Posts by The other JJ 77 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2010
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'.
Even if more than one business account could be configured it doesn't address the requirement in the slightest if only one can be active and you have to keep switching. Recall that until about 2003 the only way to have more than one Exchange account in Outlook was to switch between profiles, then they allowed three and since about 2010 an unlimited(?) number. All the mailboxes are open and you can work with them simultaneously. That's what's needed in Teams, nothing less.
Yet again Microsoft assumes that every other business in the world works the same way as theirs.
I don't even recall the 2008 XPS M1330 being that high end, although I bought low and immediately upgraded disk and memory. But I was treating myself as it was going to be my main machine while working abroad for a year. I still use it for ham radio work as recently as last month. It's had two memory upgrades, at least two disk upgrades (most recently to SSD), dual boots W10 or Ubuntu and performance isn't as shabby as you'd expect for a twelve year old laptop.
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.
Or on the other hand if you regularly use your laptop on a desk as well as on the move, one cable into that USB-C port and you've got charging, a decent external monitor (or two), full-sized keyboard and mouse, wired network, printer, scanner, external speakers...
Some fifteen years ago when my son was a teenager he saved up to buy a DVD player so we went off to a popular high street electricals superstore that's possibly been mentioned above. The salesman offered a regular HDMI cable for £9.99 or a premium one for £29.99. He pointed out two TVs on display, one with a noticeably better picture than the other, explaining that one with the better picture was through a premium cable. I repeatedly declined both (having a drawerful at home) until he gave up and while he was getting the DVD player I took a quick look round the back, confirming my suspicion that the good one was on a vanilla HDMI cable and the bad one on an RF output.
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