Let’s get ready to tumble
We haven’t filled up this column with stuff from YouTube yet, and frankly we’re the last column to do so. Having missed the Web 2.0 phenomenon, we’re delighted to bring you Smart 421’s company night out.
John Rutter writes: ‘Is this the sort of thing that will go on at The Stack?’ We can only hope.
He adds: ‘And does it relate to the questions about queues and stacks? First-in was not the first-out.’
We have no answer, nor does it look as if the lads from Smart 421 were offering one, but if you want to find out about what a Domino Jagermeister Bomb is, watch www.youtube.com/watch?v=76EFBa5t3L0.
And if your company night out was better, send us the evidence, and we’ll post it on our blog.
Swede and sour
This week’s rubbish car was snapped a couple of years ago in IBM’s North Harbour car park by Richard Skeets.
In the hope of finding the owner of this beautiful gold Volvo (we’re assuming it’s a he), we publish these pictures, front and rear. Any tips leading to the owner will be rewarded. More rubbish cars please.
Do we have to spell it out?
Last week’s lament about the state of modern spelling prompted a missive from Sharon Mossman at Sage.
‘I once had a software developer working for me on a fuel management system who submitted his code for testing,’ she says. ‘He spelled the word “fuel” as “fule” throughout.’ There can’t be a coder with worse spelling skills out there, can there?
Hoyled again
Which brings us to this week’s hidden messages. ‘A few years ago, shortly after one of our programmers left the company, I received an error on one of our package programs. I decided to edit it. All that was inside the .exe file was the word “Hello”,’ says Mick Bryan at ICM Business Solutions, who is still haunted by this.
‘While working on a data entry system for NatWest Bank, I included a check for anyone daft enough to enter values for both a day of the week and date in the month for a regular payment schedule,’ says Bob Foale at Royal Bank of Scotland.
He couldn’t think of an error message, so he asked an analyst called Hoyle who promised to get back to him. Bob inserted a temporary error message and forgot about it. A year and a half after the system went live, the helpdesk received a call from a user who wanted to speak to Mr Hoyle, because he had an error message which said: ‘D Hoyle to say why you should not do that’.
Short and sweet
This week’s six-word IT stories. Nick de Smith at RAB Capital submits the Zen-like: ‘No worries: UPS! Last tested: Never.’
Mark Humphries at Secor Consulting suggests the following mini drama: ‘Caught playing Quake? Network load testing.’
And from the next generation of Backbytes readers, Ellie Hawtin provides: ‘Saving... frozen. Is “End Now” safe?’
How do we know she’s the next generation? We can tell you in six of her words: ‘Dad’s subscription. Stolen for Backbytes/Dilbert’.
Through the looking glass
In a Stack-related problem, the best thing to do is find an analyst at the bar and ask his opinion.
For example: ‘Regarding your discussion about pub glasses being either half full or half empty,’ says Ian Sewell at ADT Fire and Security: ‘It seems that you are missing out the only true answer: the glass is twice the size it needs to be.’
Deliverance
Is there anything that Amazon won’t do to keep a customer?
Carl Pereira recently tried to order an unavailable DVD, and received this message: ‘Les Visiteurs – Parts 1 and 2. This title will be released on January 1, 2020. Pre-order now! Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
‘And don’t forget, for a few extra pounds you can guarantee next-day delivery.’
Bottom of the shops
Paul Owen is distressed that Computing carried a story about Tesco ‘wanting to replicate the feel of a local supermarket in cyberspace’.
‘The thought of being virtually held up by people exchanging life stories in the aisles, blocking shelves with temporarily abandoned trolleys, and berating their ill-behaved progeny fills me with dread. I thought the benefit of online shopping was not having to mix with humanity while you buy your milk,’ he says.
‘I look forward to the Web 2.0 bubble bursting so we can get on with life without being forced to be sociable,’ he says, effortlessly, and accidentally, bounding to the top of the shortlist for the job of landlord of The Stack.
Rocket man
Reader PJ Wilkins was jolly excited last week by one of Computing’s stories, and quite right too.
‘I settled down to read an interesting technical article,’ he said, having assumed that in our headline ‘London wireless use rockets’, the third word was a verb. ‘Of course,’ he adds, ‘it could not have been true anyway, as any Backbytes reader knows that configuring a WiFi network is not rocket science.’
Fee FIFO fun
Several of you write demanding a final word on the practicality of FIFO stacks of concrete slabs, queues, or whatever you want to call them. To paraphrase Ant and Dec on Britain’s Got Talent, in the smoking areas outside the UK’s IT departments, people are talking about little else.
‘A FIFO stack of paving slabs works fine provided the slabs are stacked standing on end,’ says Michael Aspaturian at British Energy. ‘Perhaps a bit unstable, but so are most FIFO stacks. The plastic cup dispenser in a coffee machine is also FIFO stack: you load from the top, remove from the bottom.’
Paul Ireland at UX Online says: ‘Stack them vertically and you have a FILO queue, but stack them horizontally on their edges and you can easily remove the first one. Perhaps we should use a different nomenclature for queues or stacks to make their function clearer to all: horizontal and vertical.’
We’d love to say that was the last word, but we suspect it isn’t.
Two wrongs will not make a right
Last week we asked if you have found any strange messages buried in your code.
‘Some strange nested exception handling code I found does not actually produce a message,’ says a mystified Kevin Clarke at Foster Yeoman. ‘Translated into English, it instructs the system to do the following: If anything goes wrong, don’t do anything; and if that also goes wrong, don’t do anything.’ More hidden messages please.
Bangers and crash
‘I spent £300 on a “get me over the Christmas period” car’, Tony Bradfield writes from Tesco. What does £300 get you? Let him explain.
‘A diesel L reg Rover 218 from a friend... it has been leaking power steering fluid for months, has a slow puncture and smokes like a trouper. One of the windows will not wind down, but it does have an electric sun roof. It only has about 103k on the clock and I reckon I could push it to at least double that. I never have trouble filtering in when the person beside me realises that their car is worth far more than mine.’ A sound investment indeed.
This week’s sad car is at least larger than the Perodua Nippa we featured. ‘Why did Jim Bassett buy a car that was obviously too tiny to fit his 6ft 4in, 17-stone frame?’ asks Jonathan McColl. Just one of many questions that this thread raises. More of your sad cars please.
Casting spells
This week’s job – ‘salaries £25k to £45k, dependant on skills and experience’ – was spotted by Adrian Oram at Sheffield Hallam University.
‘Clearly, being able to spell isn’t one of those skills,’ he laments. He spends a lot of time correcting students’ spelling, rather than grading their work. We wonder if poor spelling makes it all the way to software these days? If it does, could our army of pedants please let us know?
Write on
Two more of your six-word IT stories, one happy, one sad. ‘CRASH! Backup? Monthly. When? Yesterday! Hurrah!’ writes Andy Martin at Formal Software Construction, who obviously enjoys fantasy novels.
‘Oh no, not another Microsoft release,’ says John Stenhouse at Ninewells Hospital, more a fan of the gritty realism genre. Any more?
Stepping into the firing line
Our job of the week this week is Computing’s ‘Job of the week’ itself, which last week carried a double-edged opportunity that was spotted by many of you.
‘IT support manager, Oxfordshire, £40,000+ p45,’ it said, though you all choose to ignore the spacing and the different typeface to guarantee maximum comedic effect.
‘Being handed your P45 as soon as you start seems a bit cruel don’t you think? Give the person a chance – at least a day,’ says Malcolm Kayser.
‘Do you actually have to start the job or do they fire you along with the offer?’ adds Richard Jones.
Brum brum
We cannot decide whether this week’s sad car is very cool or very sad.
We think it depends on whether your IT job involves working in a black and white French film with a Gauloise in your mouth – or, as Norman Brown does, working for a company that makes window blinds.
‘Meet Sid,’ he says. ‘He is not sad at all and has an ashtray of his own, so he will be replacing my VW in the company car park on 1 July – the date a certain legislation comes into effect.’
So if Norman offers you a lift, remember Sid’s not so much a car as an ashtray with wheels. More of your cars please.
Petition spoiler
Controversy over Ross Milne’s petition to make 0800 calls free for mobile phone users.
‘Even my 13-year-old daughter spotted the obvious question that Ross’s comment begged: what was preventing him from using the customer’s phone to call a freephone number, instead of using his mobile?’ asks Kevin Beasley.
He also suggests that Ross examines his mobile package and gets more free minutes, from which his 0800 calls would be subtracted.
Stop it Kevin. There is a petition. You are spoiling the fun.
A scanner darkly
Kids these days do not know they are born, because they do not spend nearly enough time looking directly at source code.
Unlike Jamie Gordon at Data Encryption Systems, who was scanning someone else’s source code the other day when he saw this error message had been included: ‘This is not an error. If you are reading this, something has gone wrong.’
More mysterious: ‘There does not appear to be any code path that results in this message being displayed to the user, which I suppose is actually a good thing. Although I am sure most users would be comforted by the knowledge that if something had gone wrong with their software it was not actually an error.’
Is anyone else finding odd messages hidden in source code? Now that you cannot hide messages backwards
in record grooves, all of you Devil worshippers out there might find this a suitable outlet.
Crazy paving
The final, final word on FIFO stacks, queues or whatever they are.
‘To those who say a FIFO stack works: you should actually try stacking 20 paving slabs and then try to get the first one out,’ says John Barrett at Biomet Europe.
In training for the Olympic logo
You know our policy on helping PR companies give publicity to their clients. But when we get the chance to poke fun at the new Olympic logo, we will make an exception to our ‘no puffery’ rule.
And so we bring you the news that The Training Camp has launched a competition to let you submit an alternative London 2012 logo, with £400 if you win. And it has promised to forward all the best designs to the people who are planning the Olympics, for all the good that will do.
Training Camp chief executive Rob Chapman calls the official logo ‘a complete waste of time and money’, presumably on the ‘if you can’t beat them...’ principle to which Backbytes has long subscribed.
So if – like the official designers – you have five minutes to spare and a packet of magic markers, pop along to http://www.trainingcamp.co.uk/2012.
You could even send them to us, but unfortunately we are not offering a prize.
Hit a car when it’s down
‘I would like to claim the title of “saddest car” in IT Britain,’ says Jim Bassett at Allied Irish Offshore.
‘You may recall an occasion when Jeremy Clarkson was so incensed by a car that he drove to the dealership, bought one, parked it outside and beat it to death with a sledge hammer. Well, I own one of them.’
The car in question is the unlamented Perodua Nippa, which, as Jim points out, is ‘the cheapest – £4,500 new – and one of the smallest cars in Britain’.
Or, as Auto Express says: ‘It always proved a bit of a compromise – lacking in the sort of safety equipment that we have come to expect in even the cheapest of cars.’
Jim knows all about compromise: he’s 6’4” and 17 stone. ‘I would have taken a photo, but I can’t stand up straight enough to operate a camera.’ So here’s a picture of a Nippa without Jim
instead (below). Is your car sadder? Tell us if it is.
The tortoise...
We really must get out more. When we started discussing this, we didn’t realise the richness and diversity of the silly electronic signs available in the UK.
‘My drive consists of a trip across the Pennines into Lancashire from Morrisons HQ in Bradford,’ says John Lomas, at WM Morrison Supermarkets. On the M62 two weeks ago he saw the following sign: ‘Slow pedestrians in carriageway’, and a 50mph speed restriction.
‘This sign was then repeated at every opportunity until I left the M62 for the M66 at junction 18, some 20 miles later.’
In the time it took to drive the 20 miles, travelling at speeds between 40mph and 50mph, he had not overtaken a single pedestrian.
His question: how slow were they travelling?
... and the hare
Many of you ask us to point out that the set of Google directions from New York to the UK we published a couple of weeks ago, which advocate swimming the Atlantic, also propose a short spell in France on the way across.
‘Presumably to miss the M25,’ says Jeremy Hall at Hall Marketing.
‘I also wonder if swimming the 3,462 miles across the Atlantic in 29 days is realistic,’ says Paul Freeman. ‘According to the Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation, the fastest swim across the Channel is 21.5 miles in just over seven hours, or 3mph.
‘Assuming you can keep up the 3mph for all 3,462 miles, 24 hours a day, seven days a week without sleep or rest, I calculate that it would take you just over 48 days.
‘Come on, Google – this really is not good enough. Please have a realistic speed estimate for those parts of a journey that are swum.’
Lost in translation
‘These hordes of swimmers must have been what Jacques Chirac was talking about when he referred to an “American cultural invasion” while planning to set up a rival French search engine to Google in August 2005,’ says Phil Beynon at
Infolink Electronic Systems.
Can our Francophone readers enlighten us as to the progress of project Quaero, which he announced at the time?
It has gone ominously silent, perhaps because Chirac’s advisers have found that Google searches for French web pages, too.
We don’t have high hopes: as Phil reminds us, when the project came to register its web site, it discovered that Quaero.com had already been registered in 1998. By an American company.
Free vote
Looking at the results so far, we would hesitate to say that Ross Milne at ChatzWorld has captured the mood of the nation, but he might just have captured the mood of some of you.
‘As a computer engineer, I am fed up of paying to phone freephone numbers on my mobile when at clients’ houses, so I decided to make a petition to the prime minister to force mobile operators to make freephone numbers free,’ he says.
Gordon Brown’s looking for a simple, high-profile vote-winner. This might be it: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/
mobilefreephone/.
On the other hand, it might not help, but that’s democracy for you.
