Bite me? It's 'byte', and that acronym is Binary Interface Transfer Code Handler
- Reference: 1590995714
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/01/who_me/
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Today's tale is a hybrid: part [2]On Call and part [3]Who, Me? . It is, however, 100 per cent "there but for the grace of God go I" for many a developer, this writer included.
"Paul" told us of his days working on a project that was running on an [4]IBM System/36 . A hefty beast compared to today's hardware, the machine succeeded IBM's System/34 and was usually programmed in IBM's legendary Report Program Generator (RPG) language. Launched in 1983, the machine lasted over 10 years before being succeeded by the AS/400.
The project, he explained, "was an automated process that would pop up screens and ask user[s] for input in order to continue." The process itself was already in place; Paul was just tweaking it for the customer's specific needs.
The help definitions were also there, "but I was trying to modify it just a little in order to add the bit of code I needed."
Dude, where's my laser? [5]READ MORE
Paul didn't need everything, just certain pieces. He created some extra test code for his validation library, declared the project complete and shunted it into production.
For the uninitiated, accessing help on the System/36 required the user to hit the F1 function key. Users were trained that if they were stuck, pressing the F1 key would show some text to tell them what to do next. Simple stuff.
Paul was at another client when the inevitable phone call came in.
"Paul, my computer just told me to Bite Me. I am not sure what I need to do."
"Bite you? What are you talking about?"
"I was running the new process, and it popped up the screen to enter the value, and I didn't know what I needed to enter, so I press the F1 key to get help, and I got a message that said 'Bite me Bitch!' I don't know what I am supposed to do."
There was a pause as Paul doubtless experienced the bowel-emptying sensation all too many developers have felt when a forgotten bit of test code comes back to, er, bite them.
After gathering his wits, he instructed the confused user to hold fire until he could "look at it," apologised to the client he was working at and raced over to the site.
It took half an hour to reach the unfortunate user, who had left the message shining brightly on the screen and was flummoxed as to what she had done to merit such ire. "I started looking at it," recalled Paul, "and it was 'Oops, my very bad'."
Paul's mistake was a simple one. He hadn't wanted to copy over all the old code and had inserted the "Bite me Bitch!" into the old template for the help text so he knew help was working in the old part. "Then when you get to the new part, my new help would pop up like it was supposed to."
His plan was that he would simply put the newly created code into production, where the old Help still lurked. So everything would work as it always had.
Alas, he confessed: "I had named my template for my test help the same as what was in production. I had inadvertently copied the template over to production when I installed it, and shame on me, didn't test the old Help function when I was done."
"I did test the new," he added. "It worked fine."
His bacon was, however, saved by a tape backup he'd taken before the "bite me" file had been inflicted on the customer's System/36.
We're sad to report that Paul did not come up with an excuse involving a tortured "Byte Imperative Transfer Exception Move Execution in the Bit Integer Throttle Channel Handle" backronym, but instead opted for the simple truth and confessed his misdeed. The user, he recalled, "wasn't too mad [and] we both laughed because the computer told her to bite me."
"I did have a conversation with her boss about using the word Bitch," he remembered, "but it was more, I shouldn't use that language."
We've all seen the odd bit of embarrassing debug code rear its ugly head in front of a user, right? No? Just us then? What excuse did you come up to justify the suddenly potty-mouthed behaviour of an otherwise innocent application? Confess all with an email to [6]Who, Me? ®
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
[3] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[4] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/rochester/rochester_4018.html
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/25/who_me/
[6] https://www.theregister.co.uk/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#05726d6a686045716d607760626c767160772b666a2b706e
Re: FUCKED
I've seen Failed Under Continuous Testing quite a lot in various jobs, but it's subtlety is oft undermined by just writing out the acronym.
For those reading from across the pond an (Essex) British English accent renders 'fuct' and 'fucked' pretty much the same
Re: FUCKED
Erm, I'd've thought they sounded the same in pretty much any version of English (including American)... I can't really see how you'd pronounce the two of them differently in any given dialect.
Re: FUCKED
Fact.
Re: FUCKED
At Hubert Cumberdale, it's obvious innit?
It's said like Throatwarbler Mangrove.
*Hands you a pint & leaves another out for our friend when they read this*
Cheers!
Ah, but the English are masters in writing a lot more letters than that which they pronounce.
As in Worcestershire, which is pronounced Worstershire if I'm not mistaken.
Wustasheer – source: family's from there.
I think the not pronouncing letters in a word accolade should go to the French. Who knows how many letters at the end of nearly every French word are left silent.
Trinidad's accent has silent words, arguably even silent sentences. They also say mothercunt instead of motherfucker, which makes no sense until you realise they refer to the UK as the mother country...
People often don't even include the -shire for that 'un.
As in, "Wuster Sauce"
But arguably it's not as bad as French - where many of the initial and particularly final consonants are silent, (morte pronounced "more" etc.) rendering many words indistinguishable from one another.
Yeah, they make up for it, though, by taking the long way round. French doesn't have words for some things, so you have to explain what they are using words it does have. Can't think of any examples right now, but stuff like "logic analyser" is probably a fair example. French would have is as a "machine for displaying digital information" or some such.
> French would have is as a "machine for displaying digital information" or some such.
But it would be pronounced "le logic analyser".
dessous and dessus .
One means below, one means above. Difference in pronunciation is basically the length of the final "oo" sound. Jesus wept :/
With my condescending hat on, whenever I see someone creating even mildly offensive tests, I always have a moan about maintaining professional standards. The usual come back is "It's only a test, no one will ever see it" at which point I direct them to an article like this.
System Test - UAT - Training
I've had the same conversation endless times speaking to devs about the test data they set up. \It invariably ends up in a UAT environment as there 'wasn't time to build one from scratch so we cloned systest' and then the same thing happens again when training environments a built.
even if it doesn't If I'm asked to front up a demo at a Project Board I know that any offensive data will pop up in front of the senior execs and I'll have to spend the next hour explaining hot it will never hit the live system / website.
Father Ted for the win
My test strings tend to be Arse, Feck, Girls and Drink.
One of which popped up in front of some Council bigwigs I was demoing to. Hint: It wasn't "girls" or "drink"...
If that happened today...
Our featured story teller would probably be tar and feathered, and likely fired, especially if the user was a "Karen".
Or conversely, he could be working for one of those places where sexual harassment is the norm, and be promoted.
Colour me square
Colour me square, but I just don't ever type any inappropriate language in to any work-related application, even if nobody else is going to see it. There have been too many cases like this (anyone remember "Dear Rich Bastard"?) and the momentary giggle isn't worth the risk.
Re: Colour me square
My thought, not being a developer, reading this was isn't this the sort of thing you'd grow out of pretty quickly. Certainly, writing programmes (amateur) a few decades ago, I did do something of that sort in debug steps for the first few projects. But then I settled down to putting something more useful to me when the programme section ended or fell over- basically the comments. "This is the bit that adds up the hours" * being far more useful than "fuck fuck fuck".
*I'd written a programme in the 1980s that collated and added up flexi-time and reported how many flexi-days could be taken, how much could be carried over etc. within the council's rules, for a girlfriend who worked for the council. It worked beautifully and could have saved her a load of the time that she spent every weekend adding up the hours etc. She never fucking used it. preferring to sit there with her bits of paper and adding it all up herself, divide by etc etc..... It was an interesting learning curve for the callow 20something year old me. About people, not computers.
Re: Colour me square
As an 18 yr old, I had a summer job as an accounts clerk. One bit of it was boring as fuck, so I wrote something in Lotus 1-2-3 that did it all for me, just had to fill in the rows in the sheet each day; when the head accountant saw it, she went white as a sheet and told me to redo it all again, this time using the calculator.... (and no, not some fancy accounts calculator with a printer outputting an audit log, just a regular desk calculator)
Correcting the problem
One product I worked on had a reasonable level of swear-words in the assertion strings (that could pop up when something happened that shouldn't be ****ing possible). Someone decided this needed cleaning up in case a customer saw it, and entered a task into the tasks database "Kick the shit out of
Anon to protect the innocent...
but I do know of an error message that referred to a rather big-boned PM's dismissal of a rather pedantic German coder's scenario.
*years later*
Client: "What does this dialog box mean? "Wobbly Wilson says this will never happen! [OK]"
I got in trouble for an address in BELL END once, but was let off once I showed them a map of Rowley Regis. But I did get a "no answering back allowed" bollocking for using the word 'niggardly' on a teleconference once. I'm still seething.
Re: Anon to protect the innocent...
I once worked on a project where the client insisted on an audio capability (to play nice tunes on startup IIRC).
I suggested to the firmware designer that we shouldn't let this opportunity go to waste, and provided him with a file of HAL saying his signature line: "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
When the machine was booted in maintenance mode, and an error occurred, Hal told you about it.
Some colleagues of mine...
There was one place I worked (briefly) that had a lot of developers working on the same (extremely old) code base. It was good practice to tag each new script with your name, the date that it was authored, and what the code was supposed to do. The usual good practice stuff.
One day I came to modify a bit of code. I couldn't work out what it did, and all of the variables were variants of swear words. I scrolled to the top of the code file to look for the author, then leaned over to one of the senior programmers and asked "Who's Wilma Dickfit?".
The senior programmer (a good-natured ageing metal-head), leaned over, read the header note without a change in expression, then shouted "Oi, Wilma!" at the far corner of the office. Everyone else turned to look at one mid-twenties programmer who had turned beetroot-red :D
Apparently he had a bit of a reputation for immaturity, and an inability to learn from experience.
And at the other extreme
I came across an error message in 's VME operating system Kernel - this was in the kernel stack not a GUI error
'I don't know how we got here and we are running at ACR2 so I think I better crash the system'
ACR2 was the Kernel / Microcode privileged layer with unrestricted access to memory and all devices. When I started laughing at a Kernel error message I knew I was a real diagnostician
I once got an error message out of a system of "we hope you know what you're doing because the system hasn't got a clue"
Back in the days of Prime and PrimeOS a branch of the Home Office had one of these. The systems manager had added a facility that would respond to swearing typed in at the command line by responding in kind.
At least the manager was validating/sanitizing the inputs.
Symbol tables
Many years ago, in the days of Windows 3.x, the official SDK/DDK symbol tables contained a reference name "Bozos_End_Up_Here", or similar...
When the same user needed his two passwords reset. For the fiftieth time. We set the first to Head and the second to Dick. To be fair he took it with good grace.
My test string in ROSCOE was 'hippopotame'. Obvious but inoffensive. Mostly.
Not coding, but similar effect....
The admin console of Novell Networks allowed for the sending of IM's to people. Didn't get used very often, except for a couple of the PFYs to annoy each other. One day this was occurring, so one PFY logged off to (he thought) put a stop to it.
Unfortunately the IMs are based on user IDs assigned at login, and when someone logs off that ID is often immediately assigned to the next user that logs in, if it's within a few seconds.
So ……..that was why a senior manager called up to ask why his PC has a message in the middle of the screen saying "STOP IT!!!!".
Could have been a lot worse though!
FUCKED
When I worked for Herberts, I often sent broken scales back from Tesco with the fault "Failed Under Calibration, Known Error Detected".
Nobody ever caught on. I think...