* Posts by bjzq888

12 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Apr 2021

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

bjzq888

We had a huge bank of batteries in the basement for the data center. They were inspected once a month; no red lights, note it on the sheet and go back upstairs. The inspector in this case fumbled with his clipboard and the page fell off, then perfectly flew into the air intake of one of the batteries, where it disappeared. It literally made it through a gap of just a few millimeters, horizontal, on its own. There was no way to remove the paper while the system was online. Not knowing if it was going to cause a fire or a problem, we had to power *everything* down in the data center, the only time I had ever observed this happening in that facility. It was a 24-hour datacenter for a reason, after all. So off everything went...That meant lights, air conditioning, mainframes, servers, you name it. The entire place had to go dark...then they had to carefully disassemble the battery unit, remove the paper, and put it back together, in a multi-hour operation.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

bjzq888

Wouldn't that be for non-clergy anatomy only?

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

bjzq888

Re: Damn!

The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each another sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.

C

You shoot yourself in the foot.

Assembly Language

You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.

C++

You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "that's me, over there."

FORTRAN

You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception processing ability.

Algol

You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.

COBOL

USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.

Full list at:

https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/joke/foot.htm

US Department of Justice claims Google bought its way to web search dominance

bjzq888

I am old enough to remember the days when Google didn't exist on the web.

You either looked through lists of websites on Yahoo, or got them from a friend, or stumbled on them through "link sharing" banner ads.

Once you could look up exactly what you wanted, and get reasonable results, there was no reason to use AskJeeves or Lycos or Altavista.

There was no reason to look anywhere but Google.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

bjzq888

Re: by 2027 – except for security-related fixes – no printer driver updates will be allowed

They can have my Laserjet 4100N when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

bjzq888

I just left a job a few months ago for this very reason. My coworker would bother me at all hours of the day, whether or not I looked busy, or whether or not I was on the phone. Even when on the phone they'd come over and tap me on the shoulder until I answered. It wasn't earth-shattering problems, either, it was things like "What's the command line name for Windows user manager?" "How many kilobytes in a gigabyte?" I was in the midst of doing things like setting up 802.1x or working on a database that wasn't running properly. It was getting to the point that I couldn't get anything done myself. I told my boss but he said I had to just deal with it. Well I did, and I quit. I'm at the point in my career that I don't have to put up with their BS. I put up with it for years, and now I don't have to, and I'm not going to. It's not worth the years off my life that it was taking.

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

bjzq888

At my second most recent former employer, we had a medium sized data center at a university. At one time it had held mainframes, now it was racks and one IBM Z9. Lots of racks. Redundant power was from batteries in the basement and a generator outside. One of my coworkers from another department was checking the battery status lights when a single piece of paper fell off of his clipboard and got perfectly sucked into an air vent. It didn't stop immediately, but there was evidently no safe way to get to the paper without shutting everything down. The entire data center had to be shut down for an hour just to remove that one piece of paper.

Undebug my heart: Using Cisco's IOS to take down capitalism – accidentally

bjzq888

Re: Yes, I've had a boss like that

In more ancient times, my employer, a medium-size university, had a big ice storm. The power went off and back on. A notoriously dodgy but still un-UPS'd fiber transceiver refused to come back up. This was during the university Christmas break. It was in a telecom room in a basement of one of the buildings. Nobody in my group was ever given keys to it; we were told we needed to be escorted at all times by the campus gendarmerie. So I drove the hour or so to work, entered the police office (staffed 24 hours) and asked to enter the telecom room, while presenting my credentials and stating the reason. The officer on duty deferred to his sergeant, who approached me and told me that there was 0 chance I was getting in that room today. He said he didn't care who I was. I called my immediate supervisor, who called the sergeant, and got a similar line. My supervisor called his supervisor, whom I remember he was an ill-tempered person when subject to administrative BS. I saw the sergeant pick up the phone again and then hold it about 2 feet from his head while the supervisor-of-supervisor screamed at him. A few minutes later the sergeant quietly approached me and asked me "to never do that to him again." I was escorted to the room without incident, and had the offending unit restarted in 30 seconds. Later we put a UPS on it, and never had problems again. I did, however, ask supervisor-of-supervisor what had transpired. This individual was very well-connected politically, and had simply told the recalcitrant sergeant that, unless he let me in, the next person on the phone would be the University President, who was on vacation in the Caribbean at the moment and would be extremely unhappy to be interrupted, and if he still held out, the person after that would be the State Governor, whom the supervisor-of-supervisor was friends with. Needless to say I never had another confrontation like that, but then again we had fixed the root of the problem with the UPS anyway.

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

bjzq888

Re: Free Supercomputer!

Upon further research I think it was NCSA Mercury:

https://www.csm.ornl.gov/workshops/SOS8/NCSA-SOS8.pdf

Mercury, phase 1 TeraGrid

ß Intel Itanium 2 1.3 GHz IBM cluster

ß 512 processors + head nodes

ß 2.662 TF peak performance

ß GPFS, 60 TB

ß Production Jan 2004

At some point they had upgraded it with Myrinet, and later on with some other changes. I saw it in place once on an informal tour. The move would have been a massive undertaking, and by the time we were offered ownership (2010 or so) it was seriously underpowered on a per-server basis compared to the newest Xeons were we getting.

http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/a_workhorse_retires

bjzq888

Free Supercomputer!

A long time ago, my educational-organization employer was offered a free Itanium cluster; it had been one of the early installs at the NCSA, and it came complete with Myrinet switches, racks, and all. Unfortunately, I did a bit of research and discovered Red Hat was about to discontinue Itanium support, and we were a 99% RHEL shop. Also, it was going to take a semi trailer to hold it all, we'd have to move it ourselves, and we had no place to put it all anyway. So we politely declined. It wasn't really going to get us much in the way of performance, since we didn't do any clustered workloads anyway.

Edit: Here it is:

https://ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu/2002/04/titan-cluster-comes-online/

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

bjzq888

I spent 7 and a half years as one of the people writing the software to keep people from destroying equipment...like simply tying two wires together on a temperature sensor and eventually cooking the entire engine. For instance we did heavy underground mining equipment. The operators were being paid by the ton, not by how well their machines worked at the end of the day. They would run them completely out of oil and just keep running, until the engine was totally destroyed. We added functionality that would turn the engine off seconds after a total loss of oil pressure. The sensors themselves were "smart" in that you couldn't just bypass the sensor, you had to actually replace it. On one hand it sucks being stuck in a field, but on the other hand, if your machine is under warranty and you blow it up by bypassing sensors, end-users are going to be angry that their warranty is now voided. Lots of times, sensors are directly tied to things that could kill you or lots of other people if you repair them wrong. The manufacturers don't want their logos shown on the evening news after having driven over a bunch of schoolchildren after someone bypassed a hydraulic sensor somewhere just to get the vehicle running.

Look, we've tried, but we just can't write this headline without saying boffins have probed Uranus's cold ring

bjzq888

Re: Old dumb joke alert...

What did Mr. Spock find in the toilet on the starship Enterprise?

...The Captain's log.