Posts by Giles C

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Sh1t Planning

I remember a comms cabinet we had installed which was under the toilet on the floor above. I don’t need to say any more do I……

Also in another building the company took over a floor above the one we were on, when I first walked in there was a large 20x10m comms rooms and we had a tiny overloaded room below it, so I said can’t we move the kit up here. After the designers had finished we had a cupboard with the drainpipe for the sink going through the comms room.

The worst bit was that the facilities did the floor wiring on the cheap and just moved the floorboxes to where they needed the desks. So when looking for a spare patch you found in the same row of desks 50,65,122,4 etc. I am sure it would have been quicker and cheaper to just rip it out and install new cables…

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Re: More stuff to track people.

Same here, the bigger problem is the a pillars getting so thick you could hide an elephant in the blind spot. I remember seeing years ago someone had proposed a lattice for the pillar instead of a solid lump of metal as it would be easier to see through. Not sure what happened to that Idea?

But really you need to be aware of what is going on around you, forget the electronics and pay attention

Heart now pledges 30-seat hybrid electric commercial flights by 2028

Re: Neat

Well on another site I found it will have 20t take off weight with 5t of batteries with a pair of 800kW-class turbogenerators which would weigh quite a lot as well.

Doesn’t leave much for the airframe and passengers

Amazon allegedly punishes sellers who dare offer lower prices on other marketplaces

Re: Amazon doing something useful?

Mains chainsaws always seem an odd item to me. Most trees you would need a chainsaw for are hopefully quite a distance from a mains socket and also any buildings, so unless you have a 50m or longer extension lead how would you use it.

Besides that who wants to be using a high speed cutter with a cable trailing from it?

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

Apricot used to use a; for the internal hard drive unlike all the other machines, I never used one but it was easy to accidentally format the hard drive rather than a floppy disk.

Coffee as glue

During a refresh years ago we discovered that coffee would if spilt under a pc (big beige compaq units) and wasn’t cleaned up it would glue the machine to the desk.

We found this was the case when to get the old machine off the desk we had to resort to levering it up and in a couple of cases it took the surface laminate off as well.

Dump these small-biz routers, says Cisco, because we won't patch their flawed VPN

Re: I was all set to be mad

Depends on the use case.

Firewalls and edge equipment I wouldn’t do this with, layer 2 switches can last years, as long as you have a spare or two to swap out if something goes bang.

I once found a 15 year old switch that someone had installed as a quick fix, however as this had a very low MAC address it became the root bridge for the network, until I spent a weekend reprogramming the spanning tree across the site…

Re: I was all set to be mad

Well as the standard cisco eos policy is 5 years support after the end of sale date

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/eos-eol-policy.html

It wont be Cisco. I don’t think anyone supports kit for that long.

Just checked and Arista and Juniper are also 5 years

Extreme is 12-36 months depending on the product.

So in the enterprise network space when something goes end of sale expect to replace it within 5 years (assuming you still want support on it)

Halfords slapped on wrist for breaching email marketing laws

Re: One of those places

You get that in quite a few places now, I always say no as I don’t want them to have the right to potentially spam me with marketing.

I always give the minimum information, obviously if something is being delivered then they need the address, but if I am in the shop give me the receipt and I will file it away in case I have a problem with the item.

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: DST is anachronistic

Yep most software runs in gmt/utc and the sensible stuff just has an offset in the display the user sees.

Correlating log files when dst kicked in was always fun - some massive holes or duplicate entries depending on which end of the year it was.

Once everyone agreed to keep the timezone the same it was a lot easier.

California passes bill requiring salary ranges on job listings

Re: Will this actually help ?

Hamilton Barnes I won’t deal with.

They sent me for a job, which stated shift work on the spec, I said I didn’t want to do shift work they said it didn’t apply to that role…

They then sent me for an interview which was at a secure site (didn’t tell me about the requirements to get in) or and reckoned the salary was higher then the company was offering.

Needless to say I didn’t take the job

But advertising a job as competitive salary doesn’t mean a thing, we all have costs / commitments so there will be a minimum salary we can work for.

Man wins competition with AI-generated artwork – and some people aren't happy

Re: Understanding my cat

There is a bit more.

Let me go outside (1 minute later) yowling to be let in.

But basically the cats aim in life “enslave all humans “ but if the humans has dreamies then all they want is feeding.

What do they put in dreamies?

I know years ago that they used to use chicken gastric juices to keep them loyal to a certain brand…..

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

Re: I have no problem with this.

Well the main road to the town centre (glinton to Peterborough) where I live has the following speed limits between roundabouts

70

50

40

30

30

40

40

40

30

So how about consistency, the whole road is a dual carriageway which until covid had a sensible 40 mph speed limit most on the run

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

Payroll errors

Going back a few years I got a massive pay cheque from my employers. As part of my contract I was paid £350 per week for being on call, someone entered 350 as the number of additional hours worked.

Result a payment of £20k that month…. When I went to the payroll department their first reaction was just give us a check for the overpayment! I told them to pull the money back, sort out the hmrc records and then pay me the correct amount

No I wasn’t going to keep the money as it was obviously wrong.

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

Re: giraffes

0.1352 NanoWales if you must know

(80.1 x 50 is 4355 square inches) feed that into the standard converter)

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Electricity cost

According to an article in the Sunday times yesterday they reckon after the uk energy price cap increase takes effect in October it will cost £44 per year to run one of these doorbells.

Now if that wasn’t an incentive to not have one……

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

And it measures in register units as well there are references to the coastline of Mozambique and a weight of teaspoons equivalent to 4 blue whales.

Unfortunately and wandering off topic I got an email message from a Mr Dabbs saying the SFTW weekend column has been axed so you need to go to https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com to read his latest musings

Just in case others hadn’t seen it

Sony camera feature hopes to make digital images immune to secret manipulation

Re: all photographs are manipulated

Got to agree, I produce a club newsletter the pictures from the camera are in raw format, they are then tweaked for exposure, cropped, corrected etc before being exported as a jpeg and then imported to the newsletter for printing.

So they don’t end up anything like the original pictures the camera took as they are 30mega pixel files which are about 6x7cm on the page typically.

Yes you could argue I don’t need them that big but it helps when editing, and the larger the source file the better the smaller picture.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

At a previous company I remember walking into one of the comms rooms to find I couldn’t get to the network switch to trace a fault because facilities had filled the room up with pallets (yes plural) of bottled water.

The water was for a promotional thing to the staff they got to told to remove it and the question came back why was it a problem ?

I left that for management to deal with

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: "Would you like the Hood Release option on your new car?"

If I remember correctly the Audi A1 came without a bonnet catch, the only way to gain access was through a flap on the front which allowed you to top up screen wash and other fluids.

To gain access to the engine that rewired a set of spanner’s….

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

Re: I'm surprised this hasn't happened more often

Halfords look at you very strange when I tell them I’m not giving them an email address, so do Argos.

One web site I went to wanted an email address before I could read the pages so it got a spam one from my domain.

The problem is a lot of people only have a single address, so they don’t have that option, and they are stupid enough to hand it over to anyone.

Mind you I don’t like communicating with people and tend to keep thing private as much as possible

Apple sued by French media over App Store power

Compared to paper copies

If you want to sell a physical newspaper, then you need to pay the printers to make it, the distributors to get it to a region, and the individual shops who stock it. I’m pretty sure that adds up to more than 30% of the cover price…

It is why magazines want subscribers because posting it directly to people gives them more money.

I think the big chains even charge you depending on where the on the shelf you go I.e. pay more be on the front row.

Still suing someone in one country under the rules in a 3rd country seems really odd, and can these huge publishers not afford $99 a year…

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

Grey market

A few years back we had a supplier ship used grey market equipment as new. We only found out when I tried to log a call directly with Cisco for support and got told the equipment belonged to someone in Malaysia (I think), Turned out they were faking the support contracts by registering one of an item legitimately and then wanting the customers to go through them for support.

It did make the news at the time but I can’t remember the company name.

Microsoft reviews M365 resilience after Indian outage

Re: No Telling

It could also be the infamous road worker going through the cable in the road outside the data centre. A local cut fibre is always a pain to deal with, although you would have hoped on a connection this important (for both companies) that multiple redundant paths would be provisioned

Security flaws in GPS trackers can be abused to cut off fuel to vehicles, CISA warns

Re: Cut off fuel ?

Anti theft - if reported as stolen then stop it running?

You would hope it isn’t possible to do this whilst it is moving, which is what it seems to be able to do. In that case it is a very stupid design.

I mean how hard it is to write a routine that shuts down fuel when speed = 0

North Koreans spotted harassing SMBs with malware

An article next to this one (sponsored article about backups) refers to SME

So now in two articles we have

SME Small Medium Enterprise

SMB Small Medium Business

Or is it

SME subject matter expert

SMB Server Message block

Or anyone of the hundreds of infuriating TLAs we have to endure

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: Lotus 1-2-crash

About 25 ish years ago my boss at the time did the same thing, but as the company only employed 20 people it was left for him to sort out.

In did work and made ordering faster but could be a problem when it went wrong.

It then got extended to do stock control as well - I can’t remember if there was a proper database involved.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Re: Monthly?

Well I had an old 1997 bmw e36 and the air conditioning compressor seized, brought the car to a complete halt. So in that case it did drain the engine power completely.

But yes modern cars they don’t really cause that much of a drain these days

UK tribunal: App Store class action seeking up to $1.8b can continue

Re: How did they come up with that value

Well I looked through the last 2 years of App Store purchase and I don’t think I have spent more that £40 (a lot of that went on the rusty lake games).

So I don’t spend that much at all

Not much of this actually from 'China anymore,' says Northern Light Motors boss

Re: Ride height?

It doesn’t look that much lower than you sit in my Tiger (Lotus 7 inspired sportscar), although it is narrower and shorter, what would concern me is the lack of mirrors - I assume they are left off the demo machines but if I had one I would ditch the canopy and stick on a motorbike helmet. Being hit in the face by a stone at 30mph is not nice.

Looks interesting though…

Contractor loses entire Japanese city's personal data in USB fail

Must be for the same people who want an app controller pressure washer.

We're now truly in the era of ransomware as pure extortion without the encryption

Well exfiltrate actually means to remove someone furtively from a hostile area. I.e. it is opposite of infiltrate.

Not really stealing information or encrypting it.

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

Could be, the reason I half remembered the size is that steel coming in 6m lengths as a standard.

I do remember the machine it stacked on was as high as the warehouse which was about 30m hence the deafness caused when it dropped one from the top of the machine.

I was only about 12 at the time….

Where my dad worked years ago was a warehouse, he used to come home and say the machine had dropped a cassette.

If was only when the company had a family open day did we see that the cassette was about 6.5 x 1 x 1 metres. Strange terminology

Microsoft readies Windows Autopatch to free admins from dealing with its fixes

Re: Hours wasted by Microsoft

Can’t upvote you more than once, but it only ever seems to happen when you are in a hurry. What is really frustrating is the machine option are update and shutdown, update and restart and not defer update for 12 hours which is the one you want in a hurry.

I had a laptop singe the carrying bag as it hadn’t shut down when I put it away (I hadn’t realised).

US must adopt USB-C charging standard like EU, senators urge

Re: There is confusion indeed

I use all of those, 2 laptops with cloverleaf, 2 monitors and 2 printers with C14. A figure of 8 (C8) on the Mac mini. Usb mini-A powering a usb hub. Old raspberry pi micro usb, somewhere there is an external drive with a jack connector.

I have lost count of the number of laptop power leads I have had over the years, HP barrel adaptors (2 types) Lenovo usb-c, macbook MagSafe and probably a few more.

Running behind my tv I have C8s, hard wired cables, C13 etc.

To be honest phones are just an easy target. The rest of the market has so many variations that it is impossible to keep track of.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

The world would be a lot duller without out people like him.

UK competition watchdog seeks to make mobile browsers, cloud gaming and payments more competitive

The biggest problem any newcomer will have into the mobile market is application support.

You have companies that develop apps for iOS and android, without the manufacturer support they won’t be new hardware for these phones built, but without the application support there won’t be anyone wanting to use the new devices.

For example you have an app for your bank this will be available for either iOS or android. Along comes the revolutionary new wibble phone, but you need the app to authorise card payments, without the bank porting the app over to wibble it isn’t going to work for you.

Yes you can argue that the two main players have cornered the market, but they have done that due to popularity of their platforms, pushing everyone else out to point they have withdrawn, blackberry - now an android device , windows phone - discontinued, firefox os ended up on panasonic TVs.

To be honest the competition authorities sat on their hands for the for the last 10 years and only now have become interested, the horse hasn’t so much bolted as the last three generations have been living wild and the stable has fallen down due to lack of use.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

My brother found one of his staff doing the same thing - he told me about a month ago that he had found out that morning when changing some numbers and finding the totals didn’t move.

Warning: Colleagues are unusually likely to 'break' their monitors soon

Re: So

My Panasonic tv is now 6 years old, iPlayer is erratic and prime doesn’t work with profiles. So now it is used for broadcast tv and the rest of time it is fed from the Apple TV, Blu-ray or PlayStation.

When it needs to be replaced (ie it is broken) then all I care about is the number of hdmi sockets and the picture quality as the rest of the services won’t be used.

I think the last firmware update was about 4 years ago…..

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Underestimating the Average Desktop User?

You do older cars do not like E10 petrol - some carburettor floats have the solder disolve with e10 meaning they fail to float. Even older cars need leaded petrol or a lead substitute these days

So for those cars you have to seek out superunleaded (E5) petrol and / or additives.

However you can get in any car from the 1930s to today and drive it. The pedals all do the same job, the steering does and yes you may have to hunt for some of the minor controls but they all do the same thing.

You don’t have to relearn the fundamentals every time you change the car or get in someone else’s vehicle.

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Other devices? Other features?

The biggest problem with usb-c is the mess of cables as you say.

Power only

Power up to x

Data only

Data high speed

Thunderbolt (same port different signalling)

Power and data with different speed / power capacity.

The port might be standard the cables are a mess.

Also I have ripped a few usb-c sockets out the board on laptops when the cable got pulled at an angle.

Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

I am colour blind, and wiring a plug is easy. Stripy, pale, dark

And as for cat5 cables they are blue red orange orange…

However traffic lights for me are orange red white (there is a colour on the new led ones) so for them I go via the sequence (I can tell the difference between the top and bottom lights).

Green / red leds no chance, snooker is confusion - not the red and Green so much but Green/brown is very hard.

But then grass is orange and picking tomatoes is hard.

Ps colour blind way to wire a plug

Green to brown

Brown to blue

Blue to bits

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Re: Snail mail can be just as bad

No just put deceased return to sender on the envelope and pop it back in the postbox.

Note in my case that was actually true regarding the previous owner of the house. But I have used it with junk mail addressed to myself.

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Re: HP Laserjet 5

We had a 5si when I used to work, less of printer more a solid piece of steel. It finally expired when the internals melted (or something) and someone decided to put it in a 30 tonne rubbish compactor.

The result after a lot of straining from the compactor the only sign of damage was a cracked plastic panel.

They knew how to build properly those days.

Mind you I have a 4350 sitting next to me at home (eBay purchase) apart from toners it has sat here for about 5 years without any real problems well one of the paper trays won’t print duplex but the other does….

Zuckerberg sued for alleged role in Cambridge Analytica data-slurp scandal

Well as is a DA who is bringing charges you would hope he is sure there is enough proof?

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Don't forget to proofread

You mean this one

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: What On "Earth"?

English and American electrician working on the same machine. (In England)

American: is the machine hot?

English: (putting hand on casing) nope

American: (using screwdriver)I just got a shock you said it wasn’t hot.

At that point it dawned on them that to the English a LIVE machine is powered up whereas in America a HOT machine is powered up.

Separated by a common language

Re: What On "Earth"?

The colourblind way to wire a plug

Green to brown

Brown to blue

Blue to bits

I am colourblind but the modern colours make it very hard to wire wrongly