* Posts by AlexG_UK

21 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2015

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

AlexG_UK

Not a million miles away ...

I was working as a software pre-sales 'droid for what was once a proud hardware company in the 70's, before it pivoted to a bit of an also ran software company by the time we were in the 90's. Regardless they did have a rather fancy, if temperamental, piece of configuration / BoM software. So being tasked with setting up said software for a customer demo I diligently followed the manual; no joy. I asked my boss for advice, he suggested liaising with the regional pre-sales lead, who said "follow the manual". Eventually, got the name of the global lead for this piece of software. I carefully explained all the steps I had gone through, and emphasised that I had followed the manual at each and every turn, his response "Ahh yes .. but what you must understand is, the manual lies!"

Never a truer word!

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

AlexG_UK

Re: Press the button

Ha,

I had sort of the same experience a couple of decades back. Hardware management had been outsourced to a IT consultancy. My dedicated contact dropped me an email letting me know our shiny new server had been received, configured and commissioned and was now available for use, heck they even provided me the IP address they had allocated for it.

I emailed back asking to check the IP because I wasn't getting a ping back from the machine, "Oh, no you won't. The machine hasn't been networked!" It's a server! In a server room! You've allocated an IP address but not connected it to the network ... in what way is this available for use???

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

AlexG_UK

Re: ...and 32-bit SPARC boxes

Ahhh fond memories ... "daybreak" was my favourite monochrome raster background. Wish I could find a download of it somewhere!

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

AlexG_UK

Re: Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

Ha! I was in Australia when the first series of polymer notes came out. A colleague of mine at the time thought it would be interesting to see what happened if he used a fancy scanner and colour printer to make a DIY $20 on some printable plastic. It was rubbish - aside from anything else the substrate was opaque which made a mockery of the transparent window - but the texture (excluding raised elements) and lovely reddy-orange colour was more or less ok. Regardless he kept it in his wallet as a bit of a talking point.

Roll forward a few months, he's forgotten all about this "one of kind" bank note and is on big night out. The next morning, he's in work, a little worse for wear, and greets us with an expletive, as he realises there is no $20 in his wallet. Yup ... he had unintentionally presented it and had it accepted.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

AlexG_UK

Re: Passwords

Ahh yeah .. I used to work for a small UK software house which was taken over by a slightly larger US software maker who suffered from delusions of grandeur (or possibly even delusions of adequacy).

Anyway our new us lords and masters introduced an upgraded security led password policy - a creative mix of numbers, letters, upcase but no 'special' characters needed, changed every month, can't be too similar to any of your previous 14 passwords. Hmm just over a years worth of passwords.

So what was to be done? Well, simples really: January2012, February2012, March2012, ... Janvier2013, Fevrier2013, .. Januar2014 ... And then cycle started again.

AlexG_UK

Re: Forget the turtles...

Oh yes.. I used to love listening to their records (and they were records) when I was a child. I found a remastered boxset on CD a few years ago - still just as clever and witty but missing the charm of the hissing and popping of the vinyl!

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

AlexG_UK

Re: Reclaiming Private Call Costs

My first real job was a long way from home (nearly 500 miles) and I missed my family so every few days I would walk down to the phone box and feed it lots coins to talk to my parents. The company's MD noticed me heading out quite often (it was only a small company .. 60 or so of us) and asked what I was doing. I told him it was a long distance personal call and didn't fell right using company phones to make it.

So first up, he said it was perfectly reasonable to make personal calls from work and in my situation understood why I would feel the need to. He then went on to say, "anyway the cost in lost productivity from you walking down the road to the phone box, far outweighs the pennies your call is going to cost the company".

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

AlexG_UK

Ahhh .. that reminds me of a customer I once had.

There was one particular user, let's call her, Brenda, who was peculiarly adept at stumbling across the most arcane bugs in the code. The dev team put in a hard coded error message that read "Brenda, if you see this call tech support and tell them the error that should never happen has just happened." (A not unpleasant contrast to the endless pages of Java Stack Traces you see these days)

Of course a couple of weeks after go live, tech support get a call from Brenda who relayed the message, with an query as to how they knew she was the user (bearing in mind the login id was something like EA27C1.4403). They told her they were trying our some code to personalise error messages.

AlexG_UK

Not quite the same, but similar

I forwarded an email from my new boss where he was describing his vision for the team etc. Using the typical 'responses in line below' approach I critiqued him and his vision in fairly unvarnished language. Of course I didn't actually forward the email to my friend, no, I replied didn't I!

I got a one line response back from the Boss saying "I don't think this was meant for me." We did though, have an excellent working relationship thereafter.

You put Marmite where? Google unveils its latest AI wizardry: A cake made of Maltesers and the pungent black tar

AlexG_UK

OK, so it's not exactly Marmite but ...

One of my daughters made chocolate brownies with twiglets in them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twiglets), they were, surprisingly, good. Sweet / savoury / salty balance, and good contrast in texture.

The world's first Apple Silicon iMac is actually a Mac Mini

AlexG_UK

This must surely be christened a Mac Mi(a)ni!

Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

AlexG_UK

I started my working career in a specialist software dev house where all the developers had SPARCstations of various flavours. The configs, while generous at the time, where tried by the work we were doing .. particularly disk and memory. One of the other devs, need to free up space on his hard drive and started deleting a stack of files he never 'used' from /, /etc, /bin, /usr, /dev, /mnt and so on.

All was fine until the next reboot when we it didn't. Our sysadmin spent many happy hours in PROM mode rebuilding just enough of the files with echo "xxxx" > 'filename' until he could minimally boot it and restore from back up. Happy days :)

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

AlexG_UK

More Mystery Reboots

Years ago (mid 90's) I was working at a site where the servers were in a secure server room (as in you needed lots of very official paperwork to get in to the room). We were working in a less secure 'console room' where there were some consoles and switches to let us connect to the subset of Sun servers we were permitted to access.

There was a bit of a strange situation. Many of us had recently come into possession of modern GSM phones (think Motorola Micro TAC 7500 and similar), which we would ostenta... err ... casually leave lying on the benches near the console. When we were connected to one particular server, if the phone rang it would spontaneously init 6.

We made some enquiries about why that might be the case and were forecfully told a) there was absolutely nothing different about that server and how it was configured, connected and spec'ed b) no we couldn't have a look and c) there was nowhere else on site we could connect from (not even to try out some hypotheses).

So mobile phones stayed off the bench, the server stayed running but we never worked out why :(

Any theories from the wiser heads of the RegHive?

I want to buy a coffee with an app – how hard can it be?

AlexG_UK

I'm also a bit of cash based luddite, but I talk to the minimum wage staff like they are human beings. Listen to their answers and respond accordingly. As a result I get about 40% of my coffee "on the house" with no one tracking my loyalty

IBM pays up after 'clearly failing' DDoS protection for Australia's #censusfail

AlexG_UK

Have you power cycled it yet?

"IBM had never tested what would happen if it turned it (the router) on and off again"

Now .. I'm not a networking expert, but I rather think if they turned the router on it MIGHT work, but once the turned it off again, well, it certainly wouldn't work.

Bacon is not my vodka friend

AlexG_UK

Re: Pretend?

Having followed the link I can put your mind at rest; even our transatlantic cousins blanch at buffalo-bonking. The phrase they use is "performance by any person of acts, or simulated acts,"

As is so often the case, the reality is slightly less entertaining than the (actual) story

Microsoft's Windows Phone folly costs it another billion dollars

AlexG_UK

It's a shame

Can honestly say, I never thought I'd say this about Microsoft, but it IS a shame. Nokia hardware (Lumia 930) and Microsoft OS (8.1) was a pretty decent phone at a great price. There were, of course, some app gaps and that is getting worse with developers fleeing the Windows 10 rewrite due to low market share.

By all accounts Windows 10 isn't great on a phone and the new Micorsoft Lumia's feel ... well ... like poor cousins compared to their predecessors.

Label your cables: A cautionary tale from the server room

AlexG_UK

Re: But never trust the labels....

Ohh.. that reminds me of a client who had some lovely racked servers (don't remember the brand)which had a nice round button on the front of the server which you could press and it would illuminate an LED on the back ... this was clever as you could make sure you were plugging / unplugging from the right machine in the cabinet.

What was not so clever was, that the nice round button on the front was right next to another nice round button which was the power.

Ooops!

AlexG_UK

Ahh happy memories ...

"Something's happened to the digitizer ... it's not working any more and it was fine last week!"

"Have you been playing with anything?"

"No, nothing! And I need to digitize some maps urgently."

<90 mins later on customer premises>

"So, when you said you hadn't been playing, how did the digitizer end up plugged into the mini-DIN audio port instead of the mini-DIN peripheral port next to it?"

"Oh .. err .. umm .. I was reading the manual and it said it supported MIDI so I might have plugged my keyboard in while I was having a beer after work on Friday."

* sigh *

Windows 10 Start menu replacements shifting like hot cakes

AlexG_UK

Is it really just me ...

Start menu was just about ok 20 years ago, but never really rocked my world.

Earlier this year I was "forced" to buy a win 8 machine to work with with one of my customers (personally I use os-x, professionally I am more flexible) and much to my surprise I actually, and actively, like the windows 8 (metro) paradigm. I know ... heretical.

I just wish MS had the strength to say, "Do you know what, UI's have moved, this really is worth trying." rather than caving after just one (major) release.

Hey ho .. I'll suck it up and carry on