* Posts by Caver_Dave

576 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2018

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Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Just a thought

If I was in charge I would put the 'digital twin' on the web so that Joe Public could have a crack at fixing it.

With so many people in parallel tinkering, someone must come up with the answer fairly soon.

And of course, you don't have the long turn around time to try your changes.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Caver_Dave Silver badge

I used to change peoples screen saves to say "I've been a twat again!"

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: This is where technology lets you down

I've seen very similar in the UK as well.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: The first one is free

I was working on the leading edge of processors when I was approached in email about a job at Thales.

I learn all about their products, technologies and customer applications from their website.

I had a telephone call with the recruiter who admitted I was a great fit for the company and new them in great detail - except how to pronounce their name.

So I was rejected solely on the basis that Thales is pronounced Talis and I didn't find this out from reading the whole company website.

I later found out that they spent about 10,000,000 with consultants coming up with a universally acceptable name! I think they failed.

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Yet another similar experience

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/09/04/column/#c_4723040

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Weird interview

Oh they were telling me to sit down so they could ask their questions.

Perhaps, like lawyers, they were paid by the word

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Weird interview

I had been creating various lap timing systems and in-car telemetry links for Formula 1. (Early 1990's)

A major worldwide car manufacturer (Dagenham) invited me directly for an interview to do timing systems for them.

I was shown to a large darkened room with a wooden (school type) chair under a spot light.

I immediately moved the chair from under the spotlight when I sat down, but received 3 or 4 people shout that it must go back. I should have left at that point, but the offered wages were 3 times what I was on.

A voice from my left started with standard fairly simple electronics questions - OpAmp configurations for various buffer types - I answered these as I had qualifications in Analog Electronics as well as Software, Digital Electronics and Telecommunications, but thought it strange.

OK, next voice starts, and as my eyes are beginning to adjust to the light and I count 10 people lines up behind desks. As I am counting the questioner berates me for not looking at him when he is speaking! He asks me about different control and feedback loops, but keeps trying to pull me back to analog examples. I just think he must be an old fuddy-duddy, but I throw in analog as well as digit feedback into the questions.

The third person asks about microprocessors, and so I am fine with this.

The fourth person asks about different types of gas sensors, and I have to say that I do not have a detailed knowledge of the ones currently on the market. He huffs and I am onto the firth person.

He really goes off on one shouting and demanding to know which car manufacturers I had been working for, so I listed the F1 teams. This leads to a tirade about how could I work on their engines and know so little about the sensors they were using. I try to bluff it out by saying that I had NDAs that would not allow me to disclose such information. That did not help and it suddenly dawned on me that instead of lap timing systems they were interviewing me for engine timing systems!

I explained this and stated that they had invited me directly for something different to what the letter had said, that I was unsuitable and that I wished to leave.

The right hand side of the room complained that they had not asked their questions, but I had left the seat already and heading for the door.

They also refused to pay me the promised expenses, and so I was out of pocket for a days holiday and 200 miles of fuel.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: NHS IT

I know a board member of a major hospital trust.

She says she has a very long list of small improvements - all of which are common sense.

She complains that if she is lucky she can get one item implemented each year.

It is ego's of senior management, and the resistance to any change by the unions, that are the biggest blockages she sees to improvement.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Happy

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

Used to collect 'cider' from the Scrumpy Farms on the Mendips (SW England) in empty 2 litre vinegar containers.

It had two limitations on use:

It would only travel as far as the nearest caving cottage

It would only last one evening

I never drank it myself, but watching the effect on others was very amusing, until I had to take them to A&E!

Firefly software snafu sends Lockheed satellite on short-lived space safari

Caver_Dave Silver badge

There are still vestiges of ‘proper’ software development in the certifiable software world.

All requirements, specifications, architectures, code, test procedures, test code and test results, reviewed by at least 3 different people/teams against previously reviewed checklists. Plus further independent reviews by the customers teams and the certification authority.

However, even in this world there is talk of Minimum Viable Product and Agile, with capability creep approaching the specified goals at some point in the future.

Hopefully, I will be long gone before this comes to fruition.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Caver_Dave Silver badge
WTF?

final exercises

"to mark what should have been one of the final exercises for HMS Vanguard and her crew. HMS Vanguard returned to sea in 2022 after a nearly seven-year overhaul period."

So 7 years overhaul for just 2 years service.

This doesn't seem like a good return on investment to me.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Lasting Power of Attorney

You don't need a solicitor, just go to https://www.gov.uk/power-of-attorney

They check that the 'donor' is absolutely happy for this to go ahead.

I set them (financial and medical) up for my father many years ago.

He died suddenly and so I never had to enact them, but it seems fairly simple.

Also have the discussion about "Do not resuscitate" or any other "living will" type issues. That can then be placed on your medical records by your Doctor. (Although, they did try it with my father until I reminded them!)

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Best name?

Am I the only one that reads FCC as "F*king Colossal Collider"?

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

Caver_Dave Silver badge

The full transcript will be more like:

"Oops, sorry" [whispered] "investors, we got caught"

Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: AI

Got distracted by work!

And so new comment.

So Microsoft, use your own AI tools to auto generate the translated code.

Caver_Dave Silver badge
FAIL

AI

Do they not keep talking about AI tools to automate development?

Eat your own dog food and see how good the result it!

Top-tier IT talent doesn't stick around in 'mid-market' organizations

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Angel

Re: No surprise

"Institutional knowledge" is a problem every where.

When I left my last company I told everyone who needed to know where all my electronic log books and guides were stored. There was 20 years of knowledge stored in the guides. Everyone left or forgot and I got a very panicked call from the new Software Manager a few years later who had to upgrade an embedded OS in a range of products I had looked after.

The call was longer on 'pleasantries' than on knowledge transfer. I got him to open the index of my guides on his browser, pointed him to the one that said "upgrading the OS" and told him to follow the instructions. The first of which was to download a VM with the complete development environment, and the last two of which were to upload a new VM image and update the guides.

It is actually quite simple to avoid "institutional knowledge", but people think that sharing their knowledge makes their job less valuable. I think that it is the opposite and if every I run into that software manager again (and I might as I work for the embedded OS company) I will get nothing but praise.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Ice is easily dealt with, squashed bugs/birds is another matter. I would hope that they have multiple redundant cameras in case one or two are splattered in guts and unusable.

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

"stupid" maybe, but it is required in many professions.

Try getting a job in a Zoo, with your 1st with Honours Degree in Zoology, without having volunteered at a Zoo for at least 18 months.

My daughter, after her 18 months, was taken on as an apprentice at another Zoo, and now 4 Zoos later is actually a Keeper.

(I've had discussions with her regarding redundancy when the whole population of some species of small fish are in one room under her care! But at least in multiple tanks, and supplied with water from different mixes and generator backed up electricity. And yes, they have run out of fuel for the generators when needed!!!)

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: We need more articles like this one

Also, why do each Council need a bespoke system?

The Councils must follow the same set of Government rules - these are the Specifications.

So, all they really do is decide on the budgets for the service areas and who gets which contracts - these are the Parameter Data Items.

It should be easy to produce one set of code to the specifications, with the local decision making in the PDI.

No, each Council wants to spend your hard earned on their own little pet project! (See Birmingham CC)

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: "if the kids select it"

No, if the school offers it, and the children select it.

My youngest got A's in everything including "Combined Science", but only because she was not in the first 30 drawn from the lottery who were the ones allowed to study triple science.

I saw the head of science at a recent STEM event and she asked why youngest had moved to a different school for 6th Form when she had done so well in the GCSEs at their school. I just said "triple science lottery". The head of science looked like a beetroot and shot out of the room!

Their latest OFSTED has moved them down to "Needing Improvement", quel suprise!

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Time for legislation

"Any company who's system is shown to be unreliable/inaccurate/unfit for purpose should be banned permanently from all government work."

All the big boys banded within a couple of years, then!

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Used to work for a mil-aero board manufacturer doing the low level software including Built-In-Test.

I had to prove every hardware fault in minute detail before it would be fixed.

Something I definitely don't miss, but it was a good learning experience that I still benefit from.

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Boffin

Strange story about field testing

I used to work with a multinational team that tested telephone networks in the time of GSM rollout.

They had to drive around the country in a van with multiple handsets mounted on a rack and monitoring the signal reception parameters.

They had to test in Greece, but the Greek speaker was off on some kind of illness leave.

They sent the Chinese speaker as he could at least order what food he liked from the Chinese take-aways for the 2 weeks of his stay.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Or the modern version:

You look for the window that had the information you want, to find that you closed it 5 minutes ago and now have to go through the whole login and search process again!

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Stop

Re: "The local recycling centre"

That will be the local recycling centre which has number plate recognition and uses that to enforce the "maximum 6 visits in any 12 month period" rule.

My county have got canny and share the information between their sites, so if you want to make a 7th trip to a recycling centre you must go out of the county!

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Alert

Re: Not to whine about it ...

Used to work somewhere that had the largest customer liquid Nitrogen tank in the UK. There was a dry pond just downhill of it to catch any leakage, to protect the later built housing estate further down the hill.

Only had the really high levels of CO2 in a cave once (Manor Farm Swallet, Mendips, UK), lethargy, a stinking headache and quite a lot of difficulty getting out. Been in there when CO2 was fairly low and it was an eye-opener to see the stupid things some people were doing as they could not think straight, and of course we got it on video! (CO2 levels are high as the water run-off from the Manor Farm cattle yard enters the cave.) On one trip down there both of us caught Leptospirosis - not pleasant! It's not even that pretty a cave, and so I don't know why I keep going down there!

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Non-drinking

And for us non-drinkers, your co-workers slink into your office the next day and ask how much the blackmail money is this year, as you have the clear memory and often the video as well.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Joke

Management material

Fuck it up, make it someone else's problem, take the glory and leave before you are really found out.

Yishi has managlement potential

Icon: If only this was a joke

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Sewerage leak

I used to look after the small Epson PX-4 laptops that were use to collect the UK Pop Charts (while it was still independent and not run by the industry, for the industry).

I had a laptop exchanged (we used to send a replacement and the courier would replace the new laptop with the broken and then return the broken one to us.)

I once received a laptop back in a sealed bag, that had evidence of a brown leakage, but generally looked pretty clean. On investigation, this was because the shop had diligently cleaned the outside, including keyboard, but it still did not work. The shop had been flooded with raw sewerage, but they were trying to avoid a bill!

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Drains

Yes, I've worked in a couple of places with water collection pans over equipment funnelling water to a drain.

One was due to water leakage through decrepit concrete.

The other was in a new building, but the (heavily lagged) liquid Nitrogen pipes to environmental ovens caused so much condensation as to require the water collection above each oven and associated control and test rigs.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Avoid

I've always in the past placed messages (using what ever method was appropriate to the language and situation) that said

"Unexpected path [nnnn]. Please report to your local IT or directly to software supplier."

where nnnn was a #defined number (or similar) carefully documented in the source code.

It doesn't have any user scary flags like the words error or warning, but does ask that it is reported.

A simple number can usually be conveyed without error, from whence the source code comment will explain what has happened and where the message was raised.

Now I'm writing certifiable code, there is obviously no need.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Paper trail and zoom recordings win!

Once had to let my team go. My boss told me I was safe.

I went through the whole morning talking with the team. Got back to my desk after they had all cleared their desks to find out my PC password had been remotely changed. Went to see my boss and he said "you are redundant as well, clear your desk". The lying bastard didn't have the guts to make us all redundant together, but leave the team work to me.

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Boffin

How long does your router take to initialise?

Helicopters (and most other military type equipment) have very complex networking needs that take time to initialise. I know of an aircraft with a 96 port Ethernet on either side of the fuselage for redundancy, with fixed IP's delivered to the DHCP requesting equipment on each port (to aid in hot swapping), sharing of information between the duplicate routers and the multiple control computers, etc.

The routers have significant memory, etc. that all has to be scrubbed before use, inbuilt redundancy and much more. Configuring routing protocols, supplying boot code to network devices, etc. all take significant time.

No wonder they have to take 30 seconds to become fully available for management purposes. Then there is the boot time of all the redundant computing resources for the control, and synchronising all this with all the other devices over the networks that may have interdependencies.

Most customers used to complain about the boot time of the routers I supplied, but then when reminded of a few of the above they tended to realise that it was not too long.

The one customer requirement that couldn't take too long was the gun turret on a marine vessel that was only activated when an incoming missile was detected. 5 seconds boot up for the whole system was thoroughly justified in that case.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: "facial age estimation"

I have held many positions within youth organisations. I can assure you that it is incredibly difficult to accurately guess the age of some people. I was commonly judged at 26 when I was in my 40's.

When the youngsters are wearing full makeup they could be 14 or 40!

I was National Deputy President of one youth and young adult organisation in the UK. We have both under and over 18's provide photo ID as part of getting their photo membership card to the organisation each year. With guardian checks for the under 18's.

For events where alcohol is served, everyone has to show this photo card (to get a wrist band showing red - under age - or green - to allow purchase of alcohol) and 17 & 18 year olds must be signed in by an over 21 member who agrees to act "in loco parentis" (to try and cut down on other people buying them alcohol).

If a human can't do it, can we really expect a computer to be able to do it?

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Swearing is the choice of those with a limited vocabulary. Unfortunately it seems that these are becoming a growing majority of the population.

I only swear under two circumstances:

When I am seriously struggling to get my body through a very tight section of cave

When I scammer rings me up, and I have to use words they might understand

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Flame

Re:Photo ID - DVLA

Someone I know who is 29 has just received a new Photo Driving licence, due to an address change.

The photo used by the DVLA for renewals during Covid was that on the persons passport (if they had one). This means it could be 10 years out of date.

However, his new driving licence did not have the previous licence photo, nor the current passport photo (the same one, 4 years old). It has a previous passport photo, from when he was 14!!! (It's never been used on a licence.)

Where the hell have they grabbed that from!

Another problem with the DVLA. A friend has to renew a licence after an isolated medical incident. They rang up a couple of weeks ago to check the status to find that it has been awaiting reading for six weeks. She has been ringing every couple of days since, but 8 weeks on since receipt, the application has still not been looked at. She has had to be travelling by trains and taxis for the 6 months of the licence suspension, costing nearly as much as she earns (I've even done the 100 mile round trip to take her for an 08:00 start about a dozen times when the trains have been cancelled.) The DVLA are either completely undermanned, or incompetent!

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Happy

Many fond memories running Turbo Pascal generated code on EPSON PX4 laptops back in the mid 1980's. Not only was the environment compact, but the produced code also. (And built-in overlays for the larger code.)

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Hope this goes well

The majority of the waste from nuclear that is buried around the place is no more radioactive than the luminous watches that people used to wear.

But that didn't stop the campaigns by the uninformed or ill informed.

Japanese tech startups testing cash incentives for office return

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Japanese office reality.

I do wish I could up vote so many more times for that (accurate in my experience) diatribe.

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: I'll be honest....

The pre-pandemic monthly trip to the Office was something to be looked forward to.

The loss of that (as people moved away during the pandemic) is the only effect the pandemic has had on my working.

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Hydrogen

I've not seen it written down, but wouldn't the amount of Hydrogen required by a plane, actually be a significant advantage (lighter than air) when it comes to take off, and this diminishing as it requires to come back to earth will also be an advantage.

My guess is that the buoyancy of the Hydrogen will be far less than the mass of the plane and passengers. Maybe someone has some figures on whether it will actually be a measurable advantage?

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Excellent!

I do 15 minute resolution.

However, the very large project that is my main task (I could potentially log against 11 projects this week) has over 200 time codes. This is so that metrics can be gathered accurately for future forecasting, and so I don't mind too much.

It has meant that my timesheet entry for "filling in timesheets" is now 45 minutes rather than 15 minutes per week. I also need to modify my spreadsheet that formats the time/project/day from chronological order into the correct aggregated format to copy into the official tool (now that we have these 200 sub-lines in a new column) which is a PITA.

EU lawmakers scolded for concealing identities of privacy-busting content-scanning 'experts'

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Joke

The names of the experts

The names cannot be provided for the participants in a conversation half-overheard in a Brussels Bar.

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

They used to have physical twins of the probes.

I remember them running a copy of Mars2020 rover around a sand and boulder strewn parking lot.

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Boffin

Software long term support is not rare in some industries

Software long term support is not rare in some industries.

If you are willing to pay a reasonable amount, then Wind River will support and enhance 25+ year old versions of the VxWorks RTOS.

I've recently performed enhancement work on 1990's vintage VxWorks 5.x, in a situation where changing to a newer hardware and software version was not a palatable option for the customer, but they wanted to support a new/replacement peripheral.

(Wikipedia has a list of publicly acknowledged VxWorks projects that you can see have no chance of replacement and need long term support.)

I would imaging that NASA have a "digital twin" of Voyager to test their code updates on - something that Wind River highlight in their Studio IDE CI/CD platform and has been supporting at processor level using SIMICS for decades.

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Boffin

On the flip side

Back in the mid/late 1980's my boss was asked to produce something for the Ferrari F1 team. (We did lots of techy things for the teams.) He decided on a TMS320 based solution (fastest DSP at the time), that I (as the only employee of the company - the boss worked for another shell) would design the hardware and software for. The problem was that the official TI assembler was about the same price as my yearly wage.

So, I had to write my own macro-assembler for the TMS320. It was a great learning experience and meant I knew the chip inside out.

The hardware struggled a little with noise on the dual layer PCB as 30MHz clock was quite fast at the time, but this turned out to be from the radio producing company next door! (It worked perfectly on a Sunday morning!)

I later rewrote a Javascript interpreter that was taking too many time and memory resources on a 4MHz 8086 Internet set-top box where memory was used for screen refresh for 50% of the time.

Getting "deep and dirty" is something everyone should do at least once to get a proper understanding of what is involved.

(Like every driver should spend a night 'on the motorway cones' to get an appreciation of that. I helped change the contraflow at the M2 jnct 5 one night. It is bloody scary standing next to cars doing 80+ in the 50mph limits imposed in such situations! - obviously pre-speed camera days.)

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Caver_Dave Silver badge

Making the problem go away is not enough

While my wife's elderly parents were alive, she would fetch them on Christmas Day morning and I would cook the dinner.

When they eventually passed, my wife said that she would happily cook the Christmas Dinner if she could be left in piece.

She did not see the funny side when I put her shower cap over the smoke alarm in the kitchen/dinner.

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Thumb Down

When fingers in the ears is a problem

One place I worked there was one of those very piercing electronic alarm sounders right next to the urinals, so it was difficult to put your fingers in your ears when it went off.

Annoyingly the weekly test was any time within a 2 hour period, so that had 2 problems:

* Everyone waited for at least 30 seconds to see if it turned off i.e. was a test

* You dared not go to the toilet during those 2 hours until it had gone off - and then there was a rush

Mars chilled for aeons, but stayed so stressed it gets crusty marsquakes

Caver_Dave Silver badge
Joke

It a shame the lead author was not called Simon, then...

Sizzza could have told us about S1222a

Stop the groaning, half of you misread it as that :-)

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