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I don't know which is more impressive; Tyler M's phat pipe (I promise to never say "phat pipe" again), or that he finally found a site that could serve files fast enough to justify his huge bandwidth bills.
In the early 80s, the server room at MegaCorp (as we'll call them) was cutting edge. Humming along to A Flock of Seagulls and occasionally taking breaks to solve Rubik's cubes, the engineers installed servers, networking equipment, and a main air conditioning unit. Their infrastructure was among the best in the business.
Sadly, some 25 years later in 2005, the server room wasn't doing so great. Winston S. witnessed firsthand the first cracks as they began appearing (literally).
Wesley D. was glad he checked the weather before going out for a cup of coffee. "Partially cloudy downtown with some scattered showers. We're seeing high 60s, low 70s throughout most of the area. If you're up in Alpine, we'll be seeing temperatures around three times the boiling point of water, so you may want to stay in to prevent your flesh from completely melting off your body."
Poor old Mark. Good guy. Kept to himself. Showed up day in, day out, writing documentation for SQL Server 2005 until one day when Sterling L. broke into his office, bludgeoned him to death with his own keyboard, and disappeared. Mark was committed to his company, though, and in his dying moments barely managed to finish typing "Service Pack 1 as part of the installation."
I know, I know, the real WTF is TheDailyWTF.com's CAPTCHA software. Har har. Just be glad we don't use patterns as long as this one that B. P. found.
It was a slow day for Levi C. His company had an excellent staff and meticulous development and testing procedures, so calls for maintenance were rare. He was beginning to feel like the Maytag repairman of maintenance programmers. Fortunately, he was delighted to get a call from one of his favorite clients.
"Hi Levi, if you have any spare time, could you check out this report that's running slow? It's for a system we had developed by another company. It's really no big deal, just if you have a second..." Bored and eager to help, he got all the information he could about the issue. He tried running the report for the previous month, and it was indeed running slow. He ran the report again for the past two months, and it timed out.
Paul D. exposes the cutthroat nature of the grocery industry. One supermarket runs a sale on ground beef, then the store across the street has it even cheaper, and so on. Meijer pulled out all the stops and basically said "screw it, half a million off. What now, jerks?"
Dan F.'s copy of Half-Life 2 will be done uninstalling in 16 days. Valve had originally planned for the uninstaller to work in 10 minutes, but they hit some snags and were forced to delay. By contrast, Duke Nukem Forever will take just over a year to uninstall.
Ask any developer at a bank about their deployment process and you'll hear about User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Many of us have felt the sting of code changes working in one or two environments, only to fail when it finally hits QA. Maybe it's just me.
Our anonymous submitter (we'll call him "Steve") felt this sting, too. He'd carefully and methodically developed a module that worked beautifully in the bank's development and test environments, but failed UAT. Testers had discovered a bug in the module that they couldn't reproduce. The official description was that the module caused "weird things" to happen.
Peter T. had, a fantastic time of the entertainment which tried to decipher what required this vigilant case of him. He could calculate towards outside, although, which it checkbox would prevent that different alarm time appears.
We live in an advanced age of computing which gives us the convenience of cut, copy, and paste. I'm not being sarcastic; long gone are the days of copying and pasting working only within the scope of one application at a time, but now the sky is the limit! With great power, though, comes great responsibility.
T. B. was working on a system that was being gradually ported to .NET. A lot of progress had been made, but there were still some legacy components. By reading some of the old VB code, you could actually see the learning curve. Early modules had code comparable to crude cave paintings of stick figures throwing spears at boars, while more recently developed modules were more like slightly less crude cave paintings of stick figures throwing spears at boars.
It's time to add a new series called Error'd and retire a classic (Pop-up Potpourri). Like Pop-up Potpourri, Error'd will feature fun error messages and other visual oddities from the world of IT. But instead of being a monthly feature, Error'd will be published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And as always, don't hesitate to send in your own Error'd screenshots and photos.
Online shopping is great. If you need a large quantity of something, you're likely to have better luck online than in a traditional store. For example, say Danny G. wants to fill his Olympic-sized pool with memory pills - he can simply order 72,489 bottles from Amazon.com (you may not want to click if you're on dial-up). Hopefully he'll qualify for free super saver shipping.
Despite being a very successful product, the core application maintained by N. L.’s company was completely proprietary, and I mean proprietary. It used its own database; you know, kind of like a normal relational database. Its proprietary database had its own proprietary querying language; you know, kind of like SQL. The application had its own scripting language; you know, kind of like VB. Planning ahead to version 2.0’s big new proprietary features, the company was excited to learn about the possibility of creating a parallel universe so that the physics the company operated under, too, could be proprietary.
It was time for a change. The application was maintenance hell – not just because of confusing, undocumented code, but because finding, training, and keeping staff on was near impossible. The company decided that the application would be ported to .NET and SQL Server. The problem, of course, is that it wouldn’t have that home-built feel. No heart. Just another .NET app, built on standard practices and reliable technologies. No, they had to do something to make the application more unique.
Most universities have it rough. If they’re not ivy league, they have a lot of work to do to impress visitors. Sure, Baron von Ivyleague, clad in a Mr. Peanut-esque monocle and tophat, can give students a ride in his flying yacht, but a tenured professor for Uncle Marty’s Community College has to make do with substantially fewer resources.
Your typical college is a sales atmosphere. Campus tours require the guide to embellish a relaxing pond (south-campus swamp area), beautiful performing arts center (cafeteria, chairs removed), and their recently-updated high-tech computing facility (small network of Pentium 200 MMX computers). All it takes, though, is one crazy tenured professor to ruin the sales pitch.
"Good morning," said Florian, an unshaven twentysomething in need of a haircut, as he approached the security desk outside of the hospital's datacenter. Sporting a tame metal T-shirt and bleached blue-jeans, he could have easily passed as a hippie. Or as a quintessential IT worker from the dot-com-era. The security guard looked up from his newspaper to see what Florian wanted: "I'm here to pick up the PRDSEC08 server."
The data center that Florian stood outside of housed all of the hospital's electronic records. We're talking employee data, payroll data, operations data, and most importantly, patient data. Ever since the passage of that ominous body of patient privacy regulation known as HIPAA, hospitals have been extra careful to ensure that patient records are physically and electronically secure. While the hospital that Florian was at did not create an impregnable fortress accessible only through a series of twenty-ton blast doors, they were very serious about data center security: hardened steel locks, security cameras, card readers, and round-the-clock security personnel monitoring the area.
Ahh, print publications. Remember those? You'd go to the store, open a magazine, await the avalanche of cards that would fall out, fish one card out of the pile, fill it out, send it in, then camp out by the mailbox awaiting your first issue. Jim T participated in an internship on the IT staff for a popular magazine in Chicago. I know what you're thinking, but no, it's not a nature magazine, though bunnies are involved. Subtlety!
Anyhow, he was tasked with interfacing his magazine's site with a fulfillment house's site, allowing people to subscribe online. Everything was in place, so it couldn't be simpler.
Jan 07
