A Reliability Solution for ZIP Drives...

Remember ZIP drives?  Those 100Mb Floppies that were the rage for a few years?  Remember the click of death?

For those who don't, both the drives and the disks that went into them were notoriously flimsy, and they when they failed, it usually let you know by clicking once a second, on and on forever...  the drive was dead, your data was gone, your disk was killed.  Well, when you've got bored web devs who are always worried about the survivability of their ZIP data, what happens?

This happens...

RAID Level 1, my friends, on a pair of ZIP drives.  So, now, when you get the click of death, you can replace the disk (and maybe the drive if it co-failed) and get your data back!  Thank god they invented USB Flash Drives a few years later...

{submitted by El}

Analytics = Hilarity

Google Analytics...  how I love thee!  Here's what analytics says you guys are using to find us here at "I can has Dev Job".

So, of course the #7 most frequent search term is "a job for a turd"; how could it not be?


Anyone else have some analytics hilarity to share?

Data Overload

/// <summary>

/// orderData class contains data for the order object
/// </summary>
public class orderData  
{
    public int orderDataID { get; private set; }
    public int orderDataDataID { get; private set; }
    public int orderDataMetaDataID { get; private set; }
    public int orderDataDataDataID { get; private set; }


    private string orderDataDataSetDataSource;
    public DataSet orderDataDataSet { get; private set; }


    private string orderDataDataTableDataSource;
    public DataTable orderDataDataTable { get; private set; }
    

  public orderData(int _orderDataID)
  {
        // connect to the DB
        and so on...

I wonder if this was an e-commerce application for Sally's SeaShells (which she sells by the sea shore) or for Peter Piper's Picked Pickled Peppers inc.?

The Doohick won't plug into the thingee...

  Years ago, I was working in the service department of our local computer shop and a man came in wanting to buy a monitor.  The salesmen were "too busy" to take care of "simple" (read as "low margin") sales like that (although they were first in line to sell a customer a cable).  At this time, VGA (running at 640x480) was common place (but only just) and it was, in fact, all we had in stock.

  The man was white-haired with a white beard and he was sort of a squirrelly non-talkative type.  Without much fuss, I sold him the monitor and went back to fixing computers.  He called about an hour later.

  "How can I help you, sir?"  I asked.

  "Well, the doohick won't plug into the thingee.  I starts to go, but then it stops short of being all the way plugged in."

  Beginning to suspect that the monitor pins might be bent - it was the only thing that sprang to mind that would prevent a monitor cable from going all the way in - I continued, "Okay, now, which is the doohick and which is the thingee?"

  He paused for a moment.  "The doohick you sold me won't plug into the thingee on the computer."

  "Gotcha.  Okay, can you look at the end of the plug of the doohick, sir?"

  "Sure, I see it, there's little doodads in there."

  "Yes, sir, those are called pins.  Are they bent?"

  "Are the doodads bent?  Naw, I can see most of 'em and they look straight."

  We went on for a while longer, I got him to look at the thingee on the computer to see if anything was in - or blocking - the holes.  No luck.  Finally, I asked him to bring both the doohick and the thingee in for me to look at.

  The next day, the man showed up with the doohick and the thingee.  I pulled out the doohick (the monitor) and looked at it...  The doodads (the pins) were, in fact, bent.  But I could see how a layman would say they weren't.  The 15 individual doodads, themselves, were still straight - as in they were uncurved - but they had been pushed together into a few teepee like structures.  Curious, I checked the computer...

  *boggle* I didn't even know Epson made computers.  He said he had bought it in Argentina for a really good price.  It had an 8088 processor, a pair of 5.25" floppies, no hard drive, and CGA graphics.    And therein lay the problem.  CGA used a 9-pin port and I had sold him a 15-pin VGA monitor.  He had been forcing the 15-pin plug into the 9-pin port and had teepeed all of the pins into the 9 available holes.  I apologized and tried to sell him a CGA monitor, but, he said they were too expensive (and he was right).

Ed: Exactly who's brilliant idea was it to take an existing plug form-factor and add 6 more pins to it.  When old graphics and serial ports were abundant, this kind of thing happened *all the time*.  I can't wait until someone designs a new USB port that happens to be a similar size to HDMI or something and the fun starts all over again.

Another Day, Another DEU

I used to work in consumer side tech support/virus removal in a call center for a security software company. Of course I had many brain donors call in, but here is one in particular that made me cry with sad.

 

A lady called in and was very upset that our software had broken her computer. When asking for clarification, she said that when she had updated our software, it had broken it and it would no longer turn on. As she was not interested in hearing how a software update would physically break her computer, I asked her to attempt to turn on her computer. You could hear it turn on, so the actual computer was running, however nothing would show up on her monitor. She insisted that was proof that our software was the cause of her problem as she didn't have this issue before she ran the update.

 

I asked her what color the power button was on her monitor. She informed me that it was orange. I asked her to check the monitor cable connection at the back of her computer. She continued to argue and refused to do so for several minutes. After finally coercing her to make sure that it was secure, magically her monitor had a picture again and things were back to normal. I politely informed her that our software updates did not generally unplug cables as a side effect and she hung up the phone.

(submitted by Mark)

Ready to MUD!

Luckies, 2 different kinds of gin, and Pepcid.  Hrmmm...

(Warning: Ultra-obscure geekdom ahead)
Ok, let me see here...  telnet.exe...  kobra.et.tudelft.nl...  cool...  logging in...  still on AD2029, good...  uptime...  12 minutes?  Awesome!!  Ok, here's the plan, gonna run over and grab the black suit from the tie fighter pilot, then come back to AD2029 and get a Heavy Plate off a T800 before going to get the Vulcan Autosaber off of Skynet.  Then I'll be ready to work on my next level before the server reboots again in about 6 hours.