Posts by The other JJ 90 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2010
I stopped doing fixes for mates for much the same reason, after the time one collared me in the pub with "JJ, we've got a problem with the computer. You know you stopped it making a noise last week" (the PSU fan was clogged with dust and cat hair) "well since then my wife hasn't been able to download her email, and it was obviously something you did as it started after you fixed the noise"
Years ago I worked at an engineering firm where there receptionist wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. It was the advent of fax and head office had one installed in reception (probably next to the telex machine) so the various divisions could exchange documents. After a week or so said receptionist asked me if all the machines were the same, and anyone could see documents as they arrived. I confirmed that they were and told here that if she needed to send anything confidential she should put it in an envelope and put that through.
A few days later I was summoned to a meeting without coffee in HR, where they attempted to give me a serious bollocking for taking advantage, but failed because they couldn't help laughing throughout it.
Amazon tried that with their 'dash button' but consumers baulked at paying about a tenner per product for a button to order something at an unknown price.
Maybe Alexa could do it? "It looks like you're trying to squeeze the last toothpaste out of that tube. Would you like me to order a new one?" Er...?
For shits and giggles, run your DCs as Hyper-V guests with host time sync enabled, and join your Hyper-V hosts to the domain.
Funs fine. Until it doesn't. And then you have the problem of logging into machines that can't communicate with their DC because their clocks have been chasing each other all over the shop.
About ten years ago at a firm where I was the BOFH we had a user who would come to IT literally screaming if the network hiccupped in the afternoon because she'd lost her day's work. We learned that when she sat down to work in the morning she'd start a new document for something like a major tender or proposal, work all day, and only when she was wrapping up to go home would she save it. (She probably wouldn't have bothered at that point had we not frequently rebooted overnight for updates.) When people (not just IT) pointed out that this was asking for trouble she countered that she didn't want to give it a name until it was complete.
Never let builders or even electricians install a network. At best give them the cable and tell them explicitly where to run it. I've twice been called in to diagnose the network in a new build (one office, one residential) where the electricians thought it was like telephones and daisy-chained one Cat5 around every socket.
A few years ago a work colleague announced that the problem with her home internet was the wireless router and asked whether we could recommend one, but in trying to sound cool around the techies she pronounced it 'rowter'.
She returned from lunch to find on her desk a Screwfix catalogue open at the section of cordless power tools.
That would make for a great plot element in a heist movie, where the robbers get away in three mini Coopers in a congested Italian city where the traffic has been brought to a standstill by taking over the traffic light computer with a hacked tape. What's that? It's been done?
In a similar vein, hardened SharePoint admins and power users may encounter the restriction that the string _vti can't be used places like folder names, and it becomes apparent that this is because it's used internally by SharePoint for unique internal folder names. But why _vti?
VTI stands for Vermeer Technologies Incorporated, founded in 1994 to create development tools for that newfangled world wide web, which including FrontPage and Personal Web Server. Sold to Microsoft just two years later those products evolved radically many times indirectly resulting in SharePoint. So a decision made thirty years ago, probably out of expedience and convenience is still embodied in a flagship product today and likely to remain so for a decade or more to come.
Clearing out my long term storage last year inevitably I'd come across stuff that looked interesting and, reminded by the mention of DEC RSX-11M up the thread, I found an RSX-11M-Plus administrators course, some thirty pages of it, not that I remembered going on it such course as I'd done my training at DEC Reading. As I read through nostalgia took hold and I was reminded what an excellent OS it had been. Only as I turned the final page did I find my own name as the course leader and author.
I may have posted this before but back in the mid to late '80s we supplied a system to an office plant rental company, the sort that supplied and maintained potted plants to offices all over London. A 386 box running Xenix with about six serial terminals, it was installed late autumn when they said business was quietening down and had run fine through the winter until suddenly the customer complained that it was crashing a couple of times a day most days. Suspecting something to do with the usage increasing we took a look and did the usual sort of diagnostics but couldn't find a problem, and after a couple of weeks the problem went away. Some months later the problem started again so I went in to have another look. I wanted to speak to our contact who'd just gone out to their massive greenhouse, and as I joined him I heard a grinding sound and looked up to see the windows being opened by a system of rusty gears and motors. "Yeah, it's controlled by thermostats" he said, pre-empting my question. "...and it happens in spring and autumn but stays closed all winter and open all summer?" I hauled him back to the office and sure enough we were met by the users waiting for the system to reboot. One UPS later (that they'd said they wouldn't need when we originally quoted) and they were happy horticulturalists.
> though it also had Jerry Pournelle (and I remember someone even wrote a parody of his columns on Usenet, mocking his characteristic "style")
Was that the 'Terry Journelle' piece, that I think found its way into the April edition of a UK computer magazine. "Send me stuff and I might review it, I might not, but you probably won't get it back"
Back in around 1988 a client had a PDP-11/44 system with IIRC several RM06 disk drives, similar to the one in the story. One evening they called me in to do an overnight reverse engineering of the ODS-1 disk format to try to retrieve data from a drive.
The backstory was that one of their PFYs, who already had a reputation as a bit of a cowboy, had swapped the packs for the evening backup, but tried to hurry and crossthreaded the pack leaving it at a slight angle, but the tension allowed the cover to unlock so he didn't notice. Apparently when MOUNT DUA0: was entered in the next room there was a sound like a gunshot as the heads, travelling at several hundred miles per hour, hit the edge of the platters full on. The remains of the heads were vacuumed from the drive bay.
It also transpired that the filesystem had grown too large for two disks but he'd not had the balls to tell the beancounters they needed more disks, so instead of the A -> B -> C rotation of two drive sets, he quietly swapped to an A -> B -> A rotation of three drives. And the drive he'd trashed was the current copy and its pair, newly formatted.
They told him not to come in the next day, or the one after that, or indeed, again.
The downvotes essentially criticise the Hildebrand Glow meter as being a geek thing, but are we not geeks here? :-)
But seriously, I've gone this route myself and learned a few things about my electricity consumption that have saved a fair bit. But sure, it's not for the average consumer. And some don't want to learn, like a former IT Director who complains about his several hundred a month bill for using fan heaters as British Gas can't make his central heating work effectively, but doesn't accept that the cause is incompetence from BG that he needs to deal with.
Depends how old you are as it's been around since 1980. But it's mainly an amateur radio thing, often used in contests for targets like how many major squares you can make contact with in 24 hours. It's usually used with four or six character precision (about 100km and 10km respectively) but the standard goes to eight characters or about 1km.
So while nowhere near close enough for emergency use, it has the benefit like Lat/Long and the OS Grid of being monotonic, so comparing two locations it doesn't take much mental arithmetic to see which direction one is from the other, whether it's a long or short distance and whether you're getting closer or further. Unlike w3w.
Yours, from IO91ul...
Similar thing a few years ago. Mid-morning, workstations were dropping off the network and a quick look showed them using 192.168.1.x which wasn't the workstation LAN range. Not having particularly intelligent switches at that time we could only isolate bits of the network and ask people to reboot to see what address they got while someone went searching for any rogue SSIDs. We finally traced it to a meeting room where we found a previous generation BT HomeHub hidden behind a cupboard and plugged into a network port. We recalled that the Sales Director was constantly bitching that his phone or laptop couldn't get internet in parts of the building, and he had previous form for plugging a cheap switch in behind his workstation to get a connection for his Mac, which we didn't allow on the LAN, and which slowed his machine to 100Mbps so a core application was timing out.
We took the offending device to the carpark, took turns at reducing it to scrap with a lump hammer and left the remains on his desk. Naturally he went apeshit until I pointed out that the company had lost some 200 man hours of work owning to his unauthorised network modification and I would be quite happy to discuss it with HR. He learned his lesson this time.
No mention of whether the i Vision Dee can express panic if you enter a virtual world while in motion.
Probably still negotiating the rights from the estate of Douglas Adams.
"The Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. They follow the principle "what you don't know can't hurt you" and turn completely black at the first sign of danger. This prevents you from seeing anything that might alarm you. This does, however, mean that you see absolutely nothing, including where you're going."
Just before Covid I was working at a site where all the IT kit was in one of those freestanding air-conditioned rack cases. One day I noticed that a cleaner had spotted that the gap between the top of this rack and the ceiling was just the right size to store their bulk packs of toilet rolls. That was also the air outflow for the cabinet. With trepidation the head of IT and I opened the cabinet to be met by a blast of tropical air and a cacophony of warning bleeps. We were amazed nothing had shut down but he suspected the previous infrastructure manager had overridden the safety thresholds.
One time a client's office had an electric lock fitted to their main door (from the shared stairwell) operated by RFID fobs. When they called everyone together to demonstrate it and hand out the fobs I asked if there was a key override. They said there was and the key was in the reception desk (inside). I suggested someone take that key home.
Next day as I arrived (fashionably late, as coders do) the office manager asked my why I had suggested taking the key, because nobody had been able to get in that morning until she arrived. I pointed out in the corner behind a coffee table the unplugged PSU for the lock and asked where they thought the cleaner would plug in her vacuum and whether she'd remember to plug the lock back in afterwards.
"surely the system should lock the user out completely after X number of rejections"
And the design fault with that is effectively denial of service. Some IT bod is working through the weekend on an upgrade, shipping are working through to clear a backlog or the chief beancounter is down to the wire for filing tax on Sunday night, and now they're locked out with no IT support available to fix the problem until Monday. Not every business has or can afford 247 IT support.
The worst thing about f+f support is that the last person to touch it takes on an unlimited warranty to fix any problem however unrelated. Real life case in point "Hey John, you remember a few weeks ago you fixed the squeaking noise our computer was making? [the fan was very dirty] Well since then my wife's been having problems downloading her email".
Reminds me of a couple of years ago when I was one of a development team of two, struggling to meet increasingly ridiculous deadlines. So obviously to relieve our burden they hired a project mangler to encourage us to work smarter, not harder. They never did figure out why we would mutter darkly about someone called 'Jen'.
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