Left in a right sovereign state
More project names. Dave Goodman and Bob Grahame both wrote independently to tell us of their experience working for BT under chairman Sir Iain Vallance. ‘BT ran Project Sovereign to encourage all the best people to leave the firm by reorganising everything every week until nothing worked and then offering voluntary redundancy,’ says Dave.
Bob recalls that it was subtitled: ‘Because the customer is King’. For the 120,000 BT staff who took redundancy, it stood for something else: it soon became know as ‘Sod Off Vallance Every Reorganisation Ends In Going Nowhere.’
Verbal diarrhoea
Tom Giles at BD Solutions has aided us in our MSDN confusion. Last week Grant Bowen said: ‘If the binary predicate is irreflexive, antisymmetric and transitive, and if equivalence is transitive where two objects x and y are defined to be equivalent when both f(x,y) and f(y,x) are false’.
Tom replies: ‘Binary predicates such as = and <, are reflexive, meaning “applies to itself”,’ he says. ‘So = is reflexive. Symmetric means reversible, so = is symmetric.
‘Transitive means it “carries over”. So = is transitive because if x = y and y = z then x = z. If two objects are equivalent when both f(x,y) and f(y,x) are false, then for a third object z (where f(y,z) and f(z,y) are also false), f(x,z) and f(z,x) must be false.
‘Basically, if f does not relate to x and y, and does not relate to y and z, then it does not relate to x and z either.’
So that’s clear. We think. Can anyone explain the explanation? Six words or fewer, please.
Post stress
‘I am impressed to read that GPs can send patients’ records electronically from one surgery to another,’ says Dr Ben Ross.
‘I am less impressed that Southampton General Hospital has been unable to send my son’s MRI heart scan report to Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth, inside a month.’
Straight talking
From small acorns: Rob Gray at Saint-Gobain Abrasives adds to the long list of excellent names for the sentence case formed by accidentally hitting caps lock. He prefers the names hOPELESS cASE or sAD cASE.
Weigh it up
‘All German culverts and bridges have a weight restriction sign for wheeled and tracked vehicles,’ says Matthew Robinson. ‘Can this be the first ever example of German inefficiency?
Surely a tracked vehicle will distribute its weight over a greater surface area, meaning it can more safely cross a bridge under its own power rather than on the back of a lorry that will have an additional weight and a smaller surface area holding that weight.’ Is he right? If so, who is going to tell the German army?
Left wondering
To continue our investigation into motorway road signs, Jonathan McColl tells us of the automatic signs of the A9. ‘When I complained about them I was told they were controlled from Glasgow, 200 miles south of me.’
This leads to some exciting information: ‘They are built with really powerful lights that cut through the densest fog when it warns of fog, and I can even read them during quite heavy snowfalls when it warns that low temperatures are forecast,’ he says.
‘My favourite one near Inverness tells me all summer in six languages to drive on the left, even though it is a dual carriageway and you can only read it if you are already on the correct side.’
Stacks of my tears
Last week we suggested an IT pub named The Stack, which really seems to have caught your imagination. ‘I might “pop” in, although I may have to “push” to the front of the queue,’ says Paul Morris at Nottingham Building Society, successfully cracking jokes that no one outside his department will begin to understand.
Kevin Campbell at EDS suggests: ‘The Stack would only have the first person arriving leaving last if it was a First In Last Out stack.
The other variant of stack, First In First Out, gives us the FIFO Stack and the LIFO Stack. Early in the day the LIFO is preferred (stay all day) while later on the FIFO is preferred,’ he says, helpfully.
Mike Hayward at Helenswood School says: ‘Down in Hastings we already have a pub in the old town called the FILO or First In, Last Out. It has been here since the 1600s, showing what a pioneering bunch we are.’
We mean this nicely, but it could be there for another 400 years and we are still not going anywhere near it.
To infinity and beyond please
A colleague of John Veness at Magdalen College, Oxford, was searching www.nationalrail.co.uk for a train ticket from Oxford to Hawarden at 8am.
It looks like a busy route: when you check fares, it offers: ‘Cheapest available fare: £179,769,313,486,231,
570,000,000,000,000,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 00.00’ – and it goes on a further 165 times. ‘We are sorry, but we could not find any First Class tickets available.’
Project X
Amanda Freeland at Exemplas recalls a project name at Uniplex in the early 1990s, where the software was codenamed Jason.
‘As the expected release date got progressively later, it was rumoured that the project name was actually July, August, September, October, November.’
A colleague who worked at British Aerospace in the late 1980s – not a happy time for the firm, some of you may recall – remembers that the outplacement consultants in charge of redundancies at that time were responsible for project Focus.
It was not long before the staff who had been outplaced decided that Focus stood for a five-word phrase, the last four words of which were: ‘…Off Cos U’re Sacked.’
Send in more project names please.
Code red alert
You are very keen to send in error dialogue boxes, but it is always good to hear from the other side: those of you responsible for creating these baffling alerts in the first place.
‘When I worked in an IT company managing hardware alerts, I used defensive programming techniques to cater for conditions that could never arise – according to the supplier’s specification,’ says Alex Kodah.
Of course, those problems regularly arose, putting up the message: UNEXPECTED ALARM. ‘This caused unexpected alarm among customers and higher management,’ he said. ‘So I opted for NO CAUSE FOR ALARM.’
Everyone was much happier, he reports, until an error occurred, no one did anything about it – and the equipment caught fire.
Information overdrive
From time to time we like to help increase the knowledge in the world by sharing some of your educational difficulties in the hope that someone has an idea of what on earth is going on.
This week: Grant Bowgen at WDM is studying the map class help in MSDN. He is wondering if someone can help with the following:
‘An ordering imposed on a set is a strict weak ordering if the binary predicate is
irreflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive and if equivalence is transitive, where two objects x and y are
defined to be equivalent when both f(x,y) and f(y,x) are false.’
Of course, if you can, we only want to know about it if it is six words or fewer. Preferably fewer.
Illegal mishaps
Our campaign to find the official Backbytes Grumpy Old Git has an inauspicious start as one, signing himself ‘Curmudgenly Smudger’ (Charles Smith at Oaksys Tech) points out that we are breaking the law:
‘I am astonished that such an august publication as Computing would advertise a position which falls foul of the Age Discrimination legislation. Surely the title should have read “Backbytes Grumpy Git whose Date of Career Commencement was in the Dark Ages”.’
In an early bid for the title, he is demanding a full-page retraction. That’s the spirit. Are you more of a git than Charles? If so, get in touch.
That’s the name of the pub game
And still you show no sign of running out of steam in your discussion of pub names. ‘How about The Stack?’ says Nick Ebbitt at Premier Line Direct. ‘If you are the first to arrive in the morning, you will also be the last to leave at the end of the day.’
At Computacenter, Chris Bristow sends a long list, and the elaborate puns suggest he was in the pub when he came up with them. They include The Seepey Ewe and The Contractors Wallet, which he points out, is not as full as it was.
Muppet central
Finally, further thoughts on mUPPET cASE, also known as pILLOCK cASE, the habit of new users to accidentally hit the caps lock while typing.
‘Locally, this is known as “lOCKOUT cASE”,’ says Ian Sadler at Sinclair Collis.
‘Three attempts to input their password, and then call Systems to unlock it.’
Please gentlemen time, along come
‘Having worked with Lotus Notes for umpteen years, the last pub I would want to visit would be called Control Break,’ says Richard Moss at Gedys. ‘I get the feeling that the tables in this place wouldn’t be easy to set up, nor would they stay the way you wanted them to.’
While we are mining the rich seam of database humour: ‘My nomination for IT pub would be The Reverse Lookup, says someone signing himself Bugle Burner.
‘You enter the bar, which is packed, at least 10 deep, but because this is The Reverse Lookup, you actually get served before everyone else. The only flaw I see is having to take your pint back before buying it.’
Heavy artillery
Last week we featured the exciting sign showing what we thought was a speed limit for tanks in Germany. But, we were wrong – it is the weight.
‘All bridges and culverts which had a weight restriction had to show the maximum weight for one-way and two-way traffic for wheeled and tracked vehicles. In the example shown, the maximum weight for wheeled vehicles is 90 tonnes and for tracked vehicles 70 tonnes.
‘If you think it would not be possible to get a wheeled vehicle weighing 90 tonnes, think of a tank transporter with a tank on the back,’ says ex-serviceman Michael Hunter at Sense.
‘The signs shown are common throughout Germany and not just near the borders’ says Tim Lewcock, who has also seen them on the speed limitless autobahns.
After all, if you need to send a tank somewhere it is likely to be pretty urgent – you do not want it slowing down just so the driver can avoid getting three points on his licence.
Total recall
John Butler writes from ‘a council’ where the new document management system is having problems. After a smooth introduction ‘the project manager realised the team was not getting replies to email messages about the project’, he says.
That might be because the project was named Recall, so anyone receiving an email about the project assumed that the email was simply recalling the last email about the project, and did not bother to open it.
And as John points out, naming your document management project after the process for fixing faults on cars does not send out a positive message – whether or not you read it. Any more unfortunate project names?
Interesting drug
What, we asked, would a tablet for medics treat? ‘Obviously a graphic tablet would reduce the likelihood of medics suffering from certain strokes…’ says Michael Aspaturian at British Energy, ‘Key strokes’.
Army dreamers
‘Has anyone considered the fate of those poor servicemen and women living overseas using British Forces Post Office addresses?’ says Dave Crump, following our thread on postcodes and the difficulty of entering addresses into web sites that do not recognise your code.
‘A good game is to try to work out how to change your address to BFPO 65, London, when most of the databases won’t accept it. Suggestions please, on a postcard to Dave, BFPO 65, London – if you can work out how to send it.’
And has anyone considered those poor bailiffs?
Recently Dan Hobbs found a letter from a debt collector threatening to come round at a more unsociable hour if they did not ring his office immediately. Trouble was, the bailiff had posted the letter in the wrong door, and the debtor was hiding under the sofa at the other end of the street.
When Dan called to point this out, he explained that he posted it in Dan’s letterbox because ‘my SatNav said it was here’.
Grumpy old git: apply within
‘I see you have appointed someone to the position of Grumpy Old Git without advertising the post or considering alternative nominations,’ says Peter Grossi at 2k Business Services.
‘I suspect this is contrary to your HR policy. Why don’t you do the job properly and advertise for a Fat Welsh Grumpy Old Git, so I get a chance to apply?’
So we relent, and would like to advertise the position of Backbytes Grumpy Old Git. If you have a colleague you would like to nominate, write and tell us why.
Preference will be given to applicants with photos. If we get enough applicants, we might even put it to a vote, and award our official GOG some tat to irritate him or her even more.
Tanks a lot
It has been a while since we showed you a mysterious road sign, so how about this one, spotted on the German border by Adrian Smith at EatonSmiths Solicitors. Let’s hope that if you take this road, you do not get stuck behind a slow tank on its way to a neighbouring country.
The dog ate my homework
An online site selling excuses is a prime opportunity to take people’s money and give them nothing in return. Nothing except excuses why they didn’t give them what they paid for, says Alan MacVicar. ‘It is genius, and I shall be setting up my own version as quickly as possible.’
Tom Lawton at Honeywell tells us: I would like to contribute to the column on “Excuses, excuses”, but my cat walked on the keyboard and pressed the delete key.’
Lie direct
And talking about excuses, BA’s desire to stop us all defecting to low-cost airlines seems to be running a little ahead of reality, at least for Phil Smith at Liverpool Hope University.
Having received an email announcing low-cost flights to Barcelona from London, he searched on the web site for prices, to be told that BA could also take him direct from Birmingham.
This being closer to home, Phil looked up the flights at BA.com, which conveniently offered to take him direct from Birmingham to Glasgow. Then direct to London. And then direct to Barcelona, at a cost of £779.50 for a return flight.
On the move
No one is surprised that the postcode file is incomplete, but you are not helping: ‘No one can find our house either because we moved the entrance round the corner into the next street,’ says John Batty at JMJ Bulk Packaging.
But it is not that simple. ‘According to the sign at the end of the road it is Short Drove, but according to Autoroute and my SatNav it is Church Street. All attempts to reregister the address over five years have been futile, so all retail look-ups have us in Vicarage Close.’
When John wants a delivery, he has to call and say that he no longer lives in Vicarage Close. He lives in Short Drove. Or Church Street. Luckily, he lives opposite the post office.
And when Clive Tiney was creating a web site for his local church, he discovered it did not have a letter box, nor a postcode, and so according to Multimap there is ‘a 50-metre black hole on the south side of Haxby’. If you are looking to disappear, taking refuge in a church suddenly makes sense.
Necessary evils
John C Foster at CSC Computer Sciences refers to last week’s item on eCrime – as he says, please excuse the use of CamelCase. ‘I was interested to read Michael Barrett’s suggestion that the police practice of not investigating crimes below a certain threshold resulted in unnecessary crimes being committed.’
This, he points out, begs the question of which eCrimes are necessary? We are sure that you could supply an appropriate answer to that. He also asks: ‘If someone is arrested, but it turns out their crime was necessary, are they let off?’
A sugared pill
While looking on Xbit Laboratories’ web site www.xbitlabs.com, Dr Adrian Oram at Sheffield Hallam University was pleased to see that ‘Intel and Philips Co-Work on Tablet for Medics’.
This is a novel concept in the NHS, where previously tablets have been for everyone except medics. But there is no reason why we should not all share in the improvements technology brings. We leave it to you to speculate exactly what symptoms these tablets would treat.
Last orders
So we come to a few more pub names. At least you would not be bothered by non-IT people if you visited the The Mat and Mouse (Kevin Foulger, Fujitsu Services), the riverside pub called The Any Quay (Dave Lee) or the Scroll Lock Inn (David Borrington, Dek Printing Machines).
And in case you engineers are feeling left out, get used to it. Sorry, we meant to say: why not visit The Robot Arms, suggests Ian Bennett at Capita Business Services.
