* Posts by GlenP

1093 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2012

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Bad design

If I have to look in the manual (absolute last resort of course) it's a really bad design!

One of Apricot's IBM compatibles had the power switch on the back. It was a grey plastic rectangle with a slightly stepped outer edge, just the right size and shape to look like the cover over a 9-pin serial port or similar. I made very sure when I installed the machine that the customer staff knew exactly where it was.

More intuitive was an HP tower with the power button at the top (right next to the floppy eject button - a molly-guard was deployed on our in-house machine). We had a phone call from a customer late one afternoon, bearing in mind this was the days of hard power switches.

Customer : "How do i turn the computer off?"

Us: "Errm, press the same button as you did this morning!"

Customer: "Yes, I know that, but I've forgotten where it is!"

It takes a special kind to forget, in 8 hours, where a power button is when it's on the front of a tower system in the most obvious place possible!

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

GlenP Silver badge

Re: When I were a lad

I'm not quite as ancient :) , it was PASCAL and they'd implemented a data entry system to bypass the punch cards*. Jobs were still submitted to the IBM 370 though and it was 15-30 minutes for you to get your output (or longer if the operators had gone to lunch),

I remember the feeling of dread when you saw a huge great stack of paper in the relevant pigeonhole as that usually meant you'd c****d up badly.

*The previous year had still been punch cards so I narrowly missed them.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Not just in IT

Confession time, I've come close to the same!

Once not really my fault, just the over-convoluted starting procedure for a manual BMW that required you to press the brake and the clutch, and have it in neutral, before pressing Start. Thank Google for getting me out of that one. It wasn't anything to do with me anyway but the ladies in the office were too nervous to drive the blooming thing so I was asked to move it for them.

The other, I felt a right prat! I bought a new-to-me campervan which, typically, had a nearly empty tank. Headed off to the nearest filling station with the mate who'd given me a lift following just in case. Filled up no problem, but the blooming thing wouldn't start again. I was on the point of phoning the dealer when I went back to basics and pressed the clutch before trying again, vroom, vroom (or as much vroom as a small Daihatsu can manage). Not only had I started the thing several times previously and not had an issue but I *always* leave the vehicle in gear (I've had Citroens with front disc handbrakes and Land Rovers with dodgy transmission brakes both of which are prone to roll away) so I *always* depress the clutch, except once, in a filling station, for about 5 minutes!

GlenP Silver badge

I worked for a firm that made PCB processing machines out of welded plastic sheet. All sorts of items were fabricated in-house including bookshelves and the like. Typically the cost would be several times higher than it would have been to buy the items but of course the costs were "lost" rather than requiring approval.

On the other hand when I worked for a metal framing company we had a whole room full of bolted together bookcases that needed clearing - I'm still building racking for sheds, etc. out of the stuff having brought it home in small batches on the roof of the car.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

GlenP Silver badge

Fortunately I have an electrical/electronics engineer in the family so whilst I'm capable of bodging up simple circuits, mainly I2C interface chips to a RasPi, I can pass anything else on.

GlenP Silver badge

Phone Cabling

I was asked to look into a friend's landline phone and ADSL issues as, "You know about these things!"

Fortunately he was sensible enough to accept me saying that the whole of the internal wiring from his phone line needed replacing, and I wasn't going to do it so he hired someone in.

Even better was the annual retainer from him for my services - a bottle of decent Scotch!

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Live Printer

Having seen some shocking (pun intended) wiring recently on supposedly good quality products I'm not surprised at all. Fortunately in my case it was only 12v but given the current draw it could easily have resulted in a fire in my campervan.

Amazon halts work on ‘Scout’ delivery-bot that delivered parcels no faster than humans

GlenP Silver badge

Grocery delivery robot numbers are increasing steadily round here, in the towns at least (doubt they'll ever reach this semi-rural backwater).

They do have their problems though, such as one sitting by a pedestrian crossing waiting for someone to come and press the button so it could cross! That could easily be resolved though.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

GlenP Silver badge

Old School

We were told that copying the notes down longhand helps with memorising the content - 40 years or so ago handouts of any form were rare and usually confined to specific topics.

I'm not entirely convinced but I can still drag obscure pieces of maths from the depths of my ageing brain when needed (these days usually trig functions for 3D print designs).

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

The only time I had similar with labels was when the finance people insisted on putting the label sheet through multiple times, printing and peeling one label off each time, "to save money". They weren't happy when the new drum unit wiped any possible savings. I did try and clean it after removing the labels but no chance.

GlenP Silver badge

Years ago my then boss took it on himself to do a RAM upgrade on a PC. I generally tried to keep him away from such things for good reason!

After some huffing and puffing on his part he switched the machine on, only to be greeted with a nice curl of smoke and a smell of burning. He'd somehow managed to half insert the DIMM the wrong way round, despite the asymmetric slot, and decided that would do.

He probably had 40 years experience in IT, just not with PCs of course.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Architect Smartitect

I've been involved in a few new build projects, IT are never allowed on site until first fix is completed

It's been that way for many years. Around 35 years ago a customer was having a new building. They tried to do everything right but...

It was an ACT Apricot network which was end-to-end wiring in effect. I asked for a meeting on site with the electricians doing the install, "Oh, that's not necessary, they know what they're doing!" In the end I did get a meeting, but only with their contracts manager so I specified exactly what was needed. Of course none of that info was passed on to the sparkies themselves. Fortunately it wasn't too much of a disaster. They'd wired it as a ring so I just needed to cut a couple of connections and insert the relevant resistors (yes, it was that primitive).

The customer had specified a clean line* on a separate phase for the IT, complete with turned-earth-pin plugs. When we arrived we found they'd installed the sockets but on the same phase as everything else (regulations prohibited sockets on two separate phases being close together) and no plugs to go in them. A very expensive motorcycle courier at least got the plugs delivered and they were up and running but it had cost them several £1,000 for no gain.

*The networking was sensitive to power fluctuations, to the extent the engineers used to carry line monitoring kit.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

GlenP Silver badge

Way Back...

In the mid 80's my first job was as a civil servant, my office had formerly been used for the printers so had acoustic tiles on the walls. It was a rule that you couldn't pin, or use Sellotape to attach, anything to office walls but I got away with it as I could pin to the fibre tiles without leaving any damage.

It was useful, too. One of my projects involved getting serial plotters to work alongside the VT-220 terminals on a single connection which we duly achieved and were able to start producing graphs out of the VAX system which were invaluable to some of the users.

Microsoft Outlook sends users back to 1930 with (very) mini-Millennium-Bug glitch

GlenP Silver badge

Not Just Outlook

I believe most Microsoft products currently assumes that two digit years from 30 upwards are 19nn, and I doubt it's unique to them.

Excel certainly works that way, enter 31/12/29 and you get 31/12/2029; enter 01/01/30 and you get 01/01/1930, although for MS SQL 01/01/50 is the changeover date.

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C8H10N4O2

GlenP Silver badge

Coffee...

Not as serious but I did, many years ago, manage to spill half a mug of coffee into an HP monitor. Fortunately it was unsweetened, an immediate power off and leaving it to drain/dry overnight and it continued working without any issues.

In my experience it's sugary soft drinks that do the most damage - Fanta in a keyboard resulted in a full strip down and scrub under the tap (back when keyboards were expensive but robust enough to stand such treatment). Full fat coke in a laptop, then ignored for a couple of days, was far more damaging - result was a new laptop due to the damage caused.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

GlenP Silver badge

RDD & PDD

We had considerable confusion over whether RDD and PDD were EXW or DAP.

Don't think it was ever resolved.

Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter

GlenP Silver badge

Re: No explosives in the tech support room

Not IT but back in my much younger days I did a bit of potholing. One of the experienced cavers was also a licensed explosives technician as they occasionally cleared rockfalls in caves.

He recounted the occasion when there was a fire alarm at the school where he worked so they all evacuated out to the car park - right next to his car which happened to have a few sticks of gelignite (or similar) in the boot ready for the evening's expedition! He kept quiet.

GlenP Silver badge

I did allow a colleague to put some shopping in the computer room to keep it cool on a very hot day, but well away from any actual equipment.

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

GlenP Silver badge

Re: I don't mind training users...

The real magic, of course, is when they call you for help and the problem is fixed without you doing anything.

Now we all know they're either being impatient or rushing the input but we don't admit that!

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Photocopier challange

This is how you start the car - this is how you stop it - this is how you park it

Had the how-to-start one with a, I think, BMW lease car that I was asked to move (it had been dropped off by a leaver and the responsible person was too nervous to actually drive it). It had to be in neutral with feet on both the clutch and the brake and the hand brake on!

I can add another one to the list though, "How do you add fuel?" I had a hire car where the filler cap release was buried in a very odd place. I did eventually find it with the aid of Google.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Conference Confusion

Sounds about par for the course.

On a simpler level an employer decided they wanted two big screens in a conference room that's barely big enough to be called as such, more a largish office. The screens were purchased and delivered to site, where one was installed in the conference room and the other immediately put down in the training area.

The hardware for signal splitting, transmitting, etc. is still sat in the computer room untouched and unused. One day I'll find a use for it!

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

GlenP Silver badge

That's reminded me, I have an SK-8135 here, great keyboard but it's lost one of the legs so isn't ideal to use. I think it's 3D printer time!

GlenP Silver badge

I feel the same. I'll stick with my current Pi, External keyboard/trackpad and monitor setup for the case where this may have been useful.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

GlenP Silver badge

Re: B...... Calendars

That reminds me of a cartoon many, many years ago of a chap on the phone, "I'm just calling to see if you received my email, the one telling you I'd sent you a fax!"

I suspect it really happened as well, I certainly had users chasing emails a few moments after they were sent.

LibreOffice improves Microsoft compatibility with version 7.4

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Sharing documents

In my past experience there are issues, but largely due to corporate supplied (and mandated) masters.

It isn't for us anyway as we have, for example, add-ons supplied by the Finance system provider that run solely through Excel and our general requirements are probably too complex.

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Wireless Mice

I was just helping out so I frankly couldn't be bothered, I'd got much better things to do with my time than rescue the prat who'd bought it.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Wireless Mice

I agree on both MDs and Vaio, I've been lucky with the former recently, I wouldn't touch the latter with the proverbial barge-pole.

GlenP Silver badge

Wireless Mice

Stop me if you've heard this one...

We had a small sister company, that didn't have an IT department, who's MD tended to do things without asking*. On one occasion he decided he and the FD needed wireless mice and went out and bought them from his usual supplier (Dixons - it was a while ago!)

As usual he then wasn't happy and expected us to sort the problem for him so I rocked up there on my next trip up to the area. Apparently his mouse pointer kept moving randomly, and the FD was having the same issue. Now this was many years ago before wireless mice used encoded signals and effectively their two desks were back-to-back with just a flimsy stud partition wall between. Can you see where this is going?

Two mice running on the same channel (and no option to change it) a few inches apart was always going to be a recipe for disaster. The MD kept his, the FD went back to his cable mouse and normal service resumed.

*Another one was to buy a Sony Vaio laptop from Dixons, against company standards. Just over a year later a windows update overwrote a driver and effectively bricked it (IIRC the display reverted to EGA 16 Colours). Did he have the original install disk(s)? No. Was the driver available from Sony? No. Did Dixons want to help? No. It turned out the laptop was a DSG parts bin special directly from Sony Japan. Sony UK weren't responsible, Sony Japan referred it back to DSG, Dixons said it was out of warranty so not their problem. His "I've saved money over the corporate deal" ended up costing another new laptop.

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

GlenP Silver badge

Re: This raises a lot of questions...

It appears it wasn't public money invested, they were receiving equity shares in exchange for the data.

On that basis they haven't actually lost the money, just failed to gain it at some point in the future when they sold the shares. It also appears that most didn't ever share the data either.

Hopefully though it is the AI bubble bursting - it's about time it did.

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Why isn't it user replaceable?

I had a Ricoh Gel-Jet* printer with a simple user replaceable tank so it's definitely possible, just possibly not at the sub-£50 price point people expect to pay.

*High quality waterproof prints but expensive to run, now replaced by a colour laser.

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

GlenP Silver badge

Terminators and T-Pieces

Probably too many stories, and I've already told some of them! They were the bane of our life in the mid-late 80's and the 90's.

Working at the local college with RMNET the little s*ds soon realised that loosening the BNC connector but not actually unplugging it gave an unreliable network for the next class and we (or at least the colleague who dealt with that side, I was largely a VAX man) would spend ages checking every single connector in the room.

I won't even go onto SCSI terminators on external disk drives - too painful!

In a later role as an IS Manager my DP Manager had a thing about never removing a terminator from a 5250 terminal. If the chain ran from A - B - C and he wanted to add terminal D he'd always disconnect B to C and add in extra cables using male-male connectors so the chain was A - B - D - C, even if physically D was located beyond C. An hour's rewiring in the main admin office removed about 20 cables and several cable bridges where he'd cabled across gangways totally unnecessarily.

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

GlenP Silver badge

Not Printers but...

Earlier this year we had an issue with a SAAS supplier.

Contract expires on date X

Invoice issued 120 days prior to X with payment terms 90 days prior to X

Cancellation of renewal also must be received 90 days prior to X or invoice is payable.

For complex reasons we decided to renew but told them payment would not be made until within 30 days of X. Had they refused and not sorted some other issues we were going to serve a cancellation notice, knowing we'd withdraw it anyway - what would they do? Refuse to take our money?

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

GlenP Silver badge

Real World...

A very few of our 100 or so users have local admin rights on their machines, I'd prefer it to be none but there are a couple of finance applications that won't run correctly (blame the banks for that). That does mean we have to assist with software installs of course, but that's the whole point, we can check what they're doing.

GPO saves us having to install printers manually, means we can change home pages, etc. centrally.

Our ERP system is SQL Server based so we've got MS anyway (if we started from scratch we'd go SAAS but we've got too much investment over 15 years to change).

Noop, we won't be going Linux on my watch.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Pedant alert...

There's a restaurant in Llandudno that says "Licensed" on one side and "Licenced" on the other, obviously covering all bases.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

GlenP Silver badge

Not Me but...

Somebody stole an RM480Z from a local school, pretty stupid to start with, and then phoned RM for help. RM suggested they contact the County Education Computer Centre which, even more stupidly, they did. Quick check of the serial number and instead of the expected service engineer they got a visit from the boys in blue.

Rejoice! System Administrator Appreciation Day (SAAD) is nigh

GlenP Silver badge
Happy

I'd happily give mine a day off but I made that mistake today and my phone hasn't stopped ringing so he's out of luck!

Just because you failed doesn't mean you weren't right

GlenP Silver badge

Re: A miss is pretty obvious, no matter the apparatus

According to one of the crew members they didn't actually use it anyway, some tape on the glass worked better.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

GlenP Silver badge

Nothing New...

Many years ago I bought a Suzuki bike that, according to the spec, didn't have a brake light switch for the front brake, only the rear, you had to buy a higher model for that. Fair enough, except that the switch was present, the wiring was present, they just hadn't plugged the latter into the former! A five minute "improvement" at zero cost.

Watch a RAID rebuild or go to a Christmas party? Tough choice

GlenP Silver badge

IBM Engineer...

We were getting disk errors on one drive in the disk array on an AS/400. The engineer was adamant it was a cable fault so to avoid downtime I left my very experienced evening operator and him to sort it after office hours.

Sheer chaos hit as it wasn't the cable, it was the drive itself which then failed to restart. Of course because it was "just the cable" the engineer hadn't taken the drive out of the array first and as it was only striped, not mirrored, the system was f****d. To say I wasn't happy with either the engineer or the operator, both of whom should have known better, is an understatement.

Fortunately we had backups but it still took a few days to get everything fully working.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Nasty goings on

I met someone who'd worked for the police in a forensic IT role. She left after a couple of years as she couldn't stomach any more - she spent most of her day on her own in a locked room looking at, and cataloguing, illegal images and videos.

GlenP Silver badge

Only Once...

I've only found dodgy material once on a work machine, but then I don't normally go looking for it. As the person had already left the company there wasn't much I could do except report it to HR and delete it.

I did hear a story, which may or may not be true, from the early days of CD writers. The evening shift lab tech at one of the UK's nuclear establishments was spending most of his time duplicating dodgy material for sale.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Walk and talk

No carafes, kettle or pod in our office.

I did used to work with an a**hole who refused to refill the carafe machine, believing it was beneath him. We'd see him wander into the kitchen with his mug then wander out again with it still empty if it meant taking the last cup and being obliged to refill the machine.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Walk and talk

It's something I miss with Covid and working from home. Those coffee machine chats that could lead to early warning of upcoming problems.

GlenP Silver badge

When we moved from dedicated fax machines to MFDs the staff were absolutely insistent that, "Faxes must be on green paper!" It took the engineer a while to figure that one out! Fortunately the machines were multi-tray so the default tray on the machine was the one with the green paper, then the white paper tray was set as default in the printer drivers.

It only really ended when we stopped receiving faxes, except for the bl**dy bank who are unable to supply certain documents any other way - we now have Fax to Email for those.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

Yep, but we had an auto burster and collator. Cue endless arguments between ourselves, the machine maintenance people and the paper suppliers about why it didn't work.

Machine blamed paper, paper blamed machine and they both blamed us for the storage conditions.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Scheme

Or as Dabbsy alluded to, some jobs need to be done from the office.

For Government departments to still be using the excuse, "We can't process paper applications as there's nobody in the office to open them" is unacceptable. It wasn't acceptable during the lockdowns either.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

GlenP Silver badge
Happy

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

Wouldn't know - it's a hardware problem! :)

Seriously, anything but the 40-pin DIL sockets of the early systems.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

GlenP Silver badge

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

Essentially, yes, also the FAT table retained the sector links.

IIRC it changed the first character rather than adding a character (only 8 remember) so to undelete you had to know, or guess, what the first character should be*.

I can't recall the exact details but I was once able to reconstruct a Word temporary file via Norton even though undelete failed. The user, a young student placement, had spent all day typing a document then failed to save it - one of the times IT managed to save the day and prevent a lot of tears.

*I used to work for an Apricot dealer, swapping between PC compatible and Apricot versions of DOS. The latter used A: for the HD so it wasn't unknown to type Format A: on an Apricot then Y followed by "Oh sh*t!" Ctrl-C and Undelete usually sorted it.

GlenP Silver badge

We had a visit from the Police at work, asking if they could view our CCTV footage for a particular night as a crime had been committed nearby. Due to the ancient system we had then it wasn't easy to just view it, but I did offer to drop it onto a memory stick, which they were delighted about - promising to collect it in a couple of days.

That's the last we ever saw of them - so obviously it wasn't that important and I wasted my time trying to help!

The most they might have got anyway were times vehicles passed, the cameras didn't cover much beyond our immediate property boundaries and were poor quality.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Clean desk policy

We had the opposite back when I was a civil servant many years ago. Anything that was in the bin and hadn't been physically torn through would be returned to your desk by the cleaners.

We did have a user who stored emails awaiting action in the Deleted Items folder as it was easy to send them there (but I don't thing she ever deleted the actual rubbish). She was most upset when, as part of trying to speed her machine up, we cleaned out the folder.