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Computer Voodoo?
jbeaupre asks: "A corollary to 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call 'computer voodoo.' You don't know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I'm talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?"
For most problems, I find smacking the user is more effective than smacking the computer.
...i had to code a html page without dreamweaver
now thats voodoo
back in the day we didnt have no old school
When somebody has a problem that they want me to fix, my mere presence and their attempt to repeat the problem makes it go away.
Usually whenever it would start going on the fritz a good punch or kick to the tower would get it going again. And also stop that damn whirring noise. It always makes me laugh when I'd see people hitting the monitor. Because THAT is where everything is XD
Not sure how it works, but I've saved 2 or 3 hard drives that reported tons of bad sectors with cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hdb and then cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdb and repeating that a couple times. Seems to alleviate all the problems. The drives wouldn't format, and all the data would get corrupted, but after doing that trick, they haven't had a problem (with the longest running drive being 2 years after the fix and still going).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I once had a hard drive that wouldn't spin up if the computer had been off a few days. The only way was turning it by 90 degrees every time before booting the computer.
No, seriously. For some reason my presence is enough to get some computer problems to go away.
(until I leave...)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
In my repair monkey days, my shop used to handle data recovery jobs of all kinds. The problems ranged from minor filesystem corruption or unbootable drives to physical damage - heads, and even a bullet through a hard drive (No, I wasn't able to get anything off that one).
We had a variety of methods for dealing with the physically damaged drives that had suffered a head crash, but my boss had a technique he called the 'massage'. A clicking or noisy drive would be rotated around its various axes until the BIOS would recognize it on boot. Sometimes the clicking would stop and he would sit there holding the drive in that position or prop it up to keep it there.
Another method we used was to freeze the drives for a period of 15 minutes to 6 or 8 hours. Sometimes this allowed enough contraction to let the tracks line up again, and we'd get as much data as we could with the drive cold. Once, we even froze a drive between two ziploc bags of water with IDE and power cables hanging out the edge to keep the drive colder longer. It worked!
-- Shade
Technology tips and tricks.
Whenever I boot from Windows to Linux, I have to turn the power strip off for seven seconds for the network card to work.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I gotta stop using gentoo.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
On the first pc I built one of the best ways to keep it in line in its last few weeks with me was to randomly yell and smack the pc, it didnt know when it would happen so it didnt risk crapping out on me :P
Nah, Ive never had to rely on any voodoo to keep my pc running .. but to eliminate some annoying buzzing sounds from fans nothing beats a swift smack on the top left corner of the case.
I had a roommate that smacked his pc cause it wasnt working the way he wanted it to .. but it was working perfectly fine (no hardware or software issues - all user issues) .. I told him I'd have to start a support group for his electronics (he hit everything) if he kept it up. Electronic Victims of **** still lives to this day (name censored so he doesnt come after me :P)
If it takes effort to do, let someone else do it.
My old TV card. No matter what cables you used, if the aerial lead wasn't bent at a 90 degree angle about 2 inches away from the computer, it wouldn't pick up a signal. In the end I just blutacked it down; I assume there was a loose connection inside, and the twist put out just enough force to make the connection.
For smacking the computer to keep a hard drive formatting from failing, I'd say something is loose. And that will stop working after a while.
The same is most likely true with the ethernet card.
The motherboard itself may have something loose, and the way to deal with all of it is to move components into other PC's and see how things go.
I've seen and met all hardware problems and beat 'em all (even if by buying a new component). The REAL voodoo lies in the software. Why in God's holy name does Windows fail to boot one time, and then boot successfully the second time?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
However, after I installed the card, Windows 2000 would crash with the following BSOD:
Annoying as heck-- somewhat expected from a cheap network card.
So one day I was wat home downloading Fedora with bittorrent--- my DSL connection was maxxed out. There was too much interference on the line, so I hit the little 'channel' button to switch to a different channel.
As soon as I hit the button on the phone -- *boom*, the computer threw up the Blue Screen of Death. ANd sure enough, I reboot, hit the button on the phone-- and *boom* -- Computer crashes again.
I have since replaced all of the D-Link cards with cards from other manufacturers.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
In general, with my main desktop machine and main laptop, if something funky is happening I will simply replace the part or parts in question to ensure a smoothly working machine, but I've had some interesting things with some old hardware I kept around for no real reason.
I used to have an old pentium (133 I think) that ran well, except that the CD drive would only actually recognize a disk if you tilted the computer at about a 20 to 30 degree angle when the disk was inserted. I never did figure out why this fixed it, luckily I didn't need to use the cd drive very often.
I also used to have a cable modem that would drop the connection if you so much as blew on the power cord. I always just figgured that was just some flaky hardware, and eventually got the cable company to replace it. Another really aggrevating hardware problem that I never figgured out was an old Sony DVD drive that I had. When you opened the tray, it would about 1 to 2 seconds later automatically close the tray, but when you opened it again it would stay open for about 10 seconds, just long enough to remove or insert a disk.
I think everyone runs into a situation where there is some voodoo involved in solving a problem, it becomes problematic when people stop carying about having any answers, and just care about getting something working.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I'm not sure I'm reading your post right (no pun intended), but...
some BIOS require certain devices to be present to pass the POST. I discovered this the hard way when setting up a headless server. I spent 20 hours installing gentoo, got the services all nicely configured and put the machine in the corner, and it never went online... so I pulled it out and brought it back to my desk and it booted fine.
I didn't find out that it was keyboard/monitor missing errors that was preventing the system from booting until I carried the monitor to the other side of the room and plugged it in and saw the keyboard error... then I poked around in the bios and saw the options for requiring keyboard and monitor.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Got to love old school hacking
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
...you gotta type 'sync' three times before it works.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Hmm, what you describe is not the result of being "advanced", but of being complex to the point that people cannot tell what is causing a specific state or failure or success.
'Magic' is when a device does something well, which one did not expect technology to be able to do, and in a way that does not make it obvious how the technology is implemented.
The story is about when devices do not do what they are expected to do.
Tell the enduser their network cable "got reversed" and somebody will have to go over there and turn it around for them.
First, if you ask someone to put the phone down to check for link light, they'll answer back in 3 seconds without checking.
Second, even if they actually wouldn't lie about it, they'd never get under a desk to fix it in the first place.
Even guys in suits do it every time, if you say someone will be over "later" to reverse their (known loose) network cable.
End result -- works every time if you do it right, and no credibility lost since everybody understands what happened.
Just today I turned my computer on after leaving it on hibernate for a week. The "thaw" as I guess it could be called, failed (the computer hung before showing anything useful) so I rebooted. Windows starts up fine and then tells me my hardware has changed and I need to reactivate Windows. Except my hardware hadn't changed since the last boot (over the course of owning this computer, admittedly it had changed a lot). Oh wait, I can't activate over the Internet anymore, I've installed it too many times on the same machine, I have to call Microsoft, speak a 42 digit number slowly into the phone, get put on hold, be told I spoke the number wrong, put on hold again, read part of the number to a person, and then type another 42 digit number read to me over the phone. Then my computer will work again.
If I had mod points left I would have done it myself. I never actually thought to try and do that. It makes perfect sense now that you said it. I always assumed that when used dd setting the input file and output file to the same thing would cause it to get stuck in an infinite loop. But now that you posted that and I thought it out some more, it makes perfect sense. DD will just grab the amount of data you specified as the block size from the input file and dump it to the first part of the output file (which in this case would be the same section of the disk). It will then increment by the block size on the input file and place copy it to the output file by the same incrementation of the block size, rinse, repeat ad infinum until it hits EOF...
Again, great little one liner command to remember in the tool bag...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I keep various old expansion cards, motherboards, and processors hanging on the wall in plain sight of my beige box. The threat of disembowelment seems to keep it inline.
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
True story: I used to identify bad RAM chips in old Apple II units with a dowsing rod. Finding one bad RAM chip out of 24 was a horrible pain in the ass, the normal procedure was to remove half of them, replace those with known-good RAM chips, see if the mem diagnostic passed, ok, it wasn't in the half I removed, put those back. Take out half of the chips that weren't removed before, replace with known good chips, repeat, etc. in a binary search pattern. This was horribly unproductive, particularly if the memory fault was intermittent. And even worse, once in a while, due to all the handling and insertion/extraction, or maybe just from static discharges, you'd ruin a chip in the known-good set, which really screwed things up, you could go back and forth for HOURS.
I remember when I was a little kid, I used to watch the old Tom Snyder Tomorrow show on late night TV, and some weird guy demonstrated how to dowse using a couple of bent wires made from coat hangers. I was skeptical, but eventually I became known for some rather startling dowsing stunts, I used to challenge people to hide my keys in a location I was unfamiliar with, in houses or buildings I'd never been to, and could find them 4 times out of 5. So when I became a computer tech, I figured, what the hell, it couldn't hurt, it couldn't possibly take MORE time to try dowsing than to do the elaborate binary search method. And to my astonishment, it was a LOT faster. Sometimes it took me a couple of tries, but pulling just a couple of individual chips was a lot faster than pulling 12 chips at a time, and my results were way above the expected average of just pulling a chip at random. BUT.. I made absolutely sure that nobody ever saw me dowsing on their machines. This is Computer SCIENCE, after all, it isn't computer VOODOO. Ha!
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes/jokes from the Tom Baker era of Dr Who.
He stumbled across an old spacecraft on a very distant planet. As he sat down at the control console he remarked, "this looks like Earth technology". As he began to power it up it slowly came to life then started to fade back out. He kicked the bottom of the console and the rocket resumed slowly coming back to life. The Doctor remarked "Definitely Earth technology".
I just LOVE the implication that this sort of "kick it to keep it working" is a characteristic aspect of our technology that (in the world of this SF TV show at least) sets us apart from other species.
Didn't you ever play the role playing game "Paranoia?"
:)
Machine Empathy is a mutant power that makes all things electronic (be they computers, appliances, or killbots) into your best friends.
I submit that people who program computers, and like computers, naturally develop this mutant power.
(Incidentally, the best part of the game was that computer programmers were called "high programmers" and were worshipped (and feared) by the rest of society. That is how it should be.)
I used to have a Performa 5200 back when I started college, and if you're not familiar with the machine, it's arguably the worst Macintosh ever made. Ever. The only thing it excelled at was displaying grainy TV on the TV tuner card you could get for it.
Read that second link for all the gory details of why the follow scenario works, and you'll shudder.
I used to note in college that when doing particularly fast FTP transfers that saturated by 10-Base-T card that the machine would often lock up within a minute of starting the transfer. For months, I fiddled around and noticed that if I was actively working that this didn't happen. Eventually, I found the article I mentioned and realized that if I kept moving the mouse constantly, the machine wouldn't get in whatever weird state locked up the machine and I could finish my transfers. That's right -- to run FTP (or any other sustained, saturated transfer), I had to sit there moving the mouse in circles through the entire transfer.
Essentially, the "Left 32" bus described in the article was shared by the 16-bit Apple Desktop Bus (for mouse and keyboard) and the 16-bit networking card (as well as audio and the 8-bit SCSI controller). So long as I kept interrupting the bus with input from ADB, the networking card was unable to flood the controller that had to make sense of all the different bit-widths and clock speeds between the various busses hanging off of it, and the machine wouldn't lock up.
Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
My dad works for the Arkansas Washington County Road Service, and he is something of a computer nut, so he would 'recover' the computers they were throwing out. I was pretty profoundly poor and also a computer nut, so I would take some of the stuff off his hands.
Anyway, I used to have three or four MFM hard drives in various states of disrepair. (I think they were 40 *meg* hard drives, but I only had a controller to control up to 20 meg, to give an idea how old this hardware was.) One by one they died, until finally only one was left. When it gave up the ghost, it would spin up, then immediately spin back down. I dug into it and found some connections I could short across while it was spinning up and then break the connection, and it would keep running. I was too poor to want to go spend $1 on a pushbutton, so I just had two wires hanging out of the front of the computer that I held together while booting the PC. I ran it that way for over a year...
A non-computer story, but more interesting one, is of an old Ford Escort I used to have. The starter went out on it, and, again, I was poor, so I dug into it. I finally figured out that the relay was kicking out too far and shorting out against the housing, so I duct taped a kitchen sponge to the inside of the relay housing and put it back together. I never had a problem with the starter again for the 2 years I had the car.
That same car later had the fuel pump go out. When it went out, I asked my stepdad if I should check to make sure the pump was out instead of a wiring or power problem, and he said nah, it's the pump. So I bought a replacement - it didn't help. So, I hunted around under the hood until I found some leads that were hot when the key was on, but not when it was off, and I used ties to secure an extension cord from the leads to the fuel pump. The car ran fine.
That was in the summer. When winter came along, one day I needed to defrost the front window as I was driving down the road. I flipped the vent from dash to defrost, and the engine stopped running. (I was doing 50 mph down the road at the time.) I flipped it back to vent, and the engine started right back up again.
Somehow I had found a wire that only gave power when the vent was not on defrost. I never fixed it, just kept the inside warm enough that it didn't frost over.
Now I'm a software developer and not poor. I virtually never fix (or jerry rig) anything myself, other than software and the occasional computer hardware issue.
What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?
Ask Slashdot.
(...though I'm not quite sure it works...)
--<Mike>--
I had (still have, actually) this old Compaq Presario computer with a Pentium 200 MMX processor. The thing was never the most stable computer out there and was a pain in the but to work on, having non-standard screws and proprietay memory, as most Compaqs of that era did. One day I realized that I had a bunch of old hard drives lying around, so I decide to make this Compaq into a makeshift file server by adding the two larger drives in to the machine and brought it to school with my at the start of my Senior year. The machine's sole purpose was to act as a file server AND as a second internet/instant messaging terminal that I could use when my primary desktop was otherwise engaged. The machine didn't do this well as it seemed to suffer a 25% random reboot rate while using it. (Windows 98, couldn't even get Linux to come close to running on it.) This wasn't really any different from the sort of behavior it had shown since the day we purchased it, shortly after the MMX processors were released, so I just put up with it until...
;)
One day I'm playing Serious Sam over the LAN with some friends. There's a brief lull in the action and so I reach over for the 1 gallon bottle of apple juice I was drinking from. Well, instead of picking up the apple juice, I tip it over and the entire contents spill out ON TOP OF the Compaq. I of course, immediately jump in to disaster recovery mode and race to the kitchen to grab the paper towels. I start cleaning up the mess, expecting the wrost for the Compaq in the process. I could see where there was apple juice in all of the little crevices and I'm darn sure some of it actually got into the computer. Some had spilled on to some school papers lying next to the machine and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose any notes so I took plenty of time to salvage those papers.
After I finished cleaning up the mess, I check the computer. Mouse and keyboard input seem OK. I start up Winamp and it seems to work OK. I run scandisk on all of the drives and they all report being OK. I can't find a single thing wrong with this computer. And I'll be damned if that computer didn't have a single random reboot after I spilled apple juice on it. It became the object of admiration and jokes amongst my friends, and one friend even managed to find one of those fruity, rainbow colored Apple Computer stickers that he wanted me to put on the case. I never even bothered to open up the computer to asses the damages (partly becuase I was lazy and didn't have a torx screw driver at school). Truth be told, I was afraid to even move the comptuer or otherwise disturb it since it seemed to be working OK.
A quick addendum to this story... right before graduation I purchased another hard drive for my primary desktop machine that was about 4 times the total capacity of the drives in the apple computer. I copied all of my data off the apple computer on to this drive and pretty much relegated the apple solely to web surfing detail. About a year and a half later, I need another hard drive for a client machine and so I decide to finally open the apple computer to raid one of the hard drives in it. I was even more amazed then that the computer still worked. There was brown, sticky apple juice residue on everything in the computer. There was even a puddle of this gooey gel that had pooled at the bottom of the case. It was all over the cables, the drives, everything. I was even more surprised and even a little bit proud that the computer still worked after that ordeal.
I guess that just goes to show: if you want a stable computer, get an Apple.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
We wrote a script once that would gradually slow down the mouse pointer. We installed it on the interns computers and watched them get frustrated when their mouse pointer wouldn't move. We explained to them that they had to unplug the mouse, swing the plug end rapidly around their heads, and then plug it back in, and it would be fixed.
We would conspiciously watch from quite a few cubes away and watch this mice get whipped around in the air! It was the most hilarous thing we've ever seen! You'd think that they wouldn't buy it, but when push came to shove they did it and it worked for them after looking like fools!
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I have a friend. Her and her husband's computer works completely normal. To him, anyway, when he only "checks email occasionally". But for some reason, when the wife uses it, she says their antispy software shows the husband's profile/browsing history is mysteriously always infected cookies from a bunch of porno sites that they never visited! Seems like it's worse when she gets back from being out of town. Like the ghostly hackers know when she's been gone, or something.
There's some spooky voodoo for ya, right there. They should probably call Ghostbusters, or something.
VOTE!
Back in the day when I was a network admin (think 286 and the powerhouse 386 with a whooping 8mb RAM), we had occasional issues with one networked PC or another. Most of the time I'd carry a fairly large hammer with me and would place it on top of the computer case while I had it open to investigate the problem and work on the machine. The sight of the hammer freaked out more than one person in the office because they thought I intended to really use the thing. Apparently it had a similar effect on the computer because I never had a problem getting the thing to work again in short order. They also behaved just fine after that implicit threat (the computers, not the people).
--Udo.
I bought a clearance Super-Nintendo from CompUSA for $5 when I worked there. We didn't even sell them, but someone got suckered into taking it as a return. It worked find for about a week, then we ended up resorting to blowing on the cartridges for another week or two.
... :)
Finally it stopped working alltogether, but addicted to one of the games, I set to taking it apart and finding the problem. While it was apart, I found that if I held the game cartridge in with a certain amount of pressure it would work, but too much pressure or none at all and it would not operate at all.
Searching throughout the house for an appropriate weight, I ended up finding a 3 quarters empty bottle of Amaretto in the parental unit's liquor cabinet that worked perfectly. I spent the last semester of my senior year with a bottle of alcohol staring at me that I could never drink - for if I did my game console would die on me. It didn't last once summer started, though
The guy that owns my web hosting company told me a funny story along those lines once. He'd gone to the data center to upgrade the kernel on all his servers. They'd take one down, he updated the kernel, rebooted to make sure it worked, then handed it off to another guy to plug back in and the other guy would grab another one.
When they were on the third or fourth server, they realized the servers weren't booting up when they put them back in the rack. So they brought them back to the desk, booted them up and they worked fine. They'd put them back in the rack and nothing.
It took a couple of hours to figure out what the problem was. Somehow he'd managed to compile the kernel in a way that it wouldn't finish booting, if no keyboard was hooked up. He had no way to recompile the kernel there at the data center. He lives in Birmingham and the data center is in Atlanta, so going home to his own computer wasn't an option.
So he ended up buying a few dozen $5 keyboards at some computer shop and just laying them on top of the servers when they put them back in their racks. Worked like a charm.
Only on
Obviously you have never worked in a support position.
The average user doesn't give a damn how it works, doesn't care if their own actions are contributing to the failure(s) experienced, and will resist being educated. The technician who is called in after-the-fact is only half of the equation.
The way most users handle computing could be compared to approaching your doctor, complaining that there is something wrong with you, and then putting your fingers in your ears and saying "BLAH BLAH I CANT HEAR YOU!!!" when he gives advice or asks if you are willing to undergo some tests. Oh, and then getting pissed off at the doctor when you have the same complaint again. Now, would you say this is the doctor's fault? Similarly, the best technician in the world needs someone willing to work with them in order to truly solve problems instead of merely applying band-aids.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein