Worst case scenario
We’re all for forward planning, none of that running out of IP addresses or 640K limits (ask your parents) in the world of Backbytes. So we send out kudos to Business Objects for expecting a really, really big number of problems.
‘I recently submitted a problem to Business Objects after it created an account for me that didn’t let me log on,’ says Trevor Lucy, at GTS Business Objects Development & Support. ‘I received the following as a subject line: “CS0000000074638 Welcome to the Business Objects Electronic Software Delivery”. Assuming the first part is a reference, just how many enquiries are they anticipating?’
We‘d also like to know what happens to the 10000000000000th enquiry.
On a web site far, far away
Just when we think we’ve found the biggest waste of time possible, our old mate Jon Szwer, at Gordon & Gotch, sends us: www.asciimation.co.nz.
We have no problem recommending it to you because we know it represents two of the most fascinating things in the world for any Backbytes reader: Star Wars and ASCII.
It’s the original film rendered by hand in ASCII, and even after watching for 90 seconds we can see that it’s better than episodes one, two and three, and a lot cheaper. Tell us if you agree Obi Wan, you’re our only hope.
I don’t like Mondays, so heaven knows I’m miserable now
If you’re reading this, we trust you made it past 23 January – last Monday – which according to the most reprehensible pseudoscience, sorry, according to psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall at Cardiff University, is the most depressing day of the year.
We’d like to conduct our own little survey on this subject, so please tell us whether Monday was particularly depressing for you compared with Tuesday and Wednesday.
If you need a prompt to get you started, he bases his calculation on: ‘Miserable weather, mounting debt, the length of time since Christmas, failed New Year’s resolutions, a lack of motivation and a need to take action’.
Of course, it’s a bit early to make the decision, with less than a month gone as a comparison. We’re nominating the day that England get knocked out of the World Cup.
The trick is not to click
It’s a rollover week at Backbytes. Not because we’re doubling the size of our pitiful prizes, but because reader Gary Thomas, at IPS Resourcing Solutions, ‘came across an interesting web site while developing some Flash coding’.
It’s www.dontclick.it. The entire site is built using rollovers so that you don’t have to click your mouse to use it, and teases us with our desperate need to select the menus by clicking on them.
Try it, and tell us if you manage not to click. It’s interesting, fascinating and incredibly impractical, sort of like a web site turducken. And we’re sure that some of you will be able to tell us that this isn’t the first time someone has tried to do away with that agent of repression, the mouse click.
US foreign policy made simple
John ‘JP’ Gilliver, at BAE Systems, has some extremely helpful news for the US Senate after we passed on details of one of its foreign appropriations committee web pages, which last week was a mess of code. The news will be disappointing for conspiracy theorists everywhere.
‘Although the page which you mentioned still does indeed show a debug dump, I couldn’t help noticing the “foreig” on the end of the web address,’ he says.
And that’s the trick: there’s a missing letter on the URL. A couple of you add that you can do the same trick on every other page on the site, so it’s a simple error handling problem. ‘Sure enough, if you just add an “n” to the end, all is well,’ John adds.
If only it was as easy to sort out US foreign policy.
Throw the book at ‘em
We’re still looking through our bookshelves for the book we saw last year which had two full pages of dedications, finishing with one to Microsoft for creating such an excellent product in Microsoft Word, but, as we feared that the product couldn’t actually write the book for the bloke, we threw it out.
But the best submission for our cringeworthy book dedications this week comes from the opening pages of Teach Yourself C# .Net in 24 Hours, by James Foxall, as bought and read – hopefully in one day – by Kieran Wareing, at Norsk Data: ‘To me, cause I wrote the darn thing.’ Which manages to be egotistical and illiterate at the same time. Also, we didn’t ask him to write it, so why is he congratulating himself on our behalf?
Gone to the togs
Reader Peter Lord – who presumably has comfortable and practical shoes – has a helpful suggestion on the concept of duvet days, which none of you are owning up to being allowed by your employers in case we make fun of you.
To recap, duvet days are a limited annual number of unscheduled leave days that you can take on a whim, sort of like a sickie when you are not sick – not that any of you would know anything about that. Anyway, Peter’s suggestion is to create a sort of duvet budget.
‘If the new approach to time off is to be counted in duvet days, can you tell me if there will be scales of these, defined by the tog rating of each day? If a tog value of 32 is allowed throughout the year, can one take a day valued at tog 8 during quiet times, whereas, if you want a day off at busy times, it would be rated tog 16?’
This may also lead to tog trading, tog-neutral relationships between business partners, and runaway togflation.
‘Happily, I have awarded myself unlimited tog-valued duvet days by retiring in 2001,’ says Peter, thus meaning his duvet budget is unlimited, lucky so-and-so.
Freedom of error information
Quick! Before they fix it. Click here to find out about the US Senate Subcommittee on Appropriations. Or rather, to see a pretty spectacular gobbledegook page of SQL errors.
‘That’s the output from a tag called cfdump used for debugging. So, somebody knew there was a problem and was in the process of fixing it when, presumably, 3.30pm rolled around and it was time for him to go home for the day,’ says one messageboard comment.
Whatever it is, here’s one piece of open government that might as well have stayed shut, because at the time of writing no one seems to have noticed for six days. (Thanks: Alastair Wall.)
A bird-brained notion
More on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s megaturducken – one of those multiple bird things stuffed inside each other, though we hasten to point out that they are dead when this happens.
‘His effort was, in fact, a 12-bird roast, which included a turkey, duck, goose, chicken, guinea fowl, pheasant, partridge, pigeon, woodcock and more,’ says David Cartwright at Korana, pointing us to a webchat in which Hugh discusses this feat at Channel 4’s web site.
‘It looked pretty hideous, actually,’ says David. ‘If nothing else, it was a miracle of salmonella avoidance.’ At which point, we decided to visit Steve, Don’t Eat It for something a little more appetising.
Trigger unhappy
Last week we practically begged you not to read the blog Steve, Don’t Eat It!. But some of you ignored our advice.
‘Unfortunately our browser control software gave me an almighty slap back down to earth,’ says reader Gary Bartram.
We bring you edited highlights from his browser control report: ‘TextCensor Script “Pornography” triggered with a total weighting of 10: Expression “Disease or Medicine” triggered 1 time…expression “(breast or breasts) and not (cancer or anatomy or physiology)” triggered 2 times…’ and that’s what we can publish.
Be warned. This is a blog about a man who eats odd things. Don’t go there, at least not until you get home.
The bare necessities
We asked for any excruciating dedications and acknowledgements in your IT books, and we’re delighted to hear from Terry Richter, at South Downs College.
‘I was interested, as a lecturer facing rooms full of mostly male late-teenagers every day, to read a book some years ago by a young man of a similar age. I was subconsciously proof reading the text, and mentally groaned when, in the acknowledgements, he thanked his girlfriend for “baring” with him during the writing of the book,’ he says. ‘But then again…’
Meanwhile Paul Owen, at Health Solutions Wales, informs us that his copy of JavaScript – The Definitive Guide contains the simple statement that ‘This book is dedicated to all who teach peace and resist violence’.
‘Not always easy when writing JavaScript,’ he points out.
Any more ludicrous dedications?
Get stuffed
Back to the safer topic of the turducken, the traditional Christmas feast from the US involving a bird stuffed inside another bird.
Simon Stacey points out that TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall performed a version on TV featuring six birds stuffed inside each other. ‘One friend attempted a less challenging variation, although the local butcher responded to the request: “Could you de-bone the birds?” with the response: “Go forth and multiply, it’s Christmas”,’ adds Simon, which doesn’t seem awfully festive.
Food, glorious food
Let us say, right now, for the record, we wouldn’t want you to eat anything unhealthy. Even if you remember us encouraging you to eat those cheesy wotsit things that computers are packed in a couple of years ago – that was just a joke. We can’t believe you did it.
What is certainly not a joke, following on from our chickengammonturkeybacon stories, is the blog called Steve, Don’t Eat It, referred to us by the helpful Alec Cawley, at Quantel. If tinned silkworm pupae on sticks aren’t your idea of a snack, avoid. ‘May I recommend that you emphatically do not visit this site, where you would, if you were that foolhardy, find material enough to put you off your food for weeks,’ he says.
Too late. If any of you have eaten anything particularly appalling at work (or because of work), please don’t tell us. Unless you think it would entertain us, that is.
A mental block
Spam means you have to be careful who you email these days. Reader Kent Fleischer’s friend recently had all seven email addresses in her email account frozen by AOL, and a suspected spam intercepted and blocked.
The email in question, unfortunately, was news of her husband’s recovery from a life-threatening operation, which to save time she had sent to all her friends who have email addresses.
Still, if it saved just one person from receiving a round-robin email circular last Christmas listing the exploits of distant relatives you’ve never met, maybe AOL’s policy isn’t all bad.
Undercover operation
Reader Rick Adams points out that one of our advertisers last week was offering ‘25 holiday and duvet days’. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a duvet day, it’s the useful facility during January that allows you to wake up one morning, decide not to go to work, and not even have to think of a lie to justify it.
This, to us, seems like taking all the fun out of skiving off, but is apparently a benefit that gets filed under work-life balance.
We suspect that the duvet days are included in the overall holiday package, but it still leads us to ask: Can someone who works for a company with a policy of providing duvet days please tell us if they are as big a doss as they seem?
And can someone who knows about these things answer Rick’s question: ‘Has the Inland Revenue made duvet days taxable yet?’
Shutter speed
Our concern over the state of PC World’s stock-keeping is reinforced by this tale from John Heatherington. ‘I was bought a camera over Christmas, which I tried to exchange for a more expensive model,’ he says. ‘After waiting 20 minutes, the man who served me said they had two of the more expensive cameras in stock, neither of which he could find 20 minutes later.’
John eventually got a refund, and the woman at the till suggested that he go to Currys. Presumably, if the last two stories we published on this subject are typical, he will have joined the queue of people already directed there from PC World.
Elf and safety
Welcome to a new year of Backbytes. We’d like to say that from now on, Backbytes will become a serious, in-depth commentary on your business, looking behind the scenes for the stories behind the stories, the stories that the other papers dare not print. The stories that they often dare not even think about. That’s our New Year Resolution to you, our valued readers.
So with the New Year Resolution thing out of the way, we can immediately forget all about it, just like everyone else, and get on with business as usual, and our story on the law firm whose Christmas quiz involved the sexual harassment of elves.
‘One or two of my colleagues have taken an unnatural interest,’ says Dave Taskis, at LogicaCMG. ‘A friend of mine asks if the law takes a fundamentally different view over elves as opposed to domesticated quadrupeds, for instance sheep?’
Our advice to you Dave – sorry, to your friend – is to write any of these concerns into LogicaCMG’s client contracts in future, because unsanctioned customer elf bothering is one of those silly problems that’s just bound to come up at the review stage.
The art of luvvying
Dougie Lithgow has been looking at the acknowledgements sections in his computer books, and he doesn’t like what he reads. ‘You know those cringing, tearful speeches we get at the Oscars? Is there anything more that could make you throw up?’ There is, he finds.
For example: ‘Finally, I would like to thank my parents. First, my mother, for her support when I was young and for all the sacrifices she made to ensure that I had what I needed for school and all those projects. I would not be the person I am today without the help and confidence my mother gave me. Over the past 15 years or so, my father and I have come to know each other as adults, and I value the friendship we share. He has helped me come to understand what it is like to sacrifice for the good of the ones you love.’
This comes from Dougie’s copy of that seminal work The Microsoft SQL Server Black Book. Does your manual have a similarly gushing Oscar acceptance speech at the front? Let us know.
A whole lot of stuffing going on
We return to the pre-Christmas hot topic: chickengammon. We are unable to bring you the definitive word on whether any supermarkets sell gammon made out of chicken, for two reasons: first, it was Christmas and we were watching TV; second, we don’t want to investigate the mechanically recovered meat industry too closely in case we never eat again. So we’re delighted by the discovery, by Nick Dukes of Unisys, of turducken: ‘Available from Herbert's Specialist Meats in Maurice, Louisiana,’ he adds, helpfully.
We brink you the Wikipedia definition of this Cajun speciality: ‘A turducken is a de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, itself stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are filled with a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird. Some recipes call for the turkey to be stuffed with a chicken which is then stuffed with a duckling. This is called a chuckey.’
It adds that the turducken is not suitable for frying, but we feel at least one Backbytes reader will be putting a piece of bread top and bottom and taking their turducken to work as a sandwich.
Stealth and safety
As a helpful column, we bring your attention to Staellium UK’s StealthText service, sadly too late for the Christmas party season, when you really needed text messages that self-destruct 40 seconds after they have been read.
But we’re concerned that if we buy a bundle of StealthText messages (£5 for 12, since you ask), and Staellium tells us that we’ve used them all when we haven’t, how exactly do we go about proving it?
Better late than never
Nigel Barber adds to our PC World story (if you can remember that far back, they sent out an email advertising late-night shopping to a reader 12 hours after the shop had closed).
‘I recently visited my local branch of PC World intent on buying a Palm Tungsten E2. I asked the assistant if they had one in stock. “You need to ask security at the front of the store,” was the reply.
‘Security was the woman at the till, who went to get her keys, opened the storeroom, climbed a ladder, and looked for one unsuccessfully. She was then helpful enough to recommend Currys.
‘I asked why she didn’t look for stock on the computer, but she said she wouldn’t be able to find it if she did.’
If every stock request demands this much effort, it’s not surprising they’re late sending emails.
