Posts by ricardian

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

Re: rows of car batteries baking in the 48° heat

My friend had a Skoda umpteen years ago. The handbook recommended turning on the headlights for a few minutes before trying to start the engine when temperatures were below -10C

Facebook celebrates Independence Day by lighting up American outage maps

Facebook problems in the UK - photographs not displaying

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

I'd been using MS Word for some time when I complained to my colleague that words that I had correctly spelled were being underlined as spelling errors. It was only then that I discovered that spelling errors and grammar errors are underlined with different colours - the perils of being red/green colour blind!

Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings

Re: (2mbps!!)

And most of Orkney's North Isles (Westray, Stronsay, Sanday, Eday, North Ronaldsay)

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Re: I changed the start up & shut down sounds.

https://www.soundjay.com/fart-sound-effect.html

Take that NATS! Jocko IT is also totally rubbish. BOOM!

The SNP election material began arriving on my island (Stronsay, Orkney) today. Alas, the database has done a random mix of names with addresses thus affording the inhabitants much amusement and giving the postie quite a challenge

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

My very first OU course in 1977 was "Computing & Computers". The real-life company that was used as a case study ("Koch-Light chemicals") utilised the very latest "visible record computer" but I can't remember which model. Part of the course involved writing out BASIC code on squared paper and posting it (Royal Mail) to the OU who typed it up and ran it through their computer. This worked well as I was living in Brora (Sutherland) with no access other than a 75 baud time-share printer link at Thurso tech, a long drive away. The OU staff ran my first job through and annotated it showing where I'd gone wrong; after that they ran the job and returned the results, warts & all, without comment. The latter part of the course involved storing some data on the OU computer and then using that data in subsequent modules. After submitting one job that needed data which had been stored I received a note from the OU computer people asking (in rather stronger terms) "where is your data!". It took some time to discover that the OU had two separate computer sites at Milton Keynes & (I think) Sunderland, my jobs would be sent to either site, depending on the relative workloads. Alas, the data storage for the two computer sites was not shared thus causing the anguished cry of "where is your data!"

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

At least the sensors were mounted the right way up unlike those of the Russian Proton-M (which were hammered into place when they did not fit despite the arrow indicating "This way up"!)

Windows 10 May 2019 Update thwarted by obscure tech known as 'external storage'

Back in the 1990s (Windows 3.1 or Windows NT?) I discovered that accessing or storing anything on drive letter "F" slowed down the whole system. It took a bit of digging to find out why but it appeared that Microsoft had reserved drive letter F as an analytical drive on which all sorts of debugging clutter could be hung and utilised.

Strong-willed field support op holds it together during painful customer call

Re: Seriously?

In the mid 1980s I was working at a Government facility in Scarborough (N Yorks) and we had a new PDP 11/23 Plus on which to develop new "C" software. It must have been a "Friday build" because it frequently died on us and wouldn't re-boot. This meant phoning the office in Leeds who would despatch an engineer. We were charged £50 an hour from the time the engineer left Leeds until he eventually got back to Leeds.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

My first posting in the RAF after basic & trade training in 1961 was RAF Driffield (Yorkshire) which was a Thor missile base. The stores section, run by RAF & USAF personnel, had IBM 80 column card punches, verifiers and data transceivers. One day the data transceiver received a batch of cards which punched OK but the print at the top of the card was missing. The procedure for faults was to contact RAF Alconbury who then sent out an IBM technician. The chap drove all the way up to Driffield, walked into the office, flipped the "print" switch from "off" to "on" then got back into his car and drove back to Alconbury.

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Re: colourblind

And Gaelic!

Cryptography is the Bombe: Britain's Enigma-cracker on display in new home

More goodies for the museum from a decommissioned nuclear power station https://youtu.be/Tcziya_THfk.

Includes items such as an RL02 disk pack holding a working copy of RSX 3.2

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

Re: waste

My cousin was promoted within the UK Inland Revenue department. In his new office was a locked steel 6 foot cabinet with no key available. Locksmiths opened the cabinet and it was found to be crammed full of envelopes and those gummed re-use labels all marked "On His Majesty's Service". As this was in the 1970s my cousin decided it probably wasn't worth hanging on to them "just in case"...

My cousin also discovered that those gummed re-use labels actually cost more than 2 or 3 envelopes

A friend of mine worked in a large government department and had designed a piece of electronic security equipment that was to be used by the Army, Navy & Air Force. It survived all the usual extremely tough field tests with flying colours but he had great difficulty with the final part of the design - how to quickly destroy it in case of an emergency

Blue Monday: Efforts to inspire teamwork with swears back-fires for n00b team manager

Re: What's wrong with a good spoonerism?

Betty Swallocks

There is an authentic medieval dye colour called "goose shit green"

http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard/B_Chap01.html

Bored bloke takes control of British Army 'psyops' unit's Twitter

Re: PsyOps taken over

In the RAF and in non-cavalry army units the cavalry were referred to as "donkey wallopers"

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

Re: In A Slightly Different Vein

Same thing at a large RAF base in Cyprus in the 1960s. Major storm knocked out power for a couple of days. The telephone exchange had an enormous battery which should have provided power for at least 36 hours but died after about 30 minutes. It transpired that a sergeant in the Royal Corps of Signals (who looked after all RAF telephones overseas) was responsible for ensuring that the electrolyte was topped up and regular voltage tests were carried out; he hadn't checked for ages and there was hardly any electrolyte in any of the cells.

After that same storm and flooding there was a signaller (private) in the Royal Corps of Signals who was using a canvas bucket to bail out a cable pit that was full of water. An officer in the Royal Corps of Signals drove up in his LandRover and asked the signaller how he was getting on. When the lad replied "Not very well, sir" he was told to put his back into it and bail more quickly. Shortly after that the SNCO from the Royal Corps of Signals arranged for an RAF fire engine to pump out the cable pit - a job that took about 4 hours because all the cable ducts were acting as drains and feeding into the cable pit.

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Now where did I put that big box with all the Multimate installation diskettes??

https://winworldpc.com/product/multimate/40

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

Re: Bah!

Put your servers in a metal container then lower that metal container into the sea! That's what Microsoft did.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44368813

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Here's something to bring back memories!

https://youtu.be/nLy_jEbuY-U

Staff sacked after security sees 'suspect surfer' script of shame

Re: Access Denied

Or Penistone

Azure, Office 365 go super-secure: Multi-factor auth borked in Europe, Asia, USA

Re: Naturally there is a refund...

Latest:

11/19

Issues connecting to Azure resources in Europe, Asia and the Americas regions using Multi-Factor Authentication

Summary of impact: Between 04:39 UTC and approximately 21:30 on 19 Nov 2018, customers in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the American regions may have experienced difficulties signing into Azure resources, such as Azure Active Directory, when Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is required by policy.

Preliminary root cause: Requests from MFA servers to Redis Cache in Europe reached operational threshold causing latency and timeouts. After attempting to fail over traffic to North America this caused a secondary issue where servers became unhealthy and traffic was throttled to handle increased demand.

Mitigation: Engineers deployed a hotfix which eliminated the connection between Azure Identity Multi-Factor Authentication Service and a backend service. Secondly engineers cycled impacted servers which allowed authentication requests to succeed.

Next steps: Engineers will continue to investigate to establish the full root cause and prevent future occurrences. A full Root Cause Analysis will be published in approximately 72 hours. To stay informed on any issues, maintenance events, or advisories, https://www.aka.ms/ash-alerts and you will be notified via your preferred communication channel(s): email, SMS, webhook, etc.

How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank

Re: Consoleer

Back in the 1980s I worked for a large Government department in Gloucestershire. The local tech college (not Gloucester) ran a course on "C" programming so our boss signed us up for it. The "notes" looked as though they'd been written in the pub the night before and the machines were on a flaky network where you had to quit the editor in the "proper" way otherwise the whole network crashed. We reported this to our boss who managed to get the course fees returned to his acount.

Bouncing robots land on asteroid 180m miles away amid mission to fetch sample for Earth

Re: Easy to do

A review of 50 years of "Tomorrow's World" - on BBC Radio 4 Extra this morning (Saturday)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060qbwm

Sysadmin misses out on paycheck after student test runs amok

Re: "Snoopy characters"

https://youtu.be/iitYB0UpTXw

Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway

Re: Reminds me of ...

and Penistone.

'A word processor so simple my PA could use it': Joyce turns 30

Hitchin BID manager Tom Hardy tweeted Lord Sugar this lunchtime to say: “Your Amstrad computer has been printing our Hitchin Festival tickets for 25 years! Still going strong with 50,000 tickets printed over the years. Is this a record?”

http://www.thecomet.net/news/business/lord-sugar-salutes-amstrad-pc-still-printing-hitchin-festival-tickets-after-25-years-1-5630168

Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work

Re: The Smell....

I had to look up "tranga", I am sure you did not mean "dying salmon"

Police block roads to stop tech support chap 'robbing a bank'

This is a true story because I was living in Scarborough at the time (1980s) and received one of the publicity leaflets from BT praising their new domestic fire detection system which would sense a fire and automatically alert the fire brigade. I received the leaflet a few weeks before a catastrophic fire destroyed Scarborough's main telephone exchange which was only manned during office hours and did not have one of their wonderful new fire detection systems. The local paper had great fun with that story

Apocryphal story from the 1960s when a brand-new high-tech factory opened with great ceremony. The MD was boasting of his state-of-the-art fire alarm system which dialled the XXX fire station which was a couple of miles away and a tape loop continually broadcast a message "There is a fire at Bloggs & Co factory". This was, allegedly, to avoid delays inherent in the 999 system and get the fire brigade to the scene more quickly.

One night there was a fire at Bloggs & Co factory and it burned to the ground before the fire brigade arrived. The subsequent investigation discovered that the fire alarm system had worked perfectly. However, when the automated "There is a fire at Bloggs & Co Factory" was being sent over & over again the local telephone exchange's automated system broadcast a taped response "The telephone number for XXX fire station has changed to 01234 567890, please replace your receiver and re-dial"

Sysadmin hailed as hero for deleting data from the wrong disk drive

Re: Personal Tragedy

About 25 years ago it seems that Microsoft decided that drive F: was special and could be used for all sorts of fancy debugging procedures. The result was that any drive allocated the letter F ran extremely slowly. I can't remember how I discovered this information but it quickly became well-known in the large Government where I worked (and had just scrapped OS/2 in favour of MS Windows).

Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park

Re: Re:Victorian railways had a few exploding boiler incidents

And more recently as in the case of the SS France in 2003.

"Boiler No. 23, located on the starboard side of the boiler room, had ruptured. The boiler contained about 20 tons of water operating at a temperature of about 528º F under a pressure of about 60 bar (870 pounds per square inch [psi]). In the normal atmospheric pressure of the aft boiler room (14.7 psi), the pressurized hot water rapidly expanded in volume about 1,260 times into steam"

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/MAB0703.pdf

Re: Re:Victorian railways had a few exploding boiler incidents

https://www.bressingham.co.uk/blog/posts/2017/locomotive-boiler-explosions-and-how-to-avoid-them.aspx

Re: Had the fire brigade called to a five star hotel, in Malta....

There was one of those large toasters with a vertical conveyer belt in the airmen's mess at RAF Driffield (1961 or so). Apart from the arguments about whose slice it was that had just dropped into the collection tray there was the excitement of a piece of bread that became trapped in the mechanism and proceded to cremate itself. Huge quantities of smoke tended to put you off your breakfast but the cooks just took as normal behaviour and carried on as usual. We often wondered what would happen if there was a real fire in the mess!

T-Mobile owner sends in legal heavies to lean on small Brit biz over use of 'trademarked' magenta

As a chap who has seriously defective red/green colour blindness all this talk about magenta (or is it Magenta?) just leaves me somewhat baffled

TSB's middleware nightmare: Execs grilled on Total Sh*tshow at Bank

I got an email from my bank (Santander) at 9pm on Friday 27 April to say that the new debit card that I had ordered was on its way. I was suspicious as I'd not ordered a new debit card. The email was addressed to me personally but the 4 digit number that was supposed to be the last 4 digits of my debit card was incorrect. I phoned Santander and after a lengthy wait spoke to a fairly helpful chap in the UK. He explained that my old debit card had been compromised and they were sending a new one; as to the last 4 digits quoted on the email - they were the last 4 digits of the new debit card which was in the post. He said (in so many words) that the email was a bit of boilerplate that they could not change.

It was only the next day that I realised that I'd been in Kirkwall on Tuesday 24 April and, needing some cash, had used the nearest ATM. Alas, it was the TSB and my card was rejected so I went to the next ATM and was successful. Presumably just using the TSB's ATM and getting my card rejected was enough to get my debit card considered as compromised.

The new card arrived on Tuesday 1 May and has worked OK

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

5 unit tape, last time I used that was in 1967.

Here's a demo from a later time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXWpx36RF04

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

An update on 22 March 2018

https://techstartups.com/2018/03/22/nasa-receives-response-from-voyager-1-spacecraft-13-billion-miles-away-after-37-years-of-inactivity/

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

The Commodore PET had a loudspeaker which had its own memory address. You could peek/poke it and create sounds of various pitches and volumes. I created a 6502 machine code routine which produced the sound of a police car siren or a WW2 air raid siren - very dramatic and very loud! I cannot remember whether the first IBM PCs had the same facility or not

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

My first OU course was PM957 "Computing & computers" in 1977. I lived in Brora, Sutherland and all my coding (OU BASIC) was handwritten and sent off to the OU computer centre where it was keyed in and run, the results (warts & all) was then posted (Royal Mail) back to me. Later I did another OU course in computing which had HEKTOR, a small machine akin to the VIC-20 which fed an analogue TV. Great course, began hand assembly before progressing to a "proper" assembler and finally a version of BASIC).

Later in 1984 I worked in R&D for a large government department which bought a few Commodore PETs. With the invaluable help of Raeto West's hefty handbook I taught myself 6502 assembler and produced some useful programs; some of which included speed-up tricks which avoided floating point operations such as multiplying by 10 by shifting left 3 times and then adding the original number twice. I remember that all the IEEE488 (GPIB) routines were hard coded into ROM and that there were a couple of spare sockets for "home-brewed" EPROMS.

Then we got the first IBM PCs and shifted to "C" using the Aztec compiler. Still good fun though

My PC is broken, said user typing in white on a white background

Re: ~~~

I'd been using MS Word for several years before someone pointed out to me that the squiggles under mis-spelt words and bad grammar were different colours - one of the problems of being red/green colour blind

Intellisense was off and developer learned you can't code in Canadian

Re: Boro

No! Pronounced "loch" as in Loch Lomand or Lough Neagh

Developer recovered deleted data with his face – his Poker face

Re: Poker face fail

This happened to an Open University researcher who stored several years worth of data on a local machine and had no backup that was remote from his/her office, a fire destroyed most of the equipment but the manufacturer managed to recover most (but not all) of the data from the fire-damaged disk - an expensive recovery process. Alas, I cannot find any record of this event online

Military techie mangled minicomputer under nose of scary sergeant

Re: Color blind

Oh yes! I'm red/green colour blind and it was a long time (several years!) before I knew that Microsoft Word had different coloured underlining to distinguish between grammatical and spelling errors. I was a programmer for a large Civil Service department based in Cheltenham and there was a rule that colour should never be used to distinguish between items/icons on a computer screen

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

Re: Aircon Leaks

Another hazard of siphoning

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/australian-thieves-siphon-sewage-tank-petrol-article-1.2504298

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

Re: Bah!

Shortly after we moved to Scarborough in 1987 there was a mass sacking of Plaxton's staff from the local coach-builders followed by several appearances at the local courtroom. Apparently they were walking out of the gates not just with a few nuts & bolts but entire bodywork sections!

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Re: It was funny but she did learn stuff there.

I was born in 1943 and first encountered a computer in 1985 when working for a large Government department with HQ in Cheltenham. The computer was a Commodore Pet which, together with Raeto West's invaluable handbook, enabled 2 or 3 of us to produce some useful programs in 6502 assembler - despite all the Scientific Officers looking down their noses as they produced similar programs in high level language on their PDP machines. A year or so later we got the first IBM PC and an Aztec "C" compiler and never looked back!

Re: Reminds me of a story

My late wife took a course "I.T. for the terrified" which ran for six two-hour Saturday morning sessions. The first session was purely about games (including Solitaire) which gave everyone a basic grounding (and confidence) in the use of a mouse. The final session was an introduction to The Internet with dire warnings of what could appear on the computer screen if you made just a simple spelling mistake in your search - using "Ask Jeeves" or similar.