Bottoms up for project names
Is there no end to the silliness of people who name projects? Apparently not.
Ian Murphy at Data Dialogue remembers a software company that he worked for ‘that started a project with a local council which was initially called Sewerage and Housing Information Technology. Several months later they were asked to come up with a different name’.
Mike Edwards writes to tell us that he worked on a Lotus Notes order tracking system, ‘which is still used by the finance department to authorise payments. The name still in use today is “Fixed Asset Acquisition Request Tracking”.’
London pride
Gavin Asthills might have spotted an automatic sign warning of an event on a different road 50 miles away, but that’s nothing, says David Artiss.
‘I was travelling south on the M1 and, around junction 28, was told on repeated signs about a closed junction on the M25. Now, I know that most Londoners feel the universe revolves around them, but this is ridiculous. Is the idea that anyone travelling south must be going to London?’
By the way, junction 28 is near Alfreton, some 120 miles north of London. Can anyone beat this electronic sign for irrelevance?
A Mac solution
‘No need to invest £100,000 on a new keyboard design,’ says Keith Hague at Storm Advertising & Design. He has a helpful suggestion for anyone who keeps accidentally typing with the cAPS lOCK on – a Macintosh.
‘On a Mac, typing with the caps lock on LOOKS LIKE THIS. Not perfect, granted, but not completely stupid either. Mac users find that we can take good design like this for granted,’ he says.
‘One would have thought that informed users such as your readers would have done their research and switched years ago.’
Disappointing as this may be for Mac enthusiasts, we suspect you do not want to buy a new computer just to improve your typing, so Duncan Booth suggests: ‘A simpler solution to the caps lock problems can be found at http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_caps_lock/.’
Bit of an old git
Self-confessed Grumpy Old Git Brian Coote wants to be the landlord or the Stack.
‘I still have some computer bits that I think may only be of use to a museum. One is a summation module, having about 200 tiny transistors on it, no surface mount; but the other is a plug-in memory board, about 12in long, proudly stating “16 kilobits fast memory” and has a 1.2kHz clock crystal to run it with a x8 divider driven by that.
‘No edge connectors, just a big Bakelite-cased plug at the back, with 12 gold pins to slide into the rack.’
There’s a lot more of this, concluding with: ‘Some of these kids don’t know what real programming actually meant, sometimes having to add another memory module. No antistat mats – you wore a complete rubber suit and mask.’
If you are a friend of Brian’s, let us know whether he occasionally wears his suit at parties. Just for fun. The job’s still open, we feel.
A bridge too far
Possibly the final words on tank weight warning signs and whether or not those tanks would collapse German bridges.
First, the insight that it makes no difference if you have tracked vehicles or not.
‘I fear your readers are confusing weight with pressure. The pressure from track-laying vehicles is more evenly spread, but the weight on the bridge remains the same – so it would still fall down,’ says Paul Bethel, who should know because he works for something called ‘The Way Ahead Team’.
But we also bring you the geopolitical big picture through Alistair Maclean’s explanation for the signs:
‘The tank weights on the bridges were purely for the benefit of the then Soviet army who would have been most likely to make use of bridges; after all, a retreating British-American-German force would have had no tanks left, as their average life would have been less than four minutes on the 1980s battlefield.’
So if the bridges fell down, that would have been handy.
Darwin award
Alec Cawley at Quantel has some breaking news.
‘We have noticed that customers who have expressed interest in books by Richard Dawkins have also ordered On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin,’ says his email from Amazon.com. ‘For this reason, you might like to know that this book is now available.’
As, indeed, it was in 1859.
Russians stopped in their tracks
Help is at hand for the German government with its load-bearing calculations for tracked vehicles, which are the subject of many road signs out there.
‘When a tracked vehicle reaches the summit of the bridge then there is just a single point of contact, so it seems reasonable to me that the limit for tracked vehicles could be less than for a wheeled vehicle,’ suggests Mick Joy at Orange.
‘Perhaps the lower weight limit for tanks on German bridges is a hangover from the Cold War,’ adds Doug Scott at Arrow Plastics. ‘It would have prevented the Russians from sweeping across Germany as they would have had to stop at the first bridge they came to.’
Meanwhile David Reynolds says: ‘Unless modern German tanks are considerably bigger than the WWII King Tiger, or the Rhine has become considerably narrower, the length of the spread load compared with the span of a bridge means that the difference between a tracked vehicle and a multi-axle vehicle will be negligible.
‘A tracked vehicle on a hard surface does not produce a spread load. The tracks are flexible, so can only assist with load spreading in soft terrain.’
The consensus: German engineers are correct. There’s a shock.
Passing the buck
We have a new influx of project names – and we can spot a theme developing.
‘In the 1970s, IBM developed a worldwide database of information for technical and marketing staff,’ says Brian Wiseman. ‘Before it was officially launched it was renamed branch utilisation of common knowledge (Buck). It was initially known as field utilisation of common knowledge.’
Of course it was.
Meanwhile, Malcolm Perrior at Capita IT Services used to work as an electronic design engineer at a military avionics company.
All design modifications needed to follow a long process of approval, even if it was obvious and straightforward.
‘Instead of having to follow the prescribed procedure, which could take weeks, I proposed a fast-track procedure. So, company procedures now allow for JFDI (job for direct implementation).’
Or that’s what management thought it stood for.
‘Actually it stands for a four-word phrase, of which three are: just, do and it.’
Heaps of ideas
The dark spectre of nitpickiness stalks The Stack, our Backbytes virtual pub, if we want the first people in to be the first ones to leave.
‘Sorry to be picky, but there’s no such thing as a FIFO Stack,’ says John Harris at Cheshire Council.
‘A LIFO List is referred to as a Stack from the image of adding things at the top and taking them off from the top. A FIFO list is, if memory serves, called a Queue.
A real pub would be that other data structure: a Heap – elements are added and removed at random, and from time to time it is tidied up by a process of Garbage Collection.’
Somehow, The Queue or The Heap doesn’t have quite the same attraction.
Stack candidate
We’re still conducting job interviews for the honorary position of the landlord of The Stack.
John Romaines at InPS nominates his colleague Nicholas J Tarrant. ‘He is a firm believer in the glass being half empty rather than half full; he never accepts responsibility if his computer crashes and tries to blame everyone else.
‘We look forward to hearing from you and can confirm that if he is accepted for this position, he will moan about it. Having said that, he will probably moan if he doesn’t get it.’
The application is supported by his boss. ‘Some would describe his brand of cynicism as hard-bitten, I would describe it as mauled, chewed up, swallowed, regurgitated and spat out. Or that’s what I want to put on his next appraisal, if only employment law allowed,’ adds Graham Milgrew.
Keyed up
Which key should replace the irritating Caps Lock key?
‘There is a simple, quick, cheap, non-technical solution,’ says Stephen Beetlestone at CA, who wants to replace it with… the caps lock key.
‘Carefully pop the key out, wrap a rubber band several times around the prong that sticks up from the keyboard and pop the key back on. Accidentally brushing the key will not activate it, but a deliberate press will.’
He adds, with a logic that could soon have him propping up the bar at The Stack: ‘Of course, the real answer is to teach everyone to type.’
The key to your caps lock problem
More on the problem of accidentally typing words with the cAPS lOCK on. You are surprisingly analytical about all this.
‘Given the positioning of the Caps Lock key, I tend to see it most frequently pressed on words beginning with the letter A,’ says Shaun Smith at Rolls-Royce.
‘I suggest a better name for the case would be something like aSININE cASE. Whatever, put it down as an ID-10-T error.’ (Read that without dashes).
aND SO. Sorry. And so, we attempt a solution.
‘I physically remove the caps lock key from any computer I purchase,’ says Malcolm Swallow. ‘This is quite effective in preventing the irritation of producing a page of deathless prose that has the caps reversed.’
He is asking for £100,000 to begin production ‘of the keyboard we all want but no one makes’, but does not say what proportion of the equity he is willing to provide for this investment.
Which only leaves the question of what key to put in its place? In that circular way that Backbytes functions: ‘Wouldn’t an OHNO key on every PC keyboard be more useful?’ suggests Alex Kodah. He doesn’t ask for an investment, but then again, he doesn’t explain exactly how this would work.
Magnum force
More project names. ‘In the early 1980s I worked for Fisons Horticulture,’ says Ashley Peake.
He was involved in the horticultural order processing system (Hops), and the follow-up, the invoicing and ledger system. But the name they chose – pricing invoice statistical system – was frowned upon.
‘We thought this was a good name as it was also a subsequent functionality to Hops processing,’ he recalls.
‘I ran a project that consisted of adding perpetual inventory (PI) functionality to a warehouse management system,’ says Justin Pearson at Scart Limited.
The name of the project: Magnum. It meant they could call it Magnum PI.
Local derby
More evidence of the enthusiasm that our road transport authorities bring to the use of automatic signs comes from Gavin Asthill.
‘While travelling past Coventry on the M6 a sign gave two weeks’ prior warning of congestion because of a major event at Donington Park. It shows considerable forethought to have done this,’ he says, ‘but Donington is in Derbyshire, 50 miles away, just off the M1.’
Still, good to know.
2p or not 2p
As everyone gets so excited about the internet 2.0 companies, we should recall that most of the first lot never made any money at all.
So for tips on how to monetise their investment – we looked up the jargon in our old notebooks – we turn to the firms that made it big the first time round for tips on how to run promotions that do not break the bank.
Mike Tyrrell at Ineos Chlor and Columb Healy at Siemens IT Solutions and Services received this offer while browsing at Amazon: ‘Save £0.02 when you spend £100,000.00 or more on Qualifying Items offered by Amazon.co.uk. Enter code M7575XH9 at checkout.’
It doesn’t say what you get if you spend £200,000.
x, y, zzzzzzzzzzz
We have been trying to unravel a bit of MSDN for a couple of weeks, and now Bruce Parker at Computer Software Group has come up with the definitive answer.
‘Let x = complete tosh. Let y = the explanation. Clearly x = y and y = x. And f has nothing to do with x or y because there is no f in explanation. Clear?’
For those of you who are more hands-on, Graham Foster offers his explanation: ‘If the hardware engineer and the software engineer cannot agree on where a fault is, and the software engineer and the network engineer also cannot agree, then there is absolutely no chance that the hardware engineer and the network engineer will ever find it.’
Pie-eyed
A real incentive for anyone wanting to be the official Backbytes grumpy old git.
If you succeed, we will also let you be the landlord of The Stack, which seems to have universally been acclaimed as the right name for our pub. Apply now, explaining briefly why you – or your colleague – should get the job.
Don Spurr is this week’s applicant. ‘I have worked in IT since you could walk through the processor hitting the valve frames with a screwdriver,’ he says. ‘You could heat pies on the extractors, watch print hammers and swap plug-boards.’
If he gets to be landlord, don’t order the meat pie.
