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Admin
I AM FRIST ENOUGH!
Admin
Ahm...
If the new DEV server was so powerful, why not run the DB in a seperate VM on that same physical machine?
Admin
I'd gather evidence and shop this unprofessional idiot to senior management ASAP. Either that or punch him in the face :)
Admin
In that situation I would come into work late at night, grab a hard disk image of the machine hosting MITCH-DB (all 4.3GB of it, most likely), archive that, duplicate it, P2V it onto the shiny new server, then DBAN the original box to make sure it can't boot up and cause an IP address conflict with its virtual clone.
Arseholes like Mitch are organizational damage that needs to be routed around.
Admin
Son of a Mitch?
Son of a president's daughter? No, that couldn't be, no "pull".
TRWTF is places where you need "pull" to get things done.
Admin
I never understand it when people are angry about having to do their job. IT, or service delivery people who get annoyed at having to do slightly different work that they would otherwise be doing. I mean, its understandable if they get delayed from going home, but if you're just going to be there anyway, whats the issue?
Lets say you're going home at 5:30, does it really matter if you're doing X for colleague A, or Y for colleague B? Either way, you're doing something tedious for some tedious cunt, until such time as you can do your own tedious thing. Why be angry about one and not the other?
Admin
Fact is most hardware from the year 2000 should be plenty fast enough to serve most RDBMSs, be it MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL, or even Oracle (if you can get it installed).
The reality is that most databases are simply designed incorrectly, and the apps which query them are also crap.
So, the performance bottleneck, is, as usual, the user - or in this case the developer, and not the hardware.
Admin
Also....
I would email Mitch and be very courteous, making sure to CC in any relevant bosses, to ensure a consistently professional paper trail.
At the same time, I would visit him personally, out of earshot of any colleagues, and ask him: "Oi cuntsocks, where is all that fucking hardware I demanded off you last week, you abject douche-master?"
Admin
this ˆ
Admin
This is the correct answer.
+10
Admin
No, dammit this is the correct answer +10
Admin
Good trolling attempt, but you need to find some way to work a religious debate in there.
Admin
Admin
And it should be something with a bit more authority than a fist, like the GAU-8 you keep in your back pocket. You do keep one there, don't you?
Admin
I once had to deal with a designer a bit like this. I was working in a large insurance corporation doing front-end stuff. Every time a task came in with design work, I would ask which designer to get involved, and hope that it wasn't John. It usually was.
If I had to go to John with design work, he would always complain to me about the task, as though I had written the spec, and it was all my fault.
I was once half listening to him complaining about a task which I had been asked to involve him in, which had come back to me because his design was not compliant with the spec (somehow this was my fault), while I was doing some work (probably updating Lotus Notes, something John never seemed to to) and gave a vague response along the lines of "Yes John, I'm sorry you're upset, John". His counter-response was to mimic me in a high-pitched voice.
Rather than leap across the desk divider between us and throttle him, banging his head against the desk and ultimately wearing his bloody skull as a hat, yelling "I am the King!" and being escorted out by security, I got up and made myself a tea. I drank a lot of tea while working with John.
While I never technically resorted to or even threatened violence, there was one case where he was using my computer to use a messenger program for work purposes (I guess his wasn't working, but I forget the why of this). He decided to enact the Machine Lock Fairy Protocol, which was put in place specifically to avoid people forgetting to lock their machines for security reasons. This protocol involved sending a message to others (usually something juvenile and unoriginal like "I like boys") from the unlocked computer so that others were aware that the person had left their machine unlocked.
Having spotted him enacting this protocol, despite giving him - a (supposedly) trustworthy party - access to my machine, I decided to enact the Fairy Interrupt Ambush Protocol. My variation on this was to sneak up behind him and quietly reach under his chin for the other side of his jaw, with my other hand on the back of his head, and apply just a little pressure, giving the pretense that I was going to break his neck. Bear in mind, he was a rugby player and bigger than me, so I didn't expect him to complain of neck pains (he got better - I think the sudden contact made him tense his neck muscles).
So that resulted in a conversation like this: John: "My neck hurts." Me: "My chat history hurts." John: "Yeah well that's what you get." Me: "For trusting you, apparently."
Later he would say he didn't know what he had done to make me dislike him.
Admin
Admin
I've found acting as though they say everything in a friendly way is a great way to do it since it confuses the hell out of a lot of people who think being idiots like Mitch is a good way to go.
Admin
Why not do both, it's not mutually exclusive and far more satisfying.
Admin
Admin
Even reading it several times, I really don't get the WTF. Somebody please make a synopsis of this history... a clear one, I mean. Is... could it be that Mitch decommissioned the working development server to assign it to production, doing it on-the-spot?
I think lately the histories are becoming very obscure... like the origin of the sickness of the president's daughter. Please TDWTF, try to fix this in the future.
Admin
Just point your app to use his current machine. Problem solved?
Admin
Hardware Mitchmatch
Admin
Admin
If this is true, I feel bad for you son. I got 99 problems but Mitch ain't one.
Admin
Admin
Admin
In fact, given the age of the machine, it's possible that you could find a dead click click hard drive of the same vintage in the scrap pile, and Mitch wouldn't even notice that it was a different brand.
Admin
I agree with what you say, that a properly designed database should be fast enough on older hardware.
But the wall that developers hit is when the database schema is poorly done and the application queries are also poorly done. The developers can spend considerable time re-factoring the application or they can request a faster server. In most situations, it is more effective going with the faster hardware solution.
Admin
Captcha: saluto, as in: "Io saluto il tuo talento" (Google translatable!)
Admin
You gotta love those types of people. Especially the ones that can't speak english and get mad at you. I laughed in a chinese guys face when he was stuttering and trying to spit out angry responses that made sense when I asked him to DO HIS JOB.
Admin
At one workplace a group of us had a length of two-by-four that wandered between our desks. It was generally referred to as "The Persuader" or "The Enforcer". Later on, someone who had access to a lathe turned a handle-sized length of one end to make it easy to hold. My comment about a need for something like nails (sticking out, of course) was heeded, although short lengths of 5mm pine rod were used instead of actual nails for workplace safety reasons. It was usually left lying suggestively on a desk, or it appeared in conversations like, "Where's The Persuader? I need to talk to ${IDIOT_CTO}."
Admin
Seems likely that this Mitch got caught red-handed with his used hardware sales business on the side. All decommissioned servers went straight to "recycling." Except that apparently no one actually figured it out when he was exposed.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Admin
Admin
Seems like they missed an opportunity with the name of this particular article
Admin
Admin
And MITCH-DB could just as easily be the otherwise normal database instance that the borderline psycho created back in 2000 as a scratch experimenting zone that just sort of "growed", as it were.
Admin
Admin
(I say "late casualty of dot-com", but in reality it was a victim of internal politics and repeated mass sackings of the sales/marketing side of the business. Oddly enough, after you sack all the salesmen and marketeers, you don't sell much product. It is another instance in my career of a company that would/could not sell the product, even though we, the engineers, built something good/better.)
Admin
Admin
The end of this story would have been even better if the "new" server actually was their db server... at least that was what I expected to happen.
Oh! And TRWTF is BizTalk.
Admin
I used to have to deal with people like that at a former employer. There was one in particular, the Finance Director, who got all bent out of shape when I told him the servers weren't powerful enough to do what he wanted.
FD: "I thought these were shit-hot high-performance machines!"
Me: "They were, when we purchased them 12 years ago. Today the combined processing power of all our servers across the country is less than your laptop." FD: "..."
Admin
Well, there's your problem right there. Using Lotus Notes is enough to make anybody grouchy.
Admin
It's about control and perception of roles.
Mitch thinks he's in a management position, in charge of designing infrastructure and setting policy. He gets frustrated as new requests for hardware come in because they remind him that he's really just providing a "gofer" service; people want to just ask him for something and have him deliver.
I felt this pain myself while "running" a corporate intranet. I wasn't in charge of anything, any design decision I would try to make was immediately thwarted by any random employee who asked for something different, no justification required. I would have to hop and all my plans would stall.
Here I am, brain the size of a planet...
CAPTCHA: conventio: Roman god of wearing blazers with nametags, carrying laptops and shaking hands.
Admin
Easy enough to work around: carry around a 4-pin molex to SATA power adapter that has the 5V and 12V lines reversed.
-OR-
Break off the contact plate on the hard drive's SATA power port.
-OR-
Jump the red (5V) and yellow (12V) wires while the drive is on using a bent paper clip.
Low tech "hardware failure" solutions are never in short supply.
Admin
Admin
Admin
It's senseless to run a bunch of old desktops for development in an environment where you have have access to recently decommissioned proper hardware. Not just for speed, although waiting around for things to complete can sap productivity, but also because it is preferable to test on something resembling actual production hardware.
I don't understand the pound foolish approach to servers (and network hardware) companies seem to have. It doesn't take long before a $10,000 server pays for itself in man-hours if 6,000 employees are waiting for it to respond dozens of times every day.