Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Ouch!

One more case of "saved by the backup". Last time I lost some important data (only my own LaTeX sources of slides I use for teaching, not other people's work) was when my laptop was stolen and BOTH recent backup disks failed. I had some older back-ups (missing the more recent additions to the sources), and the PDF files of the slides, but it does go to show you can never have too many backups. I now do my LaTeX editing in Overleaf, make regular copies to my (backed up) work machine, AND on my personal laptop AND copy those to two solid-state disks regularly. I do not doubt I will at some point lose stuff.

I have rarely had issues getting funding for hardware for a specific task, but I did once fail to get any funds for the purchase of a software library. This was in the early 90s, and I requested funds for the purchase of a UI-building toolbox for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, which at the time was a fairly pricey bit of code, but I argued that it would save tons of development time. Developing a toolbox myself would take months (and would lack the portability of the toolbox I wanted), and the cost of my salary over those months would far outstrip the cost of said software. Common sense did not prevail. One problem was that I had already developed a reasonable library for MS-DOS, but without the ease of use of a UI-editor etc., so I could hobble along and develop applications at a slower pace. General conclusion: hardware is sexy, software isn't.

Sounds like the kitty may have used up all of its nine lives in one go

Niall clearly had a lot to learn ...

before ever getting to true BOFH (or even PFY) level of abusive IT shenanigans. Sending an e-mail in the boss's name is one thing, but a proper BOFH would never have it traceable to himself.

Likewise, giving an intern admin rights over anything at all suggests there were no BOFH-level admins on site either.

If something cannot possibly go wrong ...

it will.

The more people depend on the things not going wrong, the harder it will.

Murphy's Laws hard at work

I wouldn't trust Growler further than I could kick him. The only way I would have agreed to help in the sale of the kit was after Growler signed a contract that I would receive a hefty commission on any sale. Otherwise I would probably suggested him to go and suck a neutron star.

Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams

Ouch!

I do remember one script I wrote to back up stuff getting into an infinite loop because someone had made a symlink loop in their directory structure. This resulted in loads of extra copies on the backup drive before I could stop it. Changed the script to ignore symlinks. Fairly harmless, but annoying as I had to clean up the back-up manually

The fact that there is no specific cybersecurity course (there are currently several in our curriculum) does not mean cybersecurity isn't taught as an integral part of programming and software engineering courses. Cybersecurity is not something you should tack on to an existing piece of code or system, it should really be integral to the design. Even in introductory courses on computer science, cybersecurity is discussed as an important topic. Over the decades, cybersecurity has become more and more important in our curriculum, as systems have become more complex and interconnected, which is why additional courses on the topic have been developed.

I used to drink tea (Keemun China black tea for preference) with milk, (as a kid with sugar, later without). Living in a student house where milk could be "interesting" at times (nicked by someone else, or generally lumpy), I started drinking it without milk, and continue to this day (more of a Chinese way of making tea, and they invented the stuff, so I have several Imperial dynasties to back me up).

In my experience, Americans add FAR too much salt to EVERYTHING, so small wonder they want to put salt into their cuppa.

Modern Solutions?

Modern Screw-up, more likely. They can hardly claim blaming the messenger is modern, after all

Sounds like the network engineer ...

wasn't called Simon. No problems with Windows installs or database normalization warnings

Never worked on an Amiga, but I thought the "Guru Meditation" error messages had a lot more style than the bland "segmentation fault" messages that drive so many of our students to distraction.

Sounds like one user learned the hard way that back-ups are essential. I recall quite a few cases where I used various Norton tools to recover 95% or more of a student's thesis because they failed to back up properly. Never heard of Yoshi's magic time setting trick, I must say.

Cleanliness can have its downsides

Reminds me of the reason I installed Windows NT 4.0 on our home machine. My wife tended to clean up things on disk, which is commendable in itself, but removing autoexec.bat, command.com, or config.sys can be unhelpful. After I installed NT 4.0 and didn't give her admin rights, things somehow ran much more smoothly. She was a bit ticked off at having to log in, but at least the thing would boot up properly.

Rather amateurish wannabe BOFH

The real BOFH knows so much better how to create real mayhem and get away with the sabotage, even when he is still in the building, as witnessed when he used his ether-killer.