Posts by pirxhh 66 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2017
I one had to explain by phone what a slash is...
Early in my career (just after the C-T boundary), I was in need of telling a user in some other part of Europe to type //HC into his terminal and hit Enter. After 15 frustrating minutes of trying to explain this arcane ritual, I sent them a fax.
I'm a bit OCD on backups - all really important stuff lives in Nextcloud on a VPS somewhere, synced to my (or the relevant family members') PC/phone. The Nextcloud is backed up hourly to my home server and my brother's home server, some 400km away.
Regular stuff lives on my PC, with an hourly backup to my home server, which is in turn backed up to my brother's and vice versa. So everything exists in at least 3 copies in at least two locations. (The backup is never mounted as a drive, so your run-of-the-mill ransomware would not too easily get to it, and all files are versioned.)
Maybe overkill, but drives are cheap.
Years ago, I ate at the tax office's canteen about once a year. It was incredibly bad - a basement room, greasy unappetizing food staff calling Methuselah young man... the works.
It was so bad it had to be intentional, lest the taxmen be pleasantly sated and forgiving after lunch. Can't have that - lads need to keep their edge by nurturing low-grade ulcers, apparently.
My Dell laptop had the paint coming off the left shift key, resulting in a fairly bright keyboard backlight "spotlight".
I should have just taped it over, but warranty! So I had Dell fix it. Big mistake.
First time the guy came to exchange the keyboard. Afterwards, it felt a bit wobbly, but okay, maybe that's expected. Only that the thing bluescreened several times during the following week. Crash dumps were inconclusive. Once it even complained abot the hard sisk (M.2 SSD) gone missing and refused to boot, but recovered after a bit of prodding.
Back to IT it went, and I got a loaner. Their tests did not show anything wrong.
Dell came again, a scant two weeks belatedly, and fixed it again.
Turned out the keyboard was very loose, and the case screws were loose too - except the one that was missing altogether. Our IT guy tightened everything, and it has been stable for two weeks now.
My theory is that the technician, and I'm using that term loosely, did not tighten the screws sufficiently on the first visit, causing any slight warping of the case to slightly disconnect the SSD.
I used to have a Nokia VT220 compatible terminal next to my bed. Nice for late-night/early-morning system maintenance and email.
Nowadays, my DIY alarm clock (also ESP8266 based) can be controlled via Alexa and FHEM. It will slowly dim up the LED lighting, starting 20 minutes before I'm supposed to get up.
Needlessly complext technology? You bet.
We had those at school. 15-year-old me somehow became the on-site fix-it for the computer lab aka four brand new Apple ][e with two 5.25" floppy drives each, running UCSD Pascal.
The Apple full-height, 143 KB floppy drives were noisy as hell, so some bright... person... thought that a bit of lube would help. So they put some light machine oil on a floppy and put it in. Didn't work, of course...
In the end, I spent an afternoon with a screwdriver and a bottle of 99% Isopropanol, cleaning the mess from the disk drives (and applying a tiny bit of silicone lube on the spiral that drove the head positioning where it belonged). Drive still worked when I left school over 3 years later.
In the days of DOS, I wrote a small TSR (terminate and stay resident) program that hooked the keyboard interrupt. It randomly replaced key presses with others, just adding or subtracting one from the scan code - the faster one typed, the more likely it was to hit. Typing slowly? No problem. Getting up to speed? Typos galore,
Hilarity ensued as nobody could figure out what was wrong.
Once, I wrote a keyboard driver for DOS (technically, a TSR program that hooked itself to the keyboard interrupt) that introduced typos - but only when the prank victim typed fast. Hilarity ensued.
Something like this could have helped - make the user's keyboard drop any consecutive spaces. Problem solved as now they had to learn tabs.
Some friends and colleagues received their professional socialization at management consulting firms (think McK, BCG etc.)
They exclusively think in landscape mode - overly crammed PP slide decks and huge spreadsheets. Full sentences appear as slide titles and are otherwise frowned upon. Why concisely write what you mean when you can rather make people spend an hour trying to derive it from charts and bullet points?
The flyboys have found that operating and maintenance procedures are quite important to ensure that things stay up until the pilot wants them to come down, preferably in one piece and at an airport.
So they developed Simplified Technical English.
When I write procedures, I follow that at least in spirit if not in letter. It contains so useful rules as to always call a spade a spade, not a shovel and a manually operated earth-moving device or MOEMD in the next paragraph. And use numbered lists for steps where order matters, bullets otherwise. And simple sentences ("Do ...") in active voice.
Everyone writing instructions should at least read it, it's free.
Better yet: Hand two or three people a chit labeled "Part 1", 2 etc.
Have each of them select a few random characters, write on said paper, and place all of them in an envelope. Seal it.
Run the password change process with each of them typing their part.
You now have a pretty secure password that is written down - and nobody knows all of it.
Inspecting each file has two disadvantages over using metadata: It's slower, and it's heuristic, aka educated guesswork.
Yes, a defined magic number would be beneficial, although the OS should keep this in metadata for quick access. However, this would require a central registry of known file types (a 64 bit number might just be enough).
Also, the .EXE (etc.) extension indicates that something CAN be executed, not that it SHOULD - it does not imply any security assertions.
European tour... heh, had a roadshow to do which brought me to 13 foreign countries in exactly 4 weeks - with most weekends home (in country #14). I felt very much like the stereotypical Japanese tourist. "How was Milano?", the wife asked. Me: "Dark when we came, dark when we left. Hotel was okay but in an industrial zone, conference room was windowless. Could have been Istanbul for all I know, but the caffé was good."
Reminds me of a two-week trip to Libya in 2013 (after Ghaddafi but before utter chaos).
Spent a few days with rather high security at the client's HQ in Tripoli, then flew on a 20-seater company plane to their production site in the desert (it was an oil&gas company). The camp was actually rather nice; it could have passed muster as a holiday village (although those don't close the breakfast buffet at 6am). All very safe, the sandflies being the biggest hazard.
Back to Tripoli for a layover until our return to Europe; after landing in Frankfurt, we heard on the news that some insurgents had abducted the Libyan prime minister from his residency in the early morning.
His residency being a floor of the same hotel we had been blissfully asleep, that counts as one of the more memorable business trips.
Same - I had to sit through a cyber security video before going on site. Notwithstanding that I had personally designed, written and recorded said video as a consultant to the site owner. I took the liberty to watch the thing in a language entirely foreign to me (translated by one of my native-speaker colleagues from my English version), just for fun.
Here in Germany, 3 phase 400V is standard (230V phase to ground).
Residential circuits are usually 63A per phase.
High-powered equipment like ovens, ranges and water heaters (air conditioning is still rather uncommon) get 3 phase, everything else gets 230V, usually 16A per circuit.
The 3-phase circuit comes in handy to set up a fast charge wall box for electric cars as well.
Ah... chemistry!
We did stinky stuff (like making soap from animal fat we got at the butcher's... it was already a bit off when we started), boom-y stuff that left a 1.5 meter crater in a classmate's field, and actually some sciency stuff like a Stanley Miller-Style early earth atmosphere experiment with automated sampling hooked up to the school's ancient gas chromatograph. That was actually quite involved for a high school project in 1983 - had to build some hardware, no Arduinos around at the time so we built a custom interface for the Apple II, borrowed some servos from the RC model Club as our actuators etc. It even worked reliably for the 6 weeks of the experiment.
And this is why we have the five rules:
1..Isolate
2. Lock-out/tag-out
3. Measure voltage
4..Ground and short
5. Cover or remove nearby parts that remain energized
I carry a nice homemade tool: A plug wired to short all three pins together. After making sure the breaker is off and my circuit is dead I'll plug it in to make sure it stays dead. Had one too many case where a helpful person ignored my tag-out. I "can* wire a socket under power if I really must but if so I'd want to know, thank you very much!
Had the same issue... made it part of our installation process/checklist to set the switch to 230V and apply a dollop of hot glue in the now vacant cavity on the 115V side to prevent moving the switch back easily.
Still could be done by poking the glue out with a small screwdriver if ever needed but as that took several minutes to do no idiot ever tried.
I now tag-out the breaker, lock the fuse box with my own lock, measure the circuit and then plug in a handy plug with a direct bridge between all three prongs (and a "remove before flight" tag attached).
So if any kind of... helpful person... tries to power the circuit, the breaker will trip immediately.
Paranoid? Maybe. But I have had narrow escapes of exactly that kind, so hopefully I'm paranoid enough.
German sockets ("Schuko" aka CEE 7/3) are not polarized and there is no standard nor universal consensus if the right or left connector shall be live.
Therefore the tester can show "live/neutral swapped" on a correctly wired socket; turning it by 180 degrees should show "all good" - if not you'll need to debug.
Same here - when my parents had their home built in 1978, the sparky did that "as the 4-wire cable is too expensive". Wide-eyed and all keen to learn, I asked if the relevant code (VDE0100) had been revised (happened all the times but rarely in the really fundamental areas).
Shamefaced, he pulled out the offending cable, fitted the correct one, and had the wall replastered.
I was twelve at the time.
I had a call-out once where a terminal (actually, a NorthStar set similar to a thin client nowadays) was equally dark.
Turned out the brightness dial was placed just so that a wipe down the side of the screen turned the thing utterly dark. The cleaners had been doing their job, the user was suitably red-faced, and I became the company's go-to techie.
I got a question like that for one of my first job interviews. The veep hiring a brand-new IT Team had no technical background but an issue he wanted solved ("how can we send faxes from all our computers? We have Novell NetWare..."). I proposed a solution (involving something not many companies had in 1992, Email) and got the job. Only disagreement was on the salary, they wanted to pay 15% more than I asked for.
I found it a brilliant tactic for the hiring manager-"can you come up with a good plan and explain it so non-technical but business savvy people can understand?"
In the eighties, I was an intern at an aircraft manufacturer. We had a lovely CAD system that used a lightpen and a separate function keyboard. One of the most-used keys was helpfully labeled "Yes|No".
If pressing that ambiguous bird meant "yes" or "no" was context dependent. Lovely UI.
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