* Posts by omikl

9 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2016

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

omikl

Y2K and all that

I saw in NYE 2000 standing in a customer's IT department, to be on hand just in case things went titsup.

Another customer had their bespoke pension system completely redeveloped to make it Y2K compliant, as the old one had been cobbled together in house using COBOL and duct tape some time in the late '80's.

When the UAT was underway for the replacement system, which involved running the old & new systems in parallel through the month end payment cycle, it highlighted discrepancies between the old and new systems. The new one was paying out more pensions.

Why?

Because some pensions were being paid to the surviving spouses of people born in the 19th Century, and the old code had decided that they weren't due to be paid a pension yet as it was getting the date maths wrong, and had been for who knows how long... I wasn't on the apps team so I don't know the details.

What I do know is that some of the OS features that were made available to facilitate Y2K testing, such as virtual date zones, would come in bloody useful right now.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

omikl

After a long and varied career…

The highlights were two trips to Hong Kong in the late ‘80’s:

The first was because a niggling bug was causing tpart of the acceptance test for a new system to fail and I was hauled out there for a week to try to fix it.

This was eventually achieved after about three days’ working through piles of diagnostic trace while on the phone to a colleague from the dev. Code was patched and the test run to completion.

However, the local office was now sufficiently spooked that they refused to allow me to return to the U.K. until the customer signed off acceptance upon completion of the remaining tests, which would be in about two to three weeks.

Now, back before the days of email and ubiquitous connectivity there was no way for me to do any other work during that time. So I was given a pager, a list of phone numbers, and let loose in Hong Kong.

The second trip was for the same customer about a year later. The system was in production but suddenly started to exhibit a fault that matched an old problem with a run time library that had been fixed years before. Local support was insistent that all the fixes were in place and that it must be a new problem, and that they needed me there by Monday to fix it. So I flew all the way to Hong Kong at very short notice, only to be greeted on arrival with the news that they’d worked out why they were pickup up code that didn’t have the fix I had identified at about the same time my flight had taken off from Heathrow and did I want to go to the Pub?

Cue another week loafing around Hong Kong wearing a pager.

Another trip of note was when I had to fix a corrupted database in Paris during fashion week.

Not a hotel room to be found, I ended up spending half the week in a run down hovel in St Germain where an alarm clock was rendered superfluous by the plumbing, and the rest of the stay in a somwhat suspect establishment closer to the city centre where the severely black-furnishe room had a mirrored ceiling, and the staff seemed quite perturbed by someone checking in solo…

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

omikl
IT Angle

Re: PCB Substrates

Bloody iPad interface…

Anyhow, what I meant to say was:

I bought a 1981 Fender Twin Reverb guitar amp [1] about twenty years ago that had suffered a long and hard life in the rehearsal studios of Kuala Lumpur, and as a result had become somewhat less than Bullet proof.

The construction of these amps, even as late as 1981, was based on tag board. Discrete components soldered to metal tags mounted to fibreboard and hooked up with wires.

Anyhow, thirty-some years exposure to the tropical climate around these parts had lead to the fibreboard becoming a less than perfect insulator, and one of the many problems that the amp was suffering from was current leakage in the HT circuit. Valve amps have 300-400 VDC floating around inside them. Not for the unwary.

One major advantage of these older amps of this type is that they can be repaired by anyone with a soldering iron who knows how to safely discharge a power supply smoothing capacitor.

Speaking of repairs though, I used to work for ICL back in the day, and one of the things that came to light after the fall of the Iron Curtain was that an enterprising engineer in Poland had managed to keep a late ‘70’s 1900 series mainframe running by means of field expedient repairs, which included their building a whole new backplane from scratch with only a service manual to guide them. They had hand wired the whole thing using a wire wrap tool.

1) For those who aren’t partially deaf old guitar players, a Twin Reverb is a large valve amp of a type known as a combo, meaning that the speakers and amp are in the same box. This particular variant was rated to put our 130 Watts at 5% total harmonic distortion through two 12” speakers. Translation: Loud enough at full volume to curdle milk in the next county.

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

omikl

Not just the MSISDN that gets reused

Some territories re-use the IMSI as well.

Every operator I have worked with re-uses MSISDNs: Usually there is a 6 month quarantine period before they are returned to a pool of free numbers for re-use.Margins, especially for pre-apid, are so razor thin that having to purchase new blocks of MSISDNs periodically from their issuing authority would probably collapse them.

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

omikl

Re: We have some of the old projectors still hanging there..

Oh hell yes.

It is amazing how people have rapidly reverted to assuming that if they have ten people in a meeting room, running the remote access from the built-in microphone of a laptop stuck somewhere on the table is perfectly adequate. With the result that the remote attendees can hear the following:

Indistinct mumbling from the presenter

Occasional loud typing and finger tapping

The side conversation between the two people closest the laptop

The future is now, old man: Let the young guns show how to properly cock things up

omikl

Re: Just move some disks...

Not in the land of Gorton it wasn't.

Dress code? Motorhead t-shirt and bike jacket one day, suit & tie the next. Just to keep people on their toes.

Thos dev hall "white" coats. Some of them had been unwashed for so long that they were devleping civililzations in the pockets...

Takes me back though.

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

omikl

To me in a meeting about 2 years ago from a bright eyed and bushy haired Twenty-something devloper:

"Surely you don't exepct us to check for all the possible error codes and handle them appropriately?"

Thank fuck I only have another Five years or so to retirement...

iPad bricked by iOS 9.3? Don't worry, we'll get through this together

omikl

It's very simple: Why test something when the punters will do it for you?

My wife's iPad 2 WiFi & 3G "bricked". I eventually managed to get it back to 9.2.1 by the "Hold the buttons down while chanting" routing and, third time lucky, the restore actually worked.

Extra points to Apple for sending out this borked update with the "Emergency security fixes!!! Install this or the World will end!!!" banner...

How long does it take an NHS doctor to turn on a computer?

omikl

Re: I still can't get my head round this one

I am in total agreement with this. My kids are all being taught "IT" in a manner that is essentially preparing them to write an essay about how to prepare a presentation using PowerPoint 2010, rather than teaching them how to prepare a presentation.

Until last year their course was so out dated that they were still talking about Zip drives (wipes away nostalgic tear) and having to memorise the layout of a pre-USB era PC back panel...