* Posts by GlenP

1033 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2012

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Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

GlenP Silver badge

Re: More than light fingered

I threw a couple of PC cases in the mixed metal scrap bin at work, having removed the drives and anything that might prove useful.

Three days later we were asked if we could "get those old computers working?" They got a very short answer, and it was pointed out they shouldn't have been taking metal out of the bins anyway (at various times even the the really grotty stuff had a value).

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

GlenP Silver badge

Re: AC/DC

Dad had a valve radio from his Merchant Navy days that had two plug switches on the back, one for voltage (everything from about 50v to 250v) and the other for AC/DC.

GlenP Silver badge

We once had an IBM terminal go pop first thing on a Monday morning, not a huge problem as we were generally moving over to emulation software on PCs so had spare terminals. We swapped the dead one out for a known good device, plugged it in, switched it on and it also went pop, this time accompanied by smoke!

At that point we stopped plugging terminals in and instructed the arriving staff to not turn anything on until we said so. The in-house electrician confirmed that instead of live and neutral on the sockets we had two phases hence the overvoltage supply. He blamed the ancient wiring in the factory but I wasn't entirely convinced they hadn't made a change over the weekend that caused the problem.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

GlenP Silver badge

Small Departments...

I've worked in, and managed, small IT departments for over 30 years and for much of that time I've effectively been providing 24/7 cover but with a caveat - I've nearly always been able to trust my colleagues to respect that and only seek help in emergencies.

The most common out--of-hours call was at one employer where the night-shift in the warehouse would have password problems every few months, but they'd just text me and I could deal with the issue remotely in a few minutes (generally when I got pack from the pub!) That one was fair enough, 5 minutes of my time against a whole shift standing largely idle and missed deliveries.

I had one manager though who tried phoning me three times successively at about 2am. I didn't answer, he should have known to leave a message after the first call but didn't. It turned out to be a problem with a spreadsheet that could easily wait until the next day. I let it be known that if he repeated that I would be raising a formal grievance.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

GlenP Silver badge

NMEA

NMEA should be good, in theory, but we've found manufacturer's implementation of it can be shocking.

We were trying to debug why a chart plotter would never show the correct time after startup, even though it was talking OK to the GPS module. Eventually, with the aid of a USB NMEA interface*, we found the issue; the first thing the chart plotter did was send out a request for the correct time, the second thing it did was respond to the request and send it's own time (which was incorrect as it had no inbuilt RTC) which it then read back in! As it now believed it had the correct time it was ignoring the time data from the GPS. We were able to send the necessary commands to turn off time responses from the plotter but surely that should have been the default?

*Getting that working at all was another long story involving an IT specialist, an electronics engineer and someone with a foot in both camps!

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

We used them for some staff who travel a lot, although personally I was never that keen on them for business use.

Originally an Intel based Surface was price comparable with smaller laptops and had some advantages, but the price has risen considerably and procurement became difficult - at one point the MS Business store would not provide a VAT Invoice, apparently due to Brexit (no, I never figured that out either). At the same time smaller, lighter laptops have become the norm and, thanks to COVID, people don't travel as much.

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

GlenP Silver badge

We took out a couple of subscriptions to Copilot for testing purposes - they have not been renewed!

If you could have it in Word as and when you wanted it I could see some possible benefits, although I'm not convinced that overall it would save any time I did find it useful once or twice for giving a starting outline to a document, however to have it take up a significant part of the screen all the time and interfere with general work was just annoying.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

GlenP Silver badge

I've recounted before some workarounds for UK Government procurement policies, such as buying Sound Monitoring Equipment, a PDP11/23 with a relatively low cost analogue input, as a computer had to be from ICL.

Tesla recalls 239,382 vehicles over rearview camera problems

GlenP Silver badge

I doubt you can sell a car without rear-view mirrors at all

There are certainly some European motorhomes, and possibly commercial vehicles, with no actual mirrors, just rear view cameras and screens in the A-Pillars. The saving in fuel is significant!

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Where Beancounter logic is concerned nothing is surprising

The converse, when I worked in Local Government, was the February "What are we going to spend the remaining hardware budget on?" We weren't subject to freezes back then (it's a long time ago) but any underspend would be knocked off the following year's budget as, "Clearly you don't need it!"

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Excel can also be unhelpfully helpful...

Or, instead of just opening the CSV in Excel (and even that's got better than it used to be, it often checks about reformatting fields), use Data - From Text/CSV which gives you the option to turn off data type detection and load everything as text.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

GlenP Silver badge

Prices

Yes, the price has risen significantly *for the top of the range* but you can still by a Pi 1 A+ for under GBP16 (around USD20) excluding local taxes, and a Pi 3 for not much more.

I can't see many people wanting the 16GB, I'm happy with the 8GB for my dev system, but I'm sure there'll be a market for them.

The unlicensed OneDrive free ride ends this month

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

Agreed - we archive OneDrive folders when someone leaves the company. It's largely a waste of time given how rarely anyone needs to access the data but we have it, just in case.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Bathing attire

Noop, Rally as in a mass meeting not as in a race.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Bathing attire

Sitting by a canal in Oxfordshire wasn't quite as glamorous!

I did, however, complete the necessary work with the laptop connected to a mobile over an IrDA connection (shielded from the sun) whilst at a boat rally. The alternative would have been to go home for a few hours which would have seriously interfered with the drinking time.

Shortly after that the company decided to stop the half day off in lieu we used to get for doing what was, essentially, bean counter work so we passed it back to them - mysteriously the work that "must be done on a Sunday" could then be completed on the Monday.

HMD Fusion: A budget repairable smartphone with modular flair

GlenP Silver badge

Re: I2C

I2C isn't a bad option as there are a lot of easy to use peripheral chips that support it - it's my preferred option when adding hardware to Pi's!

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Apple II

I've had very similar recently.

Someone complained that the system was going slow because their spreadsheet took a long time to refresh.

When I examined the spreadsheet I realised they'd got VLOOKUPs on each of several thousand records to a long list on an external spreadsheet that was stored in SharePoint. Given that both lists were refreshable queries to an SQL database they only had to ask and I could have amended the base query in a few minutes. They didn't get the faster laptop that they were hoping for!

GlenP Silver badge

Cobol...

About my only exposure to Cobol was when my then boss asked me to take a look at some code she was struggling to debug.

I don't think I'd ever even seen the language before but I was trained and proficient in BASIC and Pascal*, and had a self-taught working knowledge of FORTRAN, so simply going through the code logically was easy enough. It only took a few minutes to find the obvious error, I'm not blaming my boss, it was one of those where fresh eyes were needed.

*Unlike other establishments at the time Newcastle Uni focussed on programming skills in a single language, UBC Pascal, rather than teaching simple skills in multiple languages. It may have reduced immediate employment opportunities but overall it's stood me in good stead for nearly 40 years.

Backup failed, but the boss didn't slam IT – because his son was to blame

GlenP Silver badge

Backups...

My worst backup incident occurred when I was on holiday, and was thanks to the boss! I may have recounted this before on here.

Back in the days before cloud backups, when off-siting meant taking a set of tapes home with you, I was managing a 486 SCO Unix HP box with a DAT drive, running a number of terminals. Everything was fine when I went away for a week but, just in case, I took the "mobile" phone with me, this was a Motorola car phone attached to a large lead acid battery pack (see https://www.tvfilmprops.co.uk/det/4016/Motorola-4800x-Partner-Retro-Mobile-Phone/ for a picture). I'd left clear instructions on swapping the DAT tape each day but in the middle of the week I got a call, "The backup tape isn't ejecting, what should we do?" My clear instructions were to leave things as they were, don't do anything and I'd sort it when I got back a few days later.

The general manager wasn't happy with this so, without telling me, he called in an engineer from the parent company's support people who was only familiar with DOS PCs and clearly had never encountered Unix before. Apparently without even looking at anything he just powered down the box and proceeded to fix the tape drive, which he did successfully, before powering back on again. At that point he got a load of error messages and not much else. With no idea what to do he just left, basically saying it wasn't his problem as he only did hardware!

I returned the following week to find a server with a trashed file system and the most recent working backup was a week old. It took a few days to rebuild everything, restore the last available data and re-enter nearly a week's work. Did I get any thanks or an apology? Of course I didn't! A while later they relocated the operation to the parent company's offices and I turned down all offers to go there.

Veteran Microsoft engineer shares some enterprise support tips

GlenP Silver badge

A lot comes down to being polite with users and not being condescending.

Sometimes when they ask for an explanation they'll accept, "How long have you got?" or, "I could explain it but you probably won't understand!" as being reasonable. Saying, "You don't need to know that!" is definitely condescending and inadvisable when the person at the other end of the phone has been an IT professional since before you were born - the service engineer at our support discovered that when he found the sales director* leaning over his shoulder a few minutes later asking what he was playing at, he left a few weeks later.

Most users are honest enough to know they've made a mistake but I tend to just say something like, "I'm not blaming anyone but the last time this happened it was blah, blah, blah" or similar.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Me Too!

The same compliance people told one of the group companies that they must separate debtor and creditor roles in accounts, and whoever raised the POs could not also enter invoices. All a bit difficult when the company only has one administrator!

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Someone else's number

We're cautious about reissuing mobile numbers internally after one person had given their work number to a finance company. He was clearly in arrears with them but they refused to accept that it was a work phone and he was no longer with us, even after me contacting them directly. As the calls came from different random numbers they couldn't be blocked.

We ended up changing the number, and now generally do so routinely unless it's a sales manager's number passed on to their replacement,

GlenP Silver badge

Me Too!

It wasn't unusual to use your own mobile in the past, company phones tended to be limited to people who were on the road a lot. If you were lucky you might get a pager or, in a large team, there might be an "on call" mobile so it was simple convenience. Most of the time people respected that and would only call or message in a genuine emergency, such as when the warehouse came on-shift at 22:00 on a Sunday only to find the Friday late shift had changed the user* password on the ERP system and not told them.

One manager didn't understand the term "respect" though. He once called me three times in succession at around 2am without leaving a message. I ignored him, it turned out the only issue was a spreadsheet that wouldn't update and I couldn't have done anything about it from home in the the early hours anyway. I made it very clear that any repetition would result in a formal complaint. That manager was one of the reasons I left the company but that's another story!

We had plenty of experiences of Americans not understanding geography, on one occasion the corporate HR in the US asked our UK HR Manager to "pop over to Australia and help them with a problem!" They seemed to assume that as Australia were "British" they must be geographically close and were quite surprised when it was pointed out that they were a lot closer than we were.

*Yes, we had a single user for the entire warehouse as it wasn't viable for them to log on and off constantly. We'd have had a user per shift but the compliance people from the US were trying to insist we must not have any generic users, creating more than a couple would have generated unwanted attention.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Sometimes...

The trouble is IT are deemed to "own" anything with more than one button on it, therefore it is our problem!

GlenP Silver badge

Sometimes...

I prefer the idiot users to the ones who think they know what they're doing and try to be helpful.

Fortunately not a problem now (I work from home so it's SEP*) but I can't count the number of times helpful users have tried to remove jammed paper in copiers and printers and ripped it, leaving me to try and retrieve the remains from the bowels of the machine instead of just releasing the relevant pressure rollers and easing the paper out.

* Somebody Else's Problem, with thanks to Douglas Adams

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

GlenP Silver badge

Telephone Systems

I genuinely had a telephone system salesman try the contract term trick on me.

Having made it clear we wanted a 3 year lease (we had enough useless crap lying around that had been taken on 5 or 7 years leases when the effective life was around 3 years) he brought the paperwork and pressured me into getting it signed immediately. I made it clear that wasn't happening so he left quickly before I had a chance to check the agreement. Sure enough the agreement was for 5 years, not 3, with automatic rollovers at the same rate (most equipment leases at that time reverted to a peppercorn rate after the term as by then you'd paid for the equipment).

The salesman didn't seem that surprised when I told him we wouldn't be signing, but he did attempt to get me to accept it anyway despite the fact I'd got a better monthly payment over 3 years with BT than his 5 year rate.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

GlenP Silver badge

Passwords

A former employer contacted me some time after I'd left asking if I knew the administrator passwords for some NT boxes used for SolidWorks 3D CAD.

As they'd made me redundant I wasn't that inclined to help anyway but I pointed out that the computers had been sourced and set up* with no consultation with, or input from, my IT department so why did they think I would know passwords for them?

*My only involvement was rescuing the supplier's van after they'd thought it a good wheeze to drive over soaking wet grass so they could "post" the kit through a window rather than carry it 20 yards or so through the entrance. My old and battered Range Rover was well up to the task of pulling them out but I don't think our building management were very happy about the ruts left by the van!

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

GlenP Silver badge

Unless you were one of those people who had a Jupiter Ace!

I wasn't, but a distant relative bought one. Programming in Forth was "interesting", I had it running on a Spectrum when I was experimenting with an I/O interface - IIRC it was popular for controlling radio telescopes.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Thank you

Same here - my first programming was in BASIC on an RM-380Z back in around 1980, followed by a ZX-81 (bought with earnings from a holiday job).

The knowledge gained was useful when I was presented with some FORTRAN programming tasks in my first IT role, once I managed to get used to the rigid syntax!

RIP Prof Kurtz.

iOS 18 added secret and smart security feature that reboots iThings after three days

GlenP Silver badge

Hopefully they've at least disabled this when Guided Access is set.

The National Museum of Computing reboots Bletchley Park's H Block

GlenP Silver badge

Well Worth a Visit!

The renovations are very smart and well done (and I'm not influenced in the slightest by the rather good Afternoon Tea provided at the Reboot event!)

If anyone hasn't visited TNMOC I'd urge them to do so, and don't try and combine it with a visit to Bletchley Park itself on the same day as there really isn't time for both.

The only slight downside is how much of the equipment in the museum I've actually worked on over the years!

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

GlenP Silver badge

And that is why...

you always do a DIR, ls, SELECT * FROM or whatever before any significant delete command.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

GlenP Silver badge

I always say that it's the way I threaten them with being reprogrammed - with a large axe!

With thanks to Douglas Adams of course.

GlenP Silver badge

Fastest:

Ring Ring

User: "My computer is beeping constantly!"

Me: "Take the file off the corner of the keyboard!"

User: "How did you know that?"

Me: "Magic!"

Of course the beeping resulting from a constant field overflow was distinctive, even over the phone, but you don't tell the users that as it would destroy the aura.

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

GlenP Silver badge

Re: This will get worse.

Do you even need a clock on it?

No, you don't! My previous microwave was advertised as not having a clock to reduce power consumption* in standby mode. As there's a clock on the oven** (I suppose you might want to set a timed start and end) and an analogue clock already it was no loss.

*Not sure how much energy the display actually needs, but it's probably negligible.

**An oven I rarely use since getting a Ninja Foodi (which is not connected and doesn't have a permanent clock).

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

GlenP Silver badge

Users...

I have users who will open an incoming mail and if it needs action they'll leave it open until they get round to dealing with it - they then close it and leave it in the inbox.

Result, multiple open emails (although 60 would be excessive I've seen around 20 at once) and an Inbox running to thousands of messages.

I've tried educating them, if it's in the inbox it needs dealing with, otherwise it's deleted or filed, to no avail.

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Computer wiped every month ?

Computer Misuse Act came into law in 1990.

Section 3 very clearly applies (see below). I also think it's very close to fraudulent behaviour and is certainly unethical.

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if—

(a)he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer;

(b)at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and

(c)either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies.

(2)This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act—

(a)to impair the operation of any computer;

(b)to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer;

(c)to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data;

(d)to enable any of the things mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (c) above to be done.

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

GlenP Silver badge

I'm not sure how it came about but in around 1988 the small software house/dealer I was working for were asked if we could help someone who'd just installed Excel and was having a few problems. On the basis of having had brief exposure to SuperCalc and Lotus Symphony (the DOS version) I was despatched to see what I could do.

The customer seemed happy enough - he paid the bill and gave me a very nice lunch in the local pub!

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

GlenP Silver badge

I should probably have said that it was easy enough technically! They had two floors of one office, a factory and a second building to do - I was working in the States when they did the install though so was well out of the way.

GlenP Silver badge

In a previous role I'd been moved on from being IS Manager to working on a global ERP implementation, leaving local systems in the charge of my operator (who was ex-finance and had only a few years IT knowledge*).

A while later they decided to replace the thinnet (10base2) networking with Cat-5, an easy enough job except that this was in the days before autosensing on router ports (for the youngsters, you had to use a crossover cable when connecting routers and switches together - the cable pouch in my laptop bag still has one). The installers hadn't explained this, and had left a mix of unlabelled patch cables behind so when my former assistant did some repatching most of the network went down and she couldn't work out the solution or even undo her changes.

I was asked for help and quickly sorted it, then explained the problem and got the cable tester out to label all the patch cables. A couple of days later senior management told me, in no uncertain terms, that I shouldn't have got involved, it wasn't by role, etc. I did ask whether I should have ignored the problem and left most of the business unable to work but didn't get a response! I already knew my days were numbered and was only hanging on for the redundancy payout which came a few weeks later - as I expected the whole place was largely closed within a couple of years.

*One of the senior managers once instructed me to, "Make sure xxxx knows everything you know!" My suggestion that she would have to go to University then gain at least 10 years experience first didn't go down well.

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

GlenP Silver badge

Contrary View

Just to put the opposite viewpoint from all the above I did have one customer who would always request an invoice for planned work in advance, and would hand me a cheque for the full amount when I arrived.

They were an insurance agent and most of their transactions were in-and-out anyway so her view was that it was cheaper to pay immediately than employ someone to manage the accounts payable. It was a refreshing attitude if a little embarrassing when I arrived to do some work and discovered that their machine wouldn't read either copy of the relevant floppy disks that I had with me! In those pre-internet and laptop days there wasn't much I could do except return to the office and revisit the next day with disks written on a different machine plus, as an emergency measure, a desktop with the files on it in the boot just in case.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Ways to encourage payment

I used to work for a large American corporate who were bad payers at the best of times and who unilaterally decided to extend all payments to 60 day terms. We pointed out that the large suppliers wouldn't accept this and we never paid the smaller suppliers that quickly anyway!

At a European Management conference (in a very nice Amsterdam Hotel) we got our opportunity to make the point that getting a few percent discount for 30 day terms (and sticking to them) was far more beneficial than the gain on stretching payments to 60 days - I don't think it made any difference though.

GlenP Silver badge

Way back I worked for a small software house/hardware dealer and we had a couple of customer who were notorious for only paying invoices when they wanted something else. In one case all they ever bought was a single box of paper at a time, which they'd pay for three months later when they wanted the next box! The trouble was it was a small town and most of the customers were also personal friends of the owner so he'd let them get away with things, such as buying a computer from Dixons instead of from us, but then expecting us to set it up for free. Inevitably the business didn't survive.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

GlenP Silver badge

Way Back...

A friend's daughter sent him a photo from her work, all 30MB of it, and he only had a dial up modem! Inevitably this blocked all his incoming email* so he called his unofficial support, i.e. me (payment used to be made in bottles of decent Scotch :) ).

Fortunately I immediately spotted what was happening and was able to delete the message from the mailbox as I dread to think how long it would have taken to download.

*He was a local councillor and sat on several committees so this was a significant issue.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

GlenP Silver badge

Had exactly the same years ago. We specifically asked the customer to unplug the power cable and plug it firmly back in, she said she'd done that, so we then asked her to swap the power cables between the monitor and the computer, she'd already done that too. We warned her that an engineer call out might be chargeable but she insisted we went ahead.

Her boss was not amused to receive a £100+ (over £300 today) bill from IBM for the wasted visit to push the power cable back in.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Installing the same level

Provided you didn't turn it off and back on too quickly! We were external telephone support for a number of these provided by a large insurance company to their consultants.

The Model 50 was notorious for blowing PSUs so the instruction to the user would be something like, "When I tell you to, please turn off the machine and do not turn it back on!" We'd leave a minute between off and on which seemed sufficient.

A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them

GlenP Silver badge

Re: You have it the wrong way around.

Last time I ordered in BK (a long time ago) the staff used to have to ask exactly the same questions.

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

GlenP Silver badge

Not tidying but...

I know the feeling! A while back we had a fixed electrical installation test on a Saturday. It was mid-afternoon by the time they got round to the server room supply and I duly shut everything down and unplugged it from the wall (I've been caught before).After the testing was complete I fired everything up only to find two network switches were completely dead. I'd usually have a spare or two around but I think they'd gone to another site to fix a problem, it was too late to get replacements that day and Sunday wasn't looking hopeful either.

I could get the servers back online with the kit I had but it was looking likely the local staff would be without their PCs and phones until some time on the Monday morning. Cue some creative thinking, I was able to swap a small switch in a separate cabinet for an even smaller one and retrieve the 24-port switch I happened to have at home (it fell off the back of a previous employer's office, honest, Guv) so by lunchtime Sunday everything was connected up again. New switches were sourced on the Monday and another older one was replaced at the same time to provide a spare just in case.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

GlenP Silver badge

Re: 'Exit interview'

Or an opportunity to drop people you hate in the sh1t!

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Hamster wheels?

90+% of Alexa's are now just being used as radio alarm clocks

Yep, that's what I bought mine for (it was cheaper than a decent DAB radio alarm). It also lets me turn the bedside light on and off on voice command - saves stumbling from door to bed in the dark.

They're hardly critical use cases.

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