Posts by PAKennedy

It's the sun

Mumblty years back we had a Compaq Desktop machine in one lab that would work for a couple of hours and then crash. But not every day. Bring it back to IT and it'd run all day. No magnets, no radiators near it. No damned good reason. Compaq came out and tested it. No fault found.

As spring turned to summer it got worse. One of the guys looked in every day and eventually it ran all day for no obvious reason until he worked out it was raining outside. We had a couple of rainy days and without telling us he'd worked out why, he'd tell us the machine would run today. First sunny day came along and he told us it would crash. Which it did.

Turns out the sun was hitting the black case, conducting just enough extra heat into it to warm up some microfracture on the system board and click. It would go. Same would have happened if it had been near a radiator or if the fan had been slightly blocked.

Compaq engineer came in, we put it next to a radiator, it went click and now failed tests so they happily swapped out the board.

Toughest diagnostic I ever came across.

Ah. I contracted at an international pharmaceutical firm once. I was the second person at the company with the same name and working second line support so all my email would be only from my cow-orkers on a very small prototyping site.

I started getting lots of email for the other Pkennedy. So I set up a rule that forwarded any email from AU users to him and replied to the sender that this had happened. There was no way to exclude him from the rule...

He thought this was a good idea so he did the same a couple of weeks later when he received his first email that should have gone to me... on a Friday evening. Then emailed me to tell me as he left the office.

That weekend the email servers crashed under the load of an exponentially increasing load.

Once had the DSL go off at work so failed over to ISDN and emailed all 250 staff asking them to restrict their web browsing as much as humanly possible due to the lack of any bandwidth and to avoid personal browsing completely.

We set up a projector scrolling username and site stats on the IT wall and it was something to glance at throughout the day.

I had the joyous task of asking a sales member who was renowned for annoying everyone else by using speakerphone what was work related about tinypenis.co.uk (it was actually a t-shirt company of all things).

You missed a bit. Its got a 5.5" screen. Just a minor factor.

Called in to a small client who had completely lost internet connectivity. Checking the physical didn't take long. I could see the panel pins nailing the cables to the skirting boards about half a second after walking in the door.

Just looking through the results on the random ones I've checked on their page. The damned thing has been on most of them for 5 months! How can you have every customer record spewing out for that long and not have someone make the correlation?

Up?

How does an iPad know which way up it is on space?