Posts by ColinPa

I'm the rookie

When I first started work, we had a 360 DOS/VS system. Our development team had 2 disks. One live, and one build. After the build was successful - they swapped disks.

My job was to compile the product onto the build system. My second day in the job, had people coming round saying "its stopped working". Whoops I had built into the live system. My team leader came and discussed it with me, and agreed I had followed the written instructions - but there was one line missing. "Mount the build disk". He edited the instructions.

Next day the same problem happened - I overwrite the live system. My team leader came round... and agreed that yesterday's build disk was today's live disk, so the documentation should be clearer. He moved me to a different area where I could do less damage.

QWERTZ/QWERTY.

This is a real bother if you touch type! I learned to always check what you've typed! Eventually my brain became bilingual - a bit like driving in Europe/Britain, it takes a little while to get used to it.

How do I download the fix I need to fix my networking?

I was in Japan in the 1990's when hotel connectivity was to plug the phone line into the back of your computer. This didnt work because of a dialler problem ( which allowed me to connect to the corporate network) but there was a fix for it. My problem was how do I download the fix to be able to download the fix. This was late Friday night and I was working a a customer over the weekend.

I took the subway (1 hour) to our corporate building, but I could not get into the floor because my badge was not on their system, and there was no one in! I found there was a corporate WiFii signal if I held my laptop up. I downloaded the fix, went down the ground floor, and borrowed a telephone line from a security guard (who spoke no English) - and it worked!

These days with hotel Wifi - it is so easy.!

You would not keep important paper documents in the trash can would you - er yes.

One of my colleagues had a habit of if anyone gave him some confidential paper work, after he had locked his desk, he would put it in the bin. The security guards who checked the clean desk policy never looked in the bin. He was always first in the office, before the cleaners, so just got the documents out of the bin.

It's never been installed

Someone told me that they worked on a project where the development was done in one country and the testing was done in a different country. Due to the executive announcing the customer date before development was quarter done, it was pretty chaotic and corners were cut.

The installation team followed the process of getting a clean machine and trying to install the product. It always failed. They executive blew his top and sent his top expert to "SHOW THE INSTALLATION TEAM HOW TO DO IT". The guy got off the plane, went directly to the lab and tried to install it. It didn't install. He spoke to the development team - they hadn't installed it either - they just replaced the binaries every day and were careful not to turn the machine off. I think no one had actually been given the job of writing the installation process, people just used some scrappy notes.

In the development team, because the project was running late, they were asked to resize the work. Now they knew what they were working on, instead of some chart-ware design, they resized it properly - and said it had gone up from 3 months work to 9 months work. The executive blew his top as this was not the answer he wanted to hear. He wanted them to resize it again! but someone told him - every time they resize it - it costs 2 weeks work. Do you really want to ask them?

What goes around ...

I remember mainframes being water cooled, and heating the site "for free". When they became more efficient, and not needing water cooling, they had to install a big gas pipeline, and boiler to heat our site.

What to do in case of a real fire...

I was on a customer site when the fire alarm went off and they evacuated our building. There was a builder's shed in the car park which was in flames so it was a real fire. I believe there were gas cylinders in the shed - so potentially very dangerous. There were several buildings linked by corridors - and in order to get from building 1 to building 3 you had to go through our building. Despite fire wardens trying to stop people going into building 2 - people pushed their way past.

The fire brigade head officer happened to be in building 2 and asked why people were transiting through building 2.

Apparently the fire officers report was interesting reading. I heard there was an action plan along the lines of education ... "If the fire alarm is ringing. Leave the building. Do not go into the affected building to collect your keys, or to transit the building, or to go an collect your coat, or a cup of coffee... If someone is injured or killed as a result of your stupidity, you will be liable."

I wonder how old the executives are, how expensive they are, and how many are being let go.

Do they fit into the profile for being let go?

Running in parallel

Ive worked with many customers who ran two systems in parallel. You syphon off the data from the old system to the new system as it comes in... Everyday you compare the reports, and check they match. You do not go live until the data matches. It is slow - but better than debugging the live system.

it is not my fault!

I heard about the guy whose code had the highest number of abends/sigv. He was leaned on to "fix it", even though he said his code was innocent.

To please the bean counters, he added code to value check every parameter passed to his routine (which doubled the path length). Anything that failed got passed back a "error in parameters" return code.

Suddenly his code was getting no problems, but every one else's code was reporting "error in parameters".

He compromised by providing two versions of the module. One for "friends" who passed in good data, and "general" for every one else.

Encryption is not the only answer. The biggest problem is the human

Having your data encrypted means someone who does not have the keys cannot read it.

If you do have the keys then you can usually copy the data (or photograph it).

I have data on an encrypted disk. The data is visible to me because I had the key. I can easily copy the data to a USB. It is going to be a challenge to make this secure.

Why not go all the way?

The next step will be a screen, keyboard and almost nothing else. A bit like the green screens we had 40 years ago.

What do you mean - its never been rebooted ?

Someone told me of when they worked in a small software company doing pretty advanced stuff. You could get fixes onto the system and incorporate them without having to restart the system. For 6 months the development team fixed all their problems this way. It was fast, it was slick - and looked great.

At a moment's notice they were asked to do a demo for an important customer. The unlucky person created a memory stick image, and rushed to the conference room with his laptop. The system almost started. When the boot got to their code, it fell over. For the previous 6 months their server had not been rebooted. He sat there trying to fix it, when the manager came out and said "We are over running, do you mind just giving a 2 minute description rather than the demo". Suddenly all was calm, and he said "that was fine by him".

Is that really the fire alarm - oh no its not, oh yes it is.

A year or so ago (during the tail end of of covid), our local theatre was putting on one of those plays where every thing goes wrong. A theatrical flash went off on one side of the stage, and the genie appeared on the other side of the stage half dressed ... ha ha ha ... until the fire alarm went off.

We all dutifully trooped out, asking was this part of the play? We were half out - when we got told we could go back in ... so in we trooped - and we were told we >had< to evacuate.

If the fire alarm goes off and the fire brigade is summoned, you have to evacuate. etc.

Fortunately the lighting guy was a fireman and had been paged and could cancel the fire engine. We could then go back in... etc

The problem was caused by having additional doors to the theatre open for covid. Normally the over stage detector is disabled for an hour which is fine... but the wind through the open doors wafted the smoke into the corridor and so set of the alarm!

mail filters

I was involved in supporting a large sporting event, where email addresses were provided for the participants.

Initially they put mail filters on to stop "bad" emails getting through.

There was a Dutch speed skater with name like xxxx le bombe ... who got no mail!

They they found the simple statement "We have your daughter" was both a very harmless phrase - and very sinister thread. Eventually turned they email filters off as they could not adequately filter the emails.

Whoops goes the cooling

We were a development lab. We had some building work next to our machine room, and a digger dug through the main pipe from the air conditioning units to our building. It took a week to fix (getting the replacement pipe was the problem)

So no air con - and all but critical systems were shutdown. Also our building had no windows (why do you need them when you have aircon) so the offices soon got very warm with all the warm bodies.

This was before the days of being able to work from home. Some managers were enterprising. Some held meetings in the nice outdoors, under the trees. Other managers said "please work from home - and review the documentation". So people took the paper manuals and reviewed the stuff relevant to their area. Lots of stuff got pruned, and there was a lot of new content.

So overall it was not too bad an impact ( besides the sweaty bodies)

Where did they launch it from?

If they have satellites that can spot a cigarette packet from space, surely a big balloon should be easy to spot. Can they just rewind the film?

Where is the unsend button?

I was PA to a senior manager who, in a moment of clarity, sent an email to all of his managers saying "this project is a mess - and this is what we are going to do about it". He came round to me about 10 minutes later saying he should not have sent it... can I go and delete it as it should have said "DO NOT PASS ON". I went to the IT department with a list of managers, and we started to delete the email from manager's in boxes.

A little while later someone found me and told me to stop what I was doing. Some of the managers had already sent it on to their staff.

Instead of being a disaster, the general feeling was it was a good email, it was good to hear that the senior manager had the same view as the troops. The senior manager ended up by getting lots of kudos.

It's not a cost - it is a money saver

I remember visiting a foreign bank a few months after a major outage. After the event the CTO brought in an enlightened manager (and some of his old colleagues).

Instead of being a cost - he sold the IT systems as saving money. "If you are not part of the solution - you are part of the problem" and several senior managers decided it was a good time to retire.

They got rid of paper and used pdfs They managed to shrink the pipeline so things could be approved in hours not days (or weeks). Managers now had time to manager, not shuffle paper ( nor signing things).

Due to take overs they had several bespoke systems doing almost the same thing. They picked the best one (eg for loans) , and migrated all the bespoke loan systems to one. There was a 6 month bulge in spending, but then they got rid of old systems, and saved money in licensing costs. Some systems they virtualised, and so got rid of old hardware and made better usage of the existing resources.

He charged back costs to the departments, so now each department had to pay it's cost rather than have IT centrally funded. The heads of departments had to go to the CTO and discuss the cost of running their department. After this meeting the heads of departments were more than happy to let go of bespoke, expensive systems, and use the "off the shelf" system provided by the enlightened manager. When they saw progress, the heads of departments were even more keen. I think he was promised 1% of the savings, and retired a few years later a rich man. Getting rid of idle old, hot machines saved them a lot of money in electrical power and aircon.

Do not interupt -- but I've got to go!

I remember working in Japan with my UK issued laptop - in the days of dial up, when you used to have to plug your hotel telephone cable into your lapt op; and use a local free phone number.

At midnight (UK time) (getting up time in Japan) it started to download the weekly system updates; and displayed a message saying "do not disconnect - or power off". I had to go to work, so I had to disconnect and go to work with the customer.

I sent an email to the support people who told me how to disable these updates for a week. I manually did the updates one weekend - and it took over 12 hours down the slow phone line.

The download package got smarter - it detected your connectivity type, and what time zone you were in, and if they were not good - it did not do the updates.

How many people are needed on a contract?

I had to visit a customer in India. They had over 10 people working on small bit of the project I was working on. One guy doing the work (long hours), and 9 others "learning". They were not allowed to do anything. I suggested 2 of the people who seemed competent should do some of the work, and avoid a critical resource.

All 10 were billed to the customer

Lessons will be learned!

Perhaps they need a meeting or two to review major projects over the last 20 years to work out why some worked - and some did not work, and actually apply the lessons learned!

Simple lessons like

Agree the major requirements (and users) before you start, rather than half way through.

Do not add on "if we add this... function - we can do this clever nice to have at 10* the original cost."

How many millions of records in the database, and what end user response time is expected.

Prototype it at scale before you start coding.

Depends how you cost it..

I got involved in customer which had two vendors offering solutions to a customer. The competition said of our company, you'll need this huge box, and all this (expensive) software from the opposition including power etc it will cost.. . Our software only needs a small box and look at the price. We replied - most of our software they listed is not needed for the what the customer asked for, and you only need a box a quarter of the size to meet the requirements, and have they included power and aircon in their bid ? (no they hadn't)

We were each asked to demo their scenario on our hardware.

Our lead person had meetings with the customer to understand the requirements.

"1000 transactions a second" turned out to be "1000 business transactions a second". Each business transaction is composed of 10 transactions.

A database of this size, ahh we had not realised we wanted to keep history as well. So the database could be 10 times the size.

In the end the customer went with us because we helped them understand their requirements (we wanted the best solution for them - preferably our solution) , and with the opposition you had to purchase an unknown number of "optional" things, such as support, and tiered costs.

Free bar!

It would be a good time to have a "reunion" of all of the major projects over the last 15 years to remind each other of the "lessons learned" that may not have been implemented.

A free bar would more than pay for itself, to get people talking about the projects in a relaxed atmosphere, and where they may become more indiscrete than usual