Posts by Steve Kerr 117 posts • joined 26 Jul 2013
To show how "safe" they are, a senior Boeing exec must fly on a scheduled passenger plane running the exact same versions with the pilots having the same training as other global airlines.
I think this is the one of the major ways for Boeing to dig themselves out of this mess.
If their senior management won't get on them, they're not safe.
Got dumped with OS/400 once when I was helping configure one (without knowing anything it) by someone who promptly went on holiday for the next 2 weeks leaving me as the "expert" after being given an introduction into it using the words "This is the login/password, I'm off on holiday now, bye".
Cupboard full of manuals and people asking me about x, y, z.
Once I got into the steep learning curve of logging in and then "now, what", actually came to like the command verb syntax. I reckon if you thought about what you wanted to do, you could work out the command 95% of the time without looking it up, and the command prompting was excellent.
Very weird operating system though.
Having a nose around and telling friends about McWheels, I have found McFeet - https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXNM2ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-feet-kit
$299 for some stainless steel feet!
I'm sure there's some marketing droid in Apple saying "Hmmm....what could we sell to the rabid fanbois that they will just lap up?"
I put my hands up, I do have an ipod touch (music), iphone (work provided), ipad (watching netflix on the train) and a macbookpro (2010 model used as main laptop) as I treat them as consumer devices that serve a purpose.
I balk at the current prices for non-upgradable macs though and accessories and have no compunction to buy any of them.
Back at the end of the 90's
Guy calls the helpdesk at 18:45pm, comes through the Ops (me) as helpdesk finished at 6pm.
He's having a problem printing so I call the desktop people that work to 19:00, guy answers the phone and says "nah, I'm going home" and hangs up.
Phone the bod back and said that no-one is available from desktops and I can come down and have a look.
Get down to his office with his own huge HP Laserjet 4 in there and ask what the issue is, he says that the when he prints an email, nothing happens. I look on the printer and it says "load letter", knowing that outlook from the late 90's defaulted to letter and was rather hard to force to A4, I just pressed continue and his emails then came out.
He then said "Is that all I needed to do? I've been back and forth with desktop team for weeks about this and all they needed to do was to tell me to press continue on the printer?" He was very happy to just press continue each time he printed an email and was rather annoyed that no-one in desktops could give him that small snippet of info which he would've been happy with.
Ops 1 desktop 0
When I was working out in Romania on a project for an Austrian bank, I would hazard that 80% of IT were women all the way up to management.
Back then and over there, IT was seen as a woman's job, men's jobs were making and building things.
Interesting that different places, different opinions on jobs.
Other interesting things, terrible traffic issues in Bucharest so they made public transport stupidly cheap to get people out of their cars. Was also there when the first Ikea was built and opened, got caught up in gridlock as everyone tried to go there and it was off of the same road as the airport
I was just shy of my 9th birthday when Voyager 2 launched and it's still going now.
I am gobsmacked at this achievement of longevity and still helping science.
I honestly don't believe it would be possible for us to produce such an amazing piece of technology now.
Beers because, those people that built it and still run it deserver free beer for life.
I was inflicted by crystal reports when I was out of the office on a customer site in Sweden.
Had to login during the evening back to the office on a crap internet connection with a 13inch laptop screen to work out how to update a report when I had never seen it before or knew anything about it.
Being out of the office, I was unaware of this so it got palmed onto me by a vote I was unaware of by everyone else that decided to teflon it onto me as I couldn't immediately decline it.
Oh, it, didn't go well either
I use the Waitrose scanner so tracking what I buy doesn't really show exciting.
Some ready meals, assorted tinned fish, salad stuff, smoothies occasionally, some other assorted stuff, soap etc...
And lots of carrots and apples - for my horse's feeds, but then don't need tracking for that and the staff ask me if I've got carrots for my horse, they know me well, don't need a tracking app for that as I'm in there daily buying them.
My heart bleeds for those poor souls having to sully themselves in cattle.
No, wait, it doesn't.
<Morning rambling tangent story>
99% of all my business filghts of which I've had hundreds were all in cattle.
I should point out that I have a fear of flying including vertigo and ended up doing a job that at it's height meant flying each week.
Lovely bit of internal terror every flight.
By the end I couldn't care as I think enforced helplessness meant letting go - even when multiple other passengers were screaming on a bit of a bumpy flight.
Culminated in a flight on Jat airways between Bosnia and Serbia on a plane that I was surprised got off the ground and made it to the destination without the wing/engine/fuselage falling off.
<Morning rambling tangent story/>
Went onto a customer site once where payments weren't working and they were having a bit of a fit.
After analysis, found that the date on the payments servers had "mysteriously" skipped forward 100 years, the payments software didn't particularly like having this done to it.
Had to recreate the current days messaging and audit tables losing everything that was in them though I did manage to export the contents to a text file.
Turns out the MD had allowed his little Johnny to "play" directly on the server because little Johnny knew so much about computers from his playstation.
Suggested that nobody apart from those that worked and required access should be touching the thing and most certainly that did not include the spawn of the MD
Fortunately, wasn't me that done that.
have accidently bricked some very expensive hardware security modules when a software update failed but that's another story......
Yup, worked in Bucharest for a number of months.
I was working there before Ikea was built between the airport and the city and the new motorway, during the both being built and when they were both open and especially the chaos when Ikea opened!
Also, the rebuilding of all the tram rails, which originally looked very scary to be in a tram riding over.
A lot of stuff IT related was very good.
The roads, very bad!
Not forgetting "yellow cheese" with everything.
Someone (who lost access very quickly after) managed to do a chown -r from /
Took quite a bit of work to go and undo all the damage - compared to an equivalent system.
Unfortunately, it was a customer facing server so couldn't do a full restore from backup.
Fortunately, it wasn't me that had to do it (or was the one that caused it).
When I worked for an investment bank late 90's into 2001, finally ended up in web support team. We had regularly updated blacklists from external vendors.
We also had to check whether the block filters were working correctly (paid to look up porn sites!), a few unsavoury things and the browser window went to the bottom of the screen so could see whether our block page was working correctly.
We also had a grad in our team, whilst adding things to blocklists which weren't supplied, the males in team had a success rate of about 10-15% in guessing web site names, she (yup, she), had a success rate approaching 90%
Our grad also had an uncanny ability of locating "stuff" people had stored on our their home drives on our fileservers - we were also having aggro with the amount of stuff stored on file servers including videos, music and pictures. The virus, which I forget the name of, that zeroed media files was a godsend, especially when users asked for files to be restored which invariably had a response of "please provide the business justification for madonna's greatest hits?", oddly there wasn't one.
When dodgy material was located we generally asked those people to "make those files disappear in the next 5 minutes"
After being burned in a previous job, if I'm not being paid for out of hours work, you're not getting my time for free.
I've had phone calls in the evening/weekend where somebody has said "You didn't answer the mail I just sent", to which the answer is "I don't look at emails outside of my working hours". This is normally followed by an awkward silence. If it's an emergency, then I'll deal with it and claim the overtime, anything else will be dealt with during my working day.
My team does have a team chat so if that pings out of hours, I will normally have a look in case one of my direct colleagues is asking a question which may have a 20 second answer or if it's interesting stuff that colleagues are up to non work related.
The current faster payments specifications has a number of payment types
SIP - Real time payments
SOP - Standing orders
A couple of others...
and POO - Payments Originating Overseas
Yup, someone has managed to get POO's into the faster payments specifications.
Always a bit of mirth and sniggering when talking to customers about having to deal with POO's.
Somebody I used to know was such a sound sleeper, he heard nothing, he woke up in the morning to no electricity, bits of buildings and trees scattering the road and nothing moving. He thought he'd slept through a nuclear holocaust!
I was 2 weeks into my first job, made it to Holborn on a bus to get into an office with no electricity. Got my introduction into powering up a VAX 8600 when the electric came back on. I was the only IT person that made it on site so started it all up with my 2 weeks of VMS experience.
I recall one of the CEO's of a manufacturer of voting machines publicly promised to make sure that his machines would "get the correct party into power"
Sounds to me like, you don't need the machines to be tampered with by dodgy officials and other bad actors when the manufacturer is willing to do it.
I will occasionally do a friends & family fix but only for a minimum cost of dinner.
Fortunately, the ones I've dealt with have mostly been to do with helping settings things up.
Though had one friend who I gave an old Mac mini too
Friend: i think the hard drive has died
Me: Why, what were you doing?
Friend: nothing
Me: are you sure?
Friend: no, thing
I find that the OS is corrupt and nothing is wrong with the disk.
He phoned one of my other IT friends and spoke to him about it to as obviously I don't know anything, he admitted to him that it was applying patches and he couldn't be bothered waiting so pulled the plug out to turn it off. My other IT friend told me the truth
So he lied to me and even when confronted lied until I told him I knew what happened.
Would only help him if he gave me the full story without missing anything out verbatim before I would touch anything of his again.
Had to do some emergency work for a Spanish bank once to help move a banking operation from the Caymans to Jersey after the Caymans got hit by a bad hurricane many years ago. Had to fly to Jersey in an emergency and with no Caymans staff, some vague assertions of help and not much else, try to get global payments back up.
That's the background.
Turned up, was there for a couple of hours when the Spanish staff said we were all going for lunch, my response being "Er...I just got here"
Lunch + Beer, wine, shots.
Back to office
Work for a few more hours
"We're going to dinner now"
Dinner + Beer, wine, shots.
Stagger back to office, stare at wavy screen and continue until midnight....
Repeat for 5 days
What came out of this, was working payments, staff they found in the caymans and flew over and a happy bank.
5 day working bender paid for by Spanish bank and bender instigated by Spanish staff on full expenses paid!
One company I was for (in my first job) at the end of the 80's had a lot of stuff connected up their Vax that handled the local applications + email.
Said company had Vax wired up to the x29 network as it was (the joys of accessing yellow pages over x29, was amazing)
Also, to the point, the Vax was also connected to the Telex network, so by generating an email with a certain address, you could send and receive telexes
Telex terminals prohibited the use of certain character strings which were just not possible to type, not so the case of the text of an email sent out.
So it came to pass that someone (manager) sending a telex via email on a Vax for some reason used a certain set of characters (unbeknown to anyone internally), that initiated a shutdown of the telex network in the south of England.
BT tracked it back to us and were rather angry, we were also given a list of things that under no circumstances must be typed and sent via this method.
Fun days!
Talking of massive bills.
Back in my first job, used to have to download oil drilling data from drilling rigs in the North Sea (back in 1987)
Had a few ways of doing this, most involved setting up a comms link at the heady speeds of 4800, sometimes 9600 if managed to use the leased line link up to the goonhilly satellite base station.
So trying to get a comms link running with over an inmarsat link, in those days, had to pay for the satellite uplink and downlink costs, so everything was double cost - at £5.87 a minute times two plus vat
Spent 8 hours trying to get a comm link going with BP - we worked out that the bill was probably around 5 and a half grand minimum, and it never worked!
Fun times
Worked for an investment bank once, had a manager that would take all the glory but none of the blame. Basically, anything that went well, he would crow from the rooftops that it was him that made it happen, anything that went wrong, he would throw to the wolves. I discovered this when I had a rather irate head of European settlements screaming obscenities at me down the phone.
There was a major issue and every day we had a meeting in a seniors manager room for updates, so round the room we would go where everyone would update on their tasks, he would always say "Not done it yet, getting right on it" - for 2 weeks. In the end in the middle of the meeting where he said it yet again, when it came to me I said, "Oh, I've done that". I was moved team the following week!
I got pushed a couple of years later (which I was happy about), I heard he got pushed at some point too.
Oddly you mention smart water meters - I've just had one put in as part of a initial test scheme.
I had no say in this as technically speaking, the installation is outside of my property - had a letter through saying it was being done with no opt out.
I will need to query if that means I can now get up to the second water usage from my incumbent supplier (Thames Water)
Used to work for a large investment bank.
Went from my floor to the dealer floor to help with an issue, when I got there, there were people standing up looking round like meerkats.
Went back to my floor, people still standing up
Turns out, the power was out in the computer room, 1000 cabinets worth of stuff.
There was an electrician in the computer room, who was moving an electrical point, he had followed the cabling under the floor in direct line to a pair of power sockets on a pillar.
Except......
That cable, went round the pillar to the other side and another cable came round the pillar to the socket. On the other side was an emergency power off button.
Back in history when the DC was built, all the EPO's were wired up with orange cable labelled EPO every 6 inches, the installers ran out of EPO cable so rather than getting more, they used what was there which was reels of power cable in grey. The poor electrician, couldn't get the final tile up as something was sitting on it so assumed that he had the correct cable.
Outcome, a day of carnage for an investment bank :)
The electrician was escorted from the premises never to return.
Not quite water.
One place I worked at had a basement canteen on split levels.
All well and good until the fuel tanks for the diesel generators sprung a leak and flooded the lower part of the canteen in 3 feet of diesel.
There was a background smell of diesel for months and even after redecorating could still see the depth line the diesel made.
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