Comment On Crashing the Proxy

i would have commented frist but i crashed the proxy server

I love it when the execs who order total monitoring of employees don't realize that they, too, will be monitored.

I was ready to write tl;dr until I realized there was a massive visual aid in this one.

Holy spelling mistake Batman, but a really funny one
'... where any employee could easily read up on the owner's obsession with AdultFiendFinder'.

AdultFiendFinder... ooh demon kinky.

AdultFiendFinder: When normal friends just aren't enough...

Three sole developers? What?

And why didn't browsing the internet normally crash this thing?

me_again:

Holy spelling mistake Batman, but a really funny one
'... where any employee could easily read up on the owner's obsession with AdultFiendFinder'.

Thanks! Actually put that one in on purpose - really. I swear. Honest.

Since the owner wasn't convinced that the break-in wasn't internally motivated

Since the author wasn't aware that double negatives don't help readers

Richard T. Roll:

And why didn't browsing the internet normally crash this thing?

From the sounds of it, normal browsing probably would occasionally crash it, but only if you happened to be making a web request in the little 10-minute window once-per-hour. Constantly calling every few minutes would guarantee that you'd hit the 10-minute window EVERY time, so it would be "more guilty than most". That'd be my guess, anyway.

dpm:

Since the author wasn't aware that double negatives don't help readers

That's not a double negative. The "wasn't" is part of a separate clause. The owner wasn't convinced of what? He wasn't convinced that <<the break-in wasn't internally motivated>>.

Stop using the comment box! You're crashing the comment server!

Not sure what you're saying, unless it's:
"Since the author was aware that double negatives do help readers"

That wasn't no double negative.

We log a lot of stuff to open network drives as well. Sometimes the idiots in HR will dump personnel data in there, or private company finance data. Helped me out a lot when I was figuring out how much of a raise to ask for last time round.

anon:

Not sure what you're saying, unless it's:
"Since the author was aware that double negatives do help readers"

That wasn't no double negative.

I think he was trying to say "He wasn't convinced that the sentence wasn't hard to read".

From the sysadmin point of view: regardless of the WTF involved, if you're running something that brings down the works, you turn it off first and ask questions later.

That said, the above process is a WTF! At the very least the PDF generation (assuming PDF was actually required in this instance) should be asynchronous to the proxy operation.

So Daniel was the only developer and Dave was the only network technician. In that case, who the hell was Jim and how come he had his own band of IT goons? How can the lead developer not know about these people and what do they even do if they're not developers or techs? It feels like there was a paragraph missing from this article but hey, we all know that's just how Bowitz rolls.

Of course, on embedded systems, the lack of a file system would have short-cut the entire logging/pdf file creation process </obligatory>

whatever:

I love it when the execs who order total monitoring of employees don't realize that they, too, will be monitored.

At a past job, I was given responsibility for the "proxy reports" application. This was the CIO's pet project until he got too busy and I inherited it from him. There were three branches of code based upon user name for calculating time spent on the internet. One was for standard employees, one was for executives and the third was for, you guessed it, the CIO. I showed it to a couple of the other programmers, and they were not at all surprised.

Love them frumpled Bowitz rolls.

lesle:

Love them frumpled Bowitz rolls.

Thanks! Best served with butter.

How to make Frumpled Bowitz Rolls

Ingredients

1/2 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
1/2 cup warm milk
1 egg
1/3 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1/4 cup butter, softened

Directions

Place water, milk, egg, 1/3 cup butter, sugar, salt, flour and yeast in the pan of the bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select Dough/Knead and First Rise Cycle; press Start.

When cycle finishes, turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide dough in half. Roll each half into a 12 inch circle, spread 1/4 cup softened butter over entire round.

Cut each circle into 8 wedges. Roll wedges starting at wide end; roll gently but tightly. Place point side down on ungreased cookie sheet. Cover with clean kitchen towel and put in a warm place, let rise 1 hour. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).

Bake in preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes, until golden.

Crappy sales job if you ask me.

I mean, where's the MS SQL Server for tracking the PDFs?

Mark Bowytz:

lesle:

Love them frumpled Bowitz rolls.

Thanks! Best served with butter.

How to make Frumpled Bowitz Rolls

Ingredients

1/2 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
1/2 cup warm milk
1 egg
1/3 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1/4 cup butter, softened

Directions

Place water, milk, egg, 1/3 cup butter, sugar, salt, flour and yeast in the pan of the bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select Dough/Knead and First Rise Cycle; press Start.

When cycle finishes, turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide dough in half. Roll each half into a 12 inch circle, spread 1/4 cup softened butter over entire round.

Cut each circle into 8 wedges. Roll wedges starting at wide end; roll gently but tightly. Place point side down on ungreased cookie sheet. Cover with clean kitchen towel and put in a warm place, let rise 1 hour. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).

Bake in preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes, until golden.

WIN! (Thanks, Mark, you've just made my day!)

TRWTF is why you'd want to use Google Desktop in the first place. Was his computer too fast and his data too secure?

So hitting gmail periodically would crash the system. Is this any different from an OCD person manually checking gmail regularly?

I usually find talking to Dave beneficial. Nice graphic by the way.

This may be the first time that setting something on fire would help. In this case, setting a wall on fire to log blocked requests trying to get through the fire in the wall. I'm not sure how setting a wall on fire will help but this consultant I paid $100,000 said I should do it.

*is an IT manager*

Mark Bowytz:

me_again:

Holy spelling mistake Batman, but a really funny one
'... where any employee could easily read up on the owner's obsession with AdultFiendFinder'.

Thanks! Actually put that one in on purpose - really. I swear. Honest.

Yeah, but I bet you didn't put in 'havok' (should be 'havoc') on purpose, right?

Great catch! Yep, you're right - should've checked a dictionary ;-)

Cad Delworth:

Mark Bowytz:

me_again:

Holy spelling mistake Batman, but a really funny one
'... where any employee could easily read up on the owner's obsession with AdultFiendFinder'.

Thanks! Actually put that one in on purpose - really. I swear. Honest.

Yeah, but I bet you didn't put in 'havok' (should be 'havoc') on purpose, right?

It reeked of Havok.

I wonder who was the poor sod who had to read those reports.
Or were they write-only documents.

YA know, if your proxies are required to authenticate accesses, the first several versions of several Google products would attempt to phone home for updates....and when they got the 407 status returned from the proxy, would then petulantly start trying again over and over as fast as possible, forever. By the time a few dozen users had downloaded some of these apps, the proxy servers were groaning...and the proxy log sizes exploded. Took a few weeks to fuguire out and kill the update mechanism. By them Google Chrome and its friends were a dirty word here.

au gued:

I wonder who was the poor sod who had to read those reports.
Or were they write-only documents.

They are written to WORN-Media. Write once read never.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_bucket

I have found the real WTF!

It is hidden in the source of the page. Have a look (saved for greater justice).


<p>&ldquo;I find this all very hard to believe. I&rsquo;m going to speak to Dave.&rdquo;</p>
<!--
<p>---------------This belongs...somewhere...but needed?&nbsp; Relates to &ldquo;Core WTF&rdquo;?</p>
<p>As the company&rsquo;s third &ldquo;Lead Developer&rdquo; (and by &ldquo;Lead&rdquo;, they really meant &ldquo;Sole&rdquo;), Daniel had inherited a large amount of baggage and didn&rsquo;t even wince at most day-to-day WTFs he encountered.&nbsp; <br />
The company that had originally specialized in coins, but as it had grown rapidly, it now had a finger in a myriad of collectible markets. As a consequence, things their main &quot;item&quot; table was coin specific, the field contents changed based on the item type. For instance, the &quot;mint_mark&quot; field originally indicated mint mark for coins, but now mean the team for sports cards, what animal a particular Webkinz was, or something completely random if it was a unique piece like the Elvis Presley whisky decanter that someone had the inkling to offer on the website.</p>

<p>---------------</p>
-->
<h3 style="margin-bottom: 0px">Taking it to Dave</h3>

How come "business types" are so incapable of reading reports in plain and simple ASCII text files that they insist on having bloatware processes to convert them unnecessarily to stuff like PDF, M$Word, M$Excel, etc.?

shimon:

I have found the real WTF!

It is hidden in the source of the page. Have a look (saved for greater justice).


<p>&ldquo;I find this all very hard to believe. I&rsquo;m going to speak to Dave.&rdquo;</p>
<!--
<p>---------------This belongs...somewhere...but needed?&nbsp; Relates to &ldquo;Core WTF&rdquo;?</p>
<p>As the company&rsquo;s third &ldquo;Lead Developer&rdquo; (and by &ldquo;Lead&rdquo;, they really meant &ldquo;Sole&rdquo;), Daniel had inherited a large amount of baggage and didn&rsquo;t even wince at most day-to-day WTFs he encountered.&nbsp; <br />
The company that had originally specialized in coins, but as it had grown rapidly, it now had a finger in a myriad of collectible markets. As a consequence, things their main &quot;item&quot; table was coin specific, the field contents changed based on the item type. For instance, the &quot;mint_mark&quot; field originally indicated mint mark for coins, but now mean the team for sports cards, what animal a particular Webkinz was, or something completely random if it was a unique piece like the Elvis Presley whisky decanter that someone had the inkling to offer on the website.</p>

<p>---------------</p>
-->
<h3 style="margin-bottom: 0px">Taking it to Dave</h3>

I wonder how many of those exist on other articles...

the owner's obsession with AdultFiendFinder

Are we sure it wasn't just ads?

Fark u dave

There's a very simple human-factors way to get rid of systems like these...

Run a report of sites visited by frequency of hit and send to all employees. The worst offending managers will immediately recognize themselves and order a halt to monitoring.

I did it and it worked.

When I got called in to explain why I did it, I explained that there was no point in monitoring these things if we didn't publish the list to try and get the folks who were doing stuff they shouldn't be doing to stop doing it.

To ensure that no further reports were published, we were ordered to stop monitoring web traffic as it was an unnecessary and time-consuming task.

The real WTF is that Google Desktop doesn't use SSL.

Anonymous:

So Daniel was the only developer and Dave was the only network technician. In that case, who the hell was Jim and how come he had his own band of IT goons? How can the lead developer not know about these people and what do they even do if they're not developers or techs? It feels like there was a paragraph missing from this article but hey, we all know that's just how Bowitz rolls.

Hehehe, yah, but this one's better than most.

Either GOOD JORB, MARK BOWYTZ, or thanks for letting Lorne write/proof this for you!

Either way, today ZOIDBOWYTZ gets the friends! Hooray!

\:D/ \:D/   (|/)(;,;)(\|)   \:D/ \:D/

shimon:

I have found the real WTF!

It is hidden in the source of the page. Have a look (saved for greater justice).


<p>&ldquo;I find this all very hard to believe. I&rsquo;m going to speak to Dave.&rdquo;</p>
<!--
<p>---------------This belongs...somewhere...but needed?&nbsp; Relates to &ldquo;Core WTF&rdquo;?</p>
<p>As the company&rsquo;s third &ldquo;Lead Developer&rdquo; (and by &ldquo;Lead&rdquo;, they really meant &ldquo;Sole&rdquo;), Daniel had inherited a large amount of baggage and didn&rsquo;t even wince at most day-to-day WTFs he encountered.&nbsp; <br />
The company that had originally specialized in coins, but as it had grown rapidly, it now had a finger in a myriad of collectible markets. As a consequence, things their main &quot;item&quot; table was coin specific, the field contents changed based on the item type. For instance, the &quot;mint_mark&quot; field originally indicated mint mark for coins, but now mean the team for sports cards, what animal a particular Webkinz was, or something completely random if it was a unique piece like the Elvis Presley whisky decanter that someone had the inkling to offer on the website.</p>

<p>---------------</p>
-->
<h3 style="margin-bottom: 0px">Taking it to Dave</h3>

TRWTF is that Firefox renders that paragraph plainly visible as if it weren't commented out. So much for "hidden in the source".

What a truly horrible design. Where is the XML?

Because you can't make ASCII text red?

FFuser:

TRWTF is that Firefox renders that paragraph plainly visible as if it weren't commented out. So much for "hidden in the source".

Or is TRWTF that IE doesn't display the paragraph?

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4

MrEricSir:

Because you can't make ASCII text red?

Kids today...

mc:

dpm:

Since the author wasn't aware that double negatives don't help readers

That's not a double negative. The "wasn't" is part of a separate clause. The owner wasn't convinced of what? He wasn't convinced that <<the break-in wasn't internally motivated>>.

It's still awful. How about "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit aenean et orci massa."

FFuser:

shimon:

...
<!--
<p>---------------blah---------------</p>
-->

TRWTF is that Firefox renders that paragraph plainly visible as if it weren't commented out. So much for "hidden in the source".

TRWTF is that HTML commenting syntax is so obscure that few people know the above isn't really commented out. So Firefox is rendering it correctly.

Flipper:

FFuser:

shimon:

...
<!--
<p>---------------blah---------------</p>
-->

TRWTF is that Firefox renders that paragraph plainly visible as if it weren't commented out. So much for "hidden in the source".

TRWTF is that HTML commenting syntax is so obscure that few people know the above isn't really commented out. So Firefox is rendering it correctly.

HTML commenting is definitely TRWTF. It annoys me no end that it moved to XML and the XAML making it a huge PITA to comment out bits of XAML in a WPF application especially if it already includes comments (because you can't nest comments).
As a result, I'm really bad about adding any comments to my XAML because I might later want to comment out a whole section and VS isn't smart enough to figure it out itself.

AdultFiendfinder? Is that a service to help you find a zombie hooker?

whatever:

I love it when the execs who order total monitoring of employees don't realize that they, too, will be monitored.

I was working at a place back in the mid-90's where we were bringing in corporate Internet access for the first time. As a good network architect, I put in place proxy servers that logged usage, and e-mail servers that logged incoming and outgoing e-mail traffic. After a few months of everything humming along, the CIO asked me about how we handled Internet usage monitoring. I described everything we were doing, but also told him that we logged every e-mail, including content. I was just pulling his leg, but his face lost all color immediately when he thought about HIS e-mails we might have ALREADY logged. It was a priceless sight! :-D

Franz Kafka:

MrEricSir:

Because you can't make ASCII text red?

Kids today...

mc:

dpm:

Since the author wasn't aware that double negatives don't help readers

That's not a double negative. The "wasn't" is part of a separate clause. The owner wasn't convinced of what? He wasn't convinced that <<the break-in wasn't internally motivated>>.

It's still awful. How about "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit aenean et orci massa."

He's speaking in tongues, Lois! Our son is possessed! Meg, start at Psalm 41 and don't start reading until I tell you! The power of Christ compels you!

me_again:

Holy spelling mistake Batman, but a really funny one
'... where any employee could easily read up on the owner's obsession with AdultFiendFinder'.

I know - I assumed it was deliberate!!