Posts by Rufus McDufus 82 posts • joined 23 Mar 2012
My very first full time job was tech support in the Comp Sci dept at a well known London university. One day a senior lecturer came down with a sorry looking (probably Sun) keyboard. She said she'd puked on it, and then in her infinite wisdom decided to soak it in cooking oil to see if that helped. Needless to say it was knackered, and I wasn't super keen on investigating further.
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...
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!
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.
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 spent some time working in Wokingham for different s/w houses back in the late 80s and mid 90s. You're right, getting pissed at lunch/morning/afternoon was a necessary feature. The necessity of doing this seemed to disappear about ten years ago. Maybe we all just got older.
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.
Though it be fair if you're paying for next day delivery that's what you should get.
Personally my fastest delivery was five minutes. OK, I worked for Amazon for many years, and that was back in the day when system engineers worked in the same building as the distribution centre.
Anyone find Amazon Prime absolutely rubbish? Their next day delivery seems to take more days than the standard free delivery, and often gets into to clutches of Home Delivery Network which seems to be staffed by mentally-ill people. I recently had to wait several weeks for a 'next day' delivery. The excuse from the HDNL guy was 'my car broke down'. What, for three weeks?! This wouldn't be so bad but I had the exact same excuse a year or two ago from a different HDNL person.
Good. I RMA'd my original January-purchased Nexus 10 and the battery life is better on the new one but still not great. Turning off wi-fi when sleeping makes a big difference but i don't think that explains all of it. Previously it could consume 100% charge when sleeping overnight.
Also would be nice to see Chrome memory usage reduced. The Nexus 10 out of the box seems to eat all memory as fast as it possibly can with Chrome using nearly half.
Switched to VM a year ago after being with BE for maybe 5 years. BE gave excellent and very reliable service but it doesn't compete with VM to me. I'm getting 60Mbps for about the same as I paid for 5Mbps with BE & I find both offer excellent support if you need it (don't laugh). There are more outages with VM but still pretty rare.
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.
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