I was amazed too, but in honor of the FBI closing the case, History Channel brought us a new investigator with a new theory and a new suspect and 95 pieces of circumstantial evidence that he's spent his life collecting over the past 6 years. The FBI's answer to him? Unless you have found money or a parachute, we don't want to talk to you.
Something wrong with using source control automated build events in your environment?
Still, neat idea. Except this dude has already burned IT so much that my bosses do not even want him to know I exist, lest we give ourselves several weeks worth of emergency overtime fixing his code.
I'm currently not allowed to do that, as I am not allowed the network access to even see what is being saved there. I can read the code, but I do not have the same rights as the person whose system I am trying to reverse engineer.
But in the case of him leaving, that is going to be my exact suggestion: as we change the password in scripts that output XLS files, comment out the code and write out an XLS file that says "call me".
Works for now, but with the way he has it coded, if he dropped dead tomorrow, all it would take is invalidating his IT account to make it stop.
" If it does then why are you bitching? If you don't like it, rewrite it. "
Which is what I'm doing the preliminary documentation to do right now. He not only did not do comments, he didn't do requirements documents.
" If you can take 10 minutes to make a script that delivers data in a xlsx format why would you waste 10 days making some fancy C program to do the same?"
Maintainability for the future. Right now, he's the only one who understands how it works, he's the sole maintenance on this project, he's the one point of failure if it does fail (there are certain manual processes he's doing that he didn't have the scripting ability to make work).
The hard part is that it's more than him who is relying on this; management relies on these reports now and is asking us every day "can you support it yet"? And the answer right now is "No, this is unsupportable code, if this guy left tomorrow it would be inaccessible and worthless within a week"
Trouble is, it wasn't just his job. We still don't know all of his customers, but we count at least 323 people using his main report with several hundred drill downs through COSMOS (and who knows who is using the XLSs that he's putting out on random network attached storage locations).
I'm hoping that when we approach a few of them and say "this system is no longer maintainable and we're going to have to replace it with a supported production system" they'll cough up the bucks to do so.
Zero chance of that in this case. Too much dataflow, from 15 different systems near as I can tell. I just hope he doesn't quit suddenly requiring a policy password change- he's hardcoded passwords in EVERY FREAKIN SCRIPT!
He's a parts salesman who did this without checking with IT. So you're absolutely correct. Zero budget other than his own salary, that became two rogue servers living under his desk and his laptop.
Worse. He still works here, but I'm not allowed to talk to him because 5 programmers before me have quit after dealing with him. It's also just one report- or so they tell me, I've already found evidence that the system spews XLS files to random network locations that I do not have access to. Nobody seems to know who this guy's customer list is, who is accessing this report or this information, and he downright brags about "breaking down silos" .
Yes, though he started quite a bit earlier (some of this code dates to the early 1980s, accessing DB2 systems), it's pretty clear he taught himself to code and has NO idea what he's doing.
Due to the political nature of the project, I'm obviously not going to reveal any identifying information- but this is for a large multinational and what this guy has done has enabled a lot of just-in-time logistics. Unfortunately his manager has retired, and his new manager took one look at this and said "WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!?!?!?"
I'm still in the documentation stage of this project and I can already tell them what he's done- created a mess that will take a three year project to clean up and replace.
My sentiments exactly. I'm currently reverse engineering a major enterprise-level mission critical report- and it's data acquisition is based entirely in SSIS, DTS, and VBS scripts, over 300 of them, run from a task scheduler.
Nope. I'm against uncontrolled immigration from Mexico as well. I'm very much of the opinion that you should move the jobs to the people, not the people to the jobs.
Having said that, if somebody travels 2000 miles to come to my door to beg for a place to stay for the night and to have a meal, I'm giving it to him. Jobs, not so much.
Yes, but as a Silicon Valley CEO, how else are you going to put [downward] pressure on STEM wages? Supply and demand- increase supply, keep demand the same, prices go down.
Slashdot Mirror
I was amazed too, but in honor of the FBI closing the case, History Channel brought us a new investigator with a new theory and a new suspect and 95 pieces of circumstantial evidence that he's spent his life collecting over the past 6 years. The FBI's answer to him? Unless you have found money or a parachute, we don't want to talk to you.
Yep. Can't do that just with a compiler condition, and chances are the build system isn't integrated with source code control to begin with.
This is an otaku. There are people downright obsessed over DB Cooper- and that makes it nerdy.
5 years, but they got around that with a "John Doe" warrant.
Something wrong with using source control automated build events in your environment?
Still, neat idea. Except this dude has already burned IT so much that my bosses do not even want him to know I exist, lest we give ourselves several weeks worth of emergency overtime fixing his code.
I'm currently not allowed to do that, as I am not allowed the network access to even see what is being saved there. I can read the code, but I do not have the same rights as the person whose system I am trying to reverse engineer.
But in the case of him leaving, that is going to be my exact suggestion: as we change the password in scripts that output XLS files, comment out the code and write out an XLS file that says "call me".
" Does what he made work or not? "
Works for now, but with the way he has it coded, if he dropped dead tomorrow, all it would take is invalidating his IT account to make it stop.
" If it does then why are you bitching? If you don't like it, rewrite it. "
Which is what I'm doing the preliminary documentation to do right now. He not only did not do comments, he didn't do requirements documents.
" If you can take 10 minutes to make a script that delivers data in a xlsx format why would you waste 10 days making some fancy C program to do the same?"
Maintainability for the future. Right now, he's the only one who understands how it works, he's the sole maintenance on this project, he's the one point of failure if it does fail (there are certain manual processes he's doing that he didn't have the scripting ability to make work).
The hard part is that it's more than him who is relying on this; management relies on these reports now and is asking us every day "can you support it yet"? And the answer right now is "No, this is unsupportable code, if this guy left tomorrow it would be inaccessible and worthless within a week"
Trouble is, it wasn't just his job. We still don't know all of his customers, but we count at least 323 people using his main report with several hundred drill downs through COSMOS (and who knows who is using the XLSs that he's putting out on random network attached storage locations).
I'm hoping that when we approach a few of them and say "this system is no longer maintainable and we're going to have to replace it with a supported production system" they'll cough up the bucks to do so.
Zero chance of that in this case. Too much dataflow, from 15 different systems near as I can tell. I just hope he doesn't quit suddenly requiring a policy password change- he's hardcoded passwords in EVERY FREAKIN SCRIPT!
He's a parts salesman who did this without checking with IT. So you're absolutely correct. Zero budget other than his own salary, that became two rogue servers living under his desk and his laptop.
Worse. He still works here, but I'm not allowed to talk to him because 5 programmers before me have quit after dealing with him. It's also just one report- or so they tell me, I've already found evidence that the system spews XLS files to random network locations that I do not have access to. Nobody seems to know who this guy's customer list is, who is accessing this report or this information, and he downright brags about "breaking down silos" .
Yes, though he started quite a bit earlier (some of this code dates to the early 1980s, accessing DB2 systems), it's pretty clear he taught himself to code and has NO idea what he's doing.
Due to the political nature of the project, I'm obviously not going to reveal any identifying information- but this is for a large multinational and what this guy has done has enabled a lot of just-in-time logistics. Unfortunately his manager has retired, and his new manager took one look at this and said "WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!?!?!?"
I'm still in the documentation stage of this project and I can already tell them what he's done- created a mess that will take a three year project to clean up and replace.
My sentiments exactly. I'm currently reverse engineering a major enterprise-level mission critical report- and it's data acquisition is based entirely in SSIS, DTS, and VBS scripts, over 300 of them, run from a task scheduler.
GRRRR.
I have had only one in the last 20 years give me any notice the job was ending. For the record, I've never quit.
I find that employers never give two weeks notice, so why should employees?
Nope. I'm against uncontrolled immigration from Mexico as well. I'm very much of the opinion that you should move the jobs to the people, not the people to the jobs.
Having said that, if somebody travels 2000 miles to come to my door to beg for a place to stay for the night and to have a meal, I'm giving it to him. Jobs, not so much.
I feel the same about Trump, I've got a ton of friends trying to convince me to vote for him.
My response: I will not be bullied into voting for a East Coast, Elitist, big government, big business Liberal. And that goes for Hillary Too.
Government control on encryption = "put a giant backdoor in everything"
Yes, but as a Silicon Valley CEO, how else are you going to put [downward] pressure on STEM wages? Supply and demand- increase supply, keep demand the same, prices go down.
Hydrogen, combined with a rather flammable paint scheme. Mythbusters did this. http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...
No Helium involved, which if you'll remember your high school Chemistry class, is a Noble Gas (doesn't burn, doesn't react)
At $1/cu foot, this could turn Tanzania into a developed country.
Bullshit- Trump is a fiscal liberal and Hillary is a sexual liberal. Both are liberals, just different stripes.
You have a female COO- proof of liberal bias.
What makes you think you are limited to TCP/IP networks?
That's what NFC is for.
Want a messaging app that is secure, get a peer-to-peer messaging app that does not depend on servers.