What did you do today?

[Phuncz]

Apparently my phone fail story wasn't finished. This morning one of the phone servers had some bizarre issues: external phone numbers were swapped, important phones were acting erratically. It was fixed within the hour, but we're still confused how this happened as this phone server wasn't giving much issue this weekend.

Than the internet at our server site cut out and there was no failover happening. Almost 4 hours during which about a hundred people were not able to do much work. This was my monday. I'm glad the shitstorm from the bad router update was solved before that, or it would have been the mother of all shitstorms.

And the cherry on top was one of the core servers decided to not report something like not being able to sense fans, power supplies or temperatures. The cleaning lady noticed the abnormal noise from Delta fans blasting at 100%.

Failure hattrick if I ever saw one. Oh well, I survived. No heart attack, relatively low stress. I'm pretty much going to live a 100 years if I can handle this kind of bad juju.

 

[LocoMoto]

Apparently my phone fail story wasn't finished. This morning one of the phone servers had some bizarre issues: external phone numbers were swapped, important phones were acting erratically. It was fixed within the hour, but we're still confused how this happened as this phone server wasn't giving much issue this weekend.

Than the internet at our server site cut out and there was no failover happening. Almost 4 hours during which about a hundred people were not able to do much work. This was my monday. I'm glad the shitstorm from the bad router update was solved before that, or it would have been the mother of all shitstorms.

And the cherry on top was one of the core servers decided to not report something like not being able to sense fans, power supplies or temperatures. The cleaning lady noticed the abnormal noise from Delta fans blasting at 100%.

Failure hattrick if I ever saw one. Oh well, I survived. No heart attack, relatively low stress. I'm pretty much going to live a 100 years if I can handle this kind of bad juju.

You sir... Make this robot's accomplishment seem very minor..

 

[Arboreal]

Signed up as a supporter of this esteemed site. Very easy to do, and glad I got round to it. I'm enjoying it round here

 

[LocoMoto]

Signed up as a supporter of this esteemed site. Very easy to do, and glad I got round to it. I'm enjoying it round here

You.. are an MVP!

 

[Phuncz]

You sir... Make this robot's accomplishment seem very minor..

I don't feel that I'm very good at my job. At best I'd say I'm mediocre. I am happy all this failure happened stretched out over three days at the end of January and not in one day or at the end of December. The things that bothered me were the router updates being uploaded on a saturday morning and the people on-call weren't taking their responsibility.

Signed up as a supporter of this esteemed site. Very easy to do, and glad I got round to it. I'm enjoying it round here

Thanks for joining ! I also like your avatar, isn't that from Alien or maybe Event Horizon ?

 

[Arboreal]

I don't feel that I'm very good at my job. At best I'd say I'm mediocre. I am happy all this failure happened stretched out over three days at the end of January and not in one day or at the end of December. The things that bothered me were the router updates being uploaded on a saturday morning and the people on-call weren't taking their responsibility.

Thanks for joining ! I also like your avatar, isn't that from Alien or maybe Event Horizon ?

You've had quite a weekend (or lack of it)...great work. That's tough having to carry other people who aren't doing their bit.

Glad you like the avatar, it's from the Death Star targeting computer in Ep IV - I always preferred it to the 'illuminated table' that the rebels had in their Yavin HQ

 

[EdZ]

Discovered a new software development failure mode.

The story so far: inherited a pile of VBA-laden excel spreadsheets that talk to a scattering of Access DBs (no server hosting, just .accdb files on a shared drive) to maintain, mainly by being foolish enough not to say no. No spec sheets, no documentation, no comments, no source control, and those actually using the sheets helpfully explain that "we only use this to do X", until they mention that Y and Z are broken.
Have spent the last month moonlighting from the normal support role adding a fairly simple function to one of these sheets: some extra DB fields (plain text without validation, despite my best efforts, because 'they're not sure what they want to put in yet'), a UID-check, and a new interface gated for certain users. And I make sure to try and do things 'the right way': wrangle specs of exactly what is wanted, document the changes, comment the code, get testing and signoff done.
Deploy it, and THEN discover that the version I was working off of, following on from my predecessors work, while having the same version number as the one in production was actually a completely different and older revision lacking several vital functions (that had been implemented directly in the production version but never copied into the development version of the same number), that nobody testing had mentioned needing.
Luckily the changes were modular enough that inserting them into the 'old' new version only took an hour (and most of that spent on diff-by-eye, because of course we can't have the user rights to install external tools on corporate machines, and not being a formal developer cannot install the internal tools) and I was already starting early, so nothing had time to really go off the rails.

 

[LocoMoto]

I don't feel that I'm very good at my job. At best I'd say I'm mediocre. I am happy all this failure happened stretched out over three days at the end of January and not in one day or at the end of December. The things that bothered me were the router updates being uploaded on a saturday morning and the people on-call weren't taking their responsibility.

Even if you may not feel very good at the job, you took responsibility and you persevered with your experience and knowledge, that is a commendable trait!

 

[Soul_Est]

You are definite class acts, @Phuncz and @EdZ .

Today I:

1. Worked some more on RSC
   Spoiler

   Venting, Mounting, and Powering
   
   After some work over the past weekend (last week was hectic), I have gotten to this stage:
   
   

   

2. Sketched a design for another case
   Spoiler

   
3. And watched a Twitch (Creative) streamer create some amazing art (NSFW)
   Spoiler

   https://player.twitch.tv/?video=v118654358&autoplay=false

 

[CC Ricers]

I'm downloading possible test models to really test my software renderer. The renderer is written in Javascript, and I hand-coded most of the math and rasterization algorithms. It's also small form factor (taking less than 10KB of space, no external libraries) and it's already viewable in my project page here.

Beware it's CPU intensive. To test the software to its limits, I want to replace that tank model with something more visually demanding, perhaps a detailed mech or a scuplture.

 

[jØrd]

Today I finally worked out how to do custom maps in Minecraft after far too long spent wondering how its done.

 

[confusis]

Today I apparently complained about the speed of SD cards..

 

[Ceros_X]

Today I apparently complained about the speed of SD cards..

I've never thought them the speediest of storage.

 

[ricochet]

Today I played around with my new HDPLEX combo... decided I couldn't wait any longer so I went ahead and installed it without the SFX bracket. Check out my thread link.

 

[HeroXLazer]

I got 300 feet of "gold" (doesn't look that like the gold you would think) from paracordgalaxy.com for a cable. Their service is fasssst. I ordered on Saturday night and was shipped on Monday and already got here.

 

[zovc]

This isn't particularly computer related, but hey friends!

Today at lunch I got to look at a commercial property that's, like, right near the heart of the (small) city I live in. The owner has been sitting on it for a while now and we talked and he's willing to consider renting it out to me as a residential property... get this, the rent will be cheaper than my current place!

On the outside it's pretty modest, just a long rectangular brick building near a more-or-less abandoned shopping center (all of the owners of those businesses have retired these past few years). On the inside, it shows that it's been used for a few different kinds of businesses over the years but it's extremely bare and practically a blank slate. Pretty much a ~1000sqft rectangle with a few non-structural walls.

I'm excited because the owner seems kind of interested in either converting the property or just updating it (or both), and he wants to start working out what all needs to be done to spruce it up. Pretty much anything that doesn't alter the exterior he said he'd probably be on board with. We've talked to the fire marshal and whatnot and in a rural area like ours there doesn't seem to be much that needs to be done to be able to legally convert the property from commercial to residential.

There is currently no shower in the place, so that needs to change... there's also no kitchen/appliances and obviously that's a luxury I'd appreciate. Right now I'm trying to figure out a way to incorporate all of those things in a way that would make sense for a business to have. The more commercial-friendly or 'flexible' of a layout I can come up with, the more I imagine the owner will be willing to take on the cost of renovating the place.

But yeah, I'm basically looking at an open 20' * 50' floor plan and trying to find some inspiration and direction.

 

[zovc]

Today I apparently complained about the speed of SD cards..

Hey, what ever happened to SD RAID?

 

[cmyk78]

Oh dear, Cookie Clicker. It brings back memories... As soon as I got bored with that (about 3 minutes in), I started looking at ways to automate the clicking. Than I looked at improving the rendering times to optimize the cookies per sec. Than I realised I was wasting my life.

I figured out a neat trick using the Corsair Utility Engine and using mouse keys to click like insanity. I created a new macro that clicks numpad 5 about 32000 times with no delay set between the clicks. Then I turned on mouse keys, which allows you to use the numpad like a mouse, where numpad 5 happens to be click. It spikes my CPU usage up to about ~60%.

 

[Phuncz]

Nice ! I used AutoHotKey and Razer's software but I didn't get that many clicks per second. I thought it was the Flash app keeping me back.

 

[Necere]

Man, that reminds me... I totally forgot about my Cookie Clicker session:



No automation here, either