Posts by Giles C 410 posts • joined 1 Jul 2015
Well an ex colleague had a MacBook in a rucksack, rode his motorbike and it came out of the rucksack. It might have been ok until an 44tonne lorry drove over it.
Nothing was bringing that one back to life.
It was amazing there how many corporate iPhones used to fail just after the model was released and needed replacement the telecomms manager got wise to this so gave out the oldest phones he had and told them to raise a PO for a brand new one which needed to be approved by the finance director
Wow what language was that written in before it was badly translated to English.
I think Sir Humphrey would have been proud of that.
Seriously though I don’t use chrome, and after this announcement have even less desire to do so.
The browser should be a sandboxed app (as should most of applications) to stop this sort of leakage and spying on users.
I visit a website and then may leave it open whilst doing something else, hard luck site operators I’m doing what I want to do.
I haven’t dealt with Telkom for about 8 years (it was a few jobs ago) but I remember the best bit was the call centre supporting international connections couldn’t phone outside of the country. Which was great when I am sitting in an office in the UK trying to fix a network problem in Cape Town.
We used to have to give them the mobile number of one of the office managers to relay information through…
I used this a few years ago (probably about 10) the reason for this was connecting two buildings separated by a car park, there was a single duct between them but they wanted a redundant connection.
We had a couple of problems.one the laser was too powerful (we gave it sunglasses) the second was in freezing fog it refracted to the point of not working - not a problem in Africa,
But it did work and the signal did transmit for a for years until someone finally paid to run a cable for a kilometre round the site to give it redundancy.
My postcode only covers 10 houses, so if someone looked up bmw owners there is only one in this postcode area - mine. So that would identify me pretty quickly.
If you live in a block of flats then that does increase the pool size, but a row of semidetached houses there aren’t many to choose from. My parents live in a road with 8 houses using the same postcode so that reduces the pool further.
Unless companies need to post things to you then they don’t need anything more than the first 4/5 characters of the postcode.
Ie: PE4 will identify part of Peterborough (Werrington), the next digit will give you the sub area there are only 3 (5,6,7) and beyond that you shouldn’t be including the rest of the postcode especially not if the data is being anonymised.
On a side note, at a previous job someone put my machine into a policy that rebooted it at 22:30 every night, sitting on site reprogramming the core switch it got to the magic time and promptly told me it was rebooting in 1 minute. Cue frantic saving and note taking of where in the long list of tasks I had got to before I lost everything (and possibly crashed the site off the rest of the network)
So there is someone worse than the process designer….. the policy editing ad administrator
Two options
If you have a landline get a phone with bt call guardian or similar service, only numbers in your phones address book will get straight through, everyone else has to identify themselves and most call scams won’t.
On a mobile block all unknown numbers calling - iPhone this is built in, I think you need an app for Android. My phone sends all unknown / withheld numbers straight to voicemail. If it important they will leave a message.
A tower compaq proliant server (this is pre 2000, front panel is off as it had to be moved to gain access for something.
Thumb caught the power switch - the thing is these switches only actuate when the pressure is released - I sat there for about 10 minutes waiting for everyone else to shut down before I could let go of the switch - the springs on those switches get very heavy after a minute or two....
The server was the main Novell box for the entire company.
Read the whole line
Average use times are down from a peak of over 30 hours a week in 2020 – probably reflecting lockdowns in the first half of that year.
I read that as it 2020 (lockdowns) more internet use in 2021 (no / fewer lockdowns) less time spent on the internet.
You hope that but make sure when you put it back together ensure you use copper grease, correct torque settings etc. It might not be you pulling it apart again but the person doing it will be grateful.
Speaking from experience after resorting once to an angle grinder to remove a rusted on brake disc (the neighbours loved me using it at 9pm on a Saturday night as the car was needed sunday morning!)
Yep, have two manuals fo4 the Ford Sierra (comes of having a Sierra based kit car) youngsters go an look the car up.
One the grey/pink version covers everything including rebuilding the gearbox.
The other a blue cover just says check the oil and then take it to a mechanic.
For modern cars it is even worse, there is virtually no technical information and I think they have stopped producing any new ones as the cars are too complex for the home mechanic to do anything with these days.
Virtually every company tech and non tech is guilty of doing this.
The spare parts you buy to find out that they only fit a model made up until X date provided the serial number is less than something.
Just try and buy spares for a car without the chassis or registration number you will find a subtle difference where the replacement won’t fit.
I had a bmw where one year into the production run they changed the door lock mountings as a result you need to check the part number against the chassis or it won’t fit. But look at two with the different doors and nobody can spot the difference as it is all internal.
I have done several online exams during lockdown as the exam centres were closed.
To be honest next time I will go to the exam centre, as it is a lot less mucking about.
The online proctoring service the pearson Vue exams use does use the software to stop you accessing the internet, or opening up other files and as the exam is meant to be a knowledge test that seems reasonable.
Having said that I did use a spare laptop with nothing personal on it to do the exams.
But yes at the exam centre there are several cameras watching you constantly to ensure you aren’t cheating so you are under constant surveillance. The only other choice they could have is to lock each person in a cupboard with no access to anything. But that would probably be stressful for someone.
If you are taking an exam which is closed book, don’t try to cheat and if you are being observed then accept it.
It could be worse - I drive a tiger (lotus 7 type) so fibreglass bonnet and nose with a fairly large Ali fad inside. Doesn’t help when the fan stops working (thermal switch broke) and in a queue of traffic.
At road speeds the airflow works fine at no speed it overheats and there isn’t a heater fitted to allow for cool downs. The only thing you can do is to pull over and wait for a cool down.
I do have a manual switch that can be wired in and taped to the bonnet to get it to near me!
I’ve had people come to me with firewall changes with an ‘any’ in the rule.
Now for certain things this is fine i.e. web servers where you have inbound traffic; mail servers to smtp outbound etc
But the only thing that rule should be used for is with a deny statement and then send everything to a syslog server.
It isn’t hard to set up a firewall, think about it logically and check each service properly although with some of the stuff I have seen a lot of people shouldn’t be anywhere near a firewall.
Hmm
Two network engineers sitting in an office, one (not me) types in a debug command that was missing a parameter so it started overloading the console.
I glanced over at him as things started slowing down - his glanced towards the door a quick nod and we both got up with laptops and quietly walked to the comms room. Where we found a switch stuck in a debug loop
Rebooted switch and as it was spooling up management burst into the comms room
There was a panic when the network went slow followed by a bigger panic when both network engineers had vanished.
We both stayed working their for another 7 or so years - management put it down to human error…
True for my current role I don’t need to be anywhere near an office - configuring firewalls in remote data centres.
However if I was installing device I would have to go to the office to do that work (or wherever the kit was located).
So a hybrid approach will be needed - depending on what you are doing.
If the internet companies had been the ones around over 100 years ago I dread to think how many telephone systems the planet would have had.
Think about it, due to standardisation any phone can call any other phone on the planet and it will connect and allow you to carry on a conversation.
This is due to the ITU making sure all countries agreed on a standard.
The internet firms don’t care about standards
A few years (and jobs ago) we had just had some new distribution boards in the computer room.
Some new kit had been installed and powered up but it was only idling.
A while later it powered up fully and at that time the whole room went down. Nobody was in it at the time fortunately.
When we went down to investigate the first thing to check was the new dis board - everything was switched on and none of the breakers had tripped.
So out of the room and off to find the switchgear running the room - which had tripped.
We had a 40A circuit breaker feeding the new board which was protected with a 100A breaker.
So the load tripped the breaker outside the room and killed the power. The electricians were in that weekend swapping the supply cables out….
Strange about them not wanting to do a Mail shot.
I got a letter from the dvla this morning, informing me that I will be charged when the ULEZ around London expands later this year.
Strange this.
I live over 100 miles from London,
The last time I went to London I got a train
The last time was about 3 years ago.
I have never driven in London (and never want to).
Does this mean people in John O’groats also got the same letter?
Wake on lawn is great for this sort of work, provided they are using desktop machines as said below laptops are a bit of a problem.
However it can have its drawbacks….
A few years ago I had to go to a remote site to upgrade the network switch firmware. Because it was a 24x7 operation I needed to be on site to make sure the users where aware.
My change is scheduled for 11pm, about 10:20 all the agents stop taking calls. I thought this was strange and it turned out the automatic updates policy (which did a WOL call, applied the updates and then shut the machines down at the end) was applied to these machines.
So every night at 10:30 the machines would look for updates and it if didn’t find any shut the computer down….
I told the staff to raise it as a call with the service desk as they would get the policy changed. I left the company a month later and as far as I knew they hadn’t made the call yet - wonder why?
I had an lcd monitor that one summer a couple of thunder flies somehow got in and ended up walking between the backlight and the front panel. Was interesting when it was alive but it died and then left a small corpse on the screen about the same size as a full stop, fun when you are trying to edit documents wondering what the rogue punctuation is….
I was chatting to a friend who had one of his coworkers have to self isolate.
The person couldn’t figure out where he had been pinged from, as all he had done was go to work and then back home. As his self isolation came to an end he was talking to his neighbour who mentioned that their child had had it. So the ping had triggered through the walls of the house…
As I have said to people I work with, find an engineer who has never done any of the above and we have found either a liar or they have only worked in the field for a couple of weeks.
All of us have done this and the honest ones admit to doing it and will explain how they recovered from the problem.
A piece of string question.
I have a canon 28-104 f4L second hand was £900 (new It is about £1200) was it worth it, yes the picture quality compared to a cheaper lens is much higher. But a slight downside is it weighs over a kilo before you couple the camera, and is also a quite large.
Compared to my phone camera there is no comparison in quality (mind you it is coupled to a EOS-R body)
A few jobs back, I was fairly sure my manager didn’t read the long and drawn out appraisal replies I had to read.
So in the middle of a long and tedious block of text (we had something like 30 objectives to fill in) I deliberately inserted a fatuous comment in the text.
Then I found out he did read it all….. and told me to remove the live before it went to HR.
Some people do read everything…..
I was watching forensics the real csi on the bbc last night.
A suspected criminals phone needed to be got into to trace the information history on it.
It took the forensics investigatior 5 seconds to break into to this iphoneX. The reason the passcode was set to 0000 yes 4 zeros.
No password is proof against human stupidity…..
I had a manager once call me on my personal phone about 6 times in an evening.
My phone was on silent as
1 it was my personal device
2 I wasn’t on call that week
3 I was watching a film.
When it is on silent only a few peoples number overrides it and it rings.
The reason for the call they were doing a cascade test….
When I did answer (about 3 hours after the calls) I got moaned at for not answering the phone. I pointed out that I didn’t for the reasons above and if they wanted me to answer anytime then it wasn’t going to happen.
I also said that once I leave the office then I don’t care what happens until the next morning.
I won’t put any corporate stuff on a personal phone, or any of my own computers. If they insist on that then they can take a jump.
Mind you as a contractor they can’t force it on me.
I’ve never understood the bombs on wheels comment.
You happily drive a cat with 60-80 litres of explosive liquid in a single walled plastic bowl.
An electric car with a ruptured battery pack can reignite a day of so later (see Richard hammonds crash in one)
If the tank developed a leak in normal operation then the hydrogen will disperse into the atmosphere, if something impacts with an ignition source then there could be an explosion.
Do you not think that the safety precautions would have been tested before going live. I would guess a crash test or two would be needed before anyone approves this….
How not to design a system for colour blind users
Usually Alarm is red with white text,
Ok is green / white.
Both those depending on shade could be the same to me.
We also have Acknowledged(orange / black), Latched(khaki / white), Ignored(grey / black),
I could probably tell those apart.
Forced On(yellow / red), Forced Off(yellow / green).
Again they would be very hard to tell apart.
Being serious before you employ anyone on your service desk make then undertake a colour vision test.
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