Posts by 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???

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!

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

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!