• Someone (unregistered)

    Something I don't understand is why they were losing data when they lost connectivity? Why is the data not being logged and sent once connectivity is regained?

  • Peter (unregistered) in reply to b
    b:
    +1 to that!

    If he had any brains, he would have made it a part of the project to spend as much time in Mackay as possible.

    Yes to that! I had a wonderful week sailing in the Whitsundays a few years back. A beautiful place!

  • (cs) in reply to KMurx

    It's actually a very sensible message. It means "Our hardware/software keyboard detector failed to detect your keyboard. Maybe you have no keyboard, or maybe our detector failed. If you think you have a real keyboard attached, press F1. If we detect the incoming F1, the computer can run." In 1990 we got this message on one of our computers ever time we booted it. It was a mix of hardware from different sources and the BIOS didn't love the keyboard.

    Addendum (2009-05-07 21:43): (RE: "Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue.")

  • (cs) in reply to Someone

    I have been trying to resist the urge to defend myself. I have failed. The story is basically what I submitted, but has had a little spicing up by WTF.

    My pathetic attempt to redeem myself:

    1. There was a very tight budget. We could barely afford the project. What happens is that you submit a proposal to a funding body, in this case the Australian Research Council, and a budget is proposed part of that. The grant committee then decide if they will fund the proposal. About 15% of proposals are successfull. For those that are funded, the budget is normally cut back quite a bit, but the same outcomes are expected. This means that you never have enough money to do the work required. Hence, an old notebook computer, a couple of cheap UPSs on the most critical equipment, etc. No money for new equipment, let alone redundancy, backup generators and more support staff!!

    2. The HSDPA network was rolled out in Australia about 2 weeks before we installed the gear. There was only one option available, and it only came with a PCMCIA card. That's it. No choices. The card didn't arrive until we had been up there for 3 days, as it was sent to Tasmainia accicentally (thanks Australia Post!).

    3. I bought the first router that was released in Australia. I installed it within a week. Until I got that option I had to do what I could. The reboot worked ok, but I hated it.

    4. We weren't losing data when we lost connectivity. We lost data because we were so reluctant to call the local support, as they were pretty sick of us before we arrived. This meant that if we couldn't contact the gear we would leave it a day or two before calling them, just in case it was just the link, and it would come back up again by itself. If it didn't, we would have to call the support, and it might take them a couple of days to get out there. They would most likely then just have to turn the computer back on. This was because the most common problem was that there were a lot of power outages, and if the outages lasted longer than the UPSs then it would all stop. I tried enabling an auto restart at 10pm each day in the BIOS of the notebook, but it didn't seem to work reliably. I never figured out why. Once I had the router in, I could determine pretty easily if the power had been down or not, as the router would restart and I could see it, but I wouldn't be able to contact the computer.

    5. Yes, Wollongong is an industrial city, and Mackay is a holiday destination, but Wollongong is a lot nicer than Mackay in my opinion. The steelworks is a small part of the town, and the rest is fantastic. Mackay is just a lot of cane farms. The pretty stuff is under the water about 20km off shore. We didn't get to go diving on the reef while we were up there unfortunately.

    The irony is that I have just had to possum proof a suntracker on the roof of our building, as a possum fell down the tube we send the light down into the lab through, and uninated and defocated on our new $400,000 spectrometer. Damn those rotten animals.

  • SteveC (unregistered) in reply to Smash King

    How would you manage unit testing??

  • SteveC (unregistered) in reply to Smash King
    Smash King:
    hatterson:
    I find it very useful to toss in the occasional "well what it someone rolls their face on the keyboard" test because, in most cases, end users will eventually do something that stupid.
    I would love to see you perform that test.

    Ooops. Note to self: Hit "quote", not "reply". Then Preview.

    I'd like to see you perform unit testing??

  • laoreet (unregistered) in reply to hatterson
    hatterson:
    1.) System failed due to bad hard drive. Only possible WTF here is perhaps that it wasn't set up redundantly, however given that it's a last minute rush job running out of a rickshaw in a random field I would say that a RAID is out of the scope of the project.

    2.) System failed because power was out. Only possible WTF here was that there wasn't a backup generator, however similar to above it can hardly be expected.

    3.) A natural disaster resulted in downtime. Stuff like this happens, this was a backfield operation not a high reliability data center that's supposed to sustain natural disasters.

    4.) Bad driver/hardware led to poor connectivity. Only WTF here is that it took Graham so long to replace bad hardware. Once again it's possible that the budget was so drained he simply couldn't purchase the equipment he needed (new router) until later.

    5.) Frog was causing errors. The WTF here is two fold, but still somewhat weak. Also they're both Grahams fault. a.) computers weren't locked and b.) Graham couldn't simulate errors that were caused by simple user (or frog) input. I find it very useful to toss in the occasional "well what it someone rolls their face on the keyboard" test because, in most cases, end users will eventually do something that stupid.

    On number five; indeed, thats what fuzzy testing is all about. I wish they'd let me put our product through that, but I know it would writhe in great pain before giving up the ghost completely.

    Plenty of buffers that can overflow and unchecked inputs. :( Though, its getting better since we started chopping off parts and redesigning and reimplementing in java.

  • n (unregistered) in reply to diaphanein
    diaphanein:
    diaphanein:
    SuperQ:
    Jurgen:
    Shouldn't they have locked the computers?

    Yup, my first thought was, why aren't the screens setup to auto-lock after a few min.

    Better question is: Why is this "service" running interactively to begin with?

    And to the person that can't figure out how to have windows auto-lock the computer? really? It's on the same damned control panel applet to configure the screen saver if you're doing it on a per-user basis - click that "Power..." button.

    Er...sorry, that's to turn off the monitor. The "On resume, password protect" checkbox will lock the computer soon as it goes to screen saver.

    Or know user at all:

    rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation
  • db (unregistered) in reply to Mike K.
    Mike K.:
    It amazes me that people don't ever take the phyical environment and human resources into account. Technology is useless without people. A tractor and plow won't produce corn all by themselves.

    This problem could have been solved by hiring a skilled technician that lived close to the project site.

    There isn't one - consider Nevada with less people and that is the population density you are looking at. Also it's hard to find a UPS that will last for a week.

  • (cs)

    If a million frogs jumped around on a million keyboards could they have come up with community server? Better yet has this already happened?

  • bls (unregistered)

    This is basically par for the course if you're doing research in the field. It always takes longer than you think and nothing works. Harden up ;)

  • Glyphi (unregistered)

    Wow, I used to work with a test gut who's last test was always to hammer randomly at the keyboard for a while. When asked he explained it emulated a cat walking over the keyboard.

    Guess he could have adapted to frogs.

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    Has anyone seen or read On the Beach? Those crazy Aussies went all the way to California in a submarine, to track down a random morse code signal, only to to find it was an empty Coke bottle balanced overtop a keyer, tied to the drawstring of a window-shade fluttering in the wind.

    Well, I might have put it on my list of things to read or watch, but you've just told me how it ends, so I don't think I'll bother now...

  • (cs)

    A typical case of "What The Frog?!"

    (Can't believe that nobody came up with that bad joke before. Um... wait... on second thought, I do believe that nobody wanted to come up with such a bad joke.)

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Mike K.
    Mike K.:
    This problem could have been solved by hiring a skilled technician that lived close to the project site.
    You're forgetting that this was in Australia - there are no skilled technicians and no-one lives close to anything.
  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    Has anyone seen or read On the Beach? Those crazy Aussies went all the way to California in a submarine, to track down a random morse code signal, only to to find it was an empty Coke bottle balanced overtop a keyer, tied to the drawstring of a window-shade fluttering in the wind.

    Or The Year of the Angry Rabbit, in which a plague of rabbits infest Canberra and eventually paw the correct launch codes into the Prime Minister's nifty desktop nuclear holocaust control console...

  • Kef Schecter (unregistered) in reply to KMurx
    iToad:
    try:
  code...
except frog:
  handle frog exception...

    I lol'd.

    KMurx:
    Ken B:
    Keyboard not found.  Press F1 to continue.
    Which is actually a sensible error message.

    Ok, it could be clearer - "Keyboard not found. Attach Keyboard and press F1 to continue." - but well. Nothing's perfect.

    It may be a sensible error message if you have a USB keyboard. But that message comes from the days of PS/2 keyboards, which you are not supposed to plug in while the system is running.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Dan
    Dan:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Has anyone seen or read On the Beach? Those crazy Aussies went all the way to California in a submarine, to track down a random morse code signal, only to to find it was an empty Coke bottle balanced overtop a keyer, tied to the drawstring of a window-shade fluttering in the wind.

    Well, I might have put it on my list of things to read or watch, but you've just told me how it ends, so I don't think I'll bother now...

    I knew someone would complain about that. It was published in 1957, the statute of limitations for spoiler warnings is long past.

  • (cs)
    Jake Vinson:
    So, did you guys hear the WTF about the red-eyed tree frog?
    omnes:
    Read-it! Read-it! Read-it!

    ba-dumf-tisshhh!

  • (cs) in reply to hatterson
    hatterson:
    spike:
    I had a programming teacher that would test all assignments with the 'cat' test. He would literally bang on the keyboard randomly; if your program crashed due to that you failed the assignment.
    I fail to see the bad part of that.
    He should have banged on the keyboard with a real cat.
  • (cs) in reply to Glyphi
    Glyphi:
    Wow, I used to work with a test gut who's last test was always to hammer randomly at the keyboard for a while. When asked he explained it emulated a cat walking over the keyboard.
    The problem with re-telling a story that you heard somewhere recently and pretending that it happened to you is that you might inadvertently be so amnesiac as to post it a page later in the same thread where you first heard it. Plus you might also tell it worse than the OP, and add spelling and grammar mistakes while you were doing it.
  • I have no name (unregistered) in reply to iToad
    iToad:
    try:
  code...
except frog:
  handle frog exception...
    Python is a great tool for dealing with frogs!
  • Lego (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    hatterson:
    spike:
    I had a programming teacher that would test all assignments with the 'cat' test. He would literally bang on the keyboard randomly; if your program crashed due to that you failed the assignment.
    I fail to see the bad part of that.
    He should have banged on the keyboard with a real cat.

    We have a winner!

  • AndyL (unregistered) in reply to spike
    spike:
    I had a programming teacher that would test all assignments with the 'cat' test. He would literally bang on the keyboard randomly; if your program crashed due to that you failed the assignment.
    What if the simulated cat steps on CTRL-C?
  • Hellotoothpaste (unregistered)

    I love the fact that the frog probably loved Y so much because it was most likely above the CPU. There's a great secondary reason for liquid cooling your froggy laptop.

  • (cs)

    Wasn't there a software specially designed to detect random keystrokes entered by a cat? It probably needs to be upgraded to handle amphibians and other small animals, as it seems.

  • (cs) in reply to AndyL
    AndyL:
    spike:
    I had a programming teacher that would test all assignments with the 'cat' test. He would literally bang on the keyboard randomly; if your program crashed due to that you failed the assignment.
    What if the simulated cat steps on CTRL-C?
    Hah! It walked right into my simulated trap! CTRL-C fires the simulated laser at the simulated keyboard!
  • sewiv (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    I knew someone would complain about that. It was published in 1957, the statute of limitations for spoiler warnings is long past.

    There is no statute of limitations on spoilers. The polite thing to do is NEVER give away the ending of anything, unless specifically asked. Doing otherwise is just showing off (nyeah nyeah, I've read/seen this and you haven't).

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to sewiv
    sewiv:
    There is no statute of limitations on spoilers. The polite thing to do is NEVER give away the ending of anything, unless specifically asked. Doing otherwise is just showing off (nyeah nyeah, I've read/seen this and you haven't).

    Silly troll, the opposite is true. "If you've seen this movie, you'll notice a parallel, if not, nyah nyah, I've seen this and you haven't." is much more rude than "There's a parallel with this work, I will now explain the parallel for those who are curious, but not curious enough to research the topic. I assume you're smart enough to notice that I'm going into plot details, and if you're so desperate to go spoiler free, then you'll stop reading now. If not, I have no sympathy for you."

    Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father; To Serve Man, it's a cookbook; Presumed innocent, his wife did it; Verbal Kint is Kaiser Sose; River is made of chocolate!

  • dzx (unregistered)

    Wow, this is my University!

    I also work in the IT department (of of the many) and felt like I had to share this with you. Oh, the WTFs that I could share..

    Seeing the name Wollongong appear anywhere is quite an achievement. I am content.

    Captcha: Same CAPTCHA I used the last time I posted =/

  • tego (unregistered)

    WTF ???

  • duis (unregistered) in reply to Lego
    Lego:
    DaveK:
    hatterson:
    spike:
    I had a programming teacher that would test all assignments with the 'cat' test. He would literally bang on the keyboard randomly; if your program crashed due to that you failed the assignment.
    I fail to see the bad part of that.
    He should have banged on the keyboard with a real cat.

    We have a winner!

    Back when I was in college my roomate had a cat. Once when I was going to my computer to work on a project I caught the cat walking on my keyboard. Instead of worrying about making my computer programs "cat proof" I chose to modify the behavior routine of the cat. Problem solved!

  • (cs)

    convince the locals that the "government experiment" was only about sugar cane,

    Why is that so hard? Just zap them with the memory thingamabob whenever they get a glimpse of the flying saucers.

  • LiraNuna (unregistered) in reply to KMurx

    It makes sense in today's terms.

    Remember that keyboards used to use PS/2 connections which required you to reboot the computer for the BIOS to recognize them, which made no sense at the time.

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