Posts by Andy A

Who remembers looking inside Ye Olde Norton Utilities executables and seeing the the text Greetings from Peter Norton" ?

Re: IBM ATs are "liquid" proof

The weight of the AT was almost entirely in the metalwork. The HDD only weighed a couple of pounds.

The original IBM PC was even sturdier. The BOFH could have disposed of enemies just by getting them to carry one, with resulting health problems covering his tracks.

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

Famously, a department store ran an ad in a local newspaper promising phone calls with Santa Claus and was printed with an incorrect number.

The accidental recipient was the local US Air Force base. They ran with it.

This eventually morphed into to website where NORAD displays the progress of Santa's sleigh.

Re: I'm not so old that I can't scroll downwards without assistance

,,, and when the scrollbar DOES appear, it has horrible contrast, such as Dark Grey on a Slightly Darker Grey background, with a Slightly Lighter Grey marker.

By the time you have realised that this magical item has appeared unexpectedly from nowhere, it has faded from view, even though your mouse cursor was hovering over it.

Re: Brilliant!

Because Microsoft analyse every byte as it arrives in the hope of making money out of it.

Google doesn't bother until later.

Re: Black week season

Received an email, sent from a major DIY store.

"Cyber Monday is here!"

Sent on Tuesday 30/11/2021 at 01:36.

Re: Reclaiming Private Call Costs

Allocated company mobiles, we were supposed to go through the itemised bill and reimburse the company for personal use.

I've never been a big phone user, so a typical month would see my personal total at around £1.

I never paid, reasoning that processing such payment would cost the company more than that.

I did get a query when I went on holiday to Australia, because the total that month reached £20. I pointed out that it was more than offset by me fixing a problem for someone who rang me late in the evening while I was on the bus from my hotel to the airport in Singapore. Case closed.

Re: "Is it plugged in?"

I always found it useful to give them a chance to push the blame onto someone else. "Maybe the cleaners have dislodged it" often saved a field engineer trip, though you know that office last saw a cleaner around 1937.

Re: Reverse click-and-collect

Reminds me of the time I took dad's car to town to do some shopping. The car park ticket machine demanded that I enter the registration number of MY car. So I did.

Luckily our town's attendants are not stupid jobsworths. The fact that the fee had been paid was fine by them.

Re: I live half way up the hill ....

I was once tasked with decommissioning the kit at a site being vacated by my defence contractor customer. They almost certainly have a presence at that place down the hill from you.

Having boxed up almost all, and waiting for the beancounters to balance their books (they eventually took my advice to put it down to fluctuations in the exchange rate), I examined the obvious wireless access point. I removed it from the warehouse wall and traced the cable back to the rack.

Hang on - THREE POE adapters? And there was still WiFi - wide open. My company laptop connected without comment and I could browse the servers at my usual site, on the so-called "restricted" network.

I extracted the offending Cisco kit from above the false ceiling and added it to the shipping crates.

I still wonder whether that company dodged a bullet there.

Re: fax servers

A few years earlier than that I supported a place which had a couple of Faxpress boxes, and they seemed to work pretty well. Castelle were solidly into Netware.

They were also responsible for one of the most amazing equipment failures I've seen.

A Large Power Event had taken out the network frame at an outlying site. I reached there, and decided that the frame's PSU had died and was not fixable there, so we got a courier to ship a replacement from central London.

While waiting for its arrival (the power event fell under "user error" so no time limit) their chap asked me if I was going to look at their print server too. With no network, a Castelle Lanpress was unlikely to function anyway, but with nothing else to do...

The unit was dead. Not a hint of a glowing LED.

Now external PSUs for this sort of thing usually have welded plastic cases, but this one had four screws in its base. The lid was removed and there, in its neat clips, was a fuse. Normally, you can see the blob of metal through the glass tube when a fuse has blown.

Not this time. The fuse wire had turned to vapour, silvering the whole of the inside of the glass.

For the first time ever, a fuse blew in order to protect the equipment, rather than vice-versa.

A visit to their Stores department got me a new fuse of the correct rating. The unit was re-assembled and the Lanpress worked, and when the network came back, the lights on it went green.

Re: £ vs #

At the first company I worked for, I became something of an expert in converting between various character sets.

The best one I did was for a data prep job for a brewery. We had to produce the equivalent of their ancient key-to-tape equipment as their own staff were snowed under with work.

1. Data prep done in our own punch room on our Data 100. Mag tape written out in EBCDIC (IBM) format.

2. Tape read in on ICL 2904 and converted to ICL 6-bit characters.

3. JCL wrapped round the data and submitted to the George 2++ system in Birmingham. They had the last 7-track mag tape deck in the company.

4. Conversion program there wrote a 7-track mag tape in Honeywell format.

5. Tape shipped to customer.

6. Tape read by Honeywell mainframe - as a non-standard tape (which was normal for them).

When I did my test run, all characters, including the UK currency symbol, printed perfectly first time.

The bonus was that I did the tape delivery on a Friday evening, the brewery being on the way to where I spent my weekends. The ops took delivery, then we went to their "club". A round of drinks cost the same as a single pint outside the brewery walls.

I used to work at a site where we were allocated mail accounts in the same system as our customer. At the time that system was Lotus Notes. There were two people in that worldwide system with my surname.

I was listed as Andrew, the other one was listed as Andy.

People sending us email commonly took the first person with the surname that they noticed.

So he forwarded stuff to me about IT, and I forwarded stuff about his job.

And when I visited Brisbane on hols, we took up our longstanding promise to partake of a beverage or two.

Let them blame the (non-existent) cleaners

For those all too common cases where you are SURE that the cable is adrift, my solution is to ask them to check that everything is secure with "Perhaps the cleaners have dislodged something".

The chance to push the blame onto someone else, even when you are certain that their office never gets leaned, usually results in "It's working again now".

Re: Aroogah, Aroogah, Aroogah!

The place I first worked was above a paint warehouse. When the alarm went there you Got Out. Once we checked the Fire Exit (not the obvious or shortest route) and found it locked. There were ructions.

Another time, knowing that no non-restartable jobs were running on the mainframe, we tested the Big Red Switch.

It worked!

Nah. Role Playing Games.