Posts by I Am Spartacus

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Have you tried to do this?

Mostly, HMRC have made great steps forward with MTD. But theu must have outsourced this to a bunch of muppets. I see the hands of a big five consultany group - you know the ones, where the senior manager comes in to win the bid, promises to staff the project with experienced engineers, and you end up getting a group of first year graduates or interns doing the work.

I have 45 years experience of app development and IT. And I nearly through my smart phone at the wall trying to get this app to register me. I thought I had managed, but apparently I have not. So I get to go through the whole glorious process again.

This is a failed app on an epic scale.

God help the British public and the Home Office help lines, if they do decided to issue digital ID cards using this as a model.

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Ahh if only this wasn't true

I worked in an offce in Wythensawe, Manchester, UK. The building has two independent towers but with a common heating system. We had engineers in regularly to balace the AC and Heating. Getting everything just fine and comfortable.

Until someone thought their tower was to hot or cold and adjusted the temperature. And nothing happened for hours. So they did it again, tweaked the thermostat again. Meanwhile in the other tower tehy had the opposite problem. If tower-1 was too hot and its temperature was lowered, tower-2 became an ice box, so they ramped up their themostat. Tower-1 then increased in temperature, so its thermostat was lowered again. Tower-2 got colder.

You can see where this is going. Someone when the system was installed wired the HVAC controls up wrong, so the thermostat in each tower controlled the settings for the other tower. It too 3 years before someone got the HVAC company in to fix it - as in, switch two wires over.

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Violence threatened against me.

This is from London, UK.

My team had scheduled a major, non-reversable, email update. Well, more of a total email system replacement. We were taking out Lotus Notes and replacing it with a cloud based highly specialised piece of software. We had tested this for months. It was a one way process and it would take some time. As we were a global company with offices in the far east, US and London, the users asked that we do the change over during the day. This way London would face any issues first and handle them

It was explained that this would be a total email shutdown for about 120 minutes. That is, no email in or out whilst the conversion software ran. This was accepted. So we duly got the software team to fly in and do the prep work.

On the day, I walked round all the users and warned them that email would go out at 10am. I told them at 8am, 8:30, 9:00, 9:30 and at 9:50 i asked if there was any reason not tp go ahead. This was our GO/NO GO final call, and all London teams said GO.

Email was shutdown. 15 minutes later the effluent hit the air conditioning, as a company asset was under attack from a nation state. No explanatons here, just that live shots were fired and lives were in danger. Cue the team going postal. It sems that the "total email will be shut down" message failed to register that this also meant Blackberry emails.

Senior person on the desk totally lost it. Stormed over to me and told me to get emails back on line: As in right that moment. I explained, as per our copious briefings to which he has signed his acceptance (yes, phyiscal signatures) we could not restore emails with out risk of lost messages. He stood, right in my face and threatened to break my arms and legs if I did not restore emails. This was in front of my manager and my team. He was perfectly capable of carrying out this threat. But there was nothing I could do at this point. Not without compromising email integrity, which was sacrosanct.

I played it down. Told him I was limited on what I could do. He stormed off, leaving a trailed of F bombs behind him. My immediate superior asked me what I was going to do. "Absolutely nothing because there is nothing I can do. It will blow over". He wasn't happy, but I asked him not to report this to HR.

The technical team, who witnessed this and were quaking themselves, busied themselves and got the system restored less than 30 minutes later, about 45 minutes before when we said. So I was able to tell my protagonist that we listened, acted and got the comms back up. He accepted that we had done our best, appologised, and paid for drinks and food in the local bar late until the night.

I can laugh about it now, but it was a bit scary at the time.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

I would love to move off copper

I am a business customer with a London postcode. I am on FTTC, but the last 200m is copper. I would love to have FTTP, and will happily pay. But BT don't offer it on my London exchange.

Come on OpenReach, extract digit, and complete the London fibre rollout!

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Re: I carefully arranged things

I was the one who alerted the management of the new startup telco I was working for. I alerted them several years before 2000, and was called a scaremonger, a fraud and whole lot of other things. It took one of the directors reading the Financial Times to realise what I was warning them about was a real thing.

So we rented a section of a warehouse, fenced it off with security fencing, and built an isolated mini telecoms systems: customer care, switches, network management, everything. With our own timeclock that we could wind backwards and forwards. We worked long nights to be able to set up different scenarios across all of the system. We ran endless, well documented, simultations. We had our suppliers in to fix issues.

Come the big night, of course, nothing went wrong. It all passed off without incident. So then I got a telling off for having spent too much money on a white elephant. I had to explain that the reason you have insurance is so you can claim if you need to: you don't use the argument that because you haven't needed to claim, you don't need insurance.

Oh, and it was not as if we carried anything trivial - just the live feeds for BBC1 - 4 went over our circuits from BBC Centre to the broadcase attenae. Imagine the negative publicity if we had Jools Holland counting down to midnight on the millenium: "Three.....two.....one.....Happy New Mil.....<silence and blank screens>".

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

You can go home now....

In the 1980's my job was to install a VAX/11 in an engineering company. It was to handle the bill of materials, orders, trcking etc. The draftsmen used old fashioned drafting tables where they drew the engineering drawings. It was overseen by the head draftsman, Mr Vertigen, who ran his shop with a rod of iron. He was adament that the new fangled counting machine was a waste ot time and money. This was all on a long office, possible 50m long with a long corridor down one side.

On the day the Vax was to go live, Derek and I setup an old teletype on Mr Vertigen's desk. This was the type that had a paper tape reader and could be set to print what ever was on the tape. We set the teletype to autoprint, connected it to a long power lead we borrowed from the workshop next door, and ran the cable down to our end of the office.

Mr Vertigen duely arrived at 8:30. He hung up his coat and then turned to his desk. That was when he noticed the teletype. Ho looked at the teletype. Walked around it, bemused. What is this thing? Why is it on my desk? He reached out a finger, touched it, at which point we turned it on.

Clatter, clatter bing, and it typed "Good morning Mr Vertigen. I am your replacement. You can go home now".

So he put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, and headed back to the car park.

Being the youngest, I was despatched to tell him it was a joke. Besides, all the older colleagues were too busy rolling on the floor killing themselves with laughter!

This is a true story!

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

On the subject of 1990's ISPs

I worked for a telco that installed bits of kit to allow dialup phone calls to be connected to routers. The incoming calls came on a single fibre optic cable, and the output was a single internet cable. This meant that we could replace a rack of dial up modems that the ISP currently had with a 1U bit of kit. Or replace 8 racks witrh 1 rack.

Whilst examining their comms room for where we would locare the new rack as we cut over, one of the network techies came in, went to a rack containing 64 modems and powe cycled the whole rack. We asked what he was doing and he explained that one of the modems was locked up and needed a reset. Power cycling the whole rack was the easiet way to do this.

The obvious question was "and what of the 63 other users who were dialled into the internet?"

His response was classic that has sytayed with me: "For a tenner a month, what do they expect?"

We launched the ISP service to replace all the modem racks later that month.

We launched FreeServe the next month, a totally free for users internet service.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Use a reporting copy

Very, very few reports need up to the minute data. In many cases, they don't want that at all.

So the answer is to clone the transaction database into a reporting copy. Now you have a copy that users can access and if they screw it up, no problems, it will refresh at the end of the day. And as a bonus, you have an online copy of yesterdays end of business data, just in case someone does drop a table from production.

Trust the AI, says new coding manifesto by Kim and Yegge

Trust the AI? Not ony your nellie

I spent yesterday burning through my Cursor AI tokens trying to get it to do what I told it, not hallucinating and using data and lookups that are simply not on the code base.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Nothing offensive, just impossible

CRAY has a special form of FORTRAN to support the parallel array processing that the hard ware was famous for.

Have a pint for the reference to BLISS

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

MVS OS/360 - Almost certainly

It won't have been MTO as this has an on-screen editor rather than a batch edtor.

It could have been VM/CMS, but why would you run in batch on the console if you could run in a VM.

So I am guessing MVS OS/360. That definitely has a console mode with a batch editor, and made heavy use of tapes in a time when disk space was ridicululously expensive.

Ahh, thoe were days. Who can forget PRGM=iebgenr dd-in=TAPE01 dd-out=TAPE02

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

KIM-1 Thanks for the memory

University, 1977, we were each given a KIM-1 as a set of parts. We had to solder the board together, then write a simple display program as our first assembler language class.

I had mercifully forgotten the hours of keying hex code into the memory, hoping you hadn't made an error early on.

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Seen it done at a hardware level

We had VAXen boxes with mirrored disk pairs. There was a disk issue that caused on of the disks to drop out of the mirrored pair. The system carried on as it was supposed to do, no user impact at all. Digital came and replaced the drive with a new one.

The System Manager then readied himeself to bring the new disk into the mirror and have it catch up. Unfortunately he got his source and destination wrong and before I couled yell out NOOOO, he mirrored the brand new, empty disk all over the remaining working copy of the production data.

A real oh sh1t moment.

Amazon built a massive AI supercluster for Anthropic called Project Rainier – here's what we know so far

Anyone remember the Transputer?

Those diagrams of how the chips are wired together looks awefully like the Mieko Computing Surface I used in about 1985. And used to great advantage, I might add. What comes around goes around I suppose.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

What documentation?

I was faced with a very difficult user. He would break things and complain. We would explain how it worked. He would nod wisely, go away, do exactly what we had told not to do and complain. He was senior enough that we had to do something. So the team collectively wrote a large piece of documentation. We had it poof read by other users, then printed, bound, and I proudly too kit over to him.

He immediately took it, droooed it in the bin, and said "I am not reading any documentation, just make it work for me".

I had to use a BOFH approved user readjustment tool

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Bin there and suffered

I gave a talk in Houston about networking within the telco I was working for to a bunch of software developers.

Well, I found out that if you pronounce "routing" the way we Brits do it has a totally different connotation to Americans. Cue lots of guffahs and laughter at all the parts I thought were serious.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

We had an issue with a rabbit

My daughters rabbit got lose in the house, went behind the TV, where the CAT5 cables went, and chewed through the main feed from the telco (BT) to the router.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Mine was shelf stacking in a supermarket

I used to do shelf stacking at a supermarket. First after school, and then in the first terms vaction from Uni. I was reading Computing with Electronics, but, fuck it, I was the best shelf stacker they ever had. The supermarket boss, who own the small chain, tried to get me to give up Uni to become junior manager of the branch I worked in.

The lady I worked with told me that her husband worked in an engineering company that could use some computer knowledge. He got me what we now call a minimum wage position, working on the IBM mainframes. After a bit, I managed to rewrite their Fortran simulation programs, link it directly to the graph plotter, and save them a couple of hours each run. So, I quickly got promoted to a reasonable wage and asked to come back each vacation.

Then, in the final term, when we were doing the milk round, trying to find a job when we left those gleaming spires, I got a telegram. "Got new computer, call me, Ray". So I duly called Ray, the new manager. He asked me what my best offer was, then added 50% to it, and said I would skip graduate entry and become a fully fledged Engineer. That got me stared on my career, 45 years ago!

Motto: Always do your best in any job, even if it trying to get that extra case of dog food on to the shelf.

IBM's z17 mainframe – now with 7.5x more AI performance

Because you want to do work

You would use this because you want to have a scalable, supported, fast system to run your AI models on. That is, you want to do real work.

As opposed to designing, sourcing, assembling, installing, debugging your own hybrid cluster, that will almost certainly be slower.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Just to be clear

The UK Government does want to make public that it intends that all our iCloud files will need to be made public.

One rule for thr rich....

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

Interesting Analysis

This row has broken out because of recognised need for a language fit for the 21st century that has security and a robust architecture at its core. C is an old language, as in I first started working with it in 1977! It is designed to compile to highly efficient code that is as close to the machine core as possible. And in this it is highly successful. The problem with C is that it is very easy to write bad code. I will go further, it is very hard to write perfect code.

Rust has been designed to overcome a lot of C's problems with a compile time checker that prevent misuse of data structures. By eliminating race conditions, buffer overruns, etc but still allowing a code conversion to efficient machine code, Rust is less of a language like C and more of a High Order Assembly Language. There are, however, two big downsides to Rust. First is has a very steep learning curve. The concepts of borrowing are just so alien to large parts of the kernel community that it does seem like snake oil - it promises a lot, but getting there is a huge struggle. The second is that it is not best suited to dealing with device drivers, where raw access to registers and I/O ports is itself alien to Rust.

Is Rust the answer to the Linux kernel? Well, perhaps not. Yes, I think it can be a good tool, but maybe start by writing all the user functions that exist in the Linux operating system as small (sometimes not so small) applications. Going headlong in to the kernel is never going to work. The issue with the bindings is just one point.

What Linux should be looking at is the size of the kernel. Does everything that is in there really need to be part of the kernel? In my opinion, we have seen kernel bloat, with the memory foot print increasing. If we had more work being done in non-kernel services or applications, then the kernel becomes smaller. Rewriting the now non-kernel components in Rust is a much cimpler task.

But moving the whole kernel, that is premised on multi access to shared data structures, will be very hard to do in Rust.

Maybe what we really need is a much more rigerous C compiler. Something that takes the lead from the Rust compiler to prohibit, or at least warn, when non-safe operations are being attempted.

DeepSeek or DeepFake? Our vultures circle China's hottest AI

"The biggest short in history"

Bet the SEC are looking at who shorted nVidia last Monday morning.

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

I work today for a Greek shipping company. I can confirm the absolute truth of this.

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

Junos OS

Anyone remember when routers were just routers. You booted your Cisco routers and they loaded from the master configuration. Not some botched implementation of FreeBSD. Oh those were that days. Sure they didn't do much more than, well, route packets. But they were secure (apart from the ones that the NSA installed their custom chips in, alledgedly). Mind you, I also remember some PFY deciding to "upgrade" the config files and losing all of them.

UK gives Openreach £289M for 4 rural broadband contracts in 'gigabit by 2030' push

How about FTTP for urbal locations, OpenReach?

I live in a London Postcode, but BT can't get me FTTP. Not only that but they can't even give my a date by which they will be able to give me FTTP. They did have a date, that was over a year ago. Now they can't even give me a date when they can start planning to give me a date.

I have FTTC and I get 60+ meg. I can literally see the cabinet from my window.

But the new pub I spoke to that is closer to the exchange than me has been told that it can have only 14.4. So, no public wifi in the pub then.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

AI - Automated Innacuracy

As an IT professional I diustrust any new technology that has not had extensive testing backed by provenance. AI is right up there with the worst technology possible.

I had to give a talk on a few astronomy issues to my local amateur group. Running out of time I asked ChatGPT to summarise the research paper and give me a 2 minute summary that I could read out. And it did. It was very readable. And totally wrong. It was only when I scanned the text that I realised that the original paper was based on Hubble imagery, whereas the ChatGPT version calimed that ALMA, the radio telescope in Chile, was responsible. This isn't a simple mistake - it is out and out fabictaion. Nowhere in the paper did it reference ALMA at all. I actually called one of the UK researchers (as a fellow of the Royal Astronomy Society I can do this) and he went from disbelief, through astonishment to anger - his work of several years was being reported incorrectly.

After that I asked ChatGPT how many books or papers I was responsible for. It gave me a nice list of books. None of them anything to do with me, but it had added my name to the accredite authors. It would have been nice to get the publication payments!

My real worry is when I see AI being used for medical diagnostics. Can we trust it to make the correct diagnosis? Well, we know that we can't. A skilled professional has to validate each positive diagnosis and check the findings. But what about the false negatives - when AI tells the clinician that there no sign of cancer, and that message is just repeated verbatim to the patient. If the patient later dies of cancer, do their heirs have a case to make against the clinician? The AI? The people who built the AI?

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

Well played sir

Oracle's Java price hikes push CIOs to brew new licensing strategies

Deja Vu

Some many years ago I was PM on a project to collect data in a database, and use BI tools to create reports that would be distibuted to customers. As we only had six connections to the database was internally priced the Oracle licenses accordingly. Oracle informed us that not only would they use the number of clients, but would also include the number of people in those clients who saw the data, even if it was printed. The costs spiraled out of control.

I was asked to look for an alternative and came up with using DB2 instead. IBM would give us the DB licenses if we used their consultants. As I needed a team anyway, whether I paid contractors or IBM made no difference.

Oracle took this to our CTO. The Head of Oracle Europe told him that "We didn't have the balls to switch DB suppliers" and the price of over £3M would stand. Infront of him the CTO called me up on speaker phone and asked if I had the IBM quote in front of me. On being told it was on my desk, he instructed me to sign it immediately under his name, and also to inform all other non-completed projected that they too would switch to DB2 with immediate effect. I heard him then turn to the Oracle VP and say "I think you can go now".

RESULT!

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory datacenter flooded, offline until 2025

Happened to me...

4" pipese are quite common if you have water mist fire supression system.

This happened to me: The high pressure pipes failed and sprayed water everywhere. One stream of water went into the Sequent, which immediately shutdown. The other steam hit the window and went stright into the cooling slots of the AS/400 -which was not at all happy. The Tandem non-stop ignored all of this, and the data centre manager pushed the big red emergency power down button. It just kept going. Truly non-stop!

IBM were not at all fased - they turned up with 4 hours with a specialist water repair team.

But it was a bit of a shock when I got a call early saturday morning saying the data centre was flooded - "WHAT on the 4th floor?????"

Claims of 'open' AIs are often open lies, research argues

Open lies?

Why am I not surprised that the openness of open AIs are lies, when the AI itself lies.

I asked ChatGPT+ how many books I have written. It lied, but then again, should I press my case for all the unpaid royalties I seem to be owed?

HPE goes Cray for Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, crams 224 into a single cabinet

Dramatic indeed

In the 1980's we had one where two sections of busbar were bolted together. Well, they were supposed to be bolted. The installers had not put sufficient torque into the bolts and there was a small gap between the two connecting busbars. It worked for years until one morning it decided to fail - and it was dramatic. About a metre of copper just vanished. Fortunately no-one was near it at the time. Took is offline for a couple of weeks.

UK councils bat away DDoS barrage from pro-Russia keyboard warriors

Rather than going donw

Rather than taking the website offline, why not have a switch that routes the DDOS traffic to 95.173.136.70

https://www.abuseipdb.com/whois/95.173.136.70

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

How to crash a CRAY-1

Way back when Cray computers were the ultimate in super computing processing, the company I worked for had one that was doing oil seismic processing. The CRAY-1 was a beautifil machine. Shaped like a torus, it stood aprox 2m tall, with a circular bench seat around the base which held all the power and cooling components. And it is extremely tactile. People would walk past and just run their hands over the cabinet.

But we kept getting crashes. When this happens 20 hours into a 23 hour job, it gets a toiuch annoying. The onsite Cray engineer had no clue. It happened at different times of day, different days of the week. No pattern at all. So he did the only thing possible and watch the computer like a hawk. All was fine until one female operator from the tape handling room walked past, touched the CRAY and crash. It only happened to her. Turns out that her nylon work coat (think lab coats, but cheaper), rubbing against her nylon tights was causing a static buildup that she discharged through the sensitive electronics.

The solution was to erect a small fence around the CRAY beyond which only male operators could venture. The unions went mad. Discrimination they yelled. Right up until the the situation was explained the the shop steward and he was told that women could of course tend the Cray, but only after the shift leader had checked they were wearing silk underware.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: A number of things wrong with this reply

A lot of University mainframes in the 70's and 80's ran the Michigan Terminal System (MTS). This was a time sharing O/s from University of Michigan. It has several advantages over TSO or VM/CMS from IBM. First it could run a lot of cheap terminals, rather than the IBM 3270 consoles; and secondly is was considerably cheaper and came with source code.

This did NOT use REXX. But it did have a shell script of sorts, but I agree not Python.

It did however have a feature that could send a message to the operators console. It was meant for things like "Please load tape VT12345 on Tape Drive 4 with ring in".

This was used by my University colleagues to write a small assemble program that could send ASCII art messages to the OPERATOR. It was oh so funny when someone sent BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING to the operator in the remote data centre.

It was somewhat less funny when the operators decided it was a message that management were watching their every activity and, as good union members, all walked out, shutting the mainframe down in the process.

Even less fun was the poor undergraduates who authored the hack having to grovel to the operators.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: 'Exit interview'

It was during the exit interview that I was asked why I was leaving. When I said "well, two years and not a hint of a promotion", the HR lady was shocked. "But you turned down a really good job in the main computing centre, you never even asked about it. It was going to be a lot more money with great prospects". I was stunned, and said I knew nothing about it. So she showed me the application form that I had "signed" to say I knew about the offer but was turning it down for personal reasons.

Not my signature. It was my bosses signature. He didn't want to lose me so faked a signature.

After that, the exit interview turned into HR gathering evidence for a major disciplinary action about said boss. Mean while I went back to conside my BOFH response to stuff him up. Revenge is disk best served some weeks after you have left, but when served, the recipient should be in no doubt that he has been properly kippered.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

We used to blow VAX 11/780 cards regularly

We had a then very new VAX 11/780 installed in 1980. It powered the designed and engineering office, but also extended a terminal to the lab, on the factory floor. This used to run all sorts of funky electronic test equipment. The VAX kept blocking one of the async terminal cards. The engineer kept coming in, humming, harring, but replaced the card. We must have had 4 or 5 in the ifrst year.

The lab was a fair distance from the VAX. Rather than invest in long-line remote options for the async terminal from digital, the machine room manager decided to wire up a very long belden cable which was slung from the window of the computer room, over the heavy machine room, in tough another window to the lab. Fairly cheap, but definitely NOT in the Digital approved way to connect a terminal.

For reasons I didn't understand they used unearthed power leads to their oscilloscopes. All such plugs were colour red to alert people. They also had red painted un-earthed extension leads. And yes, it was into one of these that their RS-232 asynch terminal was plugged. The cable tended to float high, not being earthed. And eventually the high voltage would flash over to the other parts of the terminal concentrator board and blow its TTL circuits.

The solution was to plug the terminal into a properly earthed supply. We never did tell Digital why the problem went away!

Sadly, the computer room, lab, engineering workshop are all destroyed and are now a nice little housing estate on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Up vote and a beer

for the IR35 comment.

Indian telcos to cut off scammy, spammy, telemarketers for two whole years

Re: Blockchain?

BlockchAIn

NASA pops repair kit in the mail so astronauts can fix leaky ISS telescope

Hey children - listen to this:

NASA: Our instrument is degraded. Lets work out how to fix it at minimal cost.

MY KIDS: Dad, my computer is slowing down playing Fortnight and MineCraft. I simply must have a new I9 enabled laptop and I need it now!!!!

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

Well, you do have that option, but not the obligation

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

It happened to me....

I was visiting a SUN site in Germany. The techie I had travelled specifically to meet was coming in from a different site. He arrived, shook hands, and then said he had to leave. It seemed he had, with driving, done his alotted hours and could not continue the meeting.

So, my flight, hotel, time out of the officem was all totally wasted.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Can confirm

Once, I mistakenly, took down a database. It was quickly restored and the applications brought back on line. Outage was about 15 minutes. I was asked to go over to the trading room. When I go there the head of trading stood up, shouted over the floor "Hey everyone. Here is Spartacus, he is teh cause of you nopt being able to trade FX when the BoE changed base rates".

I barely escaped with my life and stll have scars.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Its a PICNIC

I had one case with an application that worked everywhere, except on traders desk. London, Singapore, Switzerland, all perfectly fine. And New York too apart from one persons PC. So I get to fly business class to NY to see whats wrong. Plug in my machine and its fine. His machine, and its true the app fails and falls all over the floor with a BSOD.

So I do a trawl over whats different and find LimeWire, DonkeyKong and an early betting application install. All, I might add, totally against company policy. I delete these, and HEY, the App works. I leave a note on his desk saying I have rfemoved the apps. I email him and his local head of IT saying these apps were removed, the business app he really needs to do his job now works, and reminding him of the companies IT policy.

I get as far as JFK to fly home when I get a call. Its broken again. Yes, you guessed, he had installed his apps again,

I gave up and went home. Couple of months later he got fired, but not for this.

Karma can be a real bitch, but sometimes it plays your hand for you.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Well done elReg

Thanks to el Reg's team of reporters, you kept this in the public eye.

Pleased indeed to see the US Lawyers and HP's Due Diligence team reach for their latin dictionary to understand what Caveat Emptor means.

Knives out for Pritti Patel and the UK courts for ever letting this get close to a US court. Lynch is a UK citizen. Autonomy was a UK company. The deal was done in the UK. If there ever was a case to answer it should have been in a UK court.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...Today I learned

That magnetioc bowls are a thing;

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Don't for get geoquel !

Thanks for this. It is a nice trip down memory lane.

I used Ingress at University and loved the ability to do test finding paths around Berkely California on Goequels test data set. This was on the geospatial version of Quel, GeoQuel.

We also worked with relational calculus. But then we had APL keyboards so the symtax was easy to type. I do recall trying an early version of System R at the IBM research centre and was shocked that the single use terminal we had was commanding the full resources of a 360 mainframe!

I met Michael Stonbraker and Eugene Wong in London many decades ago. Lovely man to talk to.

Thanks for memories

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

I cut my teeth on DEC equipment

Still with top loading washing machine type disk packs.

We had one which kept falling off line, and brining it back required a reboot. These were the days when there was a key that slotted in the top which set the bus address number The microswitches were faulty, so heavy use of the disk, with the heads moving in and out, caused the unit to wobble and shudder just enough for the address to change.

Oh, how I miss these.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: "Users would type into an X-terminal"

Most probably X.25, which as a packet switch system in use between banks long before DECNet or TCP/IP, or even SNA.

We used them in the bank I briefly worked at. That was using Sperry Univac 1100. You remember those? The ones with 6-bit bytes and no lower case charcters. Solid as a pile of jelly.

Re: The City: A chap knows a chap...

I read that and I can still hear the voices in my head