The Three Ninjas

The Unholy Trinity of Bloggers

Categories: Work

From the Archive: Were Ninja

Nov23

by GothNinja

Published on: November 23, 2010

Categories: Comedy, Work

Tags: Good Ole Days, Ninja, Were Ninja, Work

Comments: No Comments

We at the Insane Asylum have been running some updates on our antiquated control systems, and during this update I had cause to check the Polychronicon that is the Asylums Wiki. While trying to find the list of perl modules we need to re-install after a major update to allow some of the older systems to continue working (Which I could not find) I came across an odd link to an article simply titled “Were Ninja” Intrigued I had a quick read, and memories of the old days came back, especially of the “Were Ninja” Himself. So I’m reprinting the article here.

Were Ninja

I have been researching a rumor I heard, about strange occurrences in some of the local woods. of a dark figure fleetingly seen from the corner of the eye, strange symbols, glyphs tracks. And most concernedly the noises and screams that echo out of the darkness.

I can now give a slight insight to these happenings..

It starts with a quick 10 minute job after hours, a job that ended up taking longer than was expected, It started with a man tired after hours of staring at a monitor, a man too tired to know what he was doing, It starts with an innocent chain-letter email, one that had to be sent out to a dozen people within thirty minutes or else.

It starts with someone we will call Mr X. He was a normal mild mannered I.T. professional, but one day while taking a break from his work he read his e-mail, the stuff he would normally just junk. It was while reading this e-mail he stumbled upon the book of e-vile! He innocently read out allowed the text from the satanic summoning kanji of death. And because the smtp server was down he could not fulfill the requirements of the chain-letter and the chain was broken, allowing him to be possessed by the spirit of a were-ninja from 14th century japan.

Now on nights where theres a moon he roams the welsh countryside. doing unspeakable things

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Battle to be The King of Idiots

Oct29

by CodeNinja

Published on: October 29, 2010

Categories: Customers

Tags: Customers, Idiots

Comments: 1 Comment

This week at the Asylum has been a bit weird (And I mean weirder than normal) We’ve had two customers fighting to be crowned “The King of Idiots.” Now you would not think that was a title anyone would actively seek out, but I swear the two nominated contestants must have been. There is no other explanation for the level of stupidity involved.

Contestant 1: (We shall call them Santa & the Elves)

For several weeks now Santa has been emailing our Support department asking for some DNS changes to be made for their domain name. And every week they have been informed the changes were done weeks ago. This finally got escalated to me to look at, and I inform them that the changes have all be done.

I get an email from Santa saying that where www is working and pointing at the correct IP, the domain name by itself is not pointing at the right IP so could an A record be created. So I point out www is a CNAME that points at the domain. so whatever IP www goes to is the one the domain name by itself goes too. *Repeat four Times*. Since Santa is getting nowhere with emails, he decided to phone me up and explain again how www goes to the right place, and can we point the domain to the same place as www. This time as well as explaining it all to him, I logged onto our primary NameServer and emailed him the actual zonefile for his domain to show him where things went.

Santa then asked would I mind talking to his head IT elf, I agreed so the IT elf phoned and used the same words as Santa. I explained again, and the elf came up with this solution. “If we change the www from a cname to an a record it may work?” I had to check I had heard him right and that his plan was for me to change the one he claimed worked, and set it up exactly as the one he claimed did not work?

Santa then decided we need a conference call with all the elves, and some clever dwarfs who were walking past at the time. In this call they suggested that since www worked when it was just an alias for the domain, that couldn’t we leave it pointing to the domain, and change the domain to point to the www? I believe they could tell by the sound of *BANG* *BANG* as my head banged against my desk, that maybe that would not work.

It was during this conference call while their head IT Elf was muttering that the DNS was all wrong, and his load balancer was not working because of it, which in turn stopped their certificate from working. As soon as I heard cert, I stopped them to ask was this about a SSL cert? (Which it was). They had got one www.domain, only when they went to domain it was giving warnings. And they believed if they could just get the DNS & load balancer working right, this problem would be resolved.

I had to explain what DNS and URL’s were, to several people who were IT professionals, with claimed experience in hosting, networks, dns, etc..

Contestant 2: (We shall call the Seaman)

I was asked in my role of Linux Sys.Admin to help the Seaman with any problems he had moving the hosting of a website over too us. Now there should have been no problems really since the Seaman is a professional web developer.

Now, His entry was a late one, and only lasted one day, as opposed to Contestants 1′s weeks. Yet on that one day he managed to phone up for help over a dozen times, heres a few of the problems he had.

P: FTP will not let me connect to the server.

S: Spell FTP correctly, and it will work

P: It says it can not load the file, but the files there

S: You realise Linux is case sensitive right?

P: I can not write collected email addresses to a file

S: Make the file writable and not read only.

S2: Errr why are you using a flat file, you have a MySQL DB with that account?

I’ve not decided on the winner YET. I’m leaning towards Contestant 2. Mainly because “How do you spell FTP wrong?” come on, its three letters, and you say the three letters when saying the word F T P?

1 Comment

BT has killed my will to live.

Oct20

by CodeNinja

Published on: October 20, 2010

Categories: Work

Tags: BT, TeleConference, Work

Comments: No Comments

I am sat here, feet on desk, phone resting on my shoulder trying to work out if I can slash my wrists with a business card. Why you ask? Well to fully explain I need to go back over a hour, so sit comfortably and get ready for story time.

The Governor of the Asylum signed up to attend a BT teleconference on their plans to move some of their systems to a newer environment. The only problem was, he decided to be visiting London Town for the scheduled appointment, So I was picked to fill in for him. On paper this sounds like a good thing, a couple of hour conference call where I could legitimately do no work.

I got my login details for the call and noticed the first problem. BT use Microsoft livemeeting for their conference calls, which is fine unless you run a Linux desktop. So for starters I would have to use the audio only phone part of the meeting, meaning I would not see the slides, the presentation or have access to the ongoing Q&A controls.

Feeling slightly annoyed to start off with, I follow the instructions and phone in five minutes before the conference is due to start. And get really annoying hold music which was on a two minute loop of the same tune. This very very annoying hold music continued for almost twenty minutes before the conference started.

Feeling very annoyed, I listen to the conference which seems to be almost fully talking about what we can see on the slides (What slides? audio only remember?). Another irritation was the fact there seemed to be several dozen people giving the talk. You would get one person introduce themselves, say a couple of sentences and then pass on to the next person who would do the same. This went on for over a hour, I lost count of the number of people we switched through.

Sometime in the last twenty minutes I really lost the will to live, since the constant droning in my ear from the voices in the phone are preventing me napping.

Oh, and the meeting, was a let you know whats going on before the full meeting in January next year? Like I will remember any of this junk by tomorrow, let alone next year.

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Piss-up in a Brewery

Oct15

by CodeNinja

Published on: October 15, 2010

Categories: Work

Tags: Insanity, Madness, Work

Comments: No Comments

Yesterday due to Health & Safety bureaucrats, the Inmates at the Insane Asylum all got a day pass out into the wild. Basically the overhead power cables in the Village where the Asylum is located were two inches lower than the regulations. I believe a circus stilt-walker standing on the back of an elephant could possibly electrocute themselves, so health & safety said the lines needed raising which meant a village wide power outage from 8am till 5pm.

Now the Asylum is an ISP & Telecommunications Provider & etc. So making allowances for the inmates to work from home should be no problem, especially as we had a weeks notice. The night before the planed outage we redirect our emails to a backup server, and take our phones home to connect to our Virtual PBX (which is a product we sell, so know works). So we should all have been sorted.

“The best laid plans of mice and IT professionals”

Now the Governor and our Phone Tec both have already got phones set up on the virtual PBX for testing purposes, so it was just the rest of the Inmates who needed to get online with it. Now Demonpengu tried setting his phone up the afternoon before the outage, and it took several hours to get it to actually connect. The rest of us waited until the day of the outage, where only I got my phone to connect. “Great so far right?”

After a hour or so a call locked up my phone, preventing incoming or outgoing calls. When the problem was spotted and fixed we discovered internal calls would result in only one phone being heard the other was just silence. And as for actual call quality, I could not hear the customer over hearing myself saying what I had just said. (And this is a product we sell)

For the last part of the day it was just me manning all the lines & support box, Pure madness & poor planning. I think next time I shall go the way of the others and just pretend my phone would not connect.

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Madness, Total Fraking Madness

Oct06

by CodeNinja

Published on: October 6, 2010

Categories: Office

Tags: Madness, Work

Comments: 1 Comment

The Mental Asylum where I work is an ISP, we supply all the usual stuff, Hosting, Domains, Email, ADSL, Dial-UP, Phone lines, VoIP, PBX’s, Virtual Servers, Co-Lo’s, etc, etc. And as such we have a reasonably busy support department. Oh and on top we also do IT Support, Site Visits, New Installations, etc.

So imagine the madness of letting all the support staff go off on holidays for the same two weeks? Yup, we are a ISP with no support staff for two weeks. How Fraking mad is that?

In fact we have Linux Sys.Admins taking 1st line calls. In the words of a black and white funeral director “we’re DOOOOOOOMED!!!”

1 Comment

Just when I thought they couldn’t possibly be any dumber…

Aug25

by CodeNinja

Published on: August 25, 2010

Categories: Customers

Tags: Customers, Idiots, Work

Comments: No Comments

…..they go and do something like this… and totally redeem themselves!!

I am a true believer of the phrase “Customers are Idiots“, but sometimes they seem to go out of their way to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that this phrase is true.

Recently one of our customers RedBack* ceased trading, and a load of their customers were emailed suggesting they move their hosting & emails over to the Insane Asylum. I was given the pleasure of helping a load across to us. Now some came across with little or no problems, where as others caused a variety of problems. And then there was Zoolander*.

So I copy their website and database from the RedBack server that’s shutting down over to one of ours, I change connection strings and paths accordingly and get it up and running. I recreate email accounts on our system and send them all the details with the instructions to change the nameservers over to ours and they will be up and running.

So a couple of weeks go past and I get a phone call from Zoolander that goes a bit like this.

Z: “We’ve changed the nameserver things like you said and now our email has stopped working!”

CN: “Yes, it will since you moved over to us. you need to use the new email details I previosly sent you.”

Z: “I don’t understand, its all technically, can’t you just do it for me?”

CN: “Well you need to change the setting in whatever email client you use on your computers, but if you need our guys can connect to your machine and do it for you.”

Z: “I dont do email on my computer, just my phone. I just go to the webpage and do mail.”

CN: “You only use webmail? Then you just need to use the webmail address I sent you and you’ll be fine”

Z: “what? so my webpages address will change? it wont be on www.zoolander.com* any more?”

CN: “NO. just the address of the webmail you used has changed.“

The following morning I get into the Asylum to find an email from one of the Zoolander’s Directors home gmail account, all urgent and shouty like. I could tell this as it was all written in CAPS! The basic gist of the email was that they had tried logging into the new webmail address i gave them, and their old username/passwords were not working. So I politely resend them the details I sent before the move with the NEW usernames/passwords and point out the NEW system required NEW details.

Two hours later the phone rings. And its Zoolander.

Z: “Hello, We’ve tried using the new details, only we can’t work out what goes where, so could ou talk us through it?”

CN: “no problems, what problem are you having?”

Z: “Well we need to know what to put in the box that says username, and what goes in the one called password?”

CN: “What did you have in the email I sent you?”

Z: “email address followed by my email address, then username followed by a username, then password followed by password. I just don’t know which ones I’m supposed to use.”

CN: “OK. where it asks for your username, type in your username. and put your password in the one asking for password.”

Z: “That seems to have worked. thanks”

CN: *Unplugs phone for rest of the day*

I know there is a stereotype belief that people in the fashion modelling industry are not known for playing with a full set of cards. But at least try people…..

* As normal Names changed to protect me from lawsuits… err I mean to protect the innocent.

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Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day

Jul30

by CodeNinja

Published on: July 30, 2010

Categories: Holiday, SysAdmin, Work

Tags: Holiday, SysAdmin

Comments: 1 Comment

I thought I would take a minute out of my busy hectic day to give a shout out to all my fellow under-appreciated systems administrators out there in their dark offices on this the 10th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Consider all the work your sys.admin does behind the scene, keeping your network connection running, your email not being overly flooded with spam, your IM’s running at a decent speed, and being there to fix a server outage at 3am just so some people can go look at the funny picture you uploaded. Consider how often this creature gets thanked on his day to day fight against spammers, hackers, lUsers, Software Updates, etc Consider this, then be happy that this IT Hero gets one day a year when (s)he gets appreciated.

So everyone, go take a coffee, cake, or gift to your sysadmin now. or at least drop by their hidy hole to say thanks.

For more information on this IMPORTANT festive day go read THIS SITE

For those about the Insane Asylum Myself & Demop can be found in Mission Control, and are fond of Cake, Beer, & Chocolate!!!

P.S.

Consider this as well. Your Friendly SysAdmin has access to your email, they know what you have been doing and to who. They see all the packets of data traveling back and forth from your machine, seeing when you are working and when your just browsing ebay/facebook/etc, They know what websites you’ve visited (and can change your history to show you been looking at p0rn in the office), Stuff you may not want made public. They control your password, your login name, your email address, how much of the networks bandwidth you can use, what IM clients are banned, and a million other things that help you through the working day. Consider this well, and remember, “Its only one day a year!“

1 Comment

while (1) $head->brickwall(“BANG”);

Apr27

by CodeNinja

Published on: April 27, 2010

Categories: Programing

Tags: Programing, Work

Comments: 1 Comment

This morning was quiet at the Insane Asylum, We were informed that due to work being done on trees growing through power lines, we would loose our power supply for a short while. To prevent damage to servers/systems/coffee pots we shut down all electrical equipment at 9am (The time we were told the outage was due for). at approximately 10:45am we were informed the power work had been done, and that we would not be affected after all. So everything was re-powered back up.

When FireFox starts up on my desktop and re-opens the session I had before the shutdown I notice something. A development site I have been working on is now displaying some errors. “ARRRGGGHHH! what did I do? was I in the code when my machine switched off?” So I quickly check the Live site, and that has the same errors on it. “errr OK. we work on the dev site, test any changes and only if they shown to work do they get copied over to the live site”

Quick check of the file system shows files in both the live & dev areas with modification dates/times of 9:30 today. So they were played with during the Asylum was off-line, which means only one possible person with access. The freelance Phone developer who for his own protection we shall call PhoneBoy (PB). The following is a breakdown of the IM conversation that then occurred.

CN: “Hi, What you do to the site? Both Live & Dev are showing errors”

PB: “Nothing, not touched it, and not seeing errors here!”

CN: “You sure? try refreshing browser, I’m seeing the errors here on multiple machines”

PB: “No errors, and I checked IE and Firefox”

*Repeat the last few entries continually for about fifteen minutes*

CN: “Seriously every machine here is showing the errors, here look!” *iPhone photo & email*

PB: “No. still cant see any errors and I even checked with Linux. and I did not do anything, all I did was comment out some code to make the pages load faster”

CN: “You commented out code? what code.?”

PB: “See i removed what I did and the page loads slow now”

CN: “Yes but the errors gone. Please leave it alone. I’ll make the page load faster, you leave it be!”

I would not mind so much, only this happened every time he does anything. You have to fight for about half an hour to get him to admit he actually did anything. then another hour to find out exactly what he did, then ten minutes to actually fix the problem.

So as the post title says.

while (1)

$head->brickwall(“BANG”);

1 Comment

When Development Goes MAD

Apr16

by CodeNinja

Published on: April 16, 2010

Categories: Programing, Work

Tags: Programing, Work

Comments: 1 Comment

It started off as just another day in the Asylum.

Well not just any old day, but a Friday. The countdown to the weekend had been started. The coffee brewed. and all was well!

Then IT happened.

And not a cool interesting intergalactic space spider who likes to disguise herself as a friendly clown called Pennywise. No not a good IT at all.

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

No this IT was getting called into a phone meeting, something that to date has tended to go the same way every time. I go into the meeting, i sit about for an hour listening to the marketing guys discuss what name to give things, then I have a ten minute contribution about the development, then another hour of pointless marketing drivel. (I think I fell asleep at one point in the last meeting I went to)

This was luckily just a 15 minute quick meeting to discuss what is the next area of development to concentrate on. You see the site in question is getting a major overhaul and is currently in a situation where the development site can be made live. There is just some final testing going on. This testing will be finished today, so the site will be live by Monday.

Yet in the meeting, the Governor decided that we needed a development site for the development site. So that while the development site is being tested to go live, a development version of the development site can be worked on. Now, should any bugs be found in the development site they would have to be fixed there and the fix duplicated to the development, development site. while new work is done there. We now have three versions of a site, all for the sake of waiting a day.

I don’t know if any of you can see the sense in that, I know I can’t.

Ah well on with the multiple dev site creating.

1 Comment

I Love the smell of Estrogen In the Morning!

Mar26

by GothNinja

Published on: March 26, 2010

Categories: Office, Twitter

Tags: Rant, Social Networking, Work

Comments: 1 Comment

WOW.

Its all I can say, WOW.

I am experiencing a mixture of 60% Shock and 40% Anger, With a small sprinkling of Homicidal Tendencies on top.

I’d not seen the Governor all day in the Asylum. I’d heard slight grumblings coming from down the corridor but that was it. You see one of the Support Drones has not been doing his job fully, and it had been spotted while he was on holiday for a week. And everyone else had run around sorting it all out (Without anything really being said to the drone.) Hence Grumblings.

Towards the end of the day, The Governor storms into my Cell screaming “Wheres this website!” “I’ve given you a long rain of time for it, I need it now“. Most people would have opened with a hello, or the question asked in a normal voice, not at full rage decibels.

Now, I’ve not worked on a major web project since I left the Development department three years ago, So I’m rusty. I should also point out that the website needing the overhaul was written by someone learning PHP badly at the time. Each page needs about 25 separate files of code to work, and DIV tags are spread over several files. Its a mess, and the work being done must not change the look and feel of site. Oh, and after the site was finished it had a lot of work done to it by another person with limited PHP knowledge. I digress.

So I’m rusty, it’s not an easy site, still it’s not impossible to do. Apart from the fact that I get disturbed a dozen times a day on average to help the Support Drones with problems with the ISP part of the company, or The Windows server admin wanting help with something, Or the Linux admin is working on something and wants some scripts altering to help him out, or improve something. Or the development department is bust so needs help, Or customers need help, Or the Governor needs stuff looking up or doing.

After each interruption I have lost my place on the project, and cant remember what I was doing, So I have to delete the stuff I was typing and start again. This week for example I managed about four hours of usable work on this Project.

This on top of the slight Depression I feel by not actually having a defined role in the Asylum. The Linux SysAdmin looks after the Linux Servers (Theres a lot of them), ICT Engineer only does ICT work, Developer only does development, Support guys only do support. I do, Support, Development, windows sysadmin, linux sysadmin backup work, internal development, bt development, question answering/help for all other departments, out of hours emergency support when linux sysadmin unreachable, I cover every department when they have staff people on holiday.

And they wonder a web project takes a bit longer to do than a dedicated web developer would take?

I can never finish any project, I start one, get a week working on it if i am very very lucky, then I’m given another project, and another.

I really feel like I will snap at any point. And being screamed at as the opening question of “is the website finished yet” really does not help.

I will admit that after that incident I may have vented slightly. I posted a Tweet on my Private, None Work based, None Linked to Work Twitter account thus :-

Given a web project, constantly pulled off to do other urgent jobs and get screamed at asking why web project not finished.

Only The Governor follows my Twitter account, So I get another ballistic explosion, of how he’s under pressure and how do i think it makes him feel to see a posting like that? err. probably no where near as bad as being the person screamed at for no reason? And I can remove that tweet or get sacked.

So I have decided to separate my personal “Social Networking” with my Current Employment. Since I feel I should be allowed to vent whatever I want on line as long as no names, or company names are mentioned. It’s a hell of a lot healthier for everyone for anonymous on line venting, than holding the anger in, snapping, and going on a psychopathic killing spree in the office with a philips headed screwdriver.

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