Posts by longtimeReader 21 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2018
Similarly, I wanted to watch a game at the Oval last week. Ticket office asked for Name, address, postcode, email, date of birth.... When questioned about why, they said "it's the ground's policy". Questioned further: "we need DoB because there are some junior tickets available." I'd like to think I look young for my age, but rather clearly not under 18. Ended up giving them false info of course.
I chose a Uni project to implement the Core Wars system (basically an assembler + a runtime for a very simple processor), and did it all in Fortran IV since that was the only "efficient" language available on the college's computer. I think I may even still have the green-line printouts somewhere in the attic.
I once did some work that involved connecting some new software to access the Police National Computer. The only test that was allowed to be run "live" when I was present was to query my own car's index number. (At least it proved I didn't own a stolen vehicle.) Though maybe auditors did get to wonder why that same query was being issued multiple times in a short period.
In the early days of the IBM PC, we would have some adapter cards - or even motherboards - with intermittent problems. Send the box to the CE team for repairs, and it would come back with no fault found. (We even got into the habit of putting drops of tippex on cards so we could tell whether they'd actually been replaced.) Scraping a screwdriver across some of the circuit tracks would turn an intermittent into a permanent failure. And replacement parts then arrived.
A friend told me that she had once been testing a dozen brand new, very expensive, monitors. They were the first batch off the production line and we needed to check they had been correctly built. After the tests were done, she sent them back to the manufacturing plant in Scotland for repacking and distribution. They decided to do their own basic test that the displays did still work so they could be sold on.
Plugged the first one in, and it didn't work. Plugged the second one in, and it didn't work ... All the way up to 12.
At which point they finally checked the specs and found that they had used 240V power instead of the 120V required by this model. And that they had managed to wreck all of them.
I once - very deliberately - did "rm -rf /" on a box that was going to be reimaged anyway. It took a lot longer than I expected to start throwing up errors - so much so that I pushed the command into the background and tried running "ls" to see if it was actually working. Of course, by now it was missing libc (still loaded by the rm command but not visible elsewhere) and the resulting error showed that the deletions were happening. "echo *" still worked for a short time though.
I have kept the merch I got at a conference in Australia some years ago. (It's never been used, honestly, but was worth keeping just for the amusement it creates.)
It's an IBM-branded vibrator.
Actually, it's labelled as a USB-powered personal massage device. But WE KNOW.
> What he saw was confusing, with a left side that seemed to be created by a designer and a right side that he said looks like Internet Explorer toolbars of 2008.
So the left side looked like a pretty toy with 5 times as much white space as necessary, while the right side had information neatly laid out and easy to follow?
I never liked the CDE environment on my AIX systems - in fact I'm still running Motif/mwm there. The only real difficulty I've had with it was when I needed to make some of the fonts available via my Linux machine which has one of its monitors used as a sort of XTerminal.
Just last week I cleaned out my home directory of the various config files and directories that had been left for so many years by some of the other desktop environments I'd tried and discarded.
A colleague changed an error message that would NEVER need to be printed - it was in one of those cannot-possibly-happen clauses after several other error conditions had been detected and reported - so that it simply printed "Merde!". Of course, it showed up almost immediately after shipping the product. And the customer complaint was that they didn't understand the problem since they were not running with a French locale.
My sister has been heavily involved in looking at ML approaches to analysing images for cancer. She's a doctor who has been doing this stuff in person for years. When she got involved with the ML people she said - it's absolutely critiical that the people working on the algorithms etc have an idea about what the data really means.
I regularly run "rpm -qa | grep [product prefix] | xargs rpm -e" to uninstall development level filesets of my packages, ready to do a clean install of the next build.
I'm sure there are better ways, but that's the one my fingers have learned. Except last week, they forgot to type the middle clause and various messages made me realise that almost every package installed on the image was being deleted. Killing the job didn't really help as by that point too much had gone.
For a time I had a "special" PC on my desk that was NOT beige. The case was transparent so you could see the insides. Identical in shape but cast in something like perspex. It had been created so the IBM engineers could do things like check the airflow by putting in smoke and seeing how it moved. And after it wasn't needed for that any more, it got handed down and still worked fine..
I often ended up with the ex-test or early-build stuff. A few years later, another machine on my desk was a PC AT. Serial Number 000006.
Since you mentioned the Police National Computer ... years ago I worked on a project to support access to the system from some new boxes. Why that project was needed is a story in its own right, thanks to a salesman "misunderstanding" the requirements, selling something totally wrong for the network, and then we had to bail him out.
But in order to test and demo our work, we had to send queries to the real PNC. But because of security/privacy concerns, the only query I was allowed to run was to lookup my own car registration.Unfortunately for readers of the Reg it didn't show as stolen or written off. But I did wonder if analytics (even in those days they did some, although they might not call it that) would show a concern about repeated queries for a particular vehicle.
Back in 1989 a group of us were working in the company's Texas offices. Some of the rest of the team remained in Hampshire. We were all working with Unix boxes, but there was no direct TCP/IP connection available between the sites - the only communication where we could work on the "other side's" Unix system required using a 3270 terminal emulator and then using the SNA network which did run around the world to log onto a mainframe in the right country from where we could do line-mode telnet to the Unix box. Which was not very usable but just about OK for occasionally looking at any essential logs or executing simple commands. That single line input prompt did make it very obvious whether you were working on your own local Unix system or a transatlantic machine.
So I was very surprised when my machine halted unexpectedly, and then found out that S (for that was his initial) had managed to type "shutdown -f" in the wrong window and sent the command across the ocean.
Had a manager who was being an arse at checkin for a transatlantic flight. He insisted loudly and annoyingly on being put in the smoking section, knowing it was small and likely to already be full. So hoping for a free upgrade. The agent instead called back the person she'd just processed and asked if HE would like an upgrade freeing up a space in coach smoking for my manager.
I worked for a time on QA of IBM's "Industrial" PC, intended for use in places like factory floors rather than offices. One test put the system in an excessively smoky and dirty environment - after a while the keys on the keyboard could not even be depressed as there was so much gunk caught underneath the keycaps. But we were able to simply turn it over, shake and tap it, and everything started working fine again.
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