I may have to hand in my “Geek Card” due to Geek Violations.
I was driving home from work last night and decided to listen to the radio instead of my usual choice of cd. I discovered my radio has in total 40 preset stations (I’ve only recently got this car) and all 40 of them are tuned to the same frequency which is just white noise.
Yes, I have an item of electronic toyness and have not so much as played with it, or set it up.
Here’s a Question. How much of the Internet’s Backbone is obsolete. Code that no one knows what it does or how it works?
Let me give you an example:-
I have recently been integrating my companies systems into several of the Major Telecommunications Companies own systems. Now you expect that the big boys, who I will not name to protect them, lets call them “Busby”, to be very organised and up to date. Well you would be wrong!
To send data from our system to theirs there is a very STRICT file format you must use, which is defined in a 100+page document (Which i still have not read. Hey I’m a geek we don’t do documentation!). This format is defined to an exact number of characters per row, and what you can use. Well while creating the interface from my system to theirs I was slightly confused by several of the fields I had to supply, since most of them stated I could not use these fields, but i must send them. And my all time favorite, an 18 character historical field of which only 3 characters had ever been used, the first which hand to be a 1 or the system broke (they were not sure why), the third must always be an A (due to some old link in that was no longer used, but part of the system) and the second character which you were allowed to use, had the choice of “y” or “y”.
So if there is vast amounts of code, flags, systems in This one example that no living person knows what they are, or if they can be safely removed, how much is there across all the worlds systems.
I think if we had a clean up we could free up about 70% of the worlds data storage, and free up the INTERNET to run faster, and have more space for websites :0)
I Just had this online test emailed me with the simple comment of ” Thought this may appeal to your work place ;o)”
What it seems to infer is how hard it is to tell the difference between a cerial killer and in Computer Programmer. (Knowing some of the coders I know, I can understand this, especially after an all nighter, and the realisation there is only decaf left!)
BY LOOKING AT A PICTURE OF A PERSON, YOU HAVE TO DECIDE IF HE IS A COMPUTER GEEK OR A SERIAL KILLER. GO WITH YOUR GUT FEELING AND CLICK ON YOUR CHOICE.
THERE ARE 10 PHOTOS. YOUR SCORE WILL BE GIVEN AT THE END.
I’ve just finished re-watching the 1st season of “The I.T. Crowd“. I was reconfiguring a Laptop and needed something playing in the background.
Now one of the running jokes in the show is the answer-all response to all phone requests “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” As any of you who have had contact with Tech Support either as a customer or as a support technician will know this was a common question asked, which is why the joke made it into the show. (The show is mocking real life), Only now I have noticed a new trend, I have seen more and more Support Technicians (And senior Techie bods) use the same question response to customers and each other, but now as a “in” joke from the show, and if they think their witty cultural reference may be missed they throw in a “Have you tried shoving it up your arse?”.
Is the question now a Geek in-joke referencing The I.T. Crowd, or a common Support question that’s referenced in the show.
So my qestion is. Which came first the comment or the joke…
One of our customers recently moved half their business away from us to a BIGGER networking company for added security, Better Service, and to prevent having all their eggs in one basket.
As they asked us one year. “What happens to our infrastructure if you guys all die at your office party?”
Well They are now learning that Bigger does not mean Better. In the short time they have been under the control of the NEW company, They have suffered a weeks email outage, some weird rule somewhere that looses their important emails they need to run the company, reset their firewall twice loosing all the settings, given out wrong IP’s for DNS, and broke the link to the internat msSQL server.
Now to place the cherry on the top of their incompitance, we have just recieved a request from our x-customer saying thier new I.T. guys have requested we set up a Reverse DNS on a ADSL line we do not manage, with an IP not in our range, for a customer we do not Supply.
I’m tempted to charge them an Idiot Tax.
So at the weekly “Blame & Shame” It was mentioned that the SMS notifications of Server problems were possibly a bit excessive, as the monitoring system sends out a notification of a problem ever hour, and if your phone is switched off over night you are flooded with messages as soon as you turn it on. There was also a “Costings” Issue due to the number of messages, and the number of people receiving them. No problem, Our Intrepid Systems Team will solve the problem.
So we have A Systems Administrator “Linux none of your iffy Microshite stuff here“, and A Systems Developer/Programmer.
The Design process went something along these lines. :-
So the script was designed. Databases created, testing put in place, with a script that was becoming more and more fancy in its plan. Almost to the pointof the script not just notifying of any errors, But actually connecting to Server with a problem and fixing it.
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Based on a work at three-ninjas.co.uk
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