Posts by hopkinse 135 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2012
Office I worked in, early 90s when smoking in offices was still a thing, all the PCs were under desks so all the fluff and dust from the carpet tiles stuck to the nicotine that coated the insides. Doing memory upgrades that involved endless numbers of 512kbit DIP chips was fun and games!
A colleague once managed to send an email, complaining about how things within the organisation were a shambles, as he put it, to the entire organisation rather than the couple of people it was intended for. We used Novell Groupwise at the time and he accidentally put a * in the recipient list, which automatically causes your email to be sent to every address in the global address list. Oops!
"That makes it hard to stay on the merry-go-round that is corporate executive hiring. It is much better to say nothing, be a pleasant personality and parachute out of the ball of fail only to land in another cushy post."
This is what is wrong with the Public Sector ( local govt./civil service) - constant merry-go-round of decision makers who bail out to their next gig before the sh*t hits the fan
many moons ago I worked in an office where I used to have to hide my coffee cup every night because the cleaners thought it was a good idea to periodically dump any cups they could lay their hands into a bucket of bleach, presumably to get the tannin stains off the tea-drinkers' cups. Took a good couple of days to get rid of the hint of bleach taste drinking coffee so god knows how bad it must have tasted drinking tea out of them!
A long(ish) time ago, in the late 90s/early 00s I was working for a company where I had spent a fair few years doing coding on a PC based Retail Point of Sale system.
We also provided servicedesk services for a variety of retail chains in the UK and used a fairly low-to-mid-range system, called Heat, to log calls for all the different customers.
I was given the task of seeing if we could make it multi-tenant so that calls could be easily logged and managed for each customer using categories, SLAs, and stuff like that tailored for each customer and to make it easy to switch between different customers within the system when taking calls.
After a bit of time playing with the out of the box customisation options, which were mostly around tweaking fields on forms and setting-up system wide categories,SLAs,escalation routes, I ended-up implementing a whole load of functionality using triggers and stored procedures on the back end database, which was SQL Server 7.0.
I had never even clapped eyes on SQL Server before this - The PoS system I had worked on used a flat file back end database and I had no SQL Server training (of course!) so I pretty much learned on the hoof and had no support from the people who had originally installed the system.
To cut a long story short, I accidentally truncated the core call reference table that everything else hung off pretty much at the busiest time of the day! There were no Pk/Fk relationships within the database to stop that happening - all the relationships were handled within the software itself.
I couldn't just restore the database without kicking everyone out of the system and causing a fair amount of TITSUP* so, after about 30 seconds of wild panic, I ended up restoring to another database everything up to the last transaction log backup, which I had thankfully enabled a couple of weeks previously after discovering the woeful backup strategy that had been left by the original installers, and copied the restored data back over to the live database.
All done in 15 minutes flat! Hardly anyone even noticed there had been a problem and I found a dark corner to go and recover my sanity!
Needless to say, I was much more careful about using the truncate command after that....
On the plus side, I moved to a better paid DBA job in the finance sector a year or so later off the back of that project!
* Total Inability To Support Usual PoSProblems
You can bet your bottom dollar that the DOD Azure deployment won't be running on any of the public cloud kit, will have extra layers of redundancy and will be much more strictly controlled, in terms of patching/updates.
For me, the rot had set in during the Computeraid days - I was in an office outside Glasgow and head office/sales was Farnborough. Sales didn't have a clue about using our product ( till software) as a way in to then sell other nicely profitable services off the back of it. They were only interested in stuff you could throw over the wall and forget about
I worked for Getronics briefly in the early noughties, having started my job working for Alcatel in the mid 90s, then our unit was sold to Computeraid, a spin-off from Thorn EMI. After losing their shirt on Autonomy they were bought out by PinkRoccade, which was the privatised Dutch Civil Service IT and one of the largest employers in Holland, behind Phillips. Then Getronics bought out PinkRoccade.
Each move brought further disconnect from the business so I took a sideways step elsewhere...
"Didn't GCHQ essentially told parliament that they don't trust any networking gear from anybody or that any network could be deemed secure? An everything should be encrypted before it sent across any network?"
Is that not essentially paragraph 1 of any discussion on security that's worth its salt?!
The USP was supposedly that the software was more than just a search engine and would analyze/mine and give context to data and could do supposedly 'intelligent' search.
The company I worked for in the late 90s/early 2000s sunk a shitload of cash into a datacentre built in their head office in Farnborough ( go figure??? First mistake - it was prime office estate not nice and cheap industrial unit) to sell Autonomy as an early SaaS offering.
Like everything else that we were doing at the time that didn't involve box shifting or other throw it over the wall and forget business, our sales people didn't have a clue and it went nowhere. Pretty much broke the company and the net result was that we were bought out by a Dutch outfit called PinkRoccade.
