Posts by Caver_Dave

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

I inherited a PCI enumeration function that was nearly 6000 lines long.

I broke it down into a lot of smaller, well defined functions with proper error checking, minimal parameter passing rather than whole structures (yes I know that it makes for longer assembler code, but it cuts down on data exposure), no globals (except for a table containing the pointer entry for each PCI root), fully commented, etc.

Nearly 2 decades later, at another company, I had to work on certifying a PCI software component. To my shock/surprise, it was my old code, complete with my name still at the head of the code change history! I was dreading such old code being pulled apart for very detailed testing of the requirements, but pleasantly surprised that no errors were shown up by that testing. And nobody commented on my name being at the top of the file history.

I had to think carefully if my 20+ year old code and me being part of the certification team would cause "independence problems", but the DER was happy that I pointed it out, and happy enough that I was a different person to the one who wrote it.

First thing I do when I find a really odd problem like that is to turn on all the hidden characters in the editor.

Often, as the OP says, that is the problem.

Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push

Re: It's not just AIrbus moving off!

SWIFT is global - with one data centre in The Netherlands (European transactions) and one data centre in the US (US transactions) and one in Switzerland performing a segregated 'backup' for both. IIRC the rest of the world was 'mid-Atlantic' but you could choose to be in Europe.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

Re: Which 16.9%?

Yes, my home computer was a major outlay. I bought the best I could with all the items like TPM that Microshite said that Windows 11 would require.

Only when I tried to upgrade my new PC to Windows 11 did I find out that they had decided to block the particular iCore-7 I had bought.

I will be upgrading to Linux (probably Mint) when I fid the time.

Patchpocalypse Now: Microsoft tops last month's record with 622 Patch Tuesday CVEs

You can, but it's called Certifiable Software and it is very expensive compared to commercial software!

It needs extensive requirements and testing - hence the price.

The Star Wars cantina scene shows we need a new hope for the agentic web

Re: Nope

As posted above...

The bots just keep ingesting the bot generated sh1t on the web, then produce something even more inferior and post that, for the next bot to find.

Peak usefulness and correctness if the Internet was some time in 2020. AI enshitification has taken over since then.

No

The bots just keep ingesting the bot generated sh1t on the web, then produce something even more inferior and post that, for the next bot to find.

Peak usefulness and correctness if the Internet was some time in 2020. AI enshitification has taken over since then.

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

Re: Doomed?

My team on my current project contains 9 people from 7 countries, and 3 sub-contractor companies in 2 additional countries.

We just employ the best of the best, and after that I only need to know what time zone they work in and what days of the week they work.

There is absolutely no point in having an office, except to send and receive packages.

Re: Spontaneous Hallway Chats

I had a notice board put in the kitchen in one place where I worked. People were encouraged to put up a Post-It with a problem on they were really struggling to fix. If you knew the answer you just grabbed the note and went to see them after your brew was ready. It seemed to go down well with everyone except the PHB who claimed it was a fire risk and had it removed.

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

I'm an oddity

Because I had to sign it as a minor to carry out some work for someone in my school holidays!

Re: Two options for Crapita

I read the poster of the last two (identical) posts as "Steve Stereo"

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Self education

This seems to be the standard way to learn in so many companies these days. Training is not provided.

BOFH: Amnesty means never having to say you're sorry

Clear out of old kit

I have mentioned it before, but I worked somewhere that supported 20+ years long term support contracts to certified projects. i.e. we had to be able to rebuild stuff even if was more than two decades old.

We kept all the old equipment in a nitrogen filled room, and once a year it was opened up and we tested the equipment, made new images on modern equipment, etc.

Soon after we were taken over by a company (who should have known better), they emptied the store into a secure 'crusher' over a long weekend holiday and replaced the store with a new office.

I left soon afterwards rather than face the wrath of the customers!

For anyone who is interested, we had one piece of equipment that ran in 3 levels of emulator. Windows 3.1 running in emulator A. Emulator A running in emulator B. Emulator B running in a modern emulator!

We also had a still running Windows 3.1 machine with hardware dongle/programmer for (I think) CPLD design and programming software.

Yes! It's true! Windows 11 is an agentic platform

Re: Every breath you take...

Yes, creepy. I knew about my wife's new medical condition from the ads before she was sure and told me!!!

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: my hack of the day

Back in the last century our office building did this when we came in through the door. (It also turned on lights to our room, opened curtains and booted up the PC, etc.).

It got quite boring after a while for me, but the Secretarial Staff always said "good morning" back the computer.

Race against re-entry: Swift's would-be saviour straps itself to a rocket

But of a "no lose" trial, if they are going to scrap Swift anyway.

Brussels' datacenter efficiency scorecard may come with a credit warning

'mericans don't understand geography

OK, the definitions of UK, Great Britain and British Isles might stretch a large proportion of the residents, there of.

But WorkDay (HQ, Pleasanton, California) don't even recognise 'British' as a nationality!

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Re: Not a lot of sympathy for "Evan"

There is the old truism - "Consultants never tell you anything you didn't already know!"

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

Re: Ignorance is bliss

When I was growing up I lived near an ex-RAF base that had Thor rocket launch 'blocks'. I once witnessed (from a distance) 7 Warthog A-10's going around and around for about 30 minutes practice strafing the long disused 'blocks'. I also sat in the top of a tall tree and looked down into the cockpit of a Tornado who was quite literally skimming the tops of the hedges.(The valley rises gently at that point which may not have been obvious, but the plane must have been giving all sorts of warnings!)

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

I was doing some work for the Lotus F1 Team (shows how long ago it was!) in Monza.

I was the last to check out of the hotel that morning and was handed the bill saying 6 million Lira. It did 'take a second for the penny to drop' and I realised that I was not being given the bill for the entire team.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Yes, and

Turbo Pascal could run as the IDE and still have space for the program to run in 64KB (more like 48K) on most CP/M machines.

Re: Software engineering isn't really engineering

And you can become Chartered if you want to show that you really know your Software Engineering. CITP

Re: every byte matters

I coded the Nokia 2210 noise reduction and echo removal functions in assembler. Every route through the filters had to take exactly the same number of cycles so there was no jitter. I managed it without a single NOP, (but some routes were optimised much more vigorously than others to achieve this hard requirement.)

Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

Modus operandi

I thought that this was standard practice, learning on the job in IT?

In 40 years I've only ever been on two employer funded training courses. (But, I obviously do lots of CPD to keep my chartered (CITP) status.)

Yes, you can serve a website from a $1 microcontroller

I will raise you a whole network of PIC and SMT (I think) micro's networked to control a whole office (actually a converted house) back in the last century. Some of the nodes had additional radio comms to control curtains, etc. and some had links to control lights (incandescent and fluorescent) and one had 1-wire links to flash LEDs in the floor to show the way out in a fire. We were trying to sell the controller software running on the then very new Windows NT.

It was quite cool to open the outside door with a key fob, walk in to have a voice say "Good morning [Caver_Dave]", have the lights on the route to my office light up, have the coffee machine turn on, have my PC turn on so it was booted by the time I sat down, have the curtains open, etc.

I was quite annoying when someone was demonstrating remote access by mobile from say Kuala Lumpur, opening and shutting my curtains or turning my light on and off, and taking a still photograph each time to show that feature (my reaction had to be obvious but kind, or what had been requested).

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

Re: Only hard/firmware?

I work in certifiable systems. Yes, we check that the compiler really does produce what is expected. We look for 'dead code' (undocumented in requirements) at the byte level. We have to prove that there is nothing unexpected in binary object.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Re: Outages

Caves give off a column of negative ions and walking out of one the lightening hit the rolled up metal ladder hanging from my belt, went down the wet seam of my wetsuit leg and into the ground. The seam vaporized and left a relative small burn on the skin, and I threw away the ladder just in case. The only lasting issue was about 6 months of deafness in the ear on that side.

My parents live at the top of a large plateau style hill (used as a WW II bomber airfield). We heard thunder and I was crouched over unplugging the TV aerial when the lightening struck (about 3" out at the time). My legs spasmed and I hit the corner of the ceiling and wall 14 feet horizontally away and dropped down onto the sofa next to my mother. I think that she was more shocked than I was.

Re: Not major but...

!930's house, but owned by a bodger before us.

On the first day of ownership an Electrician friend came in to check the whole system for us.

"Well, the fuse board should have MCBs, but I'll check out the easily accessible wiring first."

Que a lot of banging coming from the attic.

"I'm condemning it all. Some of the upstairs light are running on bell wire and half of it is wired up backwards. I've had two electric shocks, just moving around up there!"

We knew we had to replace windows, doors, boiler, etc., but the number of unknown jobs that had to be sorted either before or after the trades was much larger than anticipated. I took advantage of the floors up for plumbing and electrical, to flood fill the house with CAT5 and sockets.

We found out that the previous owner had got various tradesmen in, told them their prices were too high and tried to do the work himself. All the local tradesmen seemed to have the house on a blacklist, until I could persuade them otherwise.

Re: Is it just me?

With this being electrical - 'load' and 'loud' could be equally appropriate in that sentence.

Re: Outages

I've been hit directly once and indirectly once - I call myself an Engineer

UK begins antitrust inquiry into Microsoft's business software ecosystem

Charity

Yes, in the same boat.

Our one paid member of staff performs outreach work and so we now have to pay so that she can continue to use the laptop when out of the office.

The volunteers (including me as the IT admin) have to use the online versions as we cannot afford to do otherwise.

As a small charity we would not get volunteers to use the online tools unless they were "Microsoft that we learnt at school."

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Crash of a different sort

I was once called out (last century) to a major tool manufacturer (they use mobile vans to sell their mechanical tools).

They used a heavy duty printer to print labels of vary types, which now refused to move its printer head and "just buzzed".

As usual I approached the printer and walked around it before getting too close. I immediately diagnosed "user mechanical interference" as the side of the case was crushed inwards.

"Oh, that's where we give it a tap with a hammer when it doesn't print properly!"

"How long have you been doing that?"

"About once a week for 6 months."

The repair would have been a head motor replacement under warrantee, if they had called us when it first happened.

Now a replacement printer would be needed, as the hammer had gone through the side of the case and destroyed a vertical PCB behind it and broken the rigid connectors between that and the main board. (The two boards and case, plus the head motor replacement, plus labour would be a similar cost.)

Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch

I once had an unattended interface between 50 modems and a mainframe. It was in a locked room, with a window in the door. I thought it expeditious to place an unconnected monitor and keyboard on the desk so that anyone looking through the door thought it was just an ordinary PC and not bother investigating more.

Viva la revolución: LinkedIn profile visitor lists belong to the people, says Noyb

Many years ago, I had a job advert written by a prospective employer using my CV as a template (as I was the singular preferred candidate, well know to numerous employees of that company through my STEM Ambassador voluntary role.)

I obviously sent in my CV to the company owner when the job was posted and followed up with a call a week later as I had heard nothing from him. His answer was that he had binned my application as I had no social media presence that he could find. Although I believe that I escaped a bullet, if he really was so shallow, I did set up a LinkedIn profile soon after.

I get the emails to say that my profile has been looked at by 50+ people per week, but I will not pay to see who is being nosey!

Hobbyist xenomorphs Raspberry Pi into Alien-themed DIY laptop

Re: Ah, progress

Epson PX-4 was 64K CP/M. You could page in sections of either EPROM into the normal address range.

I used them for POS - including the Gallup Pop Chart recording (about 1600 shops taking part) - before the music industry took it in house (allegedly 4 shops taking part!).

I also used the barcode reader as an input from timing beams for use on F1 test days (all the teams apart from Maclaren) - the same year that I did the first F1 in-car telemetry links back to the pits (Arrows). All in Z80 assembler including the fixed point maths functions required to calculate the speeds through the timing beams. (One EPROM was the timing system code and one EPROM was the text - although only English and French were needed.)

The linked page of Epson products does not include the EHT-10 - a touchscreen handheld 1986 style. https://randoc.wordpress.com/2020/10/26/epson-eht-10/

Unexpected item in Windows' bagging area

Re: 40p per bag seems a bit steep

Tried the exchange for a broken bag twice, once at Tescos and once at Sainsburys. Refused both times due to "misuse". Maybe they were detected in another store? I can't think of another valid reason and on both occasions the manager concurred with the staff member, but know one would tell me what had been misconstrued as misuse.

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

Re: Not me but the same….

I have to put in a request to IT whenever I want to install a program or change a setting on my new laptop. (The one it was replacing was OK, but out of warrantee.)

A pain in the ass, becomes much larger when you realise I am in the UK and IT are West coast US.

Took over a week of sending multiple requests per day, before I had the new laptop configured to do nearly as much as the old one (there were some things that they categorically would not let me do as they have just one set of rules that cover the intern in accounts and us expert developers! e.g. for network testing I have to compile on the laptop and copy everything I need to my test network on a USB stick, rather than using a segregated network device. It means that I can no longer single step through code that I am developing - my managers just tell me to bill any inefficiency to IT - but it is a constant irritation and waste of time.)

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Are you burying them vertically then?

My definition of stress "The inability to strangle some idiot who really deserves it!"

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: Everybody like big boom ...

Yes, I got it wrong once. The rotten stump wasn't as stuck as we thought and ended up in the branches half way up the next tree in the avenue.

Obvious icon!

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

Re: Filth

I have a smoke allergy and last century I did walk into a customer's office building and turn straight around.

I told them that the office was unhealthy for humans and computers alike and that I was cancelling my support contract with them.

The IT person, volunteered from the general workforce as he had a home PC (I said it was last century), agreed and we parted on good terms.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Re: They should be running a casino or a sports book

That didn't go too well for Trump!

We used to use the RemedyForce system, but recently moved to ServiceNow. It's ticketing system is absolute crap in comparison to the older RemedyForce.

It looks like it was written by a teenager who has never created or resolved a service ticket in their life.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Re: Lazy by design.

I register my time in 15 minute blocks as it provides a metric to management as to how long each task actually takes - and they believe me. There is a reasonable task granularity and I fill in a spreadsheet as I go along which has macros to update everything across the week. The macros also create a table that is easy to import into the timecard system, but when I may do 26 different tasks a week (some multiple times a day, some daily, some occasionally) it can take 0.75 hours for filling in the official electronic timecard - which of course, I log in the timecard system.

Fiber on the surface of the moon could help detect moonquakes

Glad to see this technology getting an outing (pun intended)

Around the turn of the century I tried to sell the idea of embedding fibre optics into various parts of F1 cars to measure deflection under load (obviously removing the greater, but shorter term, deflection due to vibration was the biggest hurdle). I spoke to the Technical Manager at the local F1 company, but they were not interested - they could use a wind tunnel instead for development, and used a Mk 1 eyeball to look at the car in real-time. Glad to see a similar idea getting used these days.

Chips... in spaaaace – courtesy of Nvidia

Physical security

It will at least make physical security tight with no chance of anyone attending unseen by the watchers on the Earth.

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

Re: Sales

Yes, but that includes the walls either side of the too small gateways.

EV charger biz ELECQ zapped by ransomware crooks, customer contact data stolen

Re: #1 reason I haven't bought an EV

I know where you are coming from!

My wife uses our electric car all the time, and when she recently updated her mobile, she transferred across 8 different car charging apps - many of which have pre-loaded credit on them which you can't seem to be able to drain back into your own account.

Yes, we usually charge from solar at home, but some journeys are longer than a single charge.

She wonders why I won't use the car for anything other than short journeys!

I don't even have parking apps - I would rather walk from a carpark that takes cash that spaff my details to all and sundry (and of course parking companies are known to be iffy at the best of times).

Icon - no tin foil hat symbol!

Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

Re: Too much

IMHO the peak of the Internet was 2022 before AI started generating slop based on AI slop.

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Re: "It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs,"

"stretching the female socket" was the punchline of so many networking jokes in the day that are rightly, totally unrepeatable these day.