Posts by AndyMTB 55 publicly visible posts • joined 2 May 2019
I worked for an aerospace company, we used various state of the art analysis programs. We didn't mind paying for annual support, but we did insist that there were "escrow" arrangements where if the software company went bust, their products were available for us to adopt/continue using. This was pretty much to satisfy CAA/FAA record-keeping requirements, we may have had to reproduce design calculations. I could see spreadsheets falling under this umbrella for some organisations.
And the updates install a LOT more quickly, and painlessly, than Windows. How often do you need to reboot linux after updates? - probably once every couple of months, with most updates just installing in the background. I only have one Windows instance, it runs in a linux-hosted VM. My wife has some specialist software that will only run under MS, drives me crazy when it's doing it's "...please do not turn off" business. Must say though, it does seem quite stable in a VM!
When I was a nipper, I read everything the local library could offer. This included stuff like the Jennings schoolboy series, Biggles of course and Bunter. Didn't understand half of the latter - what, they don't go home at the end of the day? - but I do remember Billy getting upset after he (thought) he overheard one of his school mates refer to him as a fat accomplice. I chuckle everytime I read the proper phrase.
Algol-68 was my first introduction to the world of computing, back in 1976 as a first year maths student at Manchester. We had to do one "foreign" topic to keep us broad minded - French, German, Philosophy or Computer Science. As the computer building was right next door to the Maths Tower (now demolished) most of us opted for this the most convenient choice. We made up packs of punch cards that would be processed overnight, returned with a print-out which invariably said "syntax error line 1" or suchlike.
Never touched a computer again after that one year (not that we were let anywhere near the actual mainframe) until I started work 3 years later.
May be overly obvious - but most lights manufactured in the last few years have a built-in timer. Turn them on at,say, 4pm, choose your wave/flash/steady pattern and then just leave to their own devices. They'll turn themselves off after 8 hours and come back on after 16 hours - ie 4pm - with the settings you selected earlier.
I see someone earlier commented "Is this a bandwagon I see?" - well why not combine one bandwagon with another? Simply tell AI "Convert all this mass of code into <your language of choice>". I mean, AI can do everything else, surely something so procedural as this would be a doddle?
After years of replacing parts in desktops and lappies, I can wholeheartedly vouch for the fact that leaving out a few of those very-easy-to-lose screws definitely improves performance. My best result was a new motherboard where I misplaced 2 of the fixing screws but the PC went loads faster as a result.
My grown-up daughter has a dual-screen desktop for "serious" work which she can't do on her everyday laptop. I've upgraded the innards a number of times, it's running linux and suits her just fine. However, she insists that she just loves the very old keyboard, which works great except that half the letters have worn off. Doesn't seem to matter to her but drives me crazy when I'm called upon to upgrade etc. I'm sure I never usually look at the keyboard but I must somehow be aware of where my fingers are. Peripheral vision? (sorry!). Anyway, now turn up armed with my own keyboard.
My sister was persuaded to look after her son and partner's "house rabbit" for a week. It arrived in a hutch which was situated in the dining room, but my sister used to let it out for a run around a couple of times each day. During one free-time, she had to take a phone call and when she finally rang off, said rabbit was nowhere to be found. After a hour or so's panicky searching, Flopsy (not his real name, he asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons) finally appeared from behind a lounge chair. Not just any old lounge chair, but my brother-in-law's top of the range electric recliner, carefully lined up for the perfect Sky Sports viewing angle.
So, rabbit is re-boxed, and all is quiet until 8pm when Dave's team was playing, it was discovered that the chair was inoperable. Changes of fuses etc were to no avail. After a few days the "chair engineer" turns up and the problem is quickly diagnosed. "Bad news for you I'm afraid" he says - "You've got a rat somewhere!".
Engineer agrees to comment on the worksheet "degraded wiring" and my brother-in-law is still none the wiser. And there's no chance he will read this journal!
Not Troubles related, just an ordinary visit to a RAF base to sort out a database. The Unix guy was there already and had asked me to bring along some server hardware bits and bobs - a large box containing stuff I had no idea about. The car in front of me at the gate stopped, a rather well built military type got out and stood tight-lipped while a couple of guards proceeded to empty his car and question him about the contents. I particularly remember a full set of golf clubs being tipped out onto the floor.
My turn came, thinking to myself "I may be in a spot of bother here...". I start to get out, guard waves me back in the car, examines my pass through the open window and checks I know where I'm going. "Is that it?" asks I. "Oh sure, that chap in front gave our mate a hard time on the parade ground last week. He's a stickler for doing things by the book".
You reap what you sow.
Talking about twisted-pairs and wiring - I asked on our local freecycle site if anyone was getting rid of an old lawnmower/raker. I just wanted a pair of handles. Was invited to pick up a defunct mower which had the appropriate handles, it looked quite new (and was a good quality machine). When I got it home I noticed the cable had obviously been run over, and was patched up with coloured insulating tape. Surely that couldn't be the reason it wasn't working? Unravelled the sticky tape to inspect the join and found....let hand side of cable, blue and brown wound together, the same on the rhs, then both twisted ends wrapped together and securely taped. Had to wonder how many fuses/circuit breaker re-sets he'd gone through before abandoning the fix!
Anyone want a fairly new electric lawnmower (no handles)?
I had a TI-99 computer, onto which I tried to code a finite element stress engineering program. I soon ran out of memory, but then had the idea to use the full-colour graphics processor. By coding an integer into a character and shoving it onto the screen, I could then revisit the cell and work out the number eg red-upper-C = 78. Ran like a dog of course but very interesting seeing the graphical representation of a matrix being solved on the screen as the program worked its way down the diagonal.
Same here, massive decks for aircraft finite element models. Our main computers were the other side of of the city, a particularly large set of cards slid out of the van on a roundabout in the city centre.
Incidentally, we used a home-made FE program running on an ICL 1906A. The full analysis run could take days - or rather, several nights in batch. The Fortran code was converted to run on a new Vax,taking just a few hours. Probably run in minutes on the lowest spec PC you can find these days.
Was there something about single-ended and double-ended terminators? I wasn't really a sysadmin but was involved in a large (at the time) migration of an Oracle db from old raid-5 disks to new super-dooper smart raid arrays on a "massive" HP T500. We had a whole night to do it but the new raid arrays wouldn't connect. Finally fixed the problem just before the takeaway closed, so we could enjoy our Chinese while the DAT tape slowly restored the database.
George! I loved George (V3 I recall was the one I cut my teeth on). And those temporary files "!" whose name incremented each time you created a new one - ! became !1 then !2 if you created 2 more temp files, so you had to be on your toes to keep track of them. Were the command files called macros? We had the use of an ICL 1904S the other side of the city, a PDP 11/70 on-site and then, wonderfully, a VAX 750 which of course blew the socks of everyhting with it's unlimited virtual memory, all 500Mb of it.
I've managed to get my Edge 705 (a usb device) and an old car GPS unit to connect to Garmin Express running Wine, via this link https://christitus.com/garmin-express-linux/.
Runs very slow, you may think it's not working but look at "top" to reassure yourself it's winding up. Once displayed it runs ok. I only use it for software or map updates, I upload rides directly into Connect via the "upload" option.
When PCs were first being rolled out in the Aerospace factory I worked at, slowly replacing DEC's All-in-One offering on a Vax cluster, they had a tedious habit of locking-up/not booting/disconnecting from the network (Pathworks over Decnet - there goes all the old 386 protected(?) ram. One bright spark I workd with suggested a Fast Action Response Team to dash around the facory to sort things out. He would have got away with it too, until he suggested we leave calling cards in case the user was away at lunch -"You've been FARTed". You know who you are, Frank!
Couldn't they fit one of those knobs onto the wheel, like you used to see cool dudes using in their cars on old American PI films? Those guys used to whip the steering wheel round in a frenzy when they were chasing the baddies.Were they called "dead man's hands" or am i getting mixed up with the kill-switch on trains?
Similar tale with an application written against an Oracle db. This software near enough ran a chemical plant, I inherited the db when the client switched to us for maintenance. Performance was always slow, and got dramatically worse with a new, major, all-singing all-dancing upgrade - even though a couple of new app servers were added and the db server was improved . So one weekend I left trace on, carted the couple of Gb of log files onto a spare server and ran tkprof to sort the sql. I thought I'd get maybe 20 or 30 high-usage statements that accounted for the bulk of the resource consumption, that could perhaps be addressed with indexes etc. No, there were thousands of single-use statements - it transpired that hardly any statements were re-usable, so the db was having to parse and optimize every single query. They'd used loads of dynamic sql, forming up the statements to include eg "part_no='A1234dd5". Turned out that bind variables were an unknown to the newly-recruited sql "expert". Took them about a month to re-jig the most widely-used bits of code, and performance became satisfactory (it never became fast, I always said it was because we running on windaz). The software vendor had the good grace to send thanks, and intimated that other customers were grateful too.
Must admit I too have been "busy" googling Walsall, the plugs and switches they made took me back to my childhood growing up in Willenhall - our house was fitted exclusively with Crabtree products. I'm guessing I must have had an uncle who worked there. I definitely had an uncle who worked at Yale as a master locksmith. Even as a kid I could get back into the house without a key by applying what Uncle Les had taught me!
Pre-dating the days of IT (well, OK there were a few BBC 1st gens knocking around) when I were just a lad earning some extra pocket money working weekends and holidays at the local car-wash (yes, it was called "Jeeves"). Me and my mate were considered trusty enough to open-up, cash-up and even drop the takings off at the bank when the manager was away. The start of the day involved powering up the whole plant, separate relays for brushes, rollers, heaters etc, and a certain order these switches had to be turned on/plugged in. Bit of a faff running back and forth, so Pete and I had worked out a system where he did one end and me the other, suitably timed so that the power-up sequence was maintained via synchronized yells. Worked really quickly and efficiently, until the day we managed to get out of step. I plugged in the last connector but unfortunately it was already live at this point, resulting in a big, black smoke-filled bang. Needless to say I jumped back a socially-distanced 6 feet from the billowing socket, but with a charred and completely crusty-black hand.
"This is going to hurt soon" thinks I, as Pete comes scampering along to investigate the loud noise. He goes a bit weak-kneed and has to sit down when he spies my hand, which surprisingly was still attached to my arm and hadn't started to register on the pain threshold yet. I tried to flex a finger, and the skin cracked along the joint. I say "skin", but it became obvious that my hand wasn't completely barbecued, it was merely covered in a thick layer of carbon that had spouted out of the electrical socket. A few dabs with another finger to confirm this theory, then a swish under the tap confirmed that everything was indeed still in working order.
And the surprising thing was, after we'd re-set the master relays and re-powered up it all worked, even the exploding plug. Lessons learnt - until Pete and I had a go at fixing the VI form vending machine, but that's another story.
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