News: 1590736510

Chalk one up for the good gals!

Two hot functional tests go pear shaped? And nobody fesses up? Reports vanish? Espionage? Sabotage?

I once witnessed an inquisition of sorts going on as a visitor somewhere. All the staff of one department were being called into a meeting room one by one. They would walk out after a few minutes and the next person would be asked to come in. The person I was visiting eventually finished in there and we went out for lunch. I innocently enquired what had been going on because it looked like a redundancy set up.

That wasn't it at all. They'd noticed that they were having problems with a particular system. They ran a complex report every night using a very high spec computer at 18:30 and this automatic. Only several reports spanning a period of weeks were missing and had to be re-run when the first person had gotten in in the morning. This delayed the start of day for several people. After a few instances of this happening they'd installed a logging program to see who was doing what on that computer. The logs had told them who had logged in and stopped the program running,

They'd found out it was Employee X but had decided to call everybody in not just him. They revealed that there was a now a monitoring prog on that computer. They asked each employee if if they'd got anything they'd like to mention at this point. None of the rest of the had anything significant just things like burning an copy of a CD etc. But X had sung like a canary. He used the machine to play something like Quake or Half Life etc. on as it had the best graphics card the most memory etc. He'd had to hide the game on the hard drive and was playing it after work. However the reports prog was quite memory and processor intensive when running. So he'd shut it down before playing and if his gameplay went beyond 18:30 no report was run.

Discussions were ongoing as to what punishemnt he'd get.

Local logs mysteriously missing? No problem...

https://www.tecmint.com/install-rsyslog-centralized-logging-in-centos-ubuntu/

1990's though, still a time when storage was a massive premium.

Seems to be cheaper to log everything to a dot matrix printer and paper.

I once was hauled over the coals for “allowing” an engineer to go onsite with a piece of defective equipment that effectively lost over €10,000 in billable hours and a potential new customer. I was dragged in front of a “tribunal” of PHBs, the engineer, his boss and assorted other “people of importance”. I handed them each a copy of the email that everyone of them had been sent where I stated that the equipment was defunct and under NO CIRCUMSTANCES was it to be used in the field until it had been repaired, fully recalibrated and passed the rigorous test run.

AND? don't leave us hanging, was there mumbling from the PHBs and a muted "you can go" or did they still make it your fault because you didn't also print and fax the email to them?

"...running the unit at full load, continuously, for five days"

That's a pretty big resistor. How do you load up a power station?

Boil a lake?

Test two of them at the same time, connected to each other, out of phase.

Connect it to a wind turbine to make an enormous desk fan.

I hope you are an electrical engineer responsible for stuff like this, and might some day be able to make a justification to do this, "It was the ONLY option to save the transformer!"

We had one who complained that our software was dropping connections from their system. We checked, and found that their system was sending malformed packets which didn't comply with the standard. That information was delivered to their technical staff.

A few weeks later we got a message from our CEO wanting to know when we were planning to fix the problem, and somewhat irritated that he had learned about the lack of progress from the other company's CEO on the golf course. Clearly their technical staff had not passed the information about it being their own fault to "upstairs".

When this was explained the next step was a message from the other technical group reluctantly admitting that their system was at fault, but that it would be very expensive to fix, so would we please change our software to accept the faulty packets.

Unfortunately for that very large US Telco, not even they could convince us to lose our worldwide standards conformance certification just so they didn't need to roll out a fix across their whole network.

I went to a customer who had lost the source of their critical application and it had a bug. I was asked if we could change the application server to get round it!

We were on a customer site testing a system which was made by another company but had my card in it. Nothing worked and we ended up working overnight trying to find out why. Eventually I discovered that the other company hadn't put pull-up resistors on some of their inputs which was causing the problem. We were against the clock and it was physically easier for me to add the resistors to my card than to fix the inputs on their bits. I bodged them in and the test went OK - although it ran very late with customer staff on site overnight. As a result of this my company got the blame for the test delays and additional cost because, as the other company pointed out, I'd had to make mods to my card to make the system work so it was my card that caused the problem. I got a bollocking from my boss for adding the pull-up resistors to my card.

Yup, that's typical. If you can fix it, then it was your fault. It happened to me a couple times. Nowadays, any time I find myself in a similar situation, I won't admit I can implement a workaround until there's an extensive paper trail that proves where the problem originates.

1. The importance of a detailed and comprehensive interface specification cannot be understated.

2. Your boss is an idiot -- YOU made the system work, by exercising initiative and doing whatever it took to make the client happy and keep the project on track.

3. It's unpleasant to work for a non-technical boss

We could do with some of that in the UK at the moment with the Prime Minister and Boris Johnson.

Plus Gove, of course. People with a shame bypass.

"We could do with some of that in the UK at the moment with the Prime Minister and Boris Johnson.

Plus Gove, of course. People with a shame bypass."

Ahh.... but which face - they each have at least two to choose from!!

@Bloodbeastterror - I've got a suggestion for where we hide the printers.

Japanese politicians have been known, even recently, to do the honourable thing in the face of a scandal and channel the samurai spirit to restore honour to their name.

(If you're feeling that way please reach out for help. There is hope.)

Looking at the downvotes, we appear to have the entire readership of the spectator, and d****ic cummings amongst us

"entire readership of the spectator"

I'm guessing that they didn't get the not-very-subtle (but funny, I hope) phrasing. "Duh, this idiot doesn't even know that our lovely Boris *is* the PM. What a dope!" Duh...

In my case, it was "Why did you drag politics into the comments of a decidedly non-political article?" Especially when the OP was intended to be quite biased. Note, I'm not British and don't care about the PM at all, but just dislike folks putting politics into everything.

I once stood back and allowed a senior manager to roast my staff without standing up for them. It was our Christmas party in the early-90's and he was one of those people who saves up a whole year of personal pain just so that he can release it at the Christmas do - I think we have all met/employed/been employed by someone like that.

He stood up at the end of the meal and proceeded to start by praising us and gradually progressed to seriously insulting everyone. Apart from the incredible "I do not comprehend why we employ women in IT" and "I might be your superior but I still fail to understand what you all do for a living" some of his diatribe was directed against very junior individuals. I was expected afterwards to "thank" him for his speech but declined to do so - to my eternal shame I should have responded.

Lesson learned: do not allow sexist, racist or *ist bigots into senior positions. He lasted about another 3 months and during his entire remaining time we just could not get his computer to work properly - everytime he saved a document the computer would unexpectedly reboot while he seethed but remained quiet.

everytime he saved a document the computer would unexpectedly reboot while he seethed but remained quiet.

Macro in normal.dot? (enquiring minds want to know)

are you sure you weren't in an episode of the IT Crowd?

Looks to me like a deliberate attempt to make the turbine fail the test, so delaying acceptance so the delivery date is missed and damages/penalties became due.

She potentially saved her employer a fortune by discovering the attempt

... telling a CEO "I told you so!" before setting to work, pulling them back out of the quagmire that is called "the cloud".

telling a CEO "I told you so!"

Unfortunately, the CxOs are impervious to critique. It can never be their error. They have done everything right. Even when they are informed, it cannot be the CxO's fault. Some underling must have been sleeping because the CxO cannot fail.

(lesson learned through experience)

Remember British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) and their Squarerial (The square shaped satellite dish), a long since merged/defuncted UK corporation was using a VAX 11/785 in the development of this failed product (This is a whole story by itself in marketing pushing bizarre requirements to an engineering team) - The VAX 11/785 had been taken off contract as they had a lot of bright engineers and they would self maintain to save some money. So all seems quiet/good for about 8 months and we get the call, can we come to site the VAX 11/785 is borked and they need assistance (Which we will charge on a T&M basis). I arrive on site ask for some background as to what has happened, get basically a story that everything was good they had a problem but this problem quickly moved to a complete system failure. They had done some diagnostics but not touched the VAX physically.

The VAX 11/785 was switched off (Weird, not normally switched off, even when a fault is present) - Asked why it was switched off - They said they could not start the machine - The VAX 11/785 had a cutdown PDP that was the boot controller, so you would normally have this active even when the main machine had major issues.

So, my first action is to open the main cabinet door to look at the logic boards (The VAX 11/785 CPU was basically a set of logic boards connected to a backplane) - Opening the cover to the logic boards I asked again if they had done any "hands-on" troubleshooting - They said no, no-one had touched the machine at all.

So I said that was strange as one of the Logic Boards was inserted the wrong way round (Top was on the bottom rail) - This would have taken a lot of effort to do as the boards were keyed to go in easily one way only (i.e. with top of logic board aligned to the top).

Cue a lot of people suddenly looking guilty - They fessed up that they had taken the cards out to reseat them as they thought that may resolve the problem, they had a problem with one card being difficult to get back in, which in fairness was an issue with this enclosure - They thought the card was in the wrong way so flipped it an re-inserted and with what I can only assume was superhuman strength managed to get it all the way in.

It took some effort to prise the card out and peering at the backplane revealed crushed pins on the backplane.

So 2 days later, new backplane, assorted new logic boards and north of £35,000 they were back in business (let alone the business cost of not having the system up and running). They basically they had to spent about 8 years worth of the maintenance contract that they had cancelled in one go.

Their management did try to say that it was easy to make the mistake and it was our fault that this was possible (Negating what I can only assume was obvious visible guides not to do what they did, but the sheer brute force needed to do it). But sanity did prevail and they paid the bill and even put the system back on maintenance contract.

Alas th Squareial did not help the company make the expected millions (Especially as told to me by one of the lead engineers the spec they were instructed to build it to did not factor in cloud cover .... So in testing/demo phase all was good until it got cloudy - so expense re-design required) - And BSB got bought by Sky to become British Sky Broadcasting and the Squareial was consigned to the dustbin of "what were they thinking".

"... the Squareial was consigned to the dustbin of "what were they thinking". "

Well, there's still something similar on the market:

https://www.redappleav.co.uk/selfsat-h22d2-flat-satellite-antenna-dish-with-replaceable-twin-lnb/

We've got one and it gives us good Freesat reception in NL (except during heavy rain) and it's rather less unsightly than a conventional satellite dish.

Icon as it's almost that time of the week again. Wishing all Commentards a good weekend.

Both BSB and Sky were losing money by the bucketload and it was obvious a merger was needed. BSB did waste quite a bit of money on marketing etc. One of the biggest costs however was the IBA forcing them to broadcast in D-MAC as opposed to PAL. They were the licensed broadcaster and had to do what the IBA said. They also had to have their own two bloody expensive satellites in space with one as a backup. Again that was an IBA requirement. Then they were "invited" to show their encryption set up to GCHQ who made some suggestions. Chief amongst them was that the worry that they couldn't crack it. The system had the potential to send messages to individual subscribers like Happy Birthday etc. The bods in Cheltenham were worried they wouldn't be able to read these messages.

Murdoch at Sky went with the cheaper and easier PAL for their transmission system. He wasn't the licensed satellite broadcaster just decided to do it. He was using Astra (SES) and therefore avoided the huge cost of his own satellites. He also ran it as a tight ship and wasted as little money as possible. So that meant no "hospitality"* in the green room for guests on sky news etc. I met somebody who worked there back then. He said one guest stated they wouldn't come back after finding out there was no booze* in the green room just copies of Murdoch's papers.