Posts by old_iron

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

Re: Thingies cat

Err,,,

TalkTalk had an intranet connected PC in reception ... didn't take a Russian Hacker to have a nose around

LoL

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

Re: The other question

I think you'll find that was the People's Kent Liberation Front...

or was it the People's Popular Kent Liberation Front?

Devonitely not great: Torbay and South Devon NHS declares 'major IT incident'

Re: What ?

Ahh, Opensource, that'll be free then !

Why didn't anybody think of that?

Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper

Re: Talking of paper...

Back in the day, whilst on a Cobol training course we came back the next morning to check whether our efforts had compiled or even, celebrate..., actually run... to find a six foot pile of system dump in the name of one of our classmates. (ICL29xx, i think)

She was very pretty, smart and all in all a lovely girl but really not suited to programming and papering the room with her fan folded output was not a very nice thing to have done...

She transferred to a marketing role soon after.

And, NO, I wasn't involved standing on chairs with the bluetac...

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

Process by the book

FTSE100 co, DC site1 power fails, the ops team are on it, play book invoked....

Gotta shut down those systems in an orderly fashion in the next 10mins or so and/or transfer the workloads to site2, as appropriate...

All executed to perfection before the batteries are exhausted, just like we practised...

Trouble was, that they shut down site2

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

Re: Southport (PR8)? But the *Daily Mail* got there first?

Eh - no...

If you can't understand the trade, check the counterparty and execute inside a millisecond, you're not in the market

IBM Cloud’s elasticity stretches and stretches (Big Blue's credibility?)

Re: Niche

FJ just pulled investment to theirs

Cancelled in Crawley? At least your train has free Wi-Fi now, right?

Re: Not like they're short on backhaul

Who has the second biggest network in the country?

Yup, NR

The GWR Reading to Gatwick service often has a single crapper which, when out of service, necessitates a toilet stop at Guildford...

Re: The joys of "market forces"

TfW - there's a guy in London who could take ultimate responsibility, give him a call when he becomes available

Re: The joys of "market forces"

Some of your tunnels in the valleys are too short

Even Brunel didn't think of pantagraphs for GWR

Re: Old Tube Stock

Don't expect HSBC Rail lost any sleep over the £1 price, they'd milked the lease for years

Ryde tunnel is about a foot to small to take pwoper southern stock

Re: If only...

signalling system is about to go into the cab, gonna need some secure/"speedy"connectivity to make that work

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

Follow the process...

Facilities reported a major outage at "a leading petro-chemical firm". Ops chaps duly grabbed the playbook to understand and execute the tidy shut down of some systems and the transfer of some other workloads to the secondary site (More than just DR...)

Process duly executed they sat back, satisfied until the phone rang...

They had taken the healthy facility down, but in a very professional and orderly manner.

The UPS in the other DC had just run out...

Take-off crash 'n' burn didn't kill the Concorde, it was just too bloody expensive to maintain

Remember as a schoolboy going past on the train and seeing the huge "deflectors" built supposedly to stop the trains being blown of the track by the big passenger jet VC10/Comet? test flights.

I always wondered if they were truly necessary...

Re: Not just for the rich and famous..

"I do miss the sight & sound of it flying over Reading though."

Playing hockey at Reading (well, Sonning really) back in the day, just after 13.00 on a Saturday you could hear the engine note change as she went past the Beacon and they cranked it up further before going all out after the coast. We'd stop and watch, regardless whether the ball was in play...

Def, one of the great sights of my lifetime

Google India must pay back-taxes on $225m after cheekily funneling cash through Ireland

In a former life, whilst providing services in the UK that were sold, delivered and (supposedly therefore) invoiced in UK, we were threatened with losing them as a customer if we didn't send the invoices to Ireland WITHOUT VAT.

Our CFO bravely told them to stick their business.

We weren't paid