Posts by ColinPa

Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

Dont you know who I am?

My father was in the Royal Navy on ashore based ship. It was a ratings first day on guard duty.

One day this guy arrived at the gate, and the conversation went

Him: let me in, Ive left my badge in my office

Guard: No sir - no badge - no entry

Him: But I'm the captain of this ship

Guard: Sorry sir - I cant do it

Him: I'm the captain of this ship - dont you know me

Guard: Sorry - no sir -its my first day

Him: What's your name... .. now call the officer of the watch

OOW: Ah Hello Captain - what's the problem?

Next day the rating was summonsed to the captain's office. This usually meant punishment!

Captain: Well done for not letting me in. I left my badge behind, but if you had let me in, you would be here on a charge, rather than a commendation. Well done.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Whoops

On my first trip to the US I had to present to a room full of developers. I had given it several times in the UK. After an hour I put up a chart saying "Fag break" - every one sat there bemused.

I said "Cigarette break?!" and every one got up.

I also learned on that trip that you park on the driveway and drive on the parkway.

At a conference where there was simultaneous translation from English into French, German and Italian, someone was going though a dump

"At offset Baker Dog Dog"... there was laughter as the French heard ".. Boulanger, Chien, Chien"

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

Covid

Having read all of the comments, it made me think about the software used to guestimate the spread of Covid. It had once worked... and then been added to multiple times, by many people, and after it was "improved for publication" it was still hard to follow.

They had problems like - run it twice with the same input, it gave different results. So there was clearly some problems ( because if you run it twice you should get identical results).

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Is it just me...

Or we have "AI" which helps write and pad out document - and at the other end "AI" which take documents and condenses them getting rid of padding and valueless text?.

Microsoft boots 3% of staff in latest cull, middle managers first in line

Re: How can that happen? Software can't play golf!

Manager's should be able to manage. They do not need to have been coders or tester - but they need to understand what their staff do.

We had one guy who was a crap coder, but a very good manager. His number priority was to protect and nurture his team.. Management wanted to promote him, but he said no... he didn't have the skills for management by spread sheets and upward facing. He liked managing teams who actually do the work.

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

Can we talk to others

Please do not just invent another solution. Can we look at other systems that work - was it Denmark or Slovakia - and clone their systems

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: Been there, done that... who hasn't?

We had some code in our product which said "if you ever get here, phone George on .... because you should never get here."

5+ years later his phone rang. Someone had "optimised" the code, and took out some of the error checking.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Fish tank

30 year ago we bought our mother a laptop computer. She was living on her own and starting to get confused.

She loved the fish tank screensaver, of the fish swimming around.

I visited her once, to see her with a watering can, trying to find a hole to add more water, as it was a month since she had got the screen saver, and knew you had to top up the water in fish tanks.

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all - at least for consumers

"It is faster using pass keys"

Can someone explain how it is faster? Typing my password takes 2 seconds or less. A pass phrase is longer, and will take longer to type.

Going to another device will take longer than 2 seconds.

Or am I missing something?

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Chair on the floor tile

We had a problem that when someone sat in front of a computer, the screen had problems. It was due to a floor tile squashing a cable. When you wheeled the chair over the floor tile - the screen went funny. When people came round to fix it - they didn't use the chair, but stood around the floor tile, and so it worked.

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Re: Feeble Point

The long list of charts is so when they come back to look at the stuff6 months later they think ! Ah yes, I remember. Without these... people forget or misremember.

Also think of the people who's first language is not English

writing code is only part of the equatation

and do they use AI to write the tests to test the generated code? Is this marking your own homework, and cannot see the defects because it didn't see them in the first place?

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Please do not all power on at once

I went to a site in India and had to visit some people in the backroom - and it was the back room with no windows. They had one power lead into the room, and other power lead was daisy chained off it. If people powered on their machines one at a time everything worked. If they all powered the machines on at once, it drew too much current and blew the fuse. Everything was fine till they had a power cut. When the power was restored all the machines started at once and so blew the fuse.

I also remember visiting India on holiday where the fuse board had a nail instead of a fuse, and the hotel room had live wires adjacent to the light switch.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: What do you mean he is quiet?

Some one was telling me he had to go to an ultra secure site. This meant filling details of about 10 people who have known you for years and can vouch for your.

My friend put down just one, and sent it in. He got a very aggressive phone call from someone who said he had not filled out the forms properly.... and who is this guy you have written down.

"That guy is the minister responsible for your department. He is my father-in-law. I was at his house at the weekend". The guy's phone rang about 10 minutes later - it was his father-in-law checking. The next phone call was a very polite "and when you be arriving sir?"

What do you mean he is quiet?

We had a student working with us for a year as part of his sandwich course. He was very quiet, and didn't say much, but was a great worker. He was a self starter and did all we asked of him (and more).

After his course he applied to our company. He was called for interview and interviewed very well. Every one was pleased to see him back and went to talk to him - even though he was still quiet.

He failed to get a job offer. My manger spoke to HR. The response he got back was "yes he got 5 stars from the technical interviews, but the HR person said he was very quiet and didn't have the right social skills". My manager went ballistic. "This is the best guy we've had in years - and you say - no social skills! We want him as a programmer, not as a sales person". HR changed their minds and he was offered a job.

He did well in the company. Much later I heard that he had an "interesting" background where "don't ask, don't tell" was a family ethic. I don't know any more - he didn't tell.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Next week :

Whoooosh - splash

All right, you can have one: DOGE access to Treasury IT OK'd judge

Sensitive data

Of course if sensitive data is encrypted - like name, ss, dob and address - send them the data but without the decryption keys.

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

please can someone we trust do the sums?

I remember a cartoon many years ago about a ship sinking, the bows are under the water, and there are people on the stern saying "My end's ok"

It would be very helpful for all parties is someone we trusted did the sums.

Eg If we import steel - what does it really cost in energy (and pollution) terms. What does it cost if we do it within the UK. Don't say we import from China - so our costs are 0!

What is the true cost of windfarms - bearing in mind we need to fix the infrastructure to take the power.

If we import pellets from Canada - what is the true cost. If you cut a tree down and plant another - it will not be carbon neutral for 100 years, so if you cut one tree down, you need to plant 1000 trees now.

Electric cars - what is the (carbon/electrical) cost of creating the batteries- and processing them at end of life.

UK data watchdog seeks fresh blood as more complaints lie unanswered for up to a year

Who's in charge?

In the private sector, I would have expected that if metrics were missed (red) for a quarter, then the boss would have been summonsed, and an action plan put in place.

How does it work in the public sector?

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Why did it take two hours?

I remember a similar situation there was a C header file with 1000 entries like

#define AReasoncode1 0x1122001

#define AReasoncode2 0x1122002 etc.

Problem.. given the reason code 0x1122001 what was the label statement?

One guy started withh

if (rc == 0x1122001 ) preason = "AReasoncode1";

else if ( rc = 0x1122002) preason = "Areasoncode2";

etc

After a week it wasn't done.

I took the file changed the file to be

mymac (AReasoncode2 , 0x1122002 );

and mymac generated the case statement - case (AReasoncode2) : pReason = "AReasoncode2";

it took me half an hour.

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

Our team were short staffed, and were lent someone who's dad was high up. He had an expensive car - and a mobile phone the size of a suitcase (it never rang) . He was competent, but relaxed. He was told "install this system". At lunch time the boss came in to the open plan area and asked how things were going. Our visitor said "we'll I've drawn up a plan, and I'm thinking of starting on the install tomorrow". The boss said .. we were expecting it all to be finished today. To his credit the guy stayed late and completed it. By the end of the week, the guy was firing on all cylinders. He said he had never worked so hard - but wow, he had learned so much! He had been in an area which was tightly controlled, and you needed special permissions to do things. With us, it was get it installed, there is a new version next week. He said he learned more in two weeks with us - than 2 years in his previous job.

What management need to know

our management wanted to know what skills people had and so commissioned an expensive survey of people's skills. There was a question like "rate your TCP/IP skills from 0 to 10 - where 0 is no skill and 10 is an expert" one of my junior colleagues put himself down as an 8 (he knew all he needed to know to do his job <ping>). I put myself down as a 3 because there was so much I didn't know.

When the results were analysed the results were upside down. The manager responsible called some of the senior people in to discuss the results, and we decided the results were meaningless.

We quickly wrote a new one page survey. "Who would you go and see about a TCP/IP performance problem" ... or TCP/IP coding problem... or debugging TCP/IP problems".

This showed the real experts in the area. Some quiet people where flagged as "experts" and so got management recognition for this.

Re: "Why had it taken management so long"

I was working in Asia, and helping a customer team with one product. I did a couple of presentation on the platform, and some on life skills, such as "if you do not like your job - it's your fault - you should change jobs".

I had several people come and see me "for a career chat", and also to ask me basic questions about DB/2. The senior person in charge of the DB/2 team was never there, he was always out "with customers" and executives, so the more junior people had no one to go and ask technical questions. I knew a little about DB/2 so could answer some of their questions.

I mentioned the lack of visibility of the DB/2 team leader to some of the senior managers I was working with, but did not seem to get very far. The culture was not to criticise your elders or peers, so they were not used to the feedback I gave.

A month or so later the DB2 team leader got a job in Marketing, and was apparently very good at it.

I had some feedback from one of the senior managers saying "thank you for your feedback, but you did not handle the situation well". The fact I had raised the issue meant that the management team were not doing their job very well, and so caused "loss of face". I went back a few months later, and the DB/2 team were much happier. So overall a success.

UK government told to get a grip on £23B tech spend

Stake holders

A friend of mine worked on some big government contracts. For one project because he getting conflicting requirements he called a meeting of all the stake holders.

His opening line was " I assume you all know each other, my name is.." Non one knew anyone.

They spent the morning going round the room saying who every one was and what their role was.

After lunch he said "The one line description of this project is.... does every one agree". No. There were as many views as people in the room.

The second day someone said "We need the following information..." Someone else said "You can get that from this other system".

My friend asked questions like "What will do you with this information. How do you know it the situation has got better or worse?"

(For example reported crime has gone up - is it because there is more crime - or the same amount of crime - but more has been reported?)

By the end of the week they had a very clear view of the project - about 1/10 the original size - because some of the data existed else where, and they sorted out critical function from the nice to have.

He wrote up the project - and the project got canned.

Every one thought the meeting was useful - even though the project was cancelled.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: Same area of town

One US company I worked with was based in San Francisco. Their DR site was about 200 miles south. This was thought to be OK, until some bright young person said they were both on the San Andreas fault line. An earthquake would have taken out both data centres. It cost them $10 million to move it - but that was cheaper than potential lost (and embarrassment) if they were hit by an earthquake.

Re: 'reviewed ... by hand'?

After an incident one customer had his team go to the new DR site - but their badges were not on the system, so they could not access the building, or the operation room. The security guard would not let them in (a good thing) until the problem went up the management chain, and down again which wasted about 15 minutes.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Re: Come on now...

Someone said "In every meeting you need someone who's job is to say 'Bullsh!t' and make every one think again about the down sides of any decision"

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

What do we get for our money

I would be interested in what value it has delivered, and show that it is an investment - not just payment for charts.

It feels like "Something must be done about ..." "This is something" - Job done, tick the box move to the next job.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

The spinning wheel lies.

All the spinning wheel shows you is the subtask that displays the spinning wheel has CPU cycles.

If the system locks up ( eg CPU loop else where) the spinning wheel does not get dispatched - and so stops.

So all the spinning wheel tells you is that there is not a CPU problem.

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

Re: Back in the day

30 years ago someone elderly got a computer my wife and I were "technical support"

Chas used to have video tapes, and a book which had the contents "TAPE 1" .... TAPE 2..."

When he tried creating files ... he called the files FILE1.txt and had a book with "FILE1.txt" is the WI accounts, "File2.txt " is the list of contacts etc.

It was a big leap forward when he learned how to name the files which matched their content.

We gave my mother a laptop. She loved the fish tank screen saver. I came in one day to find her with a watering can, hovering over the laptop

"I haven't changed the water in the fish tank for a while,so I was going to top up the water -but cant find a hole"

Re: Memories having a secretary

I was a manager before the days of email. (You could write a document, print it, circulate it, and get handwritten comments back).

I shared a secretary Pauline, who was brilliant, first thing she would come in with my mail. I would read it, and dictate the response (she would make it polite and grammatical). It took half an hour.

By lunchtime she was back with all my letters - I would read and sign. She used to have a job as secretary to a senior manager. She often went with the manager in the car to the airport, taking dictation,

and have the letters ready when he got back later that day.

She also did all the filing (of non P&C) stuff.

We then got corporate email - and most of the secretaries were let go.

It then took me all morning to do the emails - write the replies- rewrite the replies etc.

Looking at the overall cost the company saved the cost of some low paid people - and had expensive people doing low paid work- so overall the costs went up.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Things are obvious once you know

I remember moving from PROFS to Lotus notes around the time of when we moved from green screens to laptops.

I was writing an email, and some combination of keys (such as the cuff of your jacket touching the ctlr key while you did something else) would reformat the text for you, indent it, or make it smaller/larger etc. I kept deleting the text and retyping it.

Some kind person heard the swearing, and came across to offer assistance.

Two minutes help along the lines of "ctrl Z is undo what you have just done", and "ctrl - shift... will reset". Got me sorted

She copied her a4 sheet of her "first step with Lotus Notes" which was invaluable.

Once you know there is a key for "undo" you know what to look for. I was used to green screens.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Space planners

Where I worked they had a small group of (lowly paid) workers who organised office moves. They made sure all the network connections were in place, you had space for your cupboards etc, they organised the movers , and it just worked.

To save money this team was let go, and managers had to do the work. Managers were paid a lot more than the space planners, and had to learn the ropes.

We had a move, and found the space we were going to still had the previous occupants because they could not move because their network connections were not set up.

Although they saved money in one budget -overall it cost money because expensive people were doing the work - taking longer, and we wasted time moving/not moving.

This expense did not show up in a budget - so "We saved money" was not true.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Re: If it aint broke

Multiple people wanting to update records in the spread sheet/database at the same time, and providing audit trails.

High availability

Re: 20 district health boards

30 years ago our multi national organisation was bloated it had 11 levels between CEO and the grunts. To get a new screen you had put in a justification, which had to be signed off by 2+ people!.

Many of the approvers just approved... and never disapproved.

The CEO got rid of 3-4 layers of management, and said every manager can sign of expenses up to £500, and need a 2nd line approval for up to $5000. It was a breath of fresh air.

The head of one of the divisions went in with his "annual leave card" and asked the CEO to approve him taking a week off. The CEO said "You are in charge of a multi million division - if you cannot manage your own vacation you are in the wrong job".

I hear,that on the CEO's first day, his PA told him,"We've printed out all of your emails for you... I'm ready to take dictation for your replies". The CEO said "I'll do my own emails - unfiltered. Some I'll ask you to handle. Get me my email address NOW"

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: "a long, very sexually explicit email from a colleague"

No - someone else's husband

Early email ettiquete

Going back over 40 years (before laptops) when I worked in Germany I had to go with a female (married) colleague to visit a customer in the US.

We were given a temporary email address from the company we could use to talk back to base.

Our second day at the office, I logged on first while my colleague went for a coffee.

I found a long, very sexually explicit email from a colleague about the things they had done together, and what he wanted to do when she got back.

As a shy 25 year old it was an education.

When she came back with her coffee. I just mentioned there was an email for he. She didn't say anything, but there were no more emails like that.

I certainly saw her in a different light from then on.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Jet lagged tired

I had to travel to the far east for an important overnight performance test.

I travelled economy arriving at 10:00 tired and jet lagged and was told to go straight to the customer!

I had asked if I could go to the hotel for a couple of hours sleep, but no... I had to go to the customer in case they wanted to ask me any questions.

I sat around, dozing for half an hour at a time. 10 pm we were ready for the big test. For my part the performance was poor, but could not see why.

As I was falling asleep on my feet, they let me doze on the comfortable chair. 3 am I woke up with inspiration...

I asked the computer equivalent of "did you release the handbrake?"... to which the answer came back "Oh dear,no".

We were lucky, there was a performance problem else where, and even with our handbrake on ... it was fast enough.

Within my area we had a debrief, and I asked, why the hand brake was left on... "we didn't think it was important"

I learned several lessons from this... and passed them on - such as always check, never assume.

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Did you really pull the big red switch?

Someone in our department was testing some software, and being a thorough tester turned off the power to the machines halfway through a test.

When the systems finally came back the data was in a mess. Some transactions had been run twice. Some transactions had not run at all, and some transactions were stuck in the middle.

The call to the development team went something like...

Her:"I turned the power off at the wall and when it restarted..."

Them: "You mean you shut the system down?"

Her:"No - I turned the power off at the wall"

Them:"But you never do that as it makes mess of the system - surely you just shut the system down in quick mode?"

Her:"No I turned the power off at the wall - I was simulating a power cut"

Them:" Wow - we've never seen anyone do that before..."

She worked for a very effective test department who were asked to write an article on "testing". It started something like

"If we were to make cars, the first thing we would do it drive it at top speed in first gear down a rough road with plenty of pot holes..."

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

carpet a cricket pitch

At work, we had a large extension built and fitted out.

The local policeman lived near by, and would often walk his dog in the grounds in the evening.

He came across some workmen working really hard... taking new basins OUT of the building, and someone else was taking OUT carpet tiles.

This was raised with the builders, who found that enough wash basins had been ordered for every person to have their own, and they could have tiled the building 2 ft deep, and the local cricket pitch with the number of floor tiles which had been ordered.

DXC paid 50% more than original contract value for disastrous public sector Oracle project

The people at the top

I was involved in a large US government project which ran successfully on the mainframe with no major problems.

The people at the top changed, and the new broom said the mainframe was too expensive, and surely it can be done with "commodity hardware". All the workers (and up to 2nd line management) agreed this was a stupid thing to do. I presented to the "top team" saying I thought it was "brave" moving off a system that worked well, to the new, unknown environment.

A year later I was asked to help (informally) because of "performance problems", although Wintel is not my platform, I could see from traces that about 1% of log I/Os were taking a very long time - 100 times longer than normal. The "platform" people said on average the disk response time was normal. (So they did not see the outliers). The virtualisation layer said every thing was OK. The distributed file system people said "every thing is normal - all our dashboards are green".

They "disabled logging" - what ever than meant - and the response time improved.

My mainframe friends had all left by then, but I heard they customer had to improve the I/O throughput by a factor of 10, and have 2-3 times the number of servers. They also had to get more office space for all of the additional people they needed to support it.

From the "new broom" perspective this project was a success - even thought it cost much more than the mainframe implementation.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

The "technical boss"

Sounds like manager I used to have. He worked in pre-sales support so you thought he would understand technically.

He would ask for a technical description of the problems I was working on "because I did work in tech sales support you know". I usually refused - until he insisted - and I explained. We got lost after the second sentence. He never asked for an explanation again.

My next boss was brilliant... she said "give me the 30 second impact of the problem" me : "It is a rare problem - it could cause a major outage".

She got a reputation of being a good manager, because she let us techie get on with the job, and kept her manager informed with all the one liners.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Re: Next Trump executive orders

I think Canada should invite Russia and China to come and visit, and discuss "storing" missiles on the border. It might be the sort of thing Trump would say.

Already three years late, NHS finance system replacement delayed again

Solving the wrong problem?

I wonder if the complexity is from having so many disparate systems, and trying to cover all of these cases?

Is there merit in changing the processes to fix existing, working systems?

When I worked we had several different ways of doing similar things. Our favourite system was canned and we had to use another one.

We grumbled, and the developers came round to see what we were doing, and realised they could optimise the automation.

A couple of years later we had a working system and no one ever mentioned it... because it worked - and worked better than previous systems.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

AC/DC

My father was in the Royal Navy as an electrical artificer. He was on a land ship in Plymouth. I remember him being called back from leave because they had had a power cut, and someone had connected an AC generator to the DC supply, and fried lots of their systems.

The rating who did it had been proud that he had managed to get the connectors to work - despite it looking like they were incompatible! Until the big bang...

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Backups mean you take them off site

Someone reminded me that there was a University department in Terrapin sheds out in the car park.

They regularly took backups, and left them in a box in the cupboard.

They had a fire, and building burn down, including the cupboard and the tapes. They lost over 10 years worth of work.

Key - what key?

A customer told me that they had had a problem. They were taking backups, and doing a test restore - which worked fine.

The tapes were then sent to the backup site for long term storage.

They had a major problem, and needed to restore from a tape at the backup site. Unfortunately, the data was encrypted on the tapes. The primary site had the key, but the backup site didn't.

There was a quick panic while they found out how they could get the key exported from the primary system, and entered on the backup system.

They didn't know if the encryption was on the tape hardware or in the software.... which added to the confusion. I think it was both.

I had a check list when I went to customers. I added .... when did you last test the backups can be processed on the remote sites?

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Hello .. I'm the manager

I was a manager in the days before mobile phones. On the whole people treated my team OK, but there were some people who wanted out of hours service - mainly because they were not organised enough.

I told my team that if there were people they didn't want to deal with (out of hours) for any reason to give me a call.

I had several responses I used.

Hello, I'm the manager... if you want this work done before next week, I'll need your manager to OK for me to charge them the overtime. Minimum charge £1000. ... Ok speak to you next week

Hello, I'm the manager, ... You say it's urgent - that's fine. I'll get my team working on it, once I've contacted the senior manager to OK the change in priorities. ... Hello.. Hello?

And once... Hello I'm the manager, hello Senior manager... Yes, I see that it is urgent. I'll see if any of my team are free.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

one way of getting the budget for an upgrade

One guy told me he was fed up justifying hardware upgrades, and being told no money available - while people were getting modern laptops.

He solved this by shutting down one of the key systems and restarting it during a busy time. This caused a mini outage, and so there was a task force to look into it.

He said the hardware might not last a month. If it failed it would be a day's outage; and the amount of money being spent on this task force would pay for the hardware upgrade 5 times!

Fortunately people saw sense and the upgrade was approved before he got back to the office.

One of the senior manager walked past later and said "good job - well done - don't do it again"