Tinseltown technology
Our request for Hollywood computer ridiculousness prompted a hearty response that should easily last us through the summer.
‘I’d like to suggest starting with every series of 24,’ says Rob Partis at Transform Sandwell. ‘They seem to have the most hi-tech system on the planet – it’s able to control satellites, tap phones, decrypt anything in “a few minutes” – yet every season they are hacked by someone with a laptop and a mobile phone, who then locks them out of their own system, and begins some kind of nuclear attack. Surely the head of IT security should have “had a meeting” by now, resulting in his seeking new employment?’
That’s a fair point, but we have the feeling that it wouldn’t make a great episode. Unless they torture him first. There’s a thought for any Backbytes-reading HR managers. Keep the suggestions coming.
Novel ways to spice up support
Your six-word IT stories are taking on a sort of IT support flavour, which is natural: it is where many small human dramas are played out every day. And thanks to the brevity of the stories, if we ever publish an anthology, it will be something you can dip in and out of even on the busiest day at the support desk.
For example, Jimmy Hanafin at Aeroflex’s story: ‘It didn’t do that last time’ effortlessly captures an awkward social moment, while suggesting exactly what led up to it, and simultaneously giving us a feeling for the state of mind – and even facial expression – of both the characters involved.
What about a more real life but less exciting story? For those of you looking for something more existential, we suggest the intriguing economy of Craig Sheppard’s short story: ‘Tap on keys. Look out window.’
The symmetry of the structure and the economy of the language leave us keen to find out what is outside his window. But – like Craig himself – not that keen.
Beanz meanz poor spelling
More bad spelling: Sandra Maxwell at Cincom worked at Heinz as a contractor many years ago.
‘One contractor spelled “method” as “methord” throughout his code,’ she says. It’s not as if the word would ever come up in a programming course.
Our worst spelling this week is from Mike Ralphson, who doesn’t want us to publicise where he works because they have inherited an ERP system with a flag named ‘setDisbaleNaviagtionSlectionChange()’.
‘We can’t correct it,’ he says, ‘because it would cause incompatibilities between different branches.’ Or is that ‘imcontapilibitise’?
A spell to repair your floppy drive
As the EU expands, so does the range of products and services on offer as a result. With this in mind, we are pleased to bring you details of the entrepreneurial spirit alive in Romania.
Go to http://vrajitoare.blogspot.com, and you can access the blog and services of Witch Rodica, the self-proclaimed ‘incontestable and undisputed leader of the Romanian witches’, who offers dream interpretation, Tarot readings, and – that indispensable offering from any 21st century witch – a set of YouTube clips.
‘I still do spells and potions the traditional way, but the blog keeps me closer to potential clients and can be used to convince sceptics that witchcraft is real,’ she writes in Romanian.
She claims to cure impotence and alcoholism, which will interest the customers at The Stack. You can even buy a charm to help you win EU grant money. Let us know how that one goes.
Mail file
More directories. ‘How about R:Ulookinatme for our scouse chums,’ says Rayt Barclay at Southampton City Council, who if he ever had any scouse chums, just lost them.
He also suggests you place naff music files in K:Tel, and that we file all our FIFO/LIFO correspondence in Q:Here.
Simon Mitchell at Maldon District Council has other regional directories: ‘The Irish could have O:Reilly,’ he says, also suggesting E:Bygum for the North. His home county, east of London, can store its files in S:Ex (read it out loud).
Solutions stack up
Finally, we have an appropriate last word on the stack vs queue debate that has divided the nation.
‘We have a word for both of these concepts in IT,’ says Sav Mellor. ‘Backlog.’
Stacks of answers to sift through
After a couple of weeks’ respite, we have almost certainly the last word on stacks or queues. We were using piles of paving slabs as a metaphor for a stack, for reasons which escape us right now.
The question was: is first-in-first-out (FIFO) a stack or a queue, because there are some patents for FIFO stacks extant, and the concrete thing proved a point that we forget – unless the slabs were stacked sideways.
Then the European Patent Office got involved. Says employee Bob Harle: ‘Your correspondent neglected to point out that in the case of sideways slabs you can insert slabs wherever there is to be a space and don’t have to take the first or last.’
He suggests calling it the ‘Wherever there is a space, in; any that catches your eye, out’ stack, which would be WTIASIATCYEO. He suggests we call it a RINO (random in, nicest out) stack instead – the exact way we decide who to serve first at the bar of the real-life Stack.
Paperback writer
Six little words are all it takes to tell an IT story.
Malcolm Swallow manages to get two chapters into his: ‘What does this key do? Oops’. At Ninewells Hospital, John Stenhouse is attempting a six-word technical manual: ‘Switch it off and on again’, possibly the six most important words in the whole of IT support (unless you know different).
At JP Morgan Chase, Stephen Lodge has six words of advice to rival it: ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del, phone back later’.
Both admirably encapsulate not just incidents, but entire careers – which makes us suspect they might be autobiographical. We’ll let you know if there’s interest in the film rights.
Directory enquiry
Appropriate directory names this week from Phil Mayhall, who suggests that digital photos should be stored in F:Stop, and Dave Bradley chips in with a long list including D:Bug, G:up, O:NoButton and the directory of all submissions to Backbytes: Y:amIdoingthis.
‘Regarding the debate on the G:Spot directory’, says Derek Risk. ‘Would that directory not be impossible to find?’ More please.
Old cars far from being up to par
This week’s sad cars are as far away from the glamour of the gold Volvo as can be.
‘Nearly two years ago I bought a K-reg Citroen AX for £150 and still have it,’ says Steve Donkin at Premierline Direct, ‘Only the driver’s window winds down, each panel has a dent in it, and it has a genuine 83,000 miles on the clock.’
That’s a car to laugh at, but we travel to Middlesbrough for this week’s saddest car (because it couldn’t make it to London).
‘Mini Metro 1995, white/rust, bought as a non-runner for £16.50 on eBay,’ says Paul Langham at Foster Wheeler Energy. ‘After a 10-minute immobiliser fix it passed its MOT with flying colours. It did 26,000 miles in a year faithfully getting me to work and back every day over the north Yorkshire moors, even through blizzards, and I sold it for £25 to the scrap yard.’
That’s an £8.50 profit from the transaction, which he can reinvest in half a new car on eBay.
Drafty research
Devastating news comes this week from Canada, where the combination of a good education system and a lot of snow has resulted in a team of computer scientists solving the game of draughts. They analysed the 500 billion billion possible draughts positions, and came up with the best move in any circumstance.
Therefore, the computers involved should win or draw any game you play against them, unless you distract them and craftily whip their pieces off the board.
However, computers might be sick of the game, as they’ve been analysing draughts for about 20 years now to reduce a pleasurable pastime to nothing more than an instruction book.
‘This was a huge computational problem – more than a million times bigger than anything that had ever been solved before,’ Professor Jonathan Schaeffer told the BBC, which raises the question: ‘Why did you bother’?
Tron is all wrong
In the wake of more Hollywood hacker boffin guff in Die Hard 4.0, we’re sure some of you couldn’t resist nudging whoever you were with and saying: ‘It doesn’t really work like that, you know’.
We’re compiling a list of the most ridiculous Hollywood internet/computer idiocies and we suspect it’s going to be a very long one. Don’t write in with ‘the whole of Tron’. We’ve got that covered.
Lord of the rings
Showing that it’s harder to design an Olympic logo than you think, Richard Moss at Gedys has spotted a potential flaw in the competition winner at www.trainingcamp.co.uk/2012.
‘It’s a great logo, don’t get me wrong,’ he says, ‘but doesn’t anyone think that the rings are rather inappropriately placed?’
He points out that the last time he saw those type of piercings, the owner had a dangerous-looking pointy-headed dog – which at least makes it very appropriate for London.
Verifying our Volvo venturer
Exciting news. Stop the presses. Hold the back page. The golden Volvo has an owner.
‘The car in question certainly belonged to someone who used to work at Entuity,’ says an anonymous informant. ‘The gentleman in question is called Andy De Clerck, last heard of at Geode Networks.’
If Andy is out there, please make contact, we – and more importantly our readers – would like to hear more about your car.
Meanwhile, for our more technical readers, Jonathan Laventhol at Imagination Limited spotted a Lexus in Covent Garden recently with the number plates SC51 BUS.
‘It drove around for a while, presumably looking for a parking space with suitable termination,’ he says.
The last post, but not post haste
‘Has anyone else noticed signs of a worrying trend that computer systems are becoming more like human beings?’ asks Ian Cooper at Hampshire County Council,
‘I heard from an IT manager whose computer room was flooded recently and his Lotus Notes system needed a complete restore.
‘When the staff checked their emails they discovered a number they’d never seen before, some marked as urgent and three months old. No one had missed them.’
He’s concerned: have some of our email servers done the rogue postie trick of occasionally ditching the post in a virtual skip?
‘My theory is that our systems are maybe a little stressed out,’ he says. Let’s hope they don’t ‘go postal’ on us. More evidence please.
Putting it bluntly
More bad spelling: ‘I was once in a class of C# web application programmers, and the guy next to me did not seem to be the sharpest spoon in the cutlery shed,’ recalls Craig Greenhouse at Relationship Audits & Management.
This impression was confirmed when the teacher came over to see Craig’s fellow student, and in an exasperated voice told him: ‘That’s not how you spell a.s.p.x.’
Alphabet swoop
We were asking for directory names, as you recall.
Phil Mayhall suggests G:Spot, and Colin Aspinall at Asda suggests P:Off-line Files and S:Tools.
‘We run an accounting system that is a natural candidate for the A: directory,’ says Jim Blair at Hills Road. ‘It is called “Symmetry”.’
Any more suggestions? The best will get one of our famous prizes, and more importantly the glory that goes with it.
Order more than half measures
To The Stack, where after hours you’re still disputing whether or not the pint glass is half full or half empty – or just twice the size it should be.
Julian Cole points out that: ‘One should source at least double the initial estimated storage required when purchasing a new system. Those who source potation-oriented hardware that initially run at only 50 per cent capacity should be regarded neither as optimists, nor as pessimists, but as forward-looking go-getters with management potential and market savvy.’
Meanwhile Ken Appleby at TMW Consultants reports that: ‘After many years of practical testing, we can confirm that in this part of the IT world, a pint exists in only two states: it is either FULL or EMPTY. So please no more namby-pamby nonsense about some entirely theoretical mid-point. Please bring money to fund further testing.’
The last word this week goes to John Loader: ‘My wife has a better answer – half a glass of gin, half of tonic.’
OK computer
Simon Thompson at South Tyneside Council has a six-word IT story that captures the essential flavour of many of our lives. ‘It worked OK on my machine’, he writes, poignantly.
An application for grumpy landlord
Our occasional contributor Antony Hawkins at the University of Sheffield adds fuel to the debate on glass half-fullness/half-emptiness after Ian Sewell decided this merely signified the glass was twice the size it needed to be.
‘Thanks to Ian for aptly demonstrating just how useless bean-counting analysts can be. No offence to useless bean-counting analysts, obviously,’ he says. ‘He has not even visited The Stack, but has merely read comments that, at some times, glasses are at 50 per cent capacity.
‘Were the glasses half their current size, they would still be at 50 per cent capacity at some times and Ian’s suggestion would have achieved nothing except longer queues at the bar. I hereby apply for position of Grumpy Landlord of the Stack, on a manifesto of pledging to ban anyone who says their glass is too big.’
No blame attached
‘Why do firms put notes in their email signatures saying: “This mail has been checked for viruses by…”?’ asks Peter Grossi at 2K Business Services, pointing out that you have no idea whether the virus checker in question is up-to-date.
‘Isn’t it rather like putting a sign: “We don’t think you need to beware of the dog” on the inside of your gate?’
He suggests a more honest wording at the end of the email: ‘By the time you read this, any virus attached to the email may have had its wicked way with your network. But don’t blame us.’
Toying around
This week’s bad car is nominated by Paul Gordon at the Trading Standards Institute.
‘The irony of having a Reliant three-wheeler for a car that was anything but reliable was lost on a former colleague of ours here at the Trading Standards Institute,’ he says, coyly declining to name his former three-wheeled mate.
‘By far our best wind-up was placing what we thought would be a well-received upgrade in his reserved parking space, complete with personalised number plate’ – see picture.
Golden eye
And on the subject of rubbish cars, we might have tracked down the owner of the gold car-kitted Volvo.
‘I believe that gold car belongs to, or at least used to belong to, a software rep who worked for Entuity,’ says an anonymous mole.
‘About five years ago he visited us when I workedfor a firm in Feltham. He was trying to sell us Eye of the Storm – how can you take a rep seriously when he drives that? Half the office was at the window laughing.’
Any more leads? Come on Entuity, we want a name.
Easy as A, B, C
After a few pints of Old Fortran (thanks Colin Bell for the beer suggestion), in a corner of the Stack, Pete Sykes reminisces that ‘in my first job at Ferranti in 1977 we had an HP desktop computer with a rather basic operating system. There were 26 directories allowed, called a: b: c: and so on, with no other naming permitted. So we wrote up a list on paper so we would all know what to find in each directory.’
Pete wasn’t enjoying the job, so his contribution to this naming scheme: f:utilities. Grab a beermat, because we are pretty sure you can come up with suggestions for the content of the other 25 drives.
Olympic go go
And now something you have all been waiting for: the winner of The Training Camp’s London Olympics Logo competition, which we puffed a few weeks ago.
If you want to see the winner (out of 400 entries), then pop along to www.trainingcamp.co.uk/2012. Much as we hate to give any credit to anyone but ourselves, it is actually quite good.
‘The best designs received over the week have been sent to the Olympics planning committee,’ brags The Training Camp.
Do not hold your breath for a reply, is our advice.
Back-tracking
Finally, we admit it: we can’t keep up. Last week we were excitedly predicting the advent of Backbytes 3.0.
Now Paul Ireland at UX Online asks: ‘Any news on when Service Pack 1 is due?’ Now we begin to understand why every software publisher secretly curses you behind your back.
And it seems we can’t even keep up with ourselves. ‘Bruce Willis is already on 4.0’ says Adrian Smith at EatonSmith Solicitors.
Backbytes 3.0 revolution arrives
We receive little mail from the analyst community, what with their focus on fact and research and everything, but we welcome to our pages the helpful opinion of Philip Howard at Bloor Research, who fully supports our accidental decision to miss this year’s fad.
‘As you say, you have missed the Web 2.0 phenomena. Good for you. Not to mention Enterprise 2.0, Business Intelligence 2.0, Data Warehousing 2.0 and others. It is only a matter of time before we get 3.0. Why not preempt them all – rename your column Backbytes 3.0 and get ahead of the game.’
If anyone from the world of venture capital – another community sadly under-represented on our pages – wants to invest in our first-mover advantage, we are happy to listen.
ET phone Luton
Strange messages in code: we do not just want to do error messages, but Rob Leech at Safety Software Limited recalls working for ‘a large chemical manufacturer’, where he encountered ‘an infamous ledger posting routine which had the error statement “Phone Luton”.’
John Hall at Geotrace writes: ‘I came across this in a mature version of ARCserve that we use: “Reinstall the stupid program (which is the worst thing I’ve ever seen)”.’
Road to nowhere
Many of you have sent reports of your pointless electronic signs, but Matthew Wild, a passenger we stress, has gone one step further and photographed one.
The shadowy newspaper, we should note, is his copy of Backbytes, including one of our stories about strange road signs.
The spot was made ‘on the M5 in the West Midlands, heading south, almost 200 miles from the M25.’
As Matthew also points out, the M25 is unlikely to come into play unless there is a substantial tailback: the M5 heads to Devon and Cornwall.
Crazy cars
We bring exciting news of last week’s rubbish car, which as you recall was a gold Volvo that had been substantially ‘pimped’.
We are not yet in a position to reveal the owner, who has not come forward, but we understand that within the custom car community it is quite a celebrity.
‘It has appeared several times on www.barryboys.co.uk – which can probably lay claim to being the world’s premier rubbish car web site,’ writes Niall Oswald – check out, for example, www.barryboys.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=295.
Charles Greig and others on the Barryboys web site point out that it is a conversion done by a firm called Mynheer, now renamed C&N Customs (www.candncustoms.com), who are apparently the big fish in this particular pond.
It promises ‘100 per cent satisfaction’, which, with a peep at its web site gallery, it has certainly given to us.
It is hard to compete with this, but does your car park have a really rubbish car in it? If so, tell us.
Bangers and cash
Before we leave the subject of motoring, we bring news of Andrew Battles at Cairn Energy and the concept of ‘Bangernomics’.
‘I have mates who regularly buy tiny-engined, sub-£200 cars for expensed mileage,’ he says. ‘I call it madness. But if you can live with horrendous colours and smells, there are real bargains to be had.
‘I bought a new Ford Ka in 1998 and used it to travel the highways for an IT services firm. I reached 120,000 miles by 2003 before the electric windows stopped working when down and its days became numbered.
‘Needless to say, the mileage was fully expensed so at 40p per mile you could say that my firm bought and ran the car for me nearly twice as long as I had it. Despite its horrific state, it was valued at £2,000 for trade.’
Which he then used as leverage to buy a car he could be proud of. But does it make five years of being laughed at OK?
Last orders
Last week we thought we had resolved the question of whether the glass is half full or half empty when an analyst programmer revealed that the glass is twice the size it needs to be. Many of you take exception to this.
Bill Ridgeway at Computer Solutions is typical of our mailbag this week: ‘It is obvious an equally true answer is that the amount of drink is half as much as it could be,’ he points out.
