Posts by Wanting more 79 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2013
I've been caught like that.
I thought one of my old laptops was broken as the wifi was enabled but just couldn't get it to work. Took me ages to realise that there was a physical switch on the side that enabled / disabled it. Windows had no clue it was turned off though, it just couldn't find any signal.
Well my Honda Civic (2007 petrol) was claiming 500 miles range earlier and I'd already driven 100 miles. In reality I know it's more likely it's likely to last another 250 miles (tank lasts about 350 with normal driving, if motorway cruising it does better). It's always been inaccurate like that. So it's not just electric vehicles that get it wrong.
I was diagnosing an authentication issue on a newly installed live server cluster and created a temporary directory and copied some log files into it for further analysis. What harm could that do? I also did the same on the other node of the cluster. Went off to lunch and apparently all hell broke out. Over lunchtime an automatic code replication process ran and tried to get rid of my unexpected directory but couldn't due to permissions and crashed leaving the server in a half upgraded state. The other node did the same. A colleague of mine who wasn't at lunch spotted the issue and silently deleted my directories and fixed the servers. We blamed the issue on the original problem under investigation and so no one ever found out what really happened! We also fixed the scheduling of the replication process so if one node failed the other node wouldn't try and do the same, so in fact it was a very good "test"...
Yep at my workplace I setup up DOSBox to run a ancient application that drives an OMR scanner. The application was custom written in the 80s in Turbo Pascal by an outside contractor (we don't have the source code). The DOSBox solution worked well even talking to the parallel port (finding those cards is getting harder!). I haven't tested it on Windows 11 yet, but it's working on Windows 10 64bit fine.
My Android 11 phone at £120 does everything I need it to and more and it's 1/8th the cost. When I drop it and smash the screen, or it gets bent etc. (all things that have happened to my previous phones) I won't be so upset and will just buy another one. Same with my £150 android tablet vs iPod. Just can't understand why people are buying Apple stuff as the cost / benefit equation just seems so out of whack. But I suppose the same applies to the latest Samsung Galaxy or Android pixel phone too. But then I'm still driving a 2007 Honda Civic Type S, so draw your own conclusions.
Yes I tried to take that and had been developing using Azure for years and thought this will be easy.
I was expecting questions about Subscriptions, Resource Groups, Storage accounts, how to deploy things etc.
But no it was all sort of weird questions about what support contract you opt for in different situations and that sort of thing.
Stuff that 1% of the organisation probably needs to know and would probably negotiate with a MS sales rep anyway.
When I started as a programmer 30 years ago, I remember the piles of (sometimes expensive) books we had. 11 ring bound manuals for the database, A shelf of Cobol Manuals, reference guides, Java API guides, Windows API, books full of algorithms etc.
Then you'd go on a training course and come back with a binder or two.
You couldn't just google it and if the vendor did have a website it was just for sales and maybe you could email them.
Still using one of my Java books as a monitor stand!
Must admit times are better now.
I've been to the office 3 times this year. We now share 18 hot desks between a department of 100, so we couldn't all come back at the same time if we wanted to. The organisation is considering closing it's current campus and rebuilding a smaller office elsewhere.
So looks like I'll likely be at home for the rest of my career,
That's quite a change in just 3 years.
At my old work, when someone was getting a PC an admin person would set it up, then wheel it to your desk on a trolley (big CRT monitors were heavy!).
They'd use the lift if it was to another floor. The incident happened when the power cord fell off the trolley and inbetween the doors. The doors closed on it and the lift ascended for a bit without issue then the UK plug on the end of the cord pulled between the doors but wasn't able to get through and acted as an anchor so the lift couldn't move any more and hit a safety cut out.
So the poor admin lady was stuck in the lift which wouldn't now respond to any commands and had to be rescued 30 minutes later. In this case they just had to lower the lift and open the doors and reset the electronics.
But from then on she refused to deliver PCs and people had to collect the trolley themselves and maybe risk the lift.
Sadly I still run 32-bit XP in a Hyper-V VM quite often. It's because I have to build VB6 and VB.NET 1.0 code and asp / com websites against IIS. Tried installing very old versions of Visual studio in Windows 10 64-bit and you can get it to just about work after a lot of messing around. But once you start adding in other legacy components / controls it stops working.
The one good thing is that it's nice and quick though.
Yes, their standard black optical wired mouse works just fine for me too (p/n X800898). At 80g not to light, not too heavy and a pleasing sensible ambidextrous shape. Scroll wheel is light to move but has the clicky detents. I have a few spares. In later years they brought out a newer model with thinner cable and only 60g, but it feels cheap and isn't as good as the earlier model..
We ported our Cobol and Fortran code off our VMS Vax to Sun Sparc in 1998 and that was the last time I used VMS. Literally some of that stuff had been written before I was born (in the early 70s) and had been ported from a Sperry mainframe before that.
Ironically now we have "offshore colleagues" porting that same stuff from Sparc to Intel Linux boxes. If it works there I expect it will run unmolested for another 30 years.
It might surprise people that we're not a bank. Education sector.
Perhaps they would of been better off staying and peddling suitably backdoored kit at knockdown prices to all the entities in Russia they could. We accuse of Huawei of doing the same, so why not follow suit.
Or maybe all their kit is already backdoored so they felt they didn't need to.
At least modern PCs / Servers when the CPU is idle they are using less power. Give them a heavy load then the power consumption goes up. So it's not actually "free" to give them something like seti@home to do. Also generates more heat therefore the cooling system has to work harder also drawing more power.
So in effect it's stealing to use the "idle" computers in this way.
We've had incidents where I work of people mining bitcoins using the organisation's electricity.
My 10 year old Canon inkjet printer died last year. So I took it apart as you do, hoping to find stepper motors, precision ground bars etc. No stepper motors any more, just normal motors and end limit switches.
But was disgusted to find a big nappy in the bottom of the printer that was saturated with most of my expensive ink. Obviously the head cleaning that the printer seemed to do every time I turned it on was sucking ink into it.
Have now switched to a laser printer (Xerox B215) which can't do pretty photos, but so far I think this one toner cartridge should last me a few years as I'm a light user and probably only print <500 pages a year. I've had it a year now and toner still says 97% .
We had an incident here where one of our developers accidentallyinstalled a Nuget package from a dodgy publisher (not Microsoft but a very close spelling). The package seemed to be from Russia. It was several months until this was noticed and the code had been deployed to test servers.
We still have a Windows 2000 server to run VB6 builds on. Heavily firewalled and running on a VM. But one day VMWare will update things and Windows2000 will no longer run any more, then we are screwed. We're currently on the 3rd project to replace the old VB6 system.
We also have some "irreplaceable" DOS software attached to a specialised scanner, but that runs on Windows 10 64bit in DosBox though, so fairly modern!
The RP2040-based Pi Pico would be tricky to use, I'm sure it could talk to the printer ok, but getting it to go onto the internet and collect the information from GitHub wouldn't be possible without extra hardware to give it ethernet / wifi. The other Pis are basically linux boxes with all that stuff built in and either an ethernet jack or wifi built on board.
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