“So how do you feel about working in a male dominated industry?”

‘Who said you were dominating me?

- overheard at a recent lunch

In the mid 1990’s during the time we were actively encouraging women in IT:

“Where’s Sharon?”

‘She’s at the Bimbos in Business Luncheon”.

I think this was one of the Telstra Business Women’s Awards luncheons.

Amazing how things have changed with women in IT.  There’s still not many of them, but they get better treatment.

Microsoft have a special website set up.

as I said to a co-worker, applies.

The problem?

We were running out of network drive space.  The network drive, where our 2000 customers store their roaming profiles, had 80MB left.  Roaming profiles, very simply put, are copies of your “My Documents” and “Desktop”, which “roam” to every computer you logon to.  To do this, they need to be stored on the network.

Co-worker: “I think we have a lot of unused user accounts taking up space”
Me: ‘Wouldn’t think so.  More like porn and music files.”

Some time later, “There was one guy with 7GB of movies on his desktop.”

There is nothing new under the sun.

Back in the 1990’s a particular Power & Water company would run out of home drive space.

The workers knew they were doing the wrong thing.  So did their management.  Management were afraid of the workers going out on strike so they wouldn’t take action.

The IT Admins took the easy way out to solve the problem, just delete the porn!

It’s not as if the workers would actually complain.

“Not IT, no sir-ee.  I shuffle papers for a living.  See the shine in the seat of my trousers?  Don’t leave my chair all day”

That’s the story most people get when I’m asked.

Only IT Workers and Doctors get the truth when they ask.

If you’re a doctor, and I’ve seen a few of them recently, you’ll get the truth.  Doctors understand.

Doctors understand that, as soon as you tell people that you work as a doctor, the “oh I’ve got this strange lump, could it be cancerous?” question soon follows.  Readers are invited to suggest what the computer version of it is.  The question I most often get is “My computer is slow, why?”.  Sometimes followed by, “What sort of computer should I buy?”

Doctors get told: I assist IT support staff with problems they cannot solve, and customers when they complain loudly enough to management about their issues.

The IT Worker version goes something like this:
I work in SOE development, and also provide 3rd level support for numpty users, and technicians, who ask questions like “Dude, you people didn’t test the printer properly! It doesn’t print colour”.  I also provide free support for numpty vendors, who’s idea of saving money is to outsource driver creation to “Gumpta of the Calcutta Black Hole”.  Don’t laugh, it happens.

Confessions can be good.  Here are mine around backup mistakes I’ve made.

1. Copy “new” backup disk over the “old” backup disk.
   The “new” disk was blank!
   I (almost) “lost” 5 years of irreplaceable photos.  Fortunately I found an “old old” backup.
   What it cost me: 100+ photos / 4 hours.
2. Production server: Disk to Disk backup.
   Setup a nightly backup of SOELAB1 server, so it copies all the changes to SOELAB1BUP.
   Some time later, try and recover a file from SOELAB1BUP.  It’s not there.
   Ask co-worker:
   ”Oh, we were running out of backup space so we don’t backup ISO files anymore.”
   What it cost me: Operating system install disk needed for fault investigation.
3. CTOS FAQ website.
   GeoCities was shutting down on 26th October 2009.  I thought it was the 31st October.
   What it cost me: complete website and Google Pagerank of 1 for CTOS.  3 files gone forever & 15 hours recovery time (had a 10 year backup).
4. Forget to backup the backup file.
   Make a backup of the Wisefaq web server.
   Download it, and store the backup locally.
   Yes, I forgot to download the backup.  I did several WordPress upgrades before I realised.
   What it cost me: nothing (phew!).  Potential lost, everything.

If you can learn something from my mistakes, more power to you.

  Or how tape backups have failed my customers over the years, and wasted our collective time, because of customer stupidity.

1. Melted tapes
   The school which stored their entire backup tape set next to their server.
   One office fire later, “No, we can’t restore your melted tapes.”
2. Old tapes
   The schools which refused to buy replacement tapes, because they were too expensive.
   And wondered why, after a server hard disk failure, we couldn’t restore data off their 4 year old tapes.
3. Dirty tape drives
   The office locations which never ever cleaned their tape drives.
   The tape drives would gum up, and make the tapes un-readable.
4. “Not my job”
   It wasn’t a difficult task to change the backup tapes every day, but it was always “someone else” responsible for it.
   Net result: continual backup failure, and lost data.
5. Slowing down with age.
   Tape drives, being mechanical devices, slow down with age.  So you get Tape Drive A (the old drive) creating tapes that Tape Drive B (the new drive) couldn’t read.

So what did we do to encourage the customers to be concerned about their backups?

Melted tapes:
Showed them what a fire-damaged tape looked like.  “Oh!” was the most common comment.

Old tapes:
Try and grab a copy of the “critical” data when we could, via over-the-network backups.

Dirty tape drives:
Cleaned the drive when we visited once a year.  Little else we could do. 

“Not my job”:
Nothing we could do about that.  A hardware failure would often change the attitude at the customer site.

Slowing down with age:
We’d only see the effect of this after a hard disk crash, where we try and read the tape, and fail.
Often involved paying a service technician *lots* of money to adjust a drive for us, so it could read the data.

With Geocities shutting down, I had to move the CTOS Faq site.

CTOS, my friends, was an kick-ass operating system which was released in 1979, and was supported for 20 years.

It was a big thing in the business community.  But Unisys stopped supporting CTOS at the end of 1999.  I documented those reasons why Unisys did, in: Frank Brandenberg, the man who killed the CTOS operating system.

Now transferring off Geocities was fairly easy, as I still had my backups from ten years ago.  I lost very little data.  And for the missing data, there is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

But there lies the problem.  The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine modify the html links in their pages to redirect to their archive copies (ie. http://web.archive.org/web/20021211071704/… ).  Which means extra work in stripping those links out, carefully.

It’s been done, and you are invited to view a website design from 1999, the CTOS FAQ.

Laser printers use two types of fusion to fuse toner to paper, hot fusion, and cold fusion.

I’ve only seen cold fusion used once.  StorageTek used to make mainframe printers with cold fusion technology.  You’d take paper off the printer, and it would be icy cold.  Cold enough to burn you.

On the other hand, the first commercial laser printer, the IBM 3800 used hot fusion.

I had the privilege of working with one of those beasts.  The things I remember about them:

• Speed.  they were capable of printing 20,040 lines per minute.
• Keeping them filled with paper was a constant chore.
  IBM claimed they could produce 1.7 miles of paper every hour.  I’d believe it.
• Toner.  They used 5 litre (guessimate) bins, and we’d go though 1.5 bins on an eight hour shift.
  In comparison, the StorageTek had a toner hopper.  You’d pour toner into the hopper, and then watch the cloud of toner form above you.
• At the backup site, the IBM 3800 generated so much heat, it would trigger the fire alarm.
  The root cause?  Don’t put a big printer in a small room.
  The fix?  We’d leave the computer room doors open when we ran it.

Back when I was a spotty faced bank teller, banks in Australia had stopped using cash dye bombs.

“Spoil the prize, and you spoil the crime.” was the theory with dye bombs.

How cash dye bombs were used was fairly simple:

• bank robber demands the cash from the bank teller.
• teller scoops cash out of cash draw, along with dye bomb, which has automatically armed; into the robbers bag.
• robber runs out the door with the loot.
• dye bomb explodes in robbers bag, denying the robber the cash prize.

That’s what happened in a robbery.

But during a normal day, bank tellers were accidently arming the dye bombs.  Which would then explode, covering the bank’s cash, and possibly the teller, in indelible dye.

This would leave the cash unusable.

The bank’s would then ship the “faulty” bank notes along to the Reserve Bank of Australia for replacement.

The Reserve Bank eventually had enough of these accidental discharges, and said “Enough.  We’ll not accept dye covered notes for replacement.”

Which killed the use of dye bombs.

Proving everything goes in circles, I was reading the Reserve Bank’s Annual Report 2009, and see that the Reserve Bank is once-again accepted dye-stained notes.

What next?  The re-arming of Bank Managers?

There is an line of thinking, which quite a few companies follow, that you can’t have games on a company PC because “employees may play games all day”.(1)

I’m sure that the management teams who think these things up, have never heard of people taking breaks.  Or, in one decision I was involved in, have ever worked a graveyard shift.

When the clock ticks past 3:00am, your whole body just wants to shut down, and fall asleep.  Heck, if you’re lucky, all your systems are alarmed, and you might get that sleep.  If you’re not lucky, you need something to keep you awake, such a PC game.(2)

(more…)

Imagine this, a scene in a Government Cyclone Shelter.

“We can’t contact the Emergency Disaster Centre on the radio”

This particular shelter was built to withstand a Category 5+ cyclone.

And it looked it.  “Built like brick *cough* outhouse.”

It was as if the designers were given the brief “Make it ugly”.

So they did.

Did you know that radio waves have a hard time going though concrete?  If you do, then you know more that the people who put the radio antenna in.

They put the antenna on the side of the building to protect it from Cyclone debris. The Emergency Disaster Centre was located 5kms away, on the other side of the Government Cyclone Shelter.  The fix was to move the antenna to the correct side of the building.

Cost?  $20,000 I heard.  They had to re-run all the radio cabling.