• titter.com (unregistered) in reply to titter.com
    titter.com:
    Wait, are we still talking about newborn humans, or is this some slang for atomic weaponry?
    I mean of course the mentioned Code Pink affair.
  • Anne (unregistered) in reply to valerion
    valerion:
    So which is the real WTF?

    HIPAA is. Just ask anyone who's ever worked in a hospital. Or even been to a hospital lately. You know how every desk now has a "Stand behind this line until you're called forward in order to protect patient privacy" sign in front of it? Thank your elected Congress-critters for that one. That's just one of thousands of similar regulations that are part of HIPAA, not a one of which has made any sense to me so far.

    (Or perhaps I should have spelled it "hopsital" in keeping with the original article. WTF? No spell-check?)

  • (cs) in reply to titter.com
    titter.com:
    titter.com:
    Wait, are we still talking about newborn humans, or is this some slang for atomic weaponry?
    I mean of course the mentioned Code Pink affair.
    To my knowledge, we don't keep any atomic weapons in the hospital nursery.
  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    titter.com:
    titter.com:
    Wait, are we still talking about newborn humans, or is this some slang for atomic weaponry?
    I mean of course the mentioned Code Pink affair.
    To my knowledge, we don't keep any atomic weapons in the hospital nursery.
    That's just the cunning camouflage!
  • abide (unregistered)

    I did that on accident on one of my first projects, I made a mass mailer that got into an infinite loop spamming one customer with over 4k emails.

    When i got to work in the morning, i had a voicemail from said customer saying 'please stop'

  • MRAB (unregistered) in reply to Jeff
    Jeff:
    A lot of CMS sites do that since not all web hosts allow you to have a shell account or cron jobs. The downside is that it assumes that the page will get traffic - if nobody goes to the page, the cron job will never fire. Not a big deal for a cron that updates the page contents, but for a mass-mailing, that won't work well. ...
    You just need a cron job on a computer somewhere to fetch the page, thus guaranteeing that the page gets some traffic. :-)
  • Krioni (unregistered) in reply to IT Girl
    IT Girl:
    voyou:
    Satanicpuppy:
    I'm calling BS on the explanation.

    Cron is a task scheduler . . . .

    It's pretty common to call any kind of task scheduler "cron," or something derived from "cron," whether it's a system daemon or a piece of code in a PHP script that's supposed to run tasks periodically . . . .

    I assume something of the latter sort is what the people in the story mean by "cron." . . .

    Kind of like the "ping" thing that had everyone worked up earlier this week. You're not going to stop the English language from morphing, even in tech-speak.

    Or the fact that a lot of people use the term "list-serve" when they are talking about a bunch of comma-separated emails pasted into the To: or Cc: field.

  • Xythar (unregistered) in reply to Eh
    Eh:
    Whoa there, the "techy" section (actually the first sentence) makes no sense.

    A cron job is something that's set up using the cron daemon (crond process) that kicks off at specified times. You can't "run" a cron script in the way described.

    Some other script could be run, but I'm pretty sure it's not a cron script.

    Yeah. You could even say it's not much of a cron job!

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to hikari
    valerion:
    presumably important medical training

    Who's to say it's "presumably important"? It could just as easily be some basic intro stuff, or related to unimportant government regulations, or something else. No need to assume that this is a class on how to conduct a heart transplant. It could just be a video on proper hygiene or how to interact with patients more productively.

  • acid (unregistered) in reply to Lister
    Lister:
    I'm not sure what is more disturbing.

    The IT department needs to know what Code Pink is?

    or

    That stealing a baby from the nursery happens often enough that you need a code for it?

    Scarier Still - the training implies that the IT dept is supposed to know WHAT TO DO about someone stealing a baby from the nursery. Perhaps you're supposed to file a service request with IT security or something.

  • (cs) in reply to Anne
    Anne:
    You know how every desk now has a "Stand behind this line until you're called forward in order to protect patient privacy" sign in front of it? Thank your elected Congress-critters for that one. That's just one of thousands of similar regulations that are part of HIPAA, not a one of which has made any sense to me so far.

    See, that one makes sense to me - there's usually some sort of form or question about why you're here, and the next person in line doesn't need to be peeking over my shoulder reading that I'm writing down, say, "AIDS testing" or something like that. Even though it's usually just boring-old "follow up appointment".

  • beltorak (unregistered) in reply to Lister
    Lister:
    I'm not sure what is more disturbing.

    The IT department needs to know what Code Pink is?

    or

    That stealing a baby from the nursery happens often enough that you need a code for it?

    What do you think would happen if you heard "Attention all hospital personnel; someone is attempting to steal a newborn from the nursery. Please report any suspicious persons to the nearest attendant." Every mother and father in the building would run to the nursery to snatch up their child in the hopes of protecting them. Whereas "Code pink. Code pink. Contact extension 2424." is far less likely to cause panic and injury due to stampeding hysterical parents. Not to mention it is going to be a lot harder to try to find one person absconding with an infant when you have a mob of parents trying to do the same thing.

    As for "what is the IT department going to do" - well nothing really. But the law probably states "all employees" and no thought was given to making it more specific. How about you draft the legal language that exempts the employees that don't need to know what to do in the case of a code pink.... remember that if you (being the lead hospital administrator) are wrong, and one employee who has not taken the training is in the building for any reason during an event, it is highly likely that the hospital insurance will not cover any damages or lawsuits brought against the hospital as a result.

    Of course I am just guessing at all of this; I don't work for the hospital biz.

  • db (unregistered) in reply to abide

    It's even more fun when someone makes that mistake with a faxmodem. It's quite bizzare to hear the words coming from a modem speaker in a darkened server room "stop whistling at me you bastard!"

  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to Eh
    Eh:
    But if I recall correctly that just displays the network usage for each specific NIC, doesn't it? I don't remember seeing per-process bandwidth usage. Still, I may be wrong. My memory's hazy about this.

    Compared to the XP task manager, the Vista one is extremely useful. Instead of just CPU time, it actually shows you what processes are causing all that disk contention that's actually bogging down the system without using any CPU, in realtime, along with top network usage and other stats.

  • TZ (unregistered) in reply to Justice

    Guilty. I run an RSS news generator once a day from a website where the host doesn't allow batch jobs kicked off from cron or similar tools. I thought it was rather clever of me. And, yes, the job can only run once a day!

  • (cs) in reply to LeftBlank
    LeftBlank:
    It's part of the NT based Windows series (NT, 2k, XP, 2K3, etc.) [The Task Manager's 'Networking' tag.]

    The 9X series used a different program ('Sysmon?').

    I just checked a server running Windows 2000 and it didn't have that tab. I think it was added in XP.

    Eh:
    It's been a while since I used Windows, but the Task Manager displays bandwidth usage? Is this new?
    It should be about 7.5 years old.
  • (cs) in reply to TZ
    TZ:
    Guilty. I run an RSS news generator once a day from a website where the host doesn't allow batch jobs kicked off from cron or similar tools. I thought it was rather clever of me. And, yes, the job can only run once a day!
    I'm puzzled by this (and other examples) that rely on the chance that a user will browse to the homepage. Couldn't some machine somewhere (pretty much any machine, anywhere) be scheduled to launch a browser with the homepage set to this triggering page? It's a genuine question, because this is not my area, and I'm wondering what I've missed as this seems almost too obvious a way to work around the host-won't-allow-cron issue?
  • (cs) in reply to Zagyg
    Zagyg:
    TZ:
    Guilty. I run an RSS news generator once a day from a website where the host doesn't allow batch jobs kicked off from cron or similar tools. I thought it was rather clever of me. And, yes, the job can only run once a day!
    I'm puzzled by this (and other examples) that rely on the chance that a user will browse to the homepage. Couldn't some machine somewhere (pretty much any machine, anywhere) be scheduled to launch a browser with the homepage set to this triggering page? It's a genuine question, because this is not my area, and I'm wondering what I've missed as this seems almost too obvious a way to work around the host-won't-allow-cron issue?
    It certainly would work, given another machine could be relied upon to be up and connected to meet the schedule. I guess you could call it "cron-over-http".
  • JTSandvik (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    valerion:
    presumably important medical training

    Who's to say it's "presumably important"? It could just as easily be some basic intro stuff, or related to unimportant government regulations, or something else. No need to assume that this is a class on how to conduct a heart transplant. It could just be a video on proper hygiene or how to interact with patients more productively.

    Hygiene in a hospital is not important? If I get sick, I hope I never get to a hospital where you work, even with IT.
  • chorlton (unregistered) in reply to thecodejanitor
    thecodejanitor:
    ah, the poor man's cron. nothing a single check flag couldn't have fixed.

    a married man sleeping? there's no sleeping...

    Well there's no sex either, so what else?

  • Maarten (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    I'm calling BS on the explanation.

    Cron is a task scheduler. A job running out of cron runs at specific intervals that are governed by the system clock. Unless visiting the webpage caused the system clock to restart, there is no way that cron would fire that job off again.

    Now, it is completely possible that the program was started by cron, and repeatedly restarted its own mailing routine because of some if(new_data){} subroutine, but it has nothing to do with the scheduler.

    There is no reason that a cron job couldn't be started by something outside cron. A cron job is actually a script placed at the right location.

  • mort8104 (unregistered)

    omg

    That's all I can say.

    omg

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Thus it is that we in the IT department, who work in a building several blocks removed from the hospital and never darken its doors, must nonetheless test annually for knowledge of hospital emergency codes (code pink means someone is trying to steal a baby from the nursery)
    Fuck that - stolen babies are security's job. I'm not even going to question a deranged looking woman with a newborn baby becuase, seriously, they all look deranged. It's the natural look to have after a living creature has just clawed its way our of your uterus. Security don't pop in to help me with my code so I'm fucked if I'm helping them with their stolen babies.
  • (cs)

    The image ... is that a MFD viking?

  • Hello? (unregistered)

    Ere, what's my missus doing round your house mate?!

    The number of times I have been prodded awake by the Missus, just after getting off to kip. "Love, the internet very slow tonight. Could you take a look in the morning? I couldn't seem to...".

    What? Spend hours talking to your online TV show forum buddies about some inane plot move in a very dire and hopefully soon to be cancelled show about hospitals/CSI cops/twenty-somethings-moaning-about-how-bored-they are?

  • Piercy (unregistered)

    Web-U-Learn...are these the same people as scrip-t-kiddies? Occasionally things malfunction a little as you might have to apologize (although it really shouldn't) but 700 emails and it was down to a script being run on a page view....

    I would hate to think what there elearning system is like.

  • summerian (unregistered)

    Implementing cron job started by user's request... Apart what happened - what if nobody enters the site after midnight? Impossible, isn't it? LOL :)

  • (cs) in reply to chorlton
    chorlton:

    Well there's no sex either, so what else?

    Speak for yourself.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Code Dependent:
    Thus it is that we in the IT department, who work in a building several blocks removed from the hospital and never darken its doors, must nonetheless test annually for knowledge of hospital emergency codes (code pink means someone is trying to steal a baby from the nursery)
    Fuck that - stolen babies are security's job. I'm not even going to question a deranged looking woman with a newborn baby becuase, seriously, they all look deranged. It's the natural look to have after a living creature has just clawed its way our of your uterus. Security don't pop in to help me with my code so I'm fucked if I'm helping them with their stolen babies.
    Then we'll all be glad that you're a coder and not a healthcare professional.
  • (cs) in reply to acid
    acid:
    Scarier Still - the training implies that the IT dept is supposed to know WHAT TO DO about someone stealing a baby from the nursery. Perhaps you're supposed to file a service request with IT security or something.
    We do know what to do about it. The annual training sees to that. The irony, and the reason I posted it as an example in the first place, is that we're never in a location where such a thing could happen. We're nowhere near the hospital.
  • Madox (unregistered) in reply to JTSandvik
    JTSandvik:
    Anonymous Coward:
    valerion:
    presumably important medical training

    Who's to say it's "presumably important"? It could just as easily be some basic intro stuff, or related to unimportant government regulations, or something else. No need to assume that this is a class on how to conduct a heart transplant. It could just be a video on proper hygiene or how to interact with patients more productively.

    Hygiene in a hospital is not important? If I get sick, I hope I never get to a hospital where you work, even with IT.

    So maybe "important" isn't the right word we should all be using. The differentiating factor is between the kind of material you can do over a half-assed web based quiz as opposed to honest-to-God hands on classroom training.

    Even "important" material like hygiene can be done through some retarded webinar, because you don't have to sit through hours of classroom training. It's mostly just remembering some good habits and some facts. Contrast that with learning how to skin a goat. Best done hands on.

    Then again, what do I know.

  • Madox (unregistered) in reply to chorlton
    chorlton:
    thecodejanitor:
    ah, the poor man's cron. nothing a single check flag couldn't have fixed.

    a married man sleeping? there's no sleeping...

    Well there's no sex either, so what else?

    There's always beer.

  • Madox (unregistered) in reply to pitchingchris
    pitchingchris:
    chorlton:

    Well there's no sex either, so what else?

    Speak for yourself.

    He speaks for most married men.

    Captcha: eros - how apropo

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Announcing a code pink gives all hospital personnel the alert to watch for a suspicious person carrying a baby, and intercept if possible. There are telltale signs that would indicate an imposter in nurse garb: how the baby is being carried, what ID badge the nurse has on, and so forth.

    Couldn't they just announce "Someone's nicked a baby!"?

    That way everyone could join in the baby-hunt, not just hospital staff. Also, the culprit would probably do a runner, making them easier to spot. ;)

  • Zock (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    I'm calling BS on the explanation.

    I'm calling BS on your BS calling. Just because you don't see how it could be done, doesn't mean it can't happen.

  • Soon to be divorced (unregistered) in reply to Charles400

    Amen, Charles400. Amen brother.

  • (cs) in reply to Madox
    Madox:
    pitchingchris:
    chorlton:

    Well there's no sex either, so what else?

    Speak for yourself.

    He speaks for most married men.

    I guess I don't fit in the most category then. Good thing.

  • (cs) in reply to pscs
    pscs:
    Couldn't they just announce "Someone's nicked a baby!"?

    That way everyone could join in the baby-hunt, not just hospital staff. Also, the culprit would probably do a runner, making them easier to spot. ;)

    Or the baby would win a free ride down the laundry chute - if it's lucky.
  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to beltorak
    beltorak:
    As for "what is the IT department going to do" - well nothing really. But the law probably states "all employees" and no thought was given to making it more specific. How about you draft the legal language that exempts the employees that don't need to know what to do in the case of a code pink.... remember that if you (being the lead hospital administrator) are wrong, and one employee who has not taken the training is in the building for any reason during an event, it is highly likely that the hospital insurance will not cover any damages or lawsuits brought against the hospital as a result.

    Of course I am just guessing at all of this; I don't work for the hospital biz.

    Or, what if said IT person is fixing a hospital computer, and Code Pink is announced? Presumably understanding what it is, and what to do might be important when serving as a potential witness?

    In bigger hospitals IT may be segregated away from the day-to-day hospital bustle, but I'm sure in smaller ones or even in a clinic it might be important that everyone understands what's going on.

    Heck, even if you don't want to stop someone, acting as a witness is often useful (you don't expect a doctor to suddenly drop everything he's doing to pursue a suspect, would you? But you may expect him to call the extension and report it).

    Or, given it's a medical setting, I'm guessing there may be times when extra personnel are pushed into service unexpectedly and having basic training might be appropriate (e.g., maybe an IT person is called upon during an overload situation to fetch supplies as every medically trained person is too busy already - things above and beyond one's job description).

  • (cs) in reply to tiller
    tiller:
    I have done that, on shared webhosts without cron installed. What I did was to record the last start time of the 'cron' job and if it was more then 4 Hour, I would update the start time field, and execute the cron job. Worked fine. (And yes it was a hack, and I did put in a comment explaining why the code did what it did).

    Wikipedia's software does the same thing (well, it's for one-off jobs, not scheduled ones). Of course, it's for jobs much smaller than sending 5000 emails.

  • (cs)

    Coincidentally, the popular forum app vBulletin uses as similar method to kick off "cron" jobs.

  • dot com code monkey (unregistered)

    Ouch totally painful. At my last job I wrote several cron-job emails at the request of the product developers. I always hated doing those because your butt was really on the line if you screwed up and mass emailed all of your customers something inappropriate...

    One I wrote was a thank-you-for-visiting-did-you-find-what-you-needed email that was sent out to everyone who created an account with us 2 or 3 days after they signed up. Well, the script was created, tested on our dev database against developers' email addresses, etc and everything was a go. Well a few days after it went live I received an upset email from a developer on one of the OTHER websites my company owned - see, someone (in their brilliance) decided that the two sites should share the same database and in fact, many of the same database tables (HORRIBLE, I know, but the one site was copied to create the other, database, code and ALL, and minor changes made, in the interest of time - long before I got there). And while I knew the sites shared numerous tables, they didn't always overlap - like an evolutionary tree, they diverged at some point and had their own unique tables too. It was not brought to my attention that we shared exactly the same tables for our log-ins, emails, saved searches, etc.... until after I received an email from the other team's webdev manager asking why our site was sending emails to THEIR members :)

    Ouch. added a check to make sure the site "source code" was correct in the query and it worked fine after that.. but taht was just one of numerous awful problems that "brilliant" idea caused.

  • Isaac (unregistered) in reply to PeriSoft
    PeriSoft:
    Spectre:
    After midnight a viewing of the homepage of your website

    My website?

    No no no - I read it again, and I'm almost certain it's my website.

    Sounds like the person who sent the email was copy pasting from an email they received from whoever manages their own backend.

    The tone of the email annoys me, the phony informality sounds like this is a company recently set up by a gang of college dropouts. Might work if you're a new social networking site, not so much if you provide corporate training for medical professionals.

  • (cs)

    The article doesn't make sense at all. It just doesn't work out.

    Some of the weak points have already been mentioned: would the mail client slow things down that badly, even if it was downloading emails continually? It was only at mail number 20 when John got there; that would account for only 5MB. Well, we don't know what bandwidth they had of course. And a cron job being started by a page view? (But that has already been explained away by mentioning that every scheduled action can be called a cron job.) But there's more. If the job was indeed being restarted by people visiting Web-U-Learn's website, that meant at least 700 people visited after midnight. 700 people out of a customer database of 5000? That's a lot in such a short time. And why did John pull up a new browser. Obviously his wife already had a browser open; wasn't that one good enough for him? Did he have to use a different brand of browser? Snob! And if the web interface is anything like any web interface for mail I've ever seen, it's not easy to erase 700 mails at once. At the rate they were arriving, his mailbox would fill up faster than he could delete them. The number of mails bothers me too. If it had risen from 621 to 700 in the short time that it took John to shut down Outlook and surf to his webmail page, that means the mail server would have sent out 79*5000=395000 mails in that short while. That doesn't match the description of the server crashing and rebooting over and over. It just doesn't all make sense.

  • threecheese (unregistered) in reply to Spectre

    No, this article is not about mature tranny midget pron...

  • Chuck D (unregistered)

    Get up, get- get- get down Web-U-Learn cron job is a joke in your town

  • Matt (unregistered)

    I have been dealing with a program that contains a runCron script that is supposed to be manually executed "by hand occasionally", so I believe every word.

  • marty (unregistered) in reply to kastein

    dailywtf articles alway seem fake. The email is obviously written by the same person who wrote the rest of the article.

  • (cs) in reply to Pim
    Pim:
    The article doesn't make sense at all. It just doesn't work out.

    Some of the weak points have already been mentioned: would the mail client slow things down that badly, even if it was downloading emails continually?

    Note that everything tested for speed was on the Internet. So, depending upon bandwidth, the answer is, quite possibly yes. But really, the only fix needed there is shut down Outlook - it won't saturate the network if it's off. It's possible John didn't think of that aspect of it. It's also possible that John knew his wife well enough to know she'd restart it if she saw it wasn't running.

    Pim:
    If the job was indeed being restarted by people visiting Web-U-Learn's website, that meant at least 700 people visited after midnight.

    No. The job was being started each time someone visited the website, not each time someone new visited the website. For all we know, it might have been any page, not just the main page - so each page in the training counted. It could be that it was just 14 people online... Or even less; I've seen quite a few people try reloading pages when they're coming up slow. If John's wife is as bad as one of the users I had to deal with back in the day, maybe she was the only one...

    Pim:
    And why did John pull up a new browser. Obviously his wife already had a browser open; wasn't that one good enough for him? Did he have to use a different brand of browser? Snob!

    Obviously, you're not married. He opened a new browser, because he didn't dare touch his wife's browser - not while she was in a bad mood already.

    Pim:
    And if the web interface is anything like any web interface for mail I've ever seen, it's not easy to erase 700 mails at once. At the rate they were arriving, his mailbox would fill up faster than he could delete them.

    Not necessarily. I've seen a few webmail interfaces that allow one to delete 50 messages with basically three button presses - one in the 'check all' box, one to the 'delete' button, and one on the confirmation window (and you can generally just press return there.) I've seen one webmail interface with a 'delete all' button. (Admittedly, that one was a bit wonky; I quickly stopped using it, as I discovered its author was a crazy man who understood the dictionary - the version I tried would delete all your messages in all your folders with that particular button. Including your sent folder.)

    Pim:
    The number of mails bothers me too. If it had risen from 621 to 700 in the short time that it took John to shut down Outlook and surf to his webmail page, that means the mail server would have sent out 79*5000=395000 mails in that short while.

    That's not the way these mail programs work. What that really means is that, in the time it took Outlook to download 20 messages, then be shut down, and John to surf to the webmail page, the mail server kicked off 79 new jobs to send 5000 messages. Or possibly they were all running, but 79 of them got to that point in their queue. Probably, it was a mix between the two, with some other number of new jobs starting and not getting to John's wife yet.

    I strongly suspect that it may have also meant that there were 700 jobs still running, assuming that the server could handle that many running simultaneously.

    Pim:
    That doesn't match the description of the server crashing and rebooting over and over. It just doesn't all make sense.

    Generally, if you hear a user story, and think that it describes what was happening server-side, you'll have a story that doesn't make sense. However, if you know how things do work server-side, you can figure out more or less what's going on over there by hearing what a user saw. It's kinda funny like that...

  • (cs)

    I'm not at all surprised by this and have idiots seen do similar things. The basic cause is always lack of knowledge. Always. And some foresight and a basic clue of course.

    When you are completely and utterly oblivious to the fact that something like Cron even exists, let alone how to use it... When all you know about programming is that it consists of PHP statements between HTML tags... When you think the only possible method of getting your own code to start is by doing a page request...

    Then 'solutions' like this are an accident waiting to happen.

    This is why people should take an education in computer science so they have at least some grasp of what they are doing, and this is also why all beginners should be mentored by some sane senior developer.

    I am very surprised though by the company giving the real reason. This is really new to me. I've ost track of the number of WTFs like this that I've encountered in real life, but have never ever seen a company confessing it in such a way. Normally the reason the marketing or communications department gives is something completely else then what really happened. This is not always because of bad intentions though. Often some guy from the marketing department gets the story from a technician, listens to it with glazed eyes and then writes it down in his own 'customer friendly' words, which is often completely missing the actual point.

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