Posts by C R Mudgeon

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

Re: A service provider that doesn't bill because their attempted fixes failed?

Once upon a time, Ontario had both Canada's federal GST (a value-added tax) and a provincial sales tax (not value-added). [1] My then employer got in a new sales order system that, among numerous other problems, had ongoing trouble with doing tax calculations correctly.

I never worked much with that system (dodged a bullet for sure), but my colleague who had primary responsibility for it remarked on the folly of buying a system from a company based in a jurisdiction with no sales tax at all (New Hampshire) for use in a jurisdiction with two of them.

[1] They've since been "harmonized", i.e. rolled into a single larger tax, HST, which the two governments divvy up between them.

Re: A service provider that doesn't bill because their attempted fixes failed?

ISTM that even if the consultant had fixed the problem, the trainee shouldn't have been billable.

That's rather like me asking if I can store my car in your driveway for a couple of weeks, giving you permission to use it occasionally -- and then bil[lk]ing you full commercial car-rental rates for the entire duration.

Of course, if the trainee had spotted the problem (entirely possible -- fresh eyes and all), pay the invoice without a quibble.

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: Hearing a 'click'

There was a fire alarm once at my school when two kids (not me!) were fighting, and one of them slammed the other one against the wall hard enough to trip a nearby alarm switch.

Re: Renovations

I once rented the third floor of a house whose first floor (ground floor in right-pondian, I think) was being renovated. This place was so old that the 2x4's were actually 2" X 4". In fact, we could date it; they found a newspaper from 1906 buried inside a wall. [1]

Under numerous layers of paint were numerous layers of wallpaper. I took a chunk of the detritus and soaked it in water to delaminate it. It was an interesting study in the changing fashions over the previous 80ish years. The only ones I remember were mint-green paint and some flocked floral wallpaper patterns that I considered hideously old-fashioned, but must once have been très chic.

The owner, who was living on the second floor, was doing much of the work. One day he came to me with a problem. (If this were IT- and job-related, it would belong in On Call.) He'd somehow (I forget how) severed some ancient but still-in-service knob-and-tube wiring leading to the upper floors [2], and needed help figuring out which way around to reconnect the wires [3]. I asked for a long extension cord, and got him to plug it into one of the dead sockets upstairs and run it down to the "injury" site, while I went to fetch my multimeter. Then I did continuity tests between the dangling K&T wires and the extension's socket to figure out which wire should be live, and which neutral. I can't recall how I figured out which of the wires coming up from the basement *was* live, but presumably it involved plugging the extension into a redone -- and so grounded -- outlet, and doing voltage measurements between those two wires and the extension's ground.

[1] Not very old at all by British standards, but you know what they say: "Brits think 100 miles is a long distance. North Americans think 100 years is a long time."

[2] Yes, of course it all had to go, but they were doing the reno one floor at a time. Once they finished the first floor, he and his wife moved into it and they started work on the second, including its wiring. By the time they (presumably) got to what had been my floor, I was gone for other reasons.

[3] Any such luxuries as colour coding were long in 1906's future.

Re: "restore it to a bright red hue"

s/hard/expensive/ and you reach the heart of the matter.

A false economy to be sure, but...

Re: new fitted benches had been installed over the shutoff valve

That sounds like the setup for a bad horror flick. C.H.U.D. U.K., perhaps?

San Francisco investigates Hotel Twitter, Musk might pack up and leave

Re: Sleeping in the footsteps of giants

I presume that was Stallman's choice, not imposed on him from above. If I'm correct, that difference from the Twitter situation makes the comparison invalid.

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

Does that adaptability apply to chargers and/or chargees (i.e. downstream devices) that are connected via adapters to other sorts of USB ports, or only to ones that are natively USB C?

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: it was impossible for anyone to track down the idiot responsible

I hate hate hate the name of the "blame" command in whichever VCS. The command itself is very useful, but I use its alias, "annotate" -- and create that if necessary and possible.

Re: Welcome Back!

"Mine's the one with the jacket in the pocket of the jacket in the pocket"

That's known as the Droste effect.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

Sometimes extracting a method/function is a good approach. Other times I just rearrange to avoid the isolated statement. That's especially so for "if"'s:

if (cond) { 80 lines of blah blah blah } else { return ERROR; }

becomes:

if (!cond) { return ERROR; } else { 80 lines of blah blah blah }

That allows the reader to be done with the "if" more quickly -- to pop it off one's mental stack, as it were, before diving into the blah blah blah.

(Sorry for cramming those onto one line each; proper formatting, in whatever HTML subset El Reg might allow me this week, on my phone where every tag is torture, is more trouble than it's worth.)

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

Even awesomer would be an xkcd that's relevant only to situations where there is *no* relevant xkcd...

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

If it goes below zero, I *know* I have a missing "{". Which is precisely why I can stop counting; I've answered the two-part question "is there an imbalance, and if so, which kind?" and am ready to move on to the next phase of problem isolation.

(Obviously, if you start counting in the middle of a properly nested structure, the count can go negative. So don't do that; start at the beginning.)

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

I count them both in one pass: starting at 0, add 1 for each "{" and subtract 1 for each "}". If the result ends up nonzero, you have a problem. (If it ever goes negative, you can stop early; not only have you found a mismatch, but have also somewhat narrowed it down.)

Re: Explosive demonstration

"For want of a nail..."

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

Watching a friend two-finger type a few days ago, it finally dawned on me: *that's* why laptop keyboards have become so universally awful -- because most people don't have a problem with them. The forces driving the switch to chiclet keyboards are obvious -- cost and thinness. But the other half of it is the dwindling market of touch typists demanding keyboards suitable for touch typing.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

I learned a long time ago: if the bug is so obscure that the only possible explanation is that the compiler is generating bad code, well, that just means I've done something *really* dumb.

(Except, of course, for the two or three times in a long career when the compiler really was generating bad code, or the moral equivalent in an interpreted language.)

Re: Explosive demonstration

Well, even one used as a *data* storage device stores energy as a byproduct.

I heard a story 45ish years ago, from what were even then the old days, about just such an occurrence. It seems a multiple-foot-wide disk drive platter broke free of its moorings, and even without teeth it sliced through the drive enclosure and kept going. I wish I could remember more details.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Re: Single sided? You were lucky!

Oops. There was a thought tickling at my brain, which I'm only fully conscious of in retrospect, that maybe I should fact-check that.

Thanks for the correction.

Re: Single sided? You were lucky!

Nope, but I've got a copy of the 12" floppy -- New Order's Blue Monday on vinyl, with Hipgnosis's brilliant sleeve design. (The floppyish holes and notches are actual cutouts in the outer sleeve, allowing the silvery inner sleeve to show through.)

Re: Bosses shouldn't touch stuff...

Only because single-sided ones were cheaper. Then we'd use a disk notcher to lie to the computer that they were double sided.

(My phone just tried to autocorrect "double" to "fucked". That's surprisingly appropriate. I'd call it Freudian if the thing had a brain!)

Re: "an on-prem email server"

Oh yes.

Re: Big red "cause a massive problem" button

The most ... imaginative use I've ever seen: in one local outlet of a nationwide coffee-and-donuts franchise, the washrooms have power locks -- you have to ask a staff member to buzz you in. You buzz yourself out again using what looks like a genuine, data-centre-grade Big Red Button mounted just inside the door.

The first couple of times, I had to overcome some serious inhibition to actually push the thing.

I can just imagine the electrical contractor who wired the store spotting those buttons in a catalog and thinking of a brilliant off-label use for them.

Re: Bosses shouldn't touch stuff...

rm foo<tab><return>

without noticing that the tab completed it to "foobar" instead of "foobar.bak" as intended.

With luck, the .bak file isn't all that far out of date...

Re: "an on-prem email server"

It depends. There's a subtle distinction there. Make dinner and then eat it? That's preparing. Make the upcoming week's dinners on the weekend? That's pre-preparing (especially if you don't eat the first one the same night you make them).

I'd never encountered "pre-preparing" before, but if the writer/speaker was using it in awareness to capture that distinction, I'd be fine with it. If they were just being sloppy, though, I'd absolutely agree with you.

Kind of like my bugbear: "instantiation", meaning an object. When you instantiate a class, what you get is an *instance*. "Instantiation" is the process of doing that, not the result. It's a perfectly reasonable word, just not with the meaning many writers ascribe to it

I live in dread of my first sighting of "instantiationize" -- i.e. the same error, repeated.

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Re: Sorted...

In my parts drawers, I sort machine screws by gauge, for obvious reasons.

But wood screws are sorted by length, because usually I don't care about a wood screw's thickness (within reason); I do care that it be long enough to make a secure joint, but not long enough to poke out the other side.

Re: Just Packaging

That reminds me of a humerous example in one of Andrew Tannenbaum's books -- Computer Networks, I'm fairly sure.

He's talking about the need for signaling elements in a communications protocol to be "out of band", i.e. not possible to be confused with the payload.

Ko

Picture, he says, a supermarket checkout. They provide dividers that you use to mark off your load from the surrounding ones on the conveyor belt.

All well and good -- until you want to buy one of those dividers...

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Agreed. "Who, Me?" and "On Call" are essentially the same sort of stories. It's just a question of whether it's the teller or someone else, respectively, that fucked up.

I think it might be worthwhile to combine the two columns into a new one, "War Stories" -- which would be a general enough name to also include stories that don't really fit into either of the existing columns.

Indeed. I gather (through hearsay, not experience) that pilots have a long, *long* preflight checklist -- and it's been said that every item on that list has its origin in a lesson learned the hard way.

Well, pilots have collectively been at it for roughly half a century longer than we have, so more of our hard-way lessons were presumably learned within living memory although, also presumably, skewing towards the older part of that range.

(I'm sure the aviation world still has its lessons yet to be learned, just as I'm sure we do too.)

Or, having not yet been in the industry as long, the younger generation might simply not yet have the accumulation of war stories to tell.

Or (pure conjecture here) they might not yet have the confidence to tell the embarrassing ones. That might come only with age and (near-)retiredness, and the long-gone-ness of many of the organizations in question.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

Re: Why the angst over Twitter?

Not all of it is angst. There's a fair amount of Schadenfreude going on too, I presume.

Re: I deleted Twitter months ago

I joined it for one reason only: somebody's project to tweet WW2 in real time. Haven't even signed on in a decade.

I suppose I should close that old account now, just to make a point...

Re: For a Comparison

Note that his purchase saddled Twitter, not the Musk-rat personally, with that $13b debt. Nice trick, Elon -- forcing the company to pay for its own demolition.

Re: So reassuring

That thing about not speaking badly of your old employer in interviews? It's waived for ex-Twitterites -- the other thing, the one about about not lying, kinda trumps it.

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

Re: Thanks & kudos

It's not "because rich guy bought it / I hate change".

It's because that particular rich troll bought it, and has loudly proclaimed his intention to make changes that are very much for the worse -- not only for Twitter users, but also for the rest of us.

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Re: Botched Aircon

You had *four* Yorkshiremen? We had one dead York king, still mouldering in his car park!

All of the norths are about to align over Britain

Climate scientists *do* admit that. That's why they project future temperatures not as exact numbers, but rather as ranges, which grow wider the further into the future they go.

Of course, then the wilfully ignorant asshats claim that that very uncertainty is reason to ignore the projections. "See? They don't even know! Wake me when you have an exact number." Which of course *can't* happen until we get there.

Feh!

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

Re: Jumbling topics jumbles the feedback

... but disagree with their "anti-Woke" tirades against "leftist politics" -- and I find calling GNOME "toxic" based on opinions of the project's technical merits, well, toxic.

Re: Jumbling topics jumbles the feedback

For the record, I quite agree with @standup about the directions that Firefox, and especially GNOME, are heading in...

Jumbling topics jumbles the feedback

"... what type of people downvote any criticism of Mozilla or leftist politics in general? ... I'm noticing quite a "long tail" of downvotes for all my anti-Woke and anti-Mozilla posts ..."

Those are two utterly unrelated topics, so it's very likely that different sorts of people would downvote each one.

But has it occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, the downvotes are coming because people simply disagree with your positions -- or at least, disagree with one position vehemently enough to outweigh possible agreement with the other, when a single post contains both?

Here's an experiment. Try confining your posts on technical issues to only technical issues, without any mention of irrelevant culture-war stuff, politics, the word "woke", etc. Leave all that to separate posts,

Then see which posts attract the downvotes.

I, for one, want to upvote your post for its opinion on one of the topics in that snippet, but downvote it for the other. (Which is which? That's beside the point of this post, so isn't included here. See how that works?)

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

"... my UK phone; it (although supposedly unlocked) wouldn't accept a Hong Kong SIM ..."

Leaving aside the artificial locking bullshit, the phone has to support the frequency band(s) the provider uses. If their towers use bands A, B, and C, but your phone only does D, E, and F, you're SOL.

https://willmyphonework.net is a useful resource.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

My response would have been to gently suggest that he try that argument on General Motors or whoever, re. gas for all the department's police cars.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Nice! I'll be adopting that...

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

T'was ever thus

"Have your renovations ever been mugged by reality?"

Has there ever been a renovation that wasn't?

Data center, domestic bathroom, legacy software -- whatever. Nasty surprises seem to be the nature of the beast.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: "Extinct media still in demand"

Even a biological species can be *effectively* extinct while members still live. When the last female dies, or the last male if none of the remaining females are pregnant, the species is done. (I've described the case for mammals obviously. Adjust for different reproductive biologies.)

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

"The plastic backing emitted some kind of water-based gunk after a few years. And was thereafter unreadable."

A similar problem exists for audio tape. Back when people were re-releasing their back catalogs on CD, they sometimes found that the old (analog) masters were deteriorating. The glue that binds the oxide to the plastic carrier had degraded and the oxide was coming off. Precious, irreplaceable master recordings were literally crumbling into dust.

The workaround is to bake the tape in an oven at low temperature for a while. That stabilizes the glue long enough to play the tape once and get a digital copy.

(That's actually what inspired us to bake old hard drives in an attempt to work around a very different failure mode. In our case the baking didn't work, but more drastic measures did -- we got the data.)

Bad UI killed the radio star

Re: My claim to fame...

"And [dry run] should be the default, with an --actually-do-it parameter instead."

That would be hugely annoying -- and for zero gain.

I worked at one point with a GUI application that when you asked to quit, *always* responded with an "are you sure?" dialog. Not just if there was unsaved work; the dialog appeared unconditionally.

Select "quit" then click "yes" quickly became lodged in muscle memory ... with the result that quit/yes/argh! was a not infrequent occurrence.

Moral: Unconditional confirmation roadblocks don't protect the user but just piss them off for little gain.

(To be fair, that confirmation dialog wasn't quite useless. If you'd been aiming at the menu option next to "quit", it could save your ass. But it helped very little with the arguably more common case.)

As I recall, MS-DOS "format" got it right -- it asked you to confirm formatting a hard drive partition, but not a floppy. So at the cost of allowing you to shoot off a toe, it gave you serious pause before taking off your whole foot.

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C₈H₁₀N₄O₂

Critters

In my case, it wasn't a single catastrophic spill, but rather a long slow accumulation. Having realized that my laptop's keyboard needed cleaning, I pulled off all the key caps, only to find a solid mat of dog hair physically interfering with key travel. (Her individual hairs were, if I recall, about 1-1.5 cm long -- just perfect for working their way down between the keys.) Cleaning that out wasn't disgusting, but it was fairly arduous.

Come to think of it, the same dog did cause catastrophic failure in another laptop's keyboard. She jumped up into my lap while the machine was already there. Broke the F key beyond my ability to repair it...

Boffins build microphone safety kit to detect eavesdroppers

Re: call the device TickTock.

"It's very, very different from any form of social media application."

In theory, that's a good reason a lawsuit ought to fail. Whether it would be attempted, though, is a different question.

In practice, the result would come down as much to who has the deeper pockets.