Posts by Prst. V.Jeltz

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

Re: The Logistics!

They still dont need a phone to avoid those commonplace hazards though as these days they are transported to and from school in an armoured personnel carrier.

Re: "Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable [with the ban]"

ok , third infraction - the parents have to come and sit with them all day to ensure learning

The Logistics!

whether students should get them back between lessons or keep them tucked away until the final bell.

So the idea is to take them off students during the day? rather than not bring them? where they gonna store them all day? how much time and admin is that ?

some sort of cloak room esque ticket system?

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

1200 bd?

Luxury!

When I were a lad we had to read the screen and shout one or zero into the handset.

Re: Bad data coming in

Good call, I guess I could do a search and replace to clean up that kind of bad data, now how do you feel about a comma at the end of a series before the "and" ?

A) "Tom, Dick, jane and Harry went to the park"

or

B) "Tom, Dick, jane, and Harry went to the park"

I've always believed A was correct and did that but now I'm starting to go with B because it just feels more .. readable .

And I believe in some places it *is* acceptable - probly 'Murica where grammar goes to die.

Bad data coming in

Some data entering our "data Warehouse" * comes in via delimited text files or spreadsheets dropped off by users into folders to be picked up by an SSIS processes , these are the most likely to have bad data , not just in the content of the data but even the layout of said files .

So I created an internal web app , now they post these files in there and it audits the file against a template , checks as much as is possible and tells them when they have missed a column off , or a date is not acceptable, or whatever. Covers all the user submitted submissions and saves us a lot of digging to find why an SSIS process has failed again .

as a bonus it kicks of the relevant SSIS process right then , rather than waiting for next scheduled check of the drop folder .

.

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* outdated term I know , theres Data Lakes now , and Beach-houses , and motor launches and whatever else some buzzword merchant wants to stretch the metaphor to.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Re: Impossible names

I hope he was run out of town. Developers using end user naming behaviour are an accident waiting to happen!

I'm continually angry at Microsoft for putting a space in "Program files" ... and quite a few other dir structure related things

I have somehow managed to create a stored procedure in SQL that cannot be reopened once created. I rescued the code by querying the schema in order to migrate to another server .

Despite examining the code for ... something .. anything .. it all seemed fine and ran Create Procedure on the new server , aaaaand it happened again .

The error is "Syntax error in TextHeader of StoredProcedure 'usp_name' " if anyone curious

"Entity Framework" .. why ?

I have a series of comments from me to me spaced a year or two apart in a Blazor app just bitching about the complete pointlessness of "Entity Framework" and how it makes a job it didnt even need to be there for much more complicated and unintuitive.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

I didnt kill the network with Nmap , but I did set off alarm bells in the networking teams office.

Good to give their security measures a little drill now and again

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Re: "The Register's home nation – England"

A strong brownian motion producer!

That is infuriating!

And reminiscent of that olde world 90s tech support yarn involving a power cut and ending in "Because you are too fucking stupid to own a computer!"

The guys a hero

He McGuyvered the fuck out it and saved the day!

That is impressive! This was the most gripping on call story yet! and I dont even like football!

So he gets a gift voucher worth less than a shirt in the gift shop , way to show your appreciation football club!

I'd suggest minimum 10% of whatever the fine would be for not staging the match might be more appropriate.

NASA says it will isolate volunteers from the outside world for a year

Theres a great movie along these lines with Christopher Walken and Brendon Fraser

Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

Re: Some clarifications

I have recently been denied access to a suppliers REST API by our "Information security" dept , and so had to opt for website screen scraping - which they are apparently fine with .

I like to automate

Trouble is you just dont know where in the organisation this kind of easily fixed manual entry tediousness is going on .

Last year I wrote some SQL / SSIS that relieved the HR department from hand writing about 300 (seriously!) emails on a monthly basis to heads of departments about incomplete timesheets.

All they have to do now is maintain a csv of departments and email addresses of people concerned , my process will tell them if a dept name or email is not valid too . or any are missed out.

.

I received a little "going above and beyond" badge for this :D

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Wait ... so is the "top man" David Robinson 1 or Andrew S. Tanenbaum ?

The English grammar system seems to be ambiguous here

Had to drive a Novell 4.1 server ( as featured in the story!) back to the main site once because it didnt seem to be able to connect properly over the link ( even though remote site seemed connected in other repects) and if it didnt talk to the main servers at base within 48 hrs it was going to have some sort of major psychological breakdown - so it had to be taxied home .

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

Its just a storage box to put your apps in

Just make yourself a few shortcuts, pin-to-start and then ignore the GUI . The OS is just there to host the apps and provide frameworks like .net

Who cares what they did with the start menu - its got a search box , just use that .

see also Win+r and then cmd / services.msc compmgmt.msc / appqiz.cpl etc

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

nice when it goes the other way

I had the opposite

When joining my current employer in a temporary role for the duration of a large rollout project I did so much of the "other peoples jobs" on the project , mainly scripting , that I was rewarded with permanent employment.

Re: Primary case of injelititis, it seems

"injelititis"

I can see why that didnt catch on , hardly rolls of the tongue does it ?

not when up against phrases like "Failing upwards"

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

business antiquated / small time enough to be using word docs in the ordering process

.. and yet has a "Fulfilment Centre" ( vom )

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: Classic psychological manipulation

theres 3 of em!?

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Re: Too good to be true

Back in the day , ie days of 56kb dialup , a friend of mine fell foul of the old "dialer virus" scam

Something got on his PC that would redirect the modem to dial in through a High Charge Rate BT line and his bill correspondingly skyrocketed.

A little investigation of the bill revealed what had happened.

Maybe Most people at that time would probably have taken it on the chin , paid it , fixed it , and made sure it didnt happen again.

I thought he was very brave at the time but my friend however took a different tack which in this day and age is clearly the much more suitable response which was to reply to this demand from BT with something along the lines of , paraphrasing here :

"You can fuck right off if you think I am going to give my money to fraudsters on your say so and I hope you realise you are an accessory in this criminal scam and thereby culpable"

BT duly revised his bill.

Hopefully with red faces but I doubt that was the end of that ruse.

I'd be more worried about the software that demands a certain size screen than the dogy tablet

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: my hack of the day

Sounds like the maker equivalent of fancy pants aristocracy being introduced by the mc as they enter the ballroom

Re: back in 1990 ish

I am still going through the nightmare of 1990s weak ECU manufacture. The 1990 supra , 1JZ JDM version had notoriously flaky ECUs which are now incredibly rare and expensive and most have been apart from repair tinkering . Biting bullet buying aftermarket ECU this week , with all the expense and trouble that comes with .

working through menus in multiple languages

That sounds infuriating!

Although i once had a helpdesk job with a wifi supplier assisting people connecting to the wifi - on a variety of devices . I'd never seen an iPad at that point , but had some notes

"yes sir , *apparently* theres a settings icon that looks like a spanner, click that first "

Left job because the wifi provided was so bad people could barely connect to it and all I could do was sympathise and tell then to wave it around a bit higher up to maybe get a signal ... which was partly down to the clients not buying enough repeaters tbf .

back in 1990 ish

Before I started I.T. I was an apprentice mechanic. This was at the time Talking Cars wasnt the name of a youtube channel but an actual thing , which British Leyland took a deep dive into with some of their Meastro and Montego cars .

We had a Montego in that would not STFU! It was maddening . It took a while to work out if it had gone senile and was just yelling out false positives , or if the car was really that f***ked .

my hack of the day

I have recently added $SpeechSynthesizer.Speak($Text) to a collection of powershell tools we have so that it when the team member opens the cmd box they live in , it identifies username and looks up actual name and greets them by name

Childish eh ?

Norks blast 250+ fake job offers to developers over 6 weeks to try and snarf creds and crypto

snarf creds and crypto

"snarf" ?

Thats a word I've not heard in a long time

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

happened in the middle of a project, meaning Evan's action was profoundly unwelcome

After a week of back-and-forth with support, Evan got good news. His client's support team was able to restore the data from a backup

Oh good! so no time wasted then

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

Re: "working for a county sheriff's office"

I was wondering what to make of the guy who requisitioned him being called "the Major"

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

We've needed that since 2016

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

Re: fucking magnificient typo

why thank you sir!

Damn unlucky

The call for temp disk failed and my routine passed back an asterisk instead of an error code,” Miller confessed.,

WDamn unlucky to be fair , what an unfortunate sequence of events !

Theres been an error - here have a wildcard and play with that - it might do the job!

Its kinda similar to how a "Buffer overrun" will execute an inturders code for them , rather than brick the machine abd crash it - which to me seems far more likely

Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

Re: A Demonstration Everyone who is going to plug anything into a LAN.

I Accidentally coined my own typo that I'm quite proud of the other day , here at El Reg

"Buffer overrun" will execute an inturders code for them

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

This has happened to me a few times , people ask for stuff to be set up , never use it , and a year later ask for it again .

Dutch cops’ shame game works wonders as most wanted scammers now turned in

Re: "Smart Ass Lawyers"

"There's nothing in there about getting the correct guilty party."

Well call me a crazy idealist but perhaps we should start with correcting that!

Especially if this leads to nobody talking the police - and thereby making their job impossible , which therefore leads to a lawless state ?

Do we want the idea of a police system to work or not ???

Expecting the police to do everything themselves is the same attitude as those parents who expect the teachers to bring up their kids for them

This is how it should be

Community working alongside the police , not (at best!) expecting them to do all the work , or (at worst) actively hampering their effectiveness.

You see these smart ass lawyers on you with videos like "Why you never talk to the police" , all with 1000s of comments in complete agreement that the police should never be talked to let alone alone assisted , wether you are suspect , witness , bystander , neighbour whatever ...

Its no wonder crime is rampant !

Damn that comment section is hard to find now!

DOOM soundtrack added to National Recording Registry

I remember "Doom 95" coming out to run on the newfangled win95 , and it ran considerably worse than DOS doom did under Win95 .

Of course best way was to exit the win gui and run it on the underlying DOS

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

And that was enough to be useful!

yeah , it would have negated the need for the metalwork company to employ that hosting company

Re: "and a ping to home worked... but nothing outside the box itself was reachable."

he should at least have asked a local network admin to check that the port was up and configured properly.

I really wouldnt go bothering the network admin with "Is this port live / configured?" until after I'd confirmed the cable was plugged into it

Re: TheReg OnCall

Never mind that, the comments button has moved!

... and theres a load of crap below the story rather than the end of the page which used to be there

"and left it for someone else to install because he had another job "

Presumably this was another I.T. guy from his company?

I can only imagine the amount of "reaming" and shouting that guy got , hopefully before being sacked .

Maybe he wasnt as "technical" as our hero , perhaps his job title was "installer" rather than "builder" and he might not have been able to diagnose more complex issues but if he cant diagnose that he hasnt plugged the NIC in, what the hell is he doing in the job?

Also this could have been easily solved over the phone by whoever took the call from the angry customer much more quickly than making our hero drive 120km.

Failure all round basically .

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

Plain hashes? or salted-hashes?

Caramel please!

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yes, new layout bad

AMD puts out new slottable GPU for AI-curious enterprises

You know what AI does ?

Enables non tech users waste hardware resource and more importantly energy on an exponentially magnified scale.

in the 90s we had 486s and office v6 , in2020s even pre AI the hardware was 1000 times better , the desktop machine and its office software however is much the same.

Now we have AI that people are using to do shit that office v6 could have done , like calendar entries , and if thery do mamage to cvobble some actual data flow or work process it will be 1000 less effecient and stable than traditional methods , but uses a datacenter to do it

... so im on the fence about the whole thing .

it *does* help with coding

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: 75 to 100 is 25%.

you can calculated to reverse value by taking the reciprical of the original multiplication value.

Sounds useful!

So could you use that information to find out what Trump meant by "down 600%" assuming he was talking backwards on a pack of pills that pre reduction cost , say ,$15 ?

Re: 75 to 100 is 25%.

this is whats always slightly confused me with percentages

75 plus 33% is 100

100 minus 25% is 75

It depends which way you're coming at it.

I'd still be fascinated to know what Trump means by "Drugs are down 600%"

Presumably he means they are now at the price that if you increased it by 600% you'd arrive at the old price , but thats being too kind when we know he is just pulling these biger and biogger numbers out of his ass