Posts by Rufus McDufus

Cui bono?

I suspect we'll never really know who did it.

Emergency power off

First job working in the comp sci department at a well-known technology-focused university in London. Annually we'd show prospective students around the facilities including the server rooms. There were big red emergency power-off buttons in various places. A particularly tall budding student decides to lean back against the wall and... These were the days of IBM 4331s, various DEC servers, a big ICL mainframe and others. Generally things didn't tend to work well after a sudden power-off.

Ha, I once worked for Data General supporting those Clariion arrays used by hospitals. I remember one big hospital in particular, who provided a computer room for the new equipment. An onsite tech told me the story of the computer room. Initially they realised they'd forgotten something - mains power. Rip all the machines out, fit power, put machines back in. Once fitted, the realised they'd forgotten something else - network cables. Move all the machines out again, fit networking, put machines back in. Turn everything on - yay! Bugger - it's all getting rather hot. Oh no, we forgot cooling. Move machines out, fit aircon, put machines back in. Aircon not fitted properly, floods the computer room...

Long passwords

Password handling is one of the most borked aspects of websites. The amount of sites that don't specify a max number of chars but will let you enter (say) a 20 or 30 char password, and then mysteriously you're unable to login afterwards because presumably they've trimmed the password to some invisible maximum and you haven't got a clue what it is.

I've not fallen for the old unset/empty variable problem with rm, but back in the nineties on an early Solaris or possibly SunOS 4.x box I wanted to remove some hidden directories so executed something like 'rm -rf \.*' . Whether due to a bug or my misunderstanding it also started removing everything in '..' and continued going upwards to the root directory and traversing into other subdirectories. I wasn't popular. And it was my job to put it right - which I did!

Proof that Google are planning on charging the man in the street.

Do...

Apple's iOS developers develop the OS only using an iPhone or iPad? If so, I'll be impressed.

Wow, is it 1997 again?

Safari

It's the changes to Safari that bug me. The irritating autohide address bar for one. Plus Safari seems to hang frequently. The pinch-zoom crash bug isn't fixed either.

Barf

Here's a couple.

First - the mail server is running out of disk space. We decide to implement the obvious policy of emptying everyone's trash, removing emails more than a month old. I immediately get calls from at least 5 users saying 'where have all my old emails gone?'. 'What do you mean' I say, 'you got the warnings that we're emptying the trash with emails older than a month?'. Every one of them then tells me that the trash folder is where they store _all_ their emails. The reasoning is that it's quicker to hit 'delete' than put them in a folder. They've got a point I suppose ...

Second - my first job at a top science and engineering university in the early 90s. Female professor of computing comes in one morning with a sorry-looking Sun 3/60 keyboard. 'It's not working', she says. I took a look at this rather greasy keyboard. After asking how it got this way, she told me... She'd puked on the keyboard. Thinking the acid in puke probably wasn't very good for it she decided to wash the keyboard. Not in water though as most people would do (and probably wreck the keyboard too but that's not important right now). No, she decided cooking oil would be a suitable cleaning solvent so she drenched the keyboard in it.

If it is anything like the supercomputer I used to manage at a particular UK university, I suspect he was the only one who'd actually figured out how to use the thing.

Their availability checker doesn't work for me on Firefox on Windows but works with IE. How quaint.

I'm ex-Amazon, but from a long time ago (left 2005). They do rely on open source but only generally as a building block (e.g languages). Most of the big stuff is bespoke and perhaps is not so useful outside of the context of Amazon where they really do like to re-invent the wheel, and rather scarily often do it better.

I worked for Amazon early on and can remember the consternation when a certain book went to the top of the bestseller list. It was 'A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting'. They tweaked the listing so it didn't appear. Most disappointing.

Marvellous

Takes me right back! I dreamed of an Atari VCS but my mate had an Atari 400 which frankly was better. Star Raiders blew my tiny mind and we spent hours playing Asteroids (one of the best implementations IMHO).

Also Casio fx-570 - tsk, forgotten about that. Proper little workhorse.

All this talk of Ecclestone, and just watching the F1 qualifying, made me think Bernie Ecclecstone could be a handy Davros.

What a terrible punishment, getting someone else to pay the fine.

Object-oriented programming failed 20 years ago? Goddamit I must be imagining all those objects I've coded for the last 20 years!

I tell tham I only know Linux. Or I'm an infrastructure architect. Or something completely opposite to what they want.

No-one expects a plumber or electrician to pop round and fix their stuff for free do they? I've got the brain the size of a planet but for some reason it's seen as if I enjoy doing my job (hobby?) and am only too eager to fix their (usually disgustingly dirty) shit for free.

Even simple things like choosing the correct input for all the connected devices is difficult to explain to someone non-technical. For instance my old Panny TV which I donated to my parents comes up with 'EC/HDMI' or whatever when switching to the Humax PVR (*). Just WTF is that supposed to mean to the casual user?

* Operating the PVR is sadly completely beyond their comprehension.

Above average over 133 years - not exactly a long time over the lifespan of life on the planet. And as we now, many of the measuring stations are poorly sited, in now built up areas for instance.