workington, Maryport etc.) you are going to be near an urban centre. Maybe this is a case of one emergency help line covering the whole region, in which case, why have the contract at all?

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

AI is just a fashionable excuse.

The word from the inside is simple: offshoring.

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Old story, new mess

Pascal was a language invented to teach coding. It was therefore an obvious candidate for writing systems. (seriously, its persnickerty approach to data types was a great advantage for education, and a disaster for systems)

The C Language was invented to write systems. It was therefore an obvious candidate for teaching coding. (I mean after all, memory is just memory. Data typing is useful until it stops being useful.)

So obviously we need a type-safe memory-safe version of C. In addition to C#, Java, etc. etc.

Horses for courses.

Cybersecurity pros admit to moonlighting as ransomware scum

Motives?

Let's face it, many a game-keeper turned poacher did so because of the greed and stupidity of the people they worked for. Cyber security? Companies have heard of it, but you guys cost too much so bye bye.

Everybody has a theory about why Nvidia dropped $20B on Groq - they're mostly wrong

I used to grok this

Groq's architecture sounds a lot like good old array processing with data pipelines and dedicated processing modules. OK back in the day the processing was Add and Multiply instead of whatever these things do, but the idea of acceleration with parallel processing has a long history. GPU's are almost certainly using similar architecture already. The original hardware from Floating Point Systems claimed (somewhat dubiously) 64 MegaFLOPS from a 4 MHz clock. It was a fun thing to work with, extracting the last ounce of efficiency by creatively arranging data flows and operations.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

White heat of technophobia

It's my understanding that the Beeb "outsourced"** all its "content generation" years ago, so there's nothing lying around that the thrusting executives in charge might see as educational.

** All the in-house people got pushed out and re-hired as independent production thingummies.

Brit broadband grilling descends into farce over targets and definitions

Blind vs. blind

MP's who don't know what they're asking about grilling ministers who don't know what they're talking about.

"What about this wheel thingy?"

"Well, we're having trouble there. We can't decide what colour it should be."

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.