Posts by ColinPa

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

Depends on what you want

A spread sheet is a little simple - it needs to be updated by many people - but an web driven server should meet the requirements.

The hard part is what will it be used for? If this was for a building - people will want to know does it have asbestos, does it have a cladding problems, is it at risk of flooding?

Step 1 is to build the list along lines of

1)Name(s) of application with a short 80 char description

2)Which department uses it?

3) Who is responsible for it ?.

4) Who do you contact when it goes wrong? - this may be different to 3)

Step 2

Work out how much software is the same - and who uses it.

Step 3

Work out what questions you want to ask about it.

Dont forget in The Register a few weeks ago, there was a server in the mail room which no one knew about till there was a site wide power off.

There is the risk that people will enter "excel" as the application - and not what it is used for (import export of trees)

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

left and right hands

My sister who was a nurse complained that she had to spend half an hour each day entering data about which patients she was planning on visiting. Name, address etc.

She then went to see the patients.

The system thought it took 5 minutes to drive from Taunton to Bristol!.

At the end of the day she had to spend an hour enter name, address, treatment, notes etc for the patients she visited - on a different computer. She could not cut and paste because it was a different computer.

She didn't think anyone actually used the information - but it was there for legal protection in case she got sued.

She asked me - was there an easy way to get the systems to talk to each other!

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Re: Your test isn't working!

My wife used to write Java code - along with all of the Unit tests needed to validate it.

The code was sent to India, and she moved to a new project.

A year or so later she was contacted by someone from India who said there was a problem with the test - it was giving an error message. Should they fix the test?

My wife asked - have you changed the base Java program ? "yes" came the reply. "Well change it back again as you have broken it".

I think that step is optional

I was on a help desk working with a customer who was having problems getting some software configured. The problem had been going on for about a week. In the end I went back to the beginning and the conversation went like

Me: Do step 1 and send me the output

Him: Here you are

Me: Do step 2 and send me the output

Him: Here you are

Me: Do step 3 and send me the output

Him:I don't think we need to do that, as it has no effect.

Me: Please do step 3 and send me the output

Him:Ok then but you are wasting your time, just wait and see

...

Me: Now start it

Him:It works!

A month later I met the guys boss at a conference and we had a conversation. The manager said the guy was often like that - not following instructions, and then it not working, and blaming it on the products. I wrote an email for the manager describing the situation - and an estimate of the costs of my time etc. I believe the managed had a career changing conversation with the employee, because we never heard from the employee again.

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Re: To be fair on BMW

I'm waiting for the first software hack that cause rude words to be displayed on the side of the cars.

A time when cabling was not so much 'structured' than 'survival of the fittest'

How did that accident happen? Whoops just like that.

My father told me about someone who cut the end of his finger off putting a steel plate in a guillotine, and managed to the end off his finger (just flesh).

After the patched him up, someone from management (this was the days before health and safety person) came round to see how he managed to do it.

Easy he said... and showed the manager - and managed to cut the end of the finger on the other hand!

It's the day before the grand opening but we need a firmware update. It'll be fine

Windows upgrade in process

I remember going to a presentation of a great new technology and just after the demo started Windows update kicked in. The download activity was enough to impact the network connection, and instead of a slick demo it was a stuttering display. The audience offered suggestions on how to kill the update, but the marketing person did not want to go off script.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

HR Tool could be used as an anti- pattern - or how not to design a tool.

We had a new corporate tool where you had to enter your achievements for the year. There was no save button, so I assumed this was (like gmail) an auto save. I spent a few hours entering my data, etc and clicked the close window button, and "send to manager".

My manager came back saying it was empty.

I did it again (another 3 hours) , and could see no save button. I used the pop up "do you need help" to ask where the save button was. They said it was on the bottom right of the screen - but only if you make it full screen! I made it full screen and there was the button. I was told "read the help for more information". I clicked the help button - and it was not very helpful... it didnt say "use full screen". I go back to my data entry page, and find it has been reset. Pressing help - wipes the page.

I told my manager. A little while later he sent an email. "Create your feedback in a document. Then go into the tool and paste it. Then make your window wide enough - then save. Do not use any other features."

I was given the email contact of the HR manager responsible for the tool, who said they had thoroughly tested it before deployment and yes, they would like feedback. I gave them over 100 points (eg what is the icon that looks like a dog - and why is there no hover text to tell me?, no I cant use Internet Explorer on Linux; why is there a picture of me at the top of the screen (non scrollable) I know what I look like, and it wastes valuable space). I said I thought the tool should be used in classes - for education. HR were pleased with this, till I said on how not to design a tool.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

Re: The People ARE The System.

The joy of testing is testing it till it breaks.

The testing Mantra is not "we ran all the tests and hey worked", but "no matter what we did, we could not break it".

If you have'nt broken it, you havn't pushed it hard enough.

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Re: Startup/Shutdown or vice versa co-dependencies

"In my experience,.. co-dependent systems can be configured to start/stop properly."

Sometimes.. Ive worked with mainframe systems, where you have a sysplex with one Db2 database spread across 10 massive hardware boxes, with 1000's of CICS, IMS etc, and transactions with 2 phase commit across of these transaction managers.

As this sort of restart is an area which isnt done very often, you can get timing (or deadlock) issues if you do things in a different order.

Develop the golden path which have tested exhaustively, and which you always follow, to minimise these sorts of problems.

Where are the instructions?

As told to me...

A customer was very organised, they had online documentation to cover all the scenarios they could think off, eg the start-up order of hardware and software etc. Most of it had been tested. It looked very impressive

They had a site wide power down. The shutdown worked well. The problem was the restart.

"The restart instructions are on this machine - ah it's been powered off."

They had a quick brainstorm, and worked out the restart order, disks, network controller, PC's, until they could logon and get the proper instructions. Then they shut it all down again, and went through a proper restart.

After this they had a folder with the "machine room boot-up" printed instructions in the operations area. it reviewed and updated every month.

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

What ignorant bar steward touched this system?

I heard this at a war story swapping contest.

A civilian onboard ship was part of a team deploying some software. Hours were long, sleep was short, things were not going well. Getting the basic system up took a week instead of an hour etc (the ship had an unsupported set of products).

Some very senior naval officers (lots of gold braid), came for a tour of the ship before it went to sea. The head of engineering wishing to impress the gold braid said this software is so advanced it will be able to recover if there is a major outage. He clicked on the delete and recover button menu item. Replying yes to all of the prompts.

It displayed a messages saying "deleting current image". Nothing happened for about 2 minutes.

Suddenly someone burst into the room, red in the face, carrying a hacksaw; swearing and cursing, along the lines of "I'm going to cut the hands off the ignorant bar steward who touched the system".

Head of Engineering: "I was trying to demonstrate the delete and recover"

Puce faced engineer screaming: "WE HAVE NOT CONFIGURED THE RECOVER YET. YOU'VE JUST DELETED THE LIVE SYSTEM".

They decided to delay departure for a week. Suddenly other departments said "ah- that's useful, it will give us more time to finish, can we have two weeks?"

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Re: Reclaiming Private Call Costs

We had an honesty box system. Every month a printout would come round, and for each phone there would be a list of external numbers etc which were direct dialled.

For our phone, there was always about 10+ hours a month to a national number. Both me and my office mate(Martin) denied it.

We phoned it ... and when someone replied, Martin said "oh hello Mum.. we were just checking the number, I hadn't realised it was your work number".

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

A hard power off is a good test

As a tester I always thought a power off was a good test.

A fast shutdown is not the same, it has time to write data out to disks etc.

A customer found a problem when there was an emergency power off.

As part of 2 phase commit you have to write to one disk, then write to the second disk in the right order.

We found the first write was a write to the disk buffers - it was not actually written to the spinning disk (there was a 10 millisecond window)

At recover time the data from the first disk was not there, but it was from the second disk, and the system would not restart.

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

circular history

"No, but we know they use nanobots for mind control. They've been doing it for years. They've been planning all of this for years."

Was this planned before Nanobots were invented?

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

When is the same not the same.

I remember some hair pulling and swearing over the partition to the next desk.

When the customer typed a command in - it worked. If he ran it in a script/program - it didn't work. They both ran on our systems. It was the identical command so why didn't it work on the customer system.

Someone else wandered over and said "get them to edit the script/program and retype the command".

We could hear the eye rolling at the far end, but he did it as he was desperate . tap tap tap - " it works!"

The customer had cut and pasted from a manual into the file. Unfortunately somewhere in the process a quoted string became a string with back quote, and forward quote - which looked like a quote at each end (or may be a code page problem).

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Not is such a tiny word

I remember getting a memo saying

"If you get xx then it is critical that you should respond to it", signed PHB.

Followed by another email an hour later

"If you get xx then it is critical that you should >NOT< respond to it".

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Some things are meant not to work.

I half remember the operator-less shuttle on tracks which take you from A to B, the door opens, you get in, the door closes, and off you go.

Until the queen came to open the facility.

She got in, and the doors stayed open.... they had to reset the shuttle before it would move.

There was lots of bad press, until they found the cause.

What happened was

The shuttle arrived, doors open, the queen says (quite) a few) words, queen boards shuttle.

The software had some code which says if the doors do not close within 1 minute, it looks like a problem. Do not let the shuttle leave the station, but send someone to check it.

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

"you are not spending enough time on the question"

I remember some online education where the answers were pretty obvious.

Q:"You have received an email from an address you do not know, with speling mistakes, saying you have won the Nigerian Lottery etc.

Do you

A1. Click on the link immediately to see what you have won

A2. Think for a minute, then click on the link

A3. Ask a grandparent.

A4. Treat it as spam.

When you clicked the answer, the computer said "You have not spent long enough reading the question".

We got round this by having this in one window, and did work in another window, it took all day - but who cares

We complained to HR, saying we are professionals with degrees, and did not have the reading age of a 5 year old. They were not interested.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

"personal printing"

We had a brand new printer to replace an old, basic one. The new one had all the mod cons, icons, and flashing lights.

Someone had a paper jam in the new one, and was not brave enough fix it.

Fools rush in ... etc. I opening it up and fixed it. It was clearly "personal printing" for school kids. The paper was about 1 inch deep in the output tray - so not the acceptable one or two sheets.

I stood by as he then took the printed output, and put it back >into< the paper drawer of the printer ("the other way up") to print another page on the back.

I asked what he was doing - and he said "saving paper - I am printing on both sides".

"Have you tried using the 'duplex' facility that comes with this printer?" I asked, pointing to one of the icons.

Shortly after that each printer had a one page, large print guide explaining what the "intuitive icons" meant. For example "To print duplex .. press this one...", "to shrink two A4 pages per one page of A4 .. press this one".

Pulling down a partition or knocking through a door does not necessarily make for a properly connected workspace

Putting walls up!

I was at a customer for a 2 week project. We had been told that there would be building works at the weekend.

We arrived the second week to find there was now a wall with a combination lock, stopping access to the machine room where we were meant to be working.

No one knew the combination, so we pulled up a few floor tiles, and sent a small person under the door to open it. When the "building manager" came round at lunch time to see the work and found the door blocked open there was a "full and frank discussion" about the requirements of the wall - if someone can crawl underneath it why have it.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Hello - it's the manager here - click

A friend of mine was in a back end support role of an 24*7 enterprise. There were teams who were meant to handle the end user calls, and pass on any really difficult ones to the back end team. Some how the number of the "call out team" got into the wild, and a small group of people were phoning them directly, as they could solve the problems.

They started getting a couple of calls a night for pretty trivial things which was exhausting for the person on call.

The manager of the team took the phone for a week to "filter the calls".

The calls went a bit like

"Hello,Jo Blogs, manager of the IT support team, who are you and what's the problem?"

"Ahh are you the manager?"

"Yes"

click.

After a few days the calls dropped off to the usual 1 a month.

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

I'll stake my reputation on it - whoops.

I remember eating humble pie when I was in support. A customer had a major problem. It could only be caused by a major setup problem with the customer's system, or code like

X = 0;

If (x> 0) then cause problem;

else x =1;

I told the customer that I staked my reputation that the code was good, I had spent hours looking at the small number of lines of code it was impossible for the value to change ... etc , it must be the customer's fault.

Someone overheard the call to the customer and came round for a chat.

The chat was along the lines of ... if you have two threads running this code - what happens?

We took a white board and crawled through the lines of code until there was an ah -ha moment. If thread 1 got here, and thread 2 got there.... then there is the problem.

We developed a fix which worked, and I sent them a picture of me with a venison pie from the local supermarket ( and an explanation of 'umble pie)

In future I used words like "very unlikely" rather than "impossible"

Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection

A thank you

I had to do a health check at a (non UK) government site. They guys seemed more than capable, but why were they doing strange things? There was a sigh, and a rolling of eyes, and the comment "we do what we are told to do - even though it makes no sense". I presented up the management chain till I reached a technical director ( or some similar title).

The meeting was strange, the "new broom director" thought the technical people we not up to the job. I said they were extremely competent people, who were resisting the move "from the mainframe to the on-site cloud" because they could not see how it would provide the high availability and performance the business needed. I said the a "vision" on a presentation is not an implementation plan, and they needed to a full scale test project to try to break it, before implementation.

Afterwards the technical team came round to say THANK YOU for speaking up for them, with comments like "it was very brave of you". The director had a reputation of biting people's heads off if they showed weakness.

I kept in touch with some of the guys, and they kept me up to date with their progress. Their fears were realised; once I was asked to help identify a performance problem. I could see the occasionally the I/O was v-e-r-y slow. But this was not what the management wanted to hear. The mainframe techies left after about 6 months.

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

Clarity focuses the mind

I was asked to go to "review the systems" at a customer after a significant outage.

Two of us went, asked all the right questions and found that the techies had said - "we recommend plan A, if you do plan B you are likely to have a major outage"

Plan B was implemented and they had a major outage.

After the review, we found some areas for improvement, but nothing major.

We presented to the techies for their feedback, then to their management and up the line.

We presented to the managers manager.

Bullet one on the first feedback chart was "Management do not listen to the techies"... He gave us a hard time - exploring our evidence. He asked us to come come back the next day and finish the presentation.

Next day, he said "Thank you for being so clear. I've fixed the first problem - would you mind removing the first bullet"- so we did.

I bumped into one of the techies a few months later, who said "heads had rolled", and there was now a team of senior technical people who could help "executives with vision" understand the implications and costs of their vision.

Brit MPs blast Baroness Dido Harding's performance as head of NHS Test and Trace

do we have a good model now?

After the initial data spreading model - which gave inconsistent results when used with the same data) do we now have a model which works, is consistent, and has scientific credibility. I remember the cleaned up python code was still a bit dicky even after it was cleaned up.

You need solid data to be able to make reliable predictions.

Or do we still have the haruspex model. (In the religion of ancient Rome, a haruspex was a person trained to practise a form of divination called haruspicy (haruspicina), the inspection of the entrails.

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

e er what's the difference

I had a colleague who set up synonym line commands

e for edit

er for erase

br for browse

Step 1 browse the file

Step 2 recall the command and overtype with e

Step 3 wonder where the file has gone.

When I pointed out he had typed er filename he said "thank you.. I often wondered why my files disappeared"

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Bible and amallet

Strangely enough this sounds like what doctors used to recommend for a ganglion cyst. My grandmother had one, and the doctor said hit it with a bible or other large book. That didnt work, so next time he hit it with a rubber hammer. This worked!

"it only took us an hour to get it working in test - why is it taking you so long to set it up in production?"

"did you have security, authentication, authorisation and logging enabled"

"no"

"I rest my case"

Re: Test into prod?

I did a review of a customer's set up where they had copied test database into production, and renamed the files at the same time - so there could be no confusion.

"are the production data backed up?"

"of course" ( eye rolling)

"please show me"

"ahh - we have been backing up the test data for 2 years - and not production - we forgot to update the backup job"

Air gaps have been 'shattered’, says new Indian policy on power sector security

what can go wrong?

The great wall of china was rendered useless when the baddies bribed a door keeper to let them in. I am expecting problems to occur because of human behaviour - "What harm will there be if I copy this amusing document around my work colleagues". I'll bring it in on a USB device.

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

executive assistance can sometimes be a good thing.

Some executive assistance, such as hourly phone calls about a critical problem is not welcome. You spend more time on the call or the pre-call call (to make sure you did not say the wrong things to the executive).

We had an executive planning to come to the UK and wanted to see a demo of our bright new shiny software. We were stuck trying to get two products to talk to each other, and could not fix it. In our call with the executive assistant who was setting up the visit, we mentioned the problem. Within 10 minutes of the end of the call we had a phone call from the top guru of the other product. Within another 10 minutes we were told which fix we needed, and what the bypass was.

The executive visit was a success!

Don't touch that dial – the new guy just closed the application that no one is meant to close

Stress test!

An enterprise software company wanted to stress test it before making it available to customers. 20 of us new grads were rounded up, and given a list of all the possible commands, and we were told to type in any command. It the system stayed up for an hour the test passed and we would get a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Most people started from the top of the card, so I started at the bottom.

I typed in a cryptic string of characters like ZYQC P ST I, and there were cries as the system shutdown.

"Who shut the system down" the manager asked?

Deadly silence

"Did anyone type in ZYOC Perform STOP"

me:"I typed in p ST I"

"OK no biscuit for you - for the rest of you ... use any command except for the P STOP command"

Two years later they had software scripts executing the commands and programs, and avoided the problem of dumb users. These scripts could generate 100 times the load rate, and didn't get tired.

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Personal heaters

We were in a "temporary" building - 1 year max - and 20 years later if you forgot to turn your heater on before you left, (it was on a building timer) you would come in next morning and find ice >inside< the windows! Mind you in summer we were allowed shorts instead of suits etc, and management brought us ice-creams.

Infosys admits it still hasn't fully fixed Indian tax portal

Re: Nope, nope, nope...

One project I was on in India has a team of 8+ people for the software I was involved in. One person doing the work - the other 7 "learning". Only the team leader could make changes. In theory I could only talk to the team leader. I managed to start working with others in the team, and found some knew almost nothing - they were there for "education" (and charging) two seemed very competent. I suggested they could do some of the backlog - but the team leader said no!

The had not thought of having different people working on different problems.

Their management review of the project was a discussion on the size and colour of the fonts on the charts!

Thatcher-era ICL mainframe fingered for failure to pay out over £1bn in UK pensions

It doesn't sound much faster

The report said "batch was 50-60% quicker". Another project went from a batch window of 5 hours to 1 hour.

Assuming these were on the ICL hardware, modern systems should be much faster for example solid state disks.

Disk response times have dropped from > 10 ms down to 0.5 ms or less.

CPU's should be much faster.

Machines have so much more cache than before, most of the active data should be in cache.

This is your final warning to re-certify, Red Hat tells tardy sysadmins

Are skills questionnaires useful ? Feel the weight of my certificates.

We had a skills questionnaire come round the department to see what skills we had, and what skills were missing.

We had to rate ourselves in about 100 areas from "Know nothing" to "expert" on a scale of 0 to 10.

I answered many questions as a 5 because I knew how much I didnt know. My colleague (who often used to come to me to ask questions) put himself down as 8 for many topics.

We discussed the scores in a team meeting.

The conversation went a bit like

Me: Are you familiar with configuring xyz from scratch?

Him: No

Me: Do you know about the abc command to display error information

Him: No -- I didnt know there was one.

etc

Me: So when you said you were an 8 ... you are more like a 2.

Him: Possibly - but you are a 10...

Me: No.. I dont know much about...

Our boss decided this was adding little value.

We came up with a skills rating

0 - Never heard of it

1 - I know enough to do my job

2 - I know how to configure and debug it

3 - I could prepare and give education on this topic.

When we came to discuss what skills the department wanted - we got lost in the weeds again. eg TCP

Do you mean

1) Use of Ping command

2) Writing a TCP send and receive program

3) Configuring TCP

4) Tuning TCP

5) Diagnosing TCP problems

er - yes and no.

We found people who were certified could usually do what it covered, but often could not handle the bigger picture.

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

Are you using the right thing?

I sent customer in India, some code to solve a problem. They compiled it, and ran it, and it didnt work.

Strange thought I... so I did more testing. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing.

Eventually I asked them to send me the listing of the program they ran. About 20% was my program - they had altered it, and added lots of stuff, and it was the stuff they added which caused the problems.

I learned a lesson - always check what they are running, and avoid sending source code - send executables instead.

We want a hostage - I mean on site support

I was involved in software performance, and had to deal with a motor manufacturer in the US. They had a performance problem in production (but not in test) which was slowing down the production line. It looked like a simple configuration problem, but they could not stop and restart the server because it would take the production line down.

They needed "on-site support". My management team said not until you apply the fix. Because the CEO of this corporation plays golf with someone senior in my corporation, my boss came in and said "can you go to the US ... today(Friday)? a plane goes in 4 hours. So I went, arriving late Friday evening, checked into the hotel, and looked for the instructions to go on site etc. and found an email saying "We managed to restart the server and the fix has fixed the problems. If you haven't left yet you do not need to come to visit".

When I went on site on Monday they team were very apologetic, and said it was Chinese Whispers up the executive chain. They were told to demand on site support, even though they knew it would not help. It was a case of the executive shouting "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!". This is something we could do. Go do it. Next!

I stayed a week and did a review of their system. In my report I said they were a very lucky team. They looked very pleased, until I said there was so much wrong with their system - they were very lucky it had not broken in many places.

How long till some drunkard puts a foot through one of BT's 'iconic, digital smart city communication hubs'?

Re: Iconic?

Iconic - as in an icon for "gone in 30 seconds"

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

The opposite.

Two guys in a team were having a technical discussion and could not resolve which of two solutions to use. They went to their manager. They had a meeting to discuss it, and after a while the boss said, I think you've made some progress, go away and work on it. Come back in 2 days.

The same thing happened, and again.

I heard the two guys complaining that their manager was useless - he didn't decide which solution to use. Totally useless etc. .

Eventually they came to a decision.

The manager said you are both experts in this field, how did you expect me,who only knows the concept to make a technical decision. My job was to get you guys to resolve it.

Afterwards (this was down the pub) the two techies said "he's right. he should not have been asked to make the decision. His job was to make us decide. Perhaps he is a good manager after all"

Re: "a multitude of fresh qualifications counted for naught"

My grandfather used to create foundations for buildings. This often meant pumping out the water from the holes in the ground.

A Newly Qualified Engineer connected a pipe to the pump, and nothing happened.

My grandfather said turn the pipe round - end to end.

NQE: No - it can make no difference

Grandad - just do it.

NQE: It works!

There was a lining to the pipe, and which had got detached at one end. If you pumped the right way, the lining became smooth and lined the pipe. If you pumped the wrong way, the lining collapsed and caused a blockage.

As Grandad said "teaching new dog old tricks!"

Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

We had a technical person who was great at solving problems. He had a photo on the desk next to him, (I think it was of his dog). Before you could ask the person a question you had to ask the photo of the dog - it was said to have an 80% success rate!

The conversation went a bit like

"Hello Dog, this feels really stupid, but I have a problem where... ah I know the answer". Score +1 to the dog.

This was because if you had to explain the problem in simple terms and get your thoughts in order, you often could solve the problem yourself.

I read an article where it described if you are looking for something, ask yourself the question aloud "Where is the ..." this causes a different part of the brain to be used, and bypasses the temporary blindness

You want us to make a change? We can do it, but it'll cost you...

Re: Lines of Code - negative defects

A couple of years later the developers were asked to break the work into 'tasks' of 1-2 weeks duration, and they started to track these.

They found it more accurate when they had to size the work if someone else had to do it (if I do it, it will take a week. If Fred does it it will take 2 weeks - we'll say 2 weeks.)

For each task they had to identify dependencies and so there was some real project management, and reordering of work.

Re: Lines of Code - negative defects

I know someone who worked for a large multi national company, and about 40 years ago, one of their key metrics was defects per loc.

The counting was simplistic number of "if" "select" "case" and semicolons.

He said that was stupid - (complex code takes longer to write etc).

He proved it, by inserting lots of dead code such as if ( 0 ==1) {... } and wrote lots of code in the {}, and lots of I = 0; repeatedly.

Because there was so much dead code, their algorithm for defects per line of code, came out as negative negative defects.

When the chart was displayed to management - they saw how stupid the metric was.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Ohh that screen

In the early days before dual screens were common, I remember helping someone one who had a problem.

The screen on the laptop showed the desk top, but there was no mouse visible, etc.

Eventually we twigged that it was plugged into an external monitor - which had the brightness turned down!

It had been turned down because a previous person "didn't want to waste electricity by having a bright screen", and thought dark was better.

Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have

year 2000

Year 2000 support. I wasn't called out, but I had to go to the US on Jan 1st - to provide support when the US banks opened.

Jan 2nd I had an email from my wife. Something went "ping" at midnight - what is is?

Jan 3rd another email from my unhappy wife. WHAT IS GOING PING - as it wakes her up. She was tired from doing support.

Jan 4th email from my very unhappy wife. She had taken contents of my bedside table and spread them on the bed and floor and sat up till the witching hour.

We had all been given pagers for the year 2K support - just in case. I had thrown it in the drawer besides my bed and forgotten about it.

At midnight all the pagers were sent a message like "the lottery numbers" etc.

She took the batteries out - and it took a long time for her to forget.

Infosys CEO hauled in to tell minister why India's tax portal is still a glitchy mess

You don't need people trying to fix it - you need people to find the problems.

A friend was telling me of his company's experiences being drafted in to help fix a major project after it went live

His boss had an excellent reputation for not panicking.

There was a big meeting - sorry a meeting with lots of decision makers making decisions.

The conversation went a bit like

Him: "what is the perceived problem and what evidence is there for the root cause"

DMs: It is slow - we are rewriting the programs

Him: What evidence do you have?

DMs; We are rewriting the problems.

Him:What makes you think it is the programs and not the database.

DMs: We have lot of coders.

Him: Can we get evidence on 1) database 2) CPU hot spots 3) locking... I'll send my team home until tomorrow morning

Next morning:

Him:It looks like evidence there is a database problem.

DMs: Great - we'll change the database

Him: Can we get evidence on where in the database it is slow. Is it slow disks, or a bad index?

DM: We'll change the programs to work round it.

Next day:

Him:It looks like the indexes have been badly designed and we are missing some...

If you want to use your coders, they can fix the application logic and implement field validation.

etc

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

How do I top up the water?

We bought my aged mother a laptop who struggled with it. We gave her a fish tank screen saver, so we had fish swimming around.

I came in one day to find her with a watering can in hand and she asked "I thought the water might needed topping up - which hole is it?".

See that last line in the access list? Yeah, that means you don't have an access list

Bluff your way to the top.

I remember working with a very senior person in our large IT company who was the test guru in one area. I had been there about a year. He wanted a configuration change made to an operation system ready for the weekend test. I made the change he requested, but the box failed to start. I tried different flavours of the change, and all failed.

Come Monday, I nervously went round and told him about the problems. It turns out he knew very little about anything. He had been hired a few years earlier on a huge salary - and therefore got the title that goes with the salary. I spoke to my boss who did some digging. Where his CV had said "has worked with ..." basically meant " sat in a room where other people worked on it". His next years "targets" were set for someone at his level, and he decided to take early retirement.