by GothNinja | Sep 17, 2009 | Travel, Work
I am sure I have done something to offend the God of Roadworks, there is no other explanation for what has been going on for the last few weeks. Let me explain.
My commute to work has been extended for a while now due to multiple roadworks and a diversion. I’ve just managed to time my trips to get me to the office in time when they decide to close a major duel carriageway that I use one my trip.
No problems. I’ll bypass that with a country road I know.
Well that worked for two days then they decided to divert all the traffic from the very busy duel carriageway down the small country road i use. making it basically a car park for hours on end.
Ok. some problems but I can drive over the mountains on a single lane country road that no one uses.
Well that one worked for one day. The following day and there are now three sets of road works on that country road. What have a done? What?
Was it that time I moved all the cones in Whitby? I was just trying to save their lives, they were standing in the middle of the road, they could have been run over? What was it? please, I cant go one….
by CodeNinja | Aug 4, 2009 | Work
Will the last inmate released please turn off the lights & electric shock chair!
The inmates at the Insane Asylum have just returned to their cells from a meeting with the Governor. At this meeting it was mentioned that due to the current world recession, state of the UK’s economy, and the lack of incoming money, the Insane Asylum may have to drop to a 4 day week. With the inmates being let out on the 5Th day.
There are a couple of obvious problems with this plan, like the fact we are a service provider whose customers get upset when they cant get support at the weekend (let alone a three day wait).
The main problem I foresee is a catch 24 spiral to death problem. Let me explain.
To cope with the 1/5th cut in salary most the inmates will have to take a second job, (Or work on their own!). “Whats the problem with that?” I hear you ask. Well given the fact the Inmates are IT bods, then any second job, or cash in hand job will be in the IT industry. SO jobs we hear of that would normally be sent to the Asylum to be done may end up being done by ourselves. Then you have the fact that the area we work in, any second job would end up being for competitors or customers direct.
So the more work we do to make up the lost wage will cut down on jobs sent to the asylum, so it makes less money, meaning a 3 day week? so we have to do more work to cover loss wage, meaning even less for company, 2 day week, spiral… spiral…….
For example. take our development department. Which of our customers will pay say £60/hour for dev work when they can have same guy, using same machine do it on his second job rate of £20/hour?
so, as stated at the start of this post…. Will the last inmate released please turn off the lights
CN
by CodeNinja | Jul 10, 2009 | Programing
I read a book many, many years ago. It was one of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, Either second foundation, or foundation and earth, I forget which. (I did read them all in order straight after each other, so the actual books blurred into one story). Anyway, In this book the empire wants to find the second foundation people who they suspect of controlling everyone’s choices. So they send out one of their guys in a state of the art spaceship to go find them. The ship had a thinking brain as its computer, and what the pilot did not know was they suspected him of being one of the advanced second foundation people, and had given him a broken ship so if he was able to fly it, then it proved he was one of the people with advanced minds…
Some days I feel like that pilot. I swear they are testing me! Let me explain. I was given a new project, out the blue, with a deadline of a week. And I mean deadline since the Governor was setting it up at the customers site in exactly one week. (OK. that’s partial hindsight as I was only told the deadline at hometime the day before he was due to install the system!).
So, Whats the project?
Right, What is needed is to integrate the LDAP address book on grandstream phones with the LDAP address book on a kerio email server. Simple!
Do I have the necessary tools?
Like what?
Do I have a Grandstream phone with LDAP capability?
Err no, you don’t. There is a fellow inmate at the other side of the building who has one. You could do a bit of code work, walk over to his desk, test the phone, walk back to your room and check the code? Oh, I should mention He is one of the phone support guys, so he is on the phone all day long, so you may have to wait until he’s not using the phone before getting a quick test!
Right, Do I have an account on a kerio server so i have an address book i can use for testing?
Don’t be silly, Kerio accounts cost money, so no account to test with!
Do I at least have documention on the phones? details on how it talks to the LDAP server? format it needs responses in.
No documentation at all, No information, The only person with that knowledge is not working on this project so You’ll just have to find it all out yourself. Oh, you do have the web address of a script someone else has written. Did I mention that?
No you did not. So I have an example script that does what I need to do, so I can work from that? That’s not too bad!
Oh. You have a link to a script. I should say it does not work on any account based LDAP server so falls over if you try using it on a Keri server. And even if it did work, it does not do what you need it to do since its a script to make an xml address book to import into older phones, so a)does not work, b)Not what you want.
So. Just to summarise. I have been asked to develop a system where a phone talks directly to a kerio email server and auto populates the address book? and has the search functionability built in? I have no phone to test with or see how it works, No account with an address book, No documentation, And only a broken script that doesn’t even do what I need? Great!!!!
You forgot less than a week to finish it and get it tested!
I’ll just go out back and shoot myself now……………
CN
by CodeNinja | May 21, 2009 | Office
It seems the Insane Asylum is haunted, or we have the worlds weirdest burglars.
Last night as i made my bid for freedom I left Gawain my trusty work desktop recompiling its kernel, and doing other re-compiles of parts of its OS. I know it was doing this as the screens were scrolling with code as i switched off the monitors by the switches on their front. I then left the Asylum at the same time as DemonP, which left two inmates left in the building who left not long after us. Now they set the alarm and locked up the building. All was well!
This morning I entered my padded cell, hit the buttons on Gawains monitors to check my social networking sites before work began… NOTHING… I press them again, and they remain blank. “Ok” I thought “My machine crashed over night” So i hit the power button on Gawain… NOTHING… Hummm? Power cut? No, everything else is working. So I investigate more and discover the extension lead that powers my desktop, monitors, switch, VoIP phone had been switched off at the wall. Now the socket is semi behind my desk, and blocked by the wedged open door, in other words “Impossible to be accidentally switched off” besides it was still on when I left the night before.
“ARSE! That’s a tad annoying” says I. Ok the exact words I may have used were not quite that polite. Right, switch the socket back on, power up the machine only for it to sit at the maintenance prompt due to disk errors. Get them fixed, and have to kick off the re-compiles to repair the damage caused by a unscheduled power off mid compiling. So far I have spent all day trying to get my desktop back up and running.
SO I checked with the two guys who left the Asylum after me last night, both deny switching off the power and say they would never do such a thing as they know the problems it would cause. (I should take a second to explain here that one is a sheep following the new-age hippie flock at the minute and keeps moaning we should switch off all electrical devices at night to save the planet). So no one turned it off, which leaves us the following options.
1) Ghosts: The Asylum is haunted with an odd poltergeist who’s only presence to date is switching one power switch to the off position.
2) Burglars: Last night some burglars picked the locks on the main building, then picked the secondary locks on the secure part of the Asylum, disabled the alarms and gained entry. They then did not steal any of the expensive equipment that’s all over the place, but just switched off one power socket before resetting the alarms, re locking the doors, and leaving.
CN
by CodeNinja | May 15, 2009 | NetIM, Programing
Quick update Time.
Thanks to the speed of roll out using Subversion version control, my single test bot is now a botnet of 6 test bots. “Well if you are going to test something, test it BIG style”
And since I was in one of Them moods, I now have the bots giving error messages in Haiku, with a built in BOFH excuse generator.
I have also been nice and added some more help files, and improved logging (for debugging) and some stability to the code.
Now I just need the users to suggest some more useful commands they would like.
OK… While that’s on hold/in testing, Whats my next project!
CN
by CodeNinja | May 13, 2009 | Work
Now a lot of people think that governments, or legal types thrive in pointless red tape, and the rest of us mere mortals are driven insane with the pointlessness of their tasks. The truth is somewhat different, Busby* could teach these lovers of the red tape a thing or two about Sisyphean tasks.
Allow me to give you an example, So grab yourself a coffee, make yourself comfortable, “you Are?” Right, we’ll begin…
You may recall I was developing some software to integrate into the Busby Directory enquirers system, allowing My company to place entries in UK phone books. Well this system is now fully up and running and we are sending hundreds of details at them in an very intricate string of text. I’ll give an example, this would be one line from a file containing several hundred entries per go :-
1Y 00049732100730039420556031 NY M20090216 Jo Blogs company LL27 3Y 08000830031 FAX S1 1 M EBF B [But with about 50 random spaces between the words]
Now I upload this file directly into the Busby Server, which then checks the data to make sure its all correct. Then as far as we can tell, Busby then prints out the datat on individual pages (One per number) and gives them to actual Humans to type into a form on a computer screen. (So from digital data, to printed data, to digital data).
Occasional the person at Busby typing in the data makes a mistake, mostly on the ID number which is a long string of gibberish, and they miss off a character, or hit another one by mistake. So we have a Busby employee staring at their computer screen looking at a bit of data that they have typed in wrong, so what do they do?
They don’t just correct their mistake and get it all working right away. Nope, what they do is this. They fill in another form which contains all the information we sent them, and then a section at the bottom informing us what they typed in wrong, and where they typed it in wrong. They send this form to us, so we can change our system to match their system, so we can then re-put the correct data into our system, flag it as an update to existing data, and resend it to Busby where its printed out and given to the human drones who will then correct the mistake on their system.
Wasting paper, many hours of peoples times, costing money for paper, postage, stamps, wages, and the outcome probably is the person who typo’d the data correcting it.
* For new readers, this blog tries to hide the names of the guilty where appropriate to protect them from shame, and the authors from legal action.
CN
