Thoughts on IT...
Dan Birchall
> ... and by IT I mean Information Technology - us - not that over-hyped
> scooter or whatever.
Right-o. Thus, expanding all instances of "IT" (and to be fair, "it")
in the remaining text, we arrive at:
> I just paused to think about what I do for a moment and information
> technology sort of fascinates me. What I do is think for a living.
> I make plans and commitments based on my projection of HOW LONG
> INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY WILL TAKE ME TO THINK OF SOMETHING. I find
> that intriguing. I have no idea how I am going to solve a given
> problem - if I did, information technology wouldn't be a problem -
> but I expect that information technology will take me two hours of
> thought and experimenting, for instance, and I'm often right.
>
> Does anyone else find this sort of interesting? Or is information
> technology just me?
>
> Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go figure out why this piece of shit
> financial package is crashing... I estimate information technology
> will take me six years.
It's a little lacking in the area of clarity, but seems to provide
a bit of a glimpse into Chris's innermost hopes and fears.
-Dan
--
My addresses expire... take out the hex stamp if your reply bounces
Ralph Wade Phillips
"Dan Birchall" <djb0x7...@scream.org> wrote in message
news:slrn97mlg7.jjf...@v2000.scream.org...
> Chris Rovers <cdrove...@ennui.biomass.to> wrote:
> > ... and by IT I mean Information Technology - us - not that over-hyped
> > scooter or whatever.
>
> Right-o. Thus, expanding all instances of "IT" (and to be fair, "it")
> in the remaining text, we arrive at:
>
> >
> > Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go figure out why this piece of shit
I happened to notice this -----------------------------------^^
and wondered if it should be expanded:
"Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go figure out why this piece of
shinformation technology ... "
Almost makes more sense that way, donnit?
RwP
Matthew Crosby
Chris Rovers <cdrove...@ennui.biomass.to> wrote:
>... and by IT I mean Information Technology - us - not that over-hyped
>scooter or whatever.
You know, a book is Information Technology. So is a pen and piece of paper, a
babylonian clay tablet, a telephone, and knowing how to speak. Yet for some
reason, buying pens at my current workplace is not handled by IT. Go figure!
--
Matthew Crosby cro...@cs.colorado.edu
Disclaimer: It was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
Chris King
<cro...@nagina.cs.colorado.edu> writes
>You know, a book is Information Technology. So is a pen and piece of paper, a
>babylonian clay tablet, a telephone, and knowing how to speak. Yet for some
>reason, buying pens at my current workplace is not handled by IT. Go figure!
Good job, really - would you put up with leaky pens, only to be told
they'll fix the leaks at the next upgrade ?
Chris
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.co.uk
http://www.csking.co.uk
Nick Avenell
>> Chris Rovers <cdrove...@ennui.biomass.to> wrote:
>> >
>> > Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go figure out why this piece of shit
>
> I happened to notice this -----------------------------------^^
>
> and wondered if it should be expanded:
>
> "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go figure out why this piece of
>shinformation technology ... "
>
> Almost makes more sense that way, donnit?
Nah, Shinformation Technology is the box that you trip over when it's
dark...
obASR: Lantastic.
I refuse to say any more.
--
Nick Avenell
Ralph Wade Phillips
Nick Avenell <aqua...@aquarionics.com> wrote in message
news:ciso7t4econ9pud3m...@4ax.com...
>
> obASR: Lantastic.
>
> I refuse to say any more.
LANtastic for the Macintosh.
RwP
Charlie Watts
Ewww.
Pathworks for the same.
--
"The door's ajar", said Tom openly.
Charlie Watts
cew...@frontier.net
Earl Grey
> obASR: Lantastic.
I remember, back in the days of v5 (IIRC) that I told some of their staff
that TCP/IP was the wave of the future, and they should make their stuff
use that as the foundational layer.
They came out with an over-priced add-on that ... well, nobody was
impressed. I kinda figured that they had sunk below the radar some time
ago. I remember when they SAID that they had the COMMIT directive
implimented right, but they were wrong. I think that was version 3.03.
Much water has flowed under that particular bridge.
--
http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/copyleft/t039.pl
http://kapu.net/~bofh/
Chris King
<cew...@animas.frontier.net> writes
>Ewww.
>
>Pathworks for the same.
At least they've had the decency to put a stake through its heart and
bury that monstrosity nice and deep.
James Cort
<cro...@nagina.cs.colorado.edu> writes
>Chris Rovers <cdrove...@ennui.biomass.to> wrote:
>>... and by IT I mean Information Technology - us - not that over-hyped
>>scooter or whatever.
>
>You know, a book is Information Technology. So is a pen and piece of paper, a
>babylonian clay tablet, a telephone, and knowing how to speak. Yet for some
>reason, buying pens at my current workplace is not handled by IT. Go figure!
Agreed. They don't teach the girls at my orkplace about using filing
cabinets, yet they make a big thing about "teaching IT".
I don't really like the term anyway - mainly because it's so vague it
can be used to foist anything upon someone (usually me).
--
"If one man calls me an ass, I can ignore him. If twenty people call me an ass,
I'd better start looking for a saddle."
- Eric the Read in the Monastery
Ralph Wade Phillips
"Chris Rovers" <cdrove...@ennui.biomass.to> wrote in message
news:95hsts$5l2$1...@ennui.biomass.to...
> In article <95hgka$93h$1...@peabody.colorado.edu>,
> Matthew Crosby <cro...@nagina.cs.colorado.edu> wrote:
> >
> >You know, a book is Information Technology. So is a pen and piece of
paper, a
> >babylonian clay tablet, a telephone, and knowing how to speak. Yet for
some
> >reason, buying pens at my current workplace is not handled by IT. Go
figure!
>
> At my orkplace, that's handled by faculities. And believe me, those of us
> in the titular IT department work so closely with the faculities person
that
> in a lot of ways she is part of our department. So, in a way, I do pens
> to. Certainly, I can't put a limit on what I do - they seem to keep
finding
> new things for me to be responsible for.
OTOH, at one customer's site where I consult as "Sysadmin and Cable
Munky{1} By The Hour" I fall under the facilities manager. And, according
to corporate, he's the one in charge of computer security ...
But all of the being IT makes sense. That explains why the lusers
have such trouble comprehending "Look, it's not computer literacy to read an
error message. It's called ENGLISH literacy. Just take a pen and a piece
of paper and make scratches that look like the dots on the screen ... "{2}
RwP
{1} Misteak intentional ...
{2} This said after I got one of THOSE calls - "It's giving me that error."
"What error?" "You know, that error I get." "What error would THAT be?"
"I don't know, I don't know much about computers." "Did you write the error
message down?" "I'm not very computer literate." <cue phrase above> For
some reason, he got miffed.
Rico Jansen
>> obASR: Lantastic.
>>
>> I refuse to say any more.
>
> LANtastic for the Macintosh.
Lantastic with 200 clients on 1 coax segment
(luckily that horror ended 5 years ago.
--
Rico Jansen (ri...@vpro.nl)
"You call it untidy, I call it LRU ordered" -- Daniel Barlow
Jasper Janssen
>Lantastic with 200 clients on 1 coax segment
>(luckily that horror ended 5 years ago.
Sounds like fun. At least if you still had it, a couple hundred bucks
on ebay would buy you around 40 ports worth of thinnet repeater.
Should make cablefailure diagnostics slightly easier...
Jasper
Chris Klein
>me. What I do is think for a living. I make plans and commitments based
Did you pause and think how much company resources (what you produce) you
just used to pause and think?
And did you pause and think how much company resources you just used to
pause and think?
And did you pause and think how much company resources you just used to
pause and think?
I see you're going to have to think about that.
--C
Mike Andrews
: On Sun, 4 Feb 2001 04:23:19 GMT, Ralph Wade Phillips <ral...@techie.com> wrote:
:>> obASR: Lantastic.
:>>
:>> I refuse to say any more.
:>
:> LANtastic for the Macintosh.
: Lantastic with 200 clients on 1 coax segment
: (luckily that horror ended 5 years ago.
I got to experience something like that about ten years back,
which IS NOT LONG ENOUGH AGO! The collision rate on this 1-seg
network rarely got below 95%, things were slower than iridium
flowing at STP, and $VENDOR told the manglement types that more
horsepower was needed!
And nobody would believe the sniffer except me and my troops.
--
Another of my pet peeves is the use of random special characters in names,
e.g. SQL*Forms. I pronounce that one "squeal splat forms" - sort of sounds
like roadkill, doesn't it?
-- Charlie Gibbs
Mark W. Schumann
Bah. LANtastic for TCP/IP. (Which really meant "TCP/IP That Sorta
Runs Over Lantastic." Stupid name, really.)
This was the POS that would not work if you assigned it a Class B
address, and it was "supported" by techs who didn't know what you
meant by "Class B" EVEN AFTER YOU ESCALATED THE PROBLEM.
Double Bah.
Logan Shaw
Mark W. Schumann <cat...@apk.net> wrote:
>This was the POS that would not work if you assigned it a Class B
>address, and it was "supported" by techs who didn't know what you
>meant by "Class B" EVEN AFTER YOU ESCALATED THE PROBLEM.
IIRC, there was a version of MacTCP that didn't allow you to use a
subnet mask with class B networks. In my case, I had to type in
255.255.255.128, and then I'd click "OK" and it would reset it to
255.255.0.0. Right... I want to have about 65000 Macintoshes all on
the same Ethernet!
And since I'm talking about Macs, I can't leave out QuickMail.
I'll just point out one thing from each of two categories. I'm sure
there are a variety of bugs I could recover from that portion of my
memory with psychotherapy, but I'll limit myself to two.
From the client category, I nominate the fact that they once
released a version with a dialog box that was impossible to close.
You were supposed to click "OK" or something to acknowledge[1] a
message of some sort, only the brilliant folks had forgotten to put
actually include the "OK" button or it was greyed out or something.
At any rate, since the Mac doesn't allow you to do anything (in that
application or any others) until that window's closed, I think the
best you could do was a force-quit of the application.
On the server side, I nominate the fact that the Internet mail
gateway had a single global setting for the format of attachments in
outgoing messages. You could either set it to MIME (AppleDouble) or
to Binhex. The fact that this was not configurable on a
message-by-message or at least account-by-account basis was a little
silly, but it pales in comparison to the other problem, which is
that the same Internet mail gateway would only accept mail in
whatever format it was set to generate it in. So much for "be
liberal in what you accept and conservative in which you generate".
This software worked on the principle of xenophobia. The part that
*particularly* amusing to me was that they obviously had a
fully-working MIME decoder and a full-working Binhex decoder in the
product, but they could not figure out how to apply them both to the
same message and use whichever one actually worked.
O.K., I promised myself I'd quit at two, but I just remembered
one more. That particular Internet mail gateway was also fully
single-threaded. This means that if you have 100 messages in the
queue, and you try to deliver to a remote system that becomes
non-responsive during the TCP session, the server wouldn't even
try to deliver those 100 until either the remote system responds
or the TCP connection times out. Some of the bigger QuickMail
servers in the organization were known to have a backlog of days;
sometimes they would barely catch up on the weekend.
[1] That originally came out "acknolwedge".
Graham Reed
> Good job, really - would you put up with leaky pens, only to be told
> they'll fix the leaks at the next upgrade ?
And when you get the new pens:
- They will still leak
- They will write in a different colour
- The ink will rub off when you handle the page
- And they won't work on adhesive labels anymore
If you call PenSupport about it, they will tell you the bug wasn't
important enough to fix and their users demanded the other changes.
For the next revision, the pens will only work with paper provided by
the vendor. This time, they'll tell you it was always like that, it
was an error that they worked with any other kinds of paper.
Of course, they will still leak.
And I'm not thinking all this up just because our ClearCase
[no]support contract is coming due for renewal soon.
Graham Reed
> And nobody would believe the sniffer except me and my troops.
Why are managers so taken with truly stupid network topologies that it
is almost impossible to get an upgrade in place?
New SparcCentre 10000 for testing? Sure!
New seriously overspecced 220R for builds? Sure!
New PIII PCs for everyone!
You need 10GB disk? How about an 80GB array and a dedicated server
instead? Heck, we'll get 160GB, you might need room to grow!
100 Mb/s network upgrade? 80% of the machines already have 10/100
cards? The building is already 100 mbps-compatible Cat5 cable? None
of the runs are too long? So it's really just getting some nice
switches and plugging 'em in?
Well, you'd better analyze this and come up with a detailed
cost/benefit report and explain why the current 10 mbps hubs aren't
good enough. And don't say that everything is on central file
servers, including home directories, and that absolutely every single
file access requires LAN traffic; you need to give us a REALLY GOOD
REASON.
Fortunately, a little traffic sniffing on what ClearCase does to an
unsuspecting LAN did the trick. (ClearCase MUST succeed, or Managers
will be Embarrassed. That Embarrassment will be taken out on my
department.)
ObWhoops: Got a nice shiny new Plextor CD writer, 12x with BURN-Proof
and all the good stuff. The idea is to stop having to copy the image
files to the station with the burner attached to it. Two things I
should have paid more attention to: (1) the 200 CD blanks we just
bought are only good to 8x speed and (2) how does 12x2x16x44100
compare with a 10 megabit LAN? I can tell you BURN-Proof works... but
that was a more drastic test than I really wanted. No-one needs to
guess which box doesn't have a 10/100 card....
Matt McLeod
Graham Reed <gr...@pobox.com> wrote:
>And I'm not thinking all this up just because our ClearCase
>[no]support contract is coming due for renewal soon.
I had the interesting experience of having them go from
"no, that couldn't possibly be a problem with ClearCase,
talk to Sun" through to "er, we've escalated this to
engineering, it could be what you thought it was, but
were you using clearmake at the time by any chance?".
There hasn't been a fix yet, but my suspicion is that
the vob scrubber did Weird Shit to the filesystem when
there were objects in views open-but-idle for longer
than the expiry the scrubber was using. Lots of lovely
unreferenced inoes all over the filesystem...
I can see why they might not have come across this before.
I mean, what sort of idiot keeps stuff open for three weeks
while they go on leave?
--
"As a Mistral employee once told me,
You're only as good as your fans."
-- TISM