Posts by tinman

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

damn your eyes! I thought I'd have a quick look at that and I haven't got past the adverts yet!

I'll have to keep it for after hours.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Typing Pools...

Just to be that pedant, isn't Blink a collection of short stories? Did you mean "A Slip of the Keyboard"?

Either way Sir Pterry is always worth reading.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

I seem to recall there was a scramble for Vulcan refuelling components when they decided to send one down to bomb the airfield at Port Stanley in the Falklands War, including finding one part that was being used as an ashtray in a squadron mess

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: This kind of semi-random, intermittent error is such a pain to diagnose

And were you able to invoice £1000 for knowing just where to tap, as per the hoary legend?

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

Whenever I have a memory lapse I always remind myself of what I heard a doctor say, "The time to worry is not when you can't remember your PIN, it's when you don't know what an ATM is".

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: As a nod to my advancing years.....

They should be grateful that you hold them in such high, or at least equal, regard

Razer made to pay $1.2M over 'N95' face mask that wasn't

Re: No jail time?

Shark bait? No, as the old joke has it, lawyer falls into shark infested waters but is able to swim to shore without being attacked. When asked why the sharks didn't go for him, he says "professional courtesy"

Home of the world's longest pleasure pier joins public sector leak club

Re: Excel and FoI basics

I know the cause here is not clear but it may be that the sender didn't send a master sheet or hidden worksheets and did what you suggested with a new document but they still include the extra information unwittingly.

In the PSNI case it appears they used a pivot table to select the requested information and then pasted that into a new workbook and sent that. What they didn't realise it that in pasting the pivot table, it could be 'unpacked' and allow access to all the data behind it, including the fields not displayed or requested.

I know whereof I speak because someone once sent me a file in similar circumstances and then nearly filled their pants when I pointed out that they'd not only sent me the staff grades I'd asked for but also the names, NI, DoBs, etc of 22k staff from the CEO down

Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

Re: A modest proposal

they didn't even need to include the second worksheet in the reply if they used a pivot table to select the requested info and then just PASTED it instead of PASTE VALUES. The underlying dataset would then have been embedded in the table and easily retrievable later

This will have been down to pasting the contents of an excel pivot table where the extra data was embedded and hidden but easily retrieved. It likely would have been reviewed but that only helps if the person(s) reviewing the data know to look for that error

Also the site posting the info is an FOI site (WhatDoTheyKnow) who receive the file straight from the responder and would have had no reason to expect that the data was not kosher

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

Re: The data was hidden from anyone opening the files

I'd imagine it's more likely that they used a pivot table to select the data requested in the FOI but then when they copied that informaton to send it on they just used PASTE (CTRL+V) instead of using PASTE VALUES. That meant that the full dataset was embedded in the table and could be uncovered with a few clicks, even if the table had been pasted into a fresh excel workbook

It happened to me where I made an internal request for the numbers of staff at different grades in different roles (the same request as was made in the recent PSNI leak), but noticed the file was far bigger than I would have expected. A couple of clicks later I found I had also been sent the names, dates of birth and National Insurance numbers for all 20K staff in our organisation, all the way up to the CEO. I resisted the temptation to start selling on the Dark Web

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: Oh dear

hahaha! seriously i have seen people store physical files on top of waste bins by their desks and then get confused/upset when it gets dumped. Equally people also get upset when genuine rubbish isn't removed because they balance it on top of the bin instead of in it, the cleaning staff haven't learned NOT to remove it after the last b0ll0cking they got.

Re: I need my Trash

"I've dealt many times with someone complaining they've run out of disk space, then looked in the Recycle bin to find hundreds of thousands of files/folders in there."

But how many times have we seen a story here where the IT bod then goes on to helpfully delete all those files only for the user to ask where the documents from their 'storage' folder went?

You're obviously more conscientious though and tell them what you're going to go, and the consequences, before you empty it.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

I don't think the tech is the issue, and lazy is a bit harsh, but not labelling the repurposed lines was setting things up to fail. Though hindsight is 20/20 vision I suppose

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

Re: Return of house calls?

and then two years after the MBA consultant suggests that it would be even more efficient to have a centralised unit that the patients would come to, to make maximum use of the professional's time. But that's probably just a crazy notion

Re: Considering other applications...

well USB endoscopes are very cheap now, you can even get them in the centre aisle of LIDL. Just saying...

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: pizza is the perfect food

Having seen someone stabbed in the eye by an unsheathed scalpel that was used a box cutter and stored on a shelf above 'head height', that's a rule that does make sense

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

A beam in their eye... Re: Physical Methods Trump Signs in Any Language

Too true! I've just been informed of a recent incident at one of our hospitals where a visiting company rep removed a laser filter from an operating microscope to use in another device, without telling anyone, so their foul. But the situation was exacerbated by two doctors subsequently using the microscope who saw a flash from the laser where there shouldn't have been one during a case. In order to confirm there was a fault they fired the laser again whilst both continuing to look through the microscope! It's hoped that the eye damage sustained won't be permanent.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Facilities 'so called' experts

i also thought ranty, but a good rant and then wondered who downvoted it, a member of the facilities team?

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Re: Doctors!

I’d respectfully disagree with your last line in that a good orthopod should also consider cauda equina as a differential diagnosis, especially if there’s faecal incontinence, but alas you obviously got a wrong ‘un and I’m sorry to hear you had to go through that

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

Re: Exchange

This drove me mad for years but there is a way around it, IF (big IF) you can find the email by a search. Once you find it, open it, click on the body, type CTRL+SHIFT+F to bring up advanced find and then you can search back through BROWSE on the top right to locate the folder

Still buggered if you can't find the email at all though!

And please don't shout at me if everyone knows this. I discovered it a year ago and I'm still chuffed, even when using it every day

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Dogs

Sounds like.a variation of the old joke about NASA sending a man and a monkey up on one of the early space missions. The monkey was to pilot the rocket, the man was to feed the monkey.

Re: This is the way... the Scotty way...

I'll take that as an excuse to quote the Great Engineer...

Captain Kirk: "Mr. Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?"

Scotty: "Certainly, Sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?

Re: "but I would not report the damage back to my head office"

'Negotiating' the extra two weeks was just the chef's kiss. Montgomery Scott would have been proud of her

Re: Next time

I'd have gone with using a metal box instead of cardboard and wired to the mains but yeah, something more robust than another sign

Also, long pig bacon, yes please. Breakfast of champions

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Re: don't spoil the magic

As Scotty taught us…

https://youtu.be/8xRqXYsksFg

Software guy smashes through the Somebody Else's Problem field to save the day

Re: I recognise the story

ah, but professional whats?

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Surely moving the printer an inch is a very temporary fix as it may easily move back with people loading paper or changing toner and slamming the covers shut with their usual vigour. This sounds like a clear case for a molly-guard instead

Re: Low IQ or low volition?

But did they demonstrate it? Or did they walk in, fix it, and then walk off without telling anyone what the problem or solution was, because that's what we usually get from our helpdesk

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: To my shame ..

are you sure you weren't in an episode of the IT Crowd?

Re: Paper trails...

AND? don't leave us hanging, was there mumbling from the PHBs and a muted "you can go" or did they still make it your fault because you didn't also print and fax the email to them?

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

"I now how really insecure those cheap safes are."

as are safes and filing cabinets at ultra top secret atomic bomb projects if you read Richard Feynman's memoir, "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman"

Spoiler

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change the factory default combination numbers before use, but read it anyway, he tells it better

we had an outage at one of our major hospitals when the mains power supply went down after the supplier lost a transformer external to the site. No generator you ask? Oh yes, estates had those and tested regularly, but only under a brown-out condition with the mains still available and not a black test with no external power.

And that's when they discovered that the battery packs necessary to kickstart the gennies were all expired so they couldn't start automatically. It took fifteen minutes to get someone in to restart them manually but you can bet the testing SOP was rewritten very quickly afterwards

Is that a stiffy disk in your drive... or something else entirely?

It would appear you're not the only one. Here is an ATM next to a parking ticket machine at my workplace and the added sign asking users not to put tickets in the ATM suggests others have made a similar mistake to yourself

https://i.imgur.com/XCz30sh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/FsdIRWQ.jpg

Microsoft: Yo dawg, we heard you liked Windows password expiry policies. So we expired your expiry policy

Re: Bank web security

well why didn't you do that from the start?

Oh yes, because it'll have been one of those systems that has lots of requirements for your password such as letters AND a number, or at least one upper case, but doesn't tell you that beforehand and instead waits until you get the first attempt wrong and then points out only one mistake!

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Re: So...

however... in Trials of an Expert Witness, Harold Klawans, a neurologist, talks about being called in to consult on a case that was somewhat similar.

A hospital porter had been tasked to taking a patient to theatre for surgery. He didn't notice that she had a respiratory arrest and that she stopped breathing for a time. It was spotted by someone else and she was resuscitated but the respiratory centre of her brain was damaged so she was conscious and unaffected cognitively but couldn't breathe without a ventilator. This meant she ended up staying in ICU for some months. As she was awake and aware she got fed up with crosswords and knitting so she asked for a TV which the hospital were only too happy to supply as they were facing a lawsuit from her for their staff member's negligence.

The TV was brought by a porter who had recently been taken off patient transport duties due to his lack of clinical awareness and unwillingness to be retrained in CPR. He brought it to her room, and seeing she was asleep thought it would be a nice surprise for her if he plugged it in so it'd be on for her when she awoke. So what medical equipment did he disconnect to plug in the TV? Yes, it was her ventilator and this was back in 1974 so the machine was not designed to alarm if unplugged. And yes, it was the same porter who'd failed to notice her problem in the first place

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

Re: I have a rule these days.

That's what known as an OCAMITE bag, "och I might need this, or I might need that"

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

Re: Kill switches that go bang

at least your MRI did shut down. In this report the kill switch had been disconnected so the two staff in question had to suffer entrapment for several hours until a GE engineer came to shut the system down

https://medicaldialogues.in/ge-pays-rs-1-crore-settlement-to-technician-who-got-stuck-in-mri-at-tata-memorial/

NHS needs to pull its finger out and prep staff for future robotics, genomics, data-led healthcare

has anyone looked at the pdf of the report?

Maybe I'm missing something but is there a reason that the pdf is formatted with a permanent two page layout making it really awkward to read, instead of a single page layout? Is this indicative of how we can expect any digital innovation to proceed, with poor consideration of the end user?

Heatwave shmeatwave: Brit IT departments cool their racks – explicit pics

Re: I always like when people put flammable materials...

jest ye not, I know a senior engineer who thought that inflammable means doesn't burn...

Trainee techie ran away and hid after screwing up a job, literally

that'll never hold, let me fix it

There have been safety alerts issued in the past for curtain rail systems used in healthcare settings where fitters have not followed the manufacturer's instructions because the installation was obvious. The problem has been that the rails in question were anti-ligature systems, designed to drop under a light load so that patients can't hang themselves, Unfortunately some installers would take one look at the set-up and say, "that'll never hold, I'll just put a few extra screws in there to keep that up", with subsequent fatal consequences

Boss sent overpaid IT know-nothings home – until an ON switch proved elusive

it's not just users who are numpties

I work in the NHS and asked our IT department to install a PC interface card for a thermometer calibrator in a theatre area. I could have done it myself and had done in the past but this time I thought I'd do it by the book. I checked a couple of days later and the nurse I'd liaised with said they'd come out but the guy said it wouldn't fit. Knowing it would as I'd checked it myself previously, I rang them up and got the techie himself who'd been out.

"It's too tall" he said

"It's a low profile case, did you try turning it sideways?"

He grumpily said he'd come out later, but then a few moments later launched into a tirade, calling me a cheeky bastard and the like, before slagging off his supervisor. I was rather startled at this but then realised he'd hung up my end of the call but not his and was still using his headset and talking to the rest of the helpdesk office

My Tibetan digital detox lasted one morning, how about yours?

Re: Fifty shades of tea

if you want it right every time then you need to work to a standard so here it is...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

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

Re: Boro

The trouble with English is that it's a complete packrat of a language - it has vocabulary and grammar from quite a few other languages grafted onto the fairly simple Germanic roots until the end result is more like a hazel thicket than a mighty oak tree..

hence the famous quote from James Nicoll oft used to silence those who complain that no one speaks "proper" English any longer

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

Military techie mangled minicomputer under nose of scary sergeant

I am pushing the button

MRI scanners usually also have a Big Red Button so they can be shut down in an emergency. As use of this subsequently costs £10K+ to replenish the helium that is vented off and it takes several days to recalibrate it is normally protected by a molly-guard. but sometimes the button is just disconnected as in this case where an acute incident was prolonged by hours whilst they waited for an engineer to shut down the system

https://medicaldialogues.in/ge-pays-rs-1-crore-settlement-to-technician-who-got-stuck-in-mri-at-tata-memorial/

'Please store the internet on this floppy disk'

Re: I'm not sure what's worse

sending a form in WORD format via email for completion and receiving back a pdf of the response which has been completed in WORD, printed out and then the printout is scanned and emailed back

Re: Not apocryphal.

"he worst are people who have never been shown even how to log in without using the mouse to get from the user name box to the password box."

I've had a rep as an IT guru in various NHS settings over the years for knowing esoteric maneuvers such as CTRL-Z and CTRL-V, and no I don't work in ICT

Re: iPads

bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'

€100 'typewriter' turns out to be €45,000 Enigma machine

Re: Reason for sale

and not only that but it never prints the same letter twice