Anyone worth their salt will be able to screw up a system so that an audit trail will be of little help.
Especially with physical access to the systems and a legitimate need to be in the server room.
If you have physical access, all bets are off. Whoops, that ethernet cable seems to have not been plugged in all the way - before I plug it back in, I'll just fiddle with the box a little bit to make sure that the interface isn't hosed as well - oh, what's this? Finance data. Flash drive, copy, clear history, plug cable in.
A smart IT person who means to do evil has plenty of options available and will know the ways they can be monitored and how to work around them. The first mistake any manager or auditor will make is assuming that the auditing software systems are foolproof. And of course there's also the delicate matter of explaining to IT staff that you're watching over their shoulders but it's not because you don't trust them. Only some industries have regulatory needs for that type of monitoring and auditing, after all.
Having an auditing system in place can be read by IT staff as "they don't trust us" which can actually lead to untrustworthy behaviour. I've seen that happen as well.
But consider this: Many IT people came from a finance background, especially those who have been in IT for a long time. Back in the 80's and 90's, the finance people were the ones using computers the most (Lotus 1-2-3, anyone?) to track company financials. So when businesses started building IT infrastructures, they turned to the people inside the company who used computers the most: the accountants.
Now, combine completely unfettered access to all of a company's financial information and enough knowledge in financial matters, and what do you get?
It's not about bringing the company to its knees - not entirely. Someone who wants to cause real harm to a company is going to generally want to do it in a way that isn't noticed (whether they're in finance or not) so they can prolong the damage.
It's also about the fact that an IT person has access (generally) to *all* of a company's secrets. An accountant - even a CFO - doesn't have access to all that information.
When the goal is to build an infrastructure that's unified and easily administered (and were IT staff are generally added only when absolutely necessary - and often long after they're actually needed), IT staff are often treated poorly and given access to *everything*.
That's a recipe for disaster if your IT staff aren't trustworthy.
Sack an accountant for violating trust and your exposure is limited only to financial data that they had access to.
Sack an IT person, though, and you need to hire in outside consultants to go over *all* of the systems that the IT person had access to to make sure they didn't put any back doors into the system. By the time they find them - if we're talking about a competent IT person with a grudge - it's far, far too late.
I've seen it happen a few times over my career in IT.
I'm not saying that a lack of integrity is good in any position, but IT people are generally highly intelligent, very resourceful, and generally very cunning. Sometimes they're also social outcasts (though that's less the case now than it was in the 80's and 90's) that the employees in a company try to minimise contact with if they possibly can.
Good point - it seems to be less of a problem in the other areas (in my experience, in any event). Thing is that admin people tend to have access to data from multiple of the other organizations, so while I wouldn't say that hiring untrustworthy people in any position is a good practice, in IT it can be doubly bad because the IT staff can generally access docs on shared drives (for example) that belong to accounting, legal, etc - and can either disclose it or nuke it along with the backups.
That can cause a lot more damage than if an accountant nukes his/her data, because they don't generally have access to the backups or other system-level tools.
If they do, the phrase "you're doing this wrong" comes to mind.;-)
Really, I think this just highlights something I've said for years: If you don't trust your IT people, they shouldn't be your IT people.
It's a job requirement to be trustworthy when working in IT. Those who aren't pull crap like this.
Even if she hadn't gone to jail, if she got caught tampering with systems (either while employed there or after being terminated), she should never, ever, under any circumstances be trusted to admin a system again.
I live in Salt Lake City and would check the signal riding between SLC and Provo, and even along I-15 (which is one of two major freeways in Utah), there was a strong propensity to drop calls multiple times along that 40 mile stretch of road, right where the bulk of the Utah population lives.
My AT&T problems (many, many dropped calls) ended when I switched from Blackberry/AT&T to Android/Verizon.
AT&T's coverage in Utah is notoriously bad. My company uses AT&T as a carrier, and consistently, those who had company-provided phones had problems, and when they dropped the company plan and switched to Verizon, the problems vanished.
When I started looking at switching, I did an informal survey of folks in the office, and those who were on their own plan were on Verizon and reported very few - if any - problems with dropped calls.
I've preferred the multi-country plugs myself; they're a bit more expensive, but I haven't had a problem with them falling apart, either. Got one I've had for years that I still use.
If the power brick for your laptop can handle the voltage and frequency (and most can, but check the label), you won't need a new power brick.
There's no such thing as region coding for wireless networks - the Thinkpad that I had on my first trip to the UK and the Dell I had for my second both worked without any changes other than setting the SSID - just like you would on any wireless network anywhere in the world. The only thing you might have to use region coding for is watching DVDs on your laptop that you purchase overseas - there are plenty of OSS solutions that don't require you to change the region coding on the laptop drive, either, though.
I've used Linux for years on a variety of laptops, and generally with recent releases (over the past 5-6 years) I have managed to get very good battery life out of Linux.
Enabling frequency scaling helps, and making sure you don't have processes sucking the processor (and thus forcing the processor to high-performance mode) will certainly help. Dimming the display also helps - most modern distributions should do this automatically.
I've got 3 different Dell laptops here that get 2-3 hours off a battery running openSUSE 11.0/11.1. I have a Thinkpad t42p with an extended life battery that I used to use constantly and I'd get 3-3.5 hours out of that.
If you're only getting 45 minutes out of a battery on Linux, either something's not been configured correctly in your distribution or you've got something driving processor utilization up.
I worked in IT for about 15 years, and always held that if a company doesn't trust its network administrators for a justifiable reason, then those people shouldn't be the network admins.
Remote/local doesn't matter. If they are not trustworthy and you can document why, then don't make them your admins. If they are, then don't worry about it until they do something to violate that trust. And if they do violate that trust, then go after them guns a-blazing (figuratively, not literally, OBVIOUSLY).
Most network admins want to be trusted - and need to be. Being untrustworthy is the kiss of death in that entire career path.
As others have said, local or remote doesn't matter. In-house or outsourced doesn't really matter. You need to accurately assess their trustworthiness and then deal with it in an appropriate manner.
> Follow the link for more background on this reader's query.
Apparently I have a disability that prevents me from seeing the link referred to in the story.
> Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable
Somehow we got from 60,000-100,000 people injured either temporarily or permanently every year to "we're all going to be disabled". I don't see anything that makes this conclusion logical at all. It's almost as if the writer hasn't really done any research, and OH MY GOD MY HAND!!!!! AGHH!!!!
'We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,' said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. 'This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'
Holy shit, all those words registered as English but I understood absolutely nothing in the article.
...to provide trolls with a place to engage in their behaviour.
You are the site operator: You get to decide what's acceptable and what isn't.
There will be some (usually the trolls themselves) who will claim you're violating their 1st amendment rights. You're not. The 1st amendment to the US Constitution has to do with *public* spaces. A web site you host or manage is like a room in your house, and you have the right to decide who comes through the front door.
So while I would first advocate the "thanks for your feedback" approach, if more restrictive measures are needed, such as mandatory registration with validation of personal details/e-mail address, paid access, or the institution of filtering to prevent the trolls from continuing, that's YOUR decision and your decision ALONE to make.
Well, I know that if *I* behave unethical at work, I can be fired for it. I think it's sickening that unethical != illegal. It damned well *should* be illegal.
There is plenty of proof out there that the election was rigged. I provided several examples. That you choose to ignore them and believe there couldn't possibly have been fraud because there was no court that overturned it (a) puts a lot of faith in our highly-politicized judicial system, and (b) shows a perfect willingness to disregard facts.
Please don't vote in the next election. We need those who vote to be *informed*, and you clearly are not.
You can't *seriously* believe that in the 2000 election everything was above board in Florida, can you? Katherine Harris had an obvious conflict of interest acting both as Bush's campaign co-chair in Florida and also being responsible for certifying the Florida vote for President.
At the very least, the appearance of a conflict of interest is unethical.
And let's not go into the felons who voted or the dead people who voted for Bush in Florida that year whose ballots were not discarded by Harris.
Gore was an idiot for giving up. Just because there wasn't a court overturning the election doesn't mean it didn't happen.
This is to say nothing about the BS that took place in Ohio in 2004 specifically intended to disenfranchise voters who were directed to the incorrect polling place, nor the co-chairs of the Bush campaign in Ohio being on the elections board in Ohio. Or the former CEO of Diebold stating pretty clearly that his intention in Ohio was to ensure Bush's election. Or the programmer who worked on the voting machines who was convicted of fraud in the manipulation of accounting systems.
It's kinda funny, but your comment here about 50% of the population being of below average intelligence is the second time in literally *2 minutes* that someone has said that to me.
The problem with writing to the lowest common denominator (or by assuming people won't understand and so writing to some perceived average, which I would argue is an assumption), then the average continues to drop.
But like I said, news is now entertainment - in order to get people to read it, it has to be emotive and entertaining to an extent. The problem is that by making it entertaining, the author promotes a biased point of view.
I agree that teaching people how to extract facts from a story should be a core requirement at school. When I went to school, fact extraction was something we were taught, but not terribly well.
The other thing that needs to be taught is situational awareness. Part of the reason people need to be entertained is because they don't understand how the information in the news affects them.
With regards to the idea of explaining the higgs boson, just make it relevant to the audience. Answer for the audience "how does this affect me?".
I agree with you about the interview - interesting, but not very illuminating. I thought there were a lot of non-answers, but the nature of the non-answers actually says a lot if you know how to read them.
Fortunately, my friend rents. But I see looking at one site that the good rates (presumably for good credit) are in the 8.5% range, not nearly as bad as I had been led to believe, but certainly not the 5%-ish I'm paying here in the states.
I kinda wondered about that statement myself. I think he's probably correct, though, that the President can declare an "inbound" action as an act of war, but it does seem to me that the really telling "statement" is Congress' declaration of war against an enemy that has taken an action that *they* determine is worthy of such a response.
"What about all these idiots who flame the US government when they don't even fucking live here."
Hmmm, I smell someone ignorant, and I just can't pass the opportunity up. First off, dude, go take a shower.
Talk to the guy in Australia - friend of mine who lived just up the street here in the good ol' USA about the cost of rent in Sydney. Ask his coworkers about their *13%* interest rate on home loans right now.
Know why that is happening? Lack of US investment in Australia is a big part of it. Why are US investors not investing in Australia? Because of the weak dollar. There's no return because the AU$ is nearly equal to the US$. While some Aussies may think that's cool, I'm sure they don't think 13% interest rates on home loans is cool. Why don't YOU try buying a house on your Visa card?
It's fairly typical of isolationist xenophobic twits like the parent here to think that what we in the US do has no effect on the rest of the world, and because we have no effect on anyone but ourselves, the rest of the world should just STFU and get on with life.
If only the world were that simple a place. It's not. Don't like it. Too fucking bad. That's the way it is.
Because the traditional media, which has been the channel of educating the public on public affairs, generally lacks expertise in every field except journalism. In other words, those that tell us what's going on most likely are unqualified and/or unwilling to digest and regurgitate that which they've been told to the masses with any accuracy and/or detail whatsoever.
I disagree. The problem is that the traditional media has no clue but spends so much time telling us what to think or how to feel about the news rather than giving us the facts - and only the facts - and letting us decide for ourselves. I don't want the journalists to have the expertise. I don't want the journalists to tell me what I should think of something. I'm an intelligent adult and I can make up my own damned mind.
We live in a world of spin and the press is complicit in keeping the masses stupid by spoon-feeding us opinions rather than facts.
News has become nothing more than another form of entertainment. Just think about that when a news story starts "In a tragic turn of events today" rather than just telling us what the hell happened. They've got to make us feel good or bad about what they're reporting. The use words that inflame or "tug at the heart strings" or other such crap. Don't tell me it was tragic, I can work that out for myself. Just tell me that a 16-year old kid was killed in a car accident. Don't tell me how to feel about it. I can work that out on my own. If I want my opinions or feelings to be manipulated, I'll go to a movie. When it comes to what's going on the world, give me the facts. If it's somehow interactive, let me ask questions and give me straight answers. Don't give me some bullshit spin doctoring story.
Since you have 4 weeks to get the myriad of projects handed over, the lack of access will let you focus on doing just that. That was ostensibly the reason for giving the length of notice you did, so use the time in the way you planned on rather than in fixing user "lost password" issues.
Your time is better spent (and your value to the company) in ensuring a smooth transition of those projects.
Why not write it in awk? Grab a copy of "The AWK Programming Language", there's loads of examples of flat-file databases in there.
For that matter, some would say perl would do the trick as well.
But also, I'm puzzled by the "must not be written in Java" aspect. Why an exclusion based on the programming language - surely a tool that does the job does the job regardless of the language it's coded in. I can see the "not web-based, not complicated", but for a simple app that does the job, it shouldn't matter what it's written in.
"I want to build a house, but without using a hammer or a saw of any kind" - I just don't understand that thought process.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone worth their salt will be able to screw up a system so that an audit trail will be of little help.
Especially with physical access to the systems and a legitimate need to be in the server room.
If you have physical access, all bets are off. Whoops, that ethernet cable seems to have not been plugged in all the way - before I plug it back in, I'll just fiddle with the box a little bit to make sure that the interface isn't hosed as well - oh, what's this? Finance data. Flash drive, copy, clear history, plug cable in.
A smart IT person who means to do evil has plenty of options available and will know the ways they can be monitored and how to work around them. The first mistake any manager or auditor will make is assuming that the auditing software systems are foolproof. And of course there's also the delicate matter of explaining to IT staff that you're watching over their shoulders but it's not because you don't trust them. Only some industries have regulatory needs for that type of monitoring and auditing, after all.
Having an auditing system in place can be read by IT staff as "they don't trust us" which can actually lead to untrustworthy behaviour. I've seen that happen as well.
That's fine, your agreement isn't required. :-)
But consider this: Many IT people came from a finance background, especially those who have been in IT for a long time. Back in the 80's and 90's, the finance people were the ones using computers the most (Lotus 1-2-3, anyone?) to track company financials. So when businesses started building IT infrastructures, they turned to the people inside the company who used computers the most: the accountants.
Now, combine completely unfettered access to all of a company's financial information and enough knowledge in financial matters, and what do you get?
It's not about bringing the company to its knees - not entirely. Someone who wants to cause real harm to a company is going to generally want to do it in a way that isn't noticed (whether they're in finance or not) so they can prolong the damage.
It's also about the fact that an IT person has access (generally) to *all* of a company's secrets. An accountant - even a CFO - doesn't have access to all that information.
When the goal is to build an infrastructure that's unified and easily administered (and were IT staff are generally added only when absolutely necessary - and often long after they're actually needed), IT staff are often treated poorly and given access to *everything*.
That's a recipe for disaster if your IT staff aren't trustworthy.
Sack an accountant for violating trust and your exposure is limited only to financial data that they had access to.
Sack an IT person, though, and you need to hire in outside consultants to go over *all* of the systems that the IT person had access to to make sure they didn't put any back doors into the system. By the time they find them - if we're talking about a competent IT person with a grudge - it's far, far too late.
I've seen it happen a few times over my career in IT.
I'm not saying that a lack of integrity is good in any position, but IT people are generally highly intelligent, very resourceful, and generally very cunning. Sometimes they're also social outcasts (though that's less the case now than it was in the 80's and 90's) that the employees in a company try to minimise contact with if they possibly can.
Good point - it seems to be less of a problem in the other areas (in my experience, in any event). Thing is that admin people tend to have access to data from multiple of the other organizations, so while I wouldn't say that hiring untrustworthy people in any position is a good practice, in IT it can be doubly bad because the IT staff can generally access docs on shared drives (for example) that belong to accounting, legal, etc - and can either disclose it or nuke it along with the backups.
That can cause a lot more damage than if an accountant nukes his/her data, because they don't generally have access to the backups or other system-level tools.
If they do, the phrase "you're doing this wrong" comes to mind. ;-)
But point well taken.
Really, I think this just highlights something I've said for years: If you don't trust your IT people, they shouldn't be your IT people.
It's a job requirement to be trustworthy when working in IT. Those who aren't pull crap like this.
Even if she hadn't gone to jail, if she got caught tampering with systems (either while employed there or after being terminated), she should never, ever, under any circumstances be trusted to admin a system again.
Ever.
I live in Salt Lake City and would check the signal riding between SLC and Provo, and even along I-15 (which is one of two major freeways in Utah), there was a strong propensity to drop calls multiple times along that 40 mile stretch of road, right where the bulk of the Utah population lives.
My AT&T problems (many, many dropped calls) ended when I switched from Blackberry/AT&T to Android/Verizon.
AT&T's coverage in Utah is notoriously bad. My company uses AT&T as a carrier, and consistently, those who had company-provided phones had problems, and when they dropped the company plan and switched to Verizon, the problems vanished.
When I started looking at switching, I did an informal survey of folks in the office, and those who were on their own plan were on Verizon and reported very few - if any - problems with dropped calls.
I'm very happy that I switched.
I've preferred the multi-country plugs myself; they're a bit more expensive, but I haven't had a problem with them falling apart, either. Got one I've had for years that I still use.
If the power brick for your laptop can handle the voltage and frequency (and most can, but check the label), you won't need a new power brick.
There's no such thing as region coding for wireless networks - the Thinkpad that I had on my first trip to the UK and the Dell I had for my second both worked without any changes other than setting the SSID - just like you would on any wireless network anywhere in the world. The only thing you might have to use region coding for is watching DVDs on your laptop that you purchase overseas - there are plenty of OSS solutions that don't require you to change the region coding on the laptop drive, either, though.
I've used Linux for years on a variety of laptops, and generally with recent releases (over the past 5-6 years) I have managed to get very good battery life out of Linux.
Enabling frequency scaling helps, and making sure you don't have processes sucking the processor (and thus forcing the processor to high-performance mode) will certainly help. Dimming the display also helps - most modern distributions should do this automatically.
I've got 3 different Dell laptops here that get 2-3 hours off a battery running openSUSE 11.0/11.1. I have a Thinkpad t42p with an extended life battery that I used to use constantly and I'd get 3-3.5 hours out of that.
If you're only getting 45 minutes out of a battery on Linux, either something's not been configured correctly in your distribution or you've got something driving processor utilization up.
I worked in IT for about 15 years, and always held that if a company doesn't trust its network administrators for a justifiable reason, then those people shouldn't be the network admins.
Remote/local doesn't matter. If they are not trustworthy and you can document why, then don't make them your admins. If they are, then don't worry about it until they do something to violate that trust. And if they do violate that trust, then go after them guns a-blazing (figuratively, not literally, OBVIOUSLY).
Most network admins want to be trusted - and need to be. Being untrustworthy is the kiss of death in that entire career path.
As others have said, local or remote doesn't matter. In-house or outsourced doesn't really matter. You need to accurately assess their trustworthiness and then deal with it in an appropriate manner.
"You seem to be pressing the keys very hard, are you upset?"
Cue "fist to keyboard" macro that causes Clippy to blow up....
> Follow the link for more background on this reader's query.
Apparently I have a disability that prevents me from seeing the link referred to in the story.
> Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable
Somehow we got from 60,000-100,000 people injured either temporarily or permanently every year to "we're all going to be disabled". I don't see anything that makes this conclusion logical at all. It's almost as if the writer hasn't really done any research, and OH MY GOD MY HAND!!!!! AGHH!!!!
'We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,' said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. 'This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'
Holy shit, all those words registered as English but I understood absolutely nothing in the article.
No, correction, "We congratulate" does track.
...to provide trolls with a place to engage in their behaviour.
You are the site operator: You get to decide what's acceptable and what isn't.
There will be some (usually the trolls themselves) who will claim you're violating their 1st amendment rights. You're not. The 1st amendment to the US Constitution has to do with *public* spaces. A web site you host or manage is like a room in your house, and you have the right to decide who comes through the front door.
So while I would first advocate the "thanks for your feedback" approach, if more restrictive measures are needed, such as mandatory registration with validation of personal details/e-mail address, paid access, or the institution of filtering to prevent the trolls from continuing, that's YOUR decision and your decision ALONE to make.
No, the worst thing you can do is vote without understanding the candidate's positions or educating yourself on the issues.
Well, I know that if *I* behave unethical at work, I can be fired for it. I think it's sickening that unethical != illegal. It damned well *should* be illegal.
There is plenty of proof out there that the election was rigged. I provided several examples. That you choose to ignore them and believe there couldn't possibly have been fraud because there was no court that overturned it (a) puts a lot of faith in our highly-politicized judicial system, and (b) shows a perfect willingness to disregard facts.
Please don't vote in the next election. We need those who vote to be *informed*, and you clearly are not.
You can't *seriously* believe that in the 2000 election everything was above board in Florida, can you? Katherine Harris had an obvious conflict of interest acting both as Bush's campaign co-chair in Florida and also being responsible for certifying the Florida vote for President.
At the very least, the appearance of a conflict of interest is unethical.
And let's not go into the felons who voted or the dead people who voted for Bush in Florida that year whose ballots were not discarded by Harris.
Gore was an idiot for giving up. Just because there wasn't a court overturning the election doesn't mean it didn't happen.
This is to say nothing about the BS that took place in Ohio in 2004 specifically intended to disenfranchise voters who were directed to the incorrect polling place, nor the co-chairs of the Bush campaign in Ohio being on the elections board in Ohio. Or the former CEO of Diebold stating pretty clearly that his intention in Ohio was to ensure Bush's election. Or the programmer who worked on the voting machines who was convicted of fraud in the manipulation of accounting systems.
It's kinda funny, but your comment here about 50% of the population being of below average intelligence is the second time in literally *2 minutes* that someone has said that to me.
The problem with writing to the lowest common denominator (or by assuming people won't understand and so writing to some perceived average, which I would argue is an assumption), then the average continues to drop.
But like I said, news is now entertainment - in order to get people to read it, it has to be emotive and entertaining to an extent. The problem is that by making it entertaining, the author promotes a biased point of view.
I agree that teaching people how to extract facts from a story should be a core requirement at school. When I went to school, fact extraction was something we were taught, but not terribly well.
The other thing that needs to be taught is situational awareness. Part of the reason people need to be entertained is because they don't understand how the information in the news affects them.
With regards to the idea of explaining the higgs boson, just make it relevant to the audience. Answer for the audience "how does this affect me?".
I agree with you about the interview - interesting, but not very illuminating. I thought there were a lot of non-answers, but the nature of the non-answers actually says a lot if you know how to read them.
Fortunately, my friend rents. But I see looking at one site that the good rates (presumably for good credit) are in the 8.5% range, not nearly as bad as I had been led to believe, but certainly not the 5%-ish I'm paying here in the states.
I kinda wondered about that statement myself. I think he's probably correct, though, that the President can declare an "inbound" action as an act of war, but it does seem to me that the really telling "statement" is Congress' declaration of war against an enemy that has taken an action that *they* determine is worthy of such a response.
"What about all these idiots who flame the US government when they don't even fucking live here."
Hmmm, I smell someone ignorant, and I just can't pass the opportunity up. First off, dude, go take a shower.
Talk to the guy in Australia - friend of mine who lived just up the street here in the good ol' USA about the cost of rent in Sydney. Ask his coworkers about their *13%* interest rate on home loans right now.
Know why that is happening? Lack of US investment in Australia is a big part of it. Why are US investors not investing in Australia? Because of the weak dollar. There's no return because the AU$ is nearly equal to the US$. While some Aussies may think that's cool, I'm sure they don't think 13% interest rates on home loans is cool. Why don't YOU try buying a house on your Visa card?
It's fairly typical of isolationist xenophobic twits like the parent here to think that what we in the US do has no effect on the rest of the world, and because we have no effect on anyone but ourselves, the rest of the world should just STFU and get on with life.
If only the world were that simple a place. It's not. Don't like it. Too fucking bad. That's the way it is.
Because the traditional media, which has been the channel of educating the public on public affairs, generally lacks expertise in every field except journalism. In other words, those that tell us what's going on most likely are unqualified and/or unwilling to digest and regurgitate that which they've been told to the masses with any accuracy and/or detail whatsoever.
I disagree. The problem is that the traditional media has no clue but spends so much time telling us what to think or how to feel about the news rather than giving us the facts - and only the facts - and letting us decide for ourselves. I don't want the journalists to have the expertise. I don't want the journalists to tell me what I should think of something. I'm an intelligent adult and I can make up my own damned mind.
We live in a world of spin and the press is complicit in keeping the masses stupid by spoon-feeding us opinions rather than facts.
News has become nothing more than another form of entertainment. Just think about that when a news story starts "In a tragic turn of events today" rather than just telling us what the hell happened. They've got to make us feel good or bad about what they're reporting. The use words that inflame or "tug at the heart strings" or other such crap. Don't tell me it was tragic, I can work that out for myself. Just tell me that a 16-year old kid was killed in a car accident. Don't tell me how to feel about it. I can work that out on my own. If I want my opinions or feelings to be manipulated, I'll go to a movie. When it comes to what's going on the world, give me the facts. If it's somehow interactive, let me ask questions and give me straight answers. Don't give me some bullshit spin doctoring story.
Since you have 4 weeks to get the myriad of projects handed over, the lack of access will let you focus on doing just that. That was ostensibly the reason for giving the length of notice you did, so use the time in the way you planned on rather than in fixing user "lost password" issues.
Your time is better spent (and your value to the company) in ensuring a smooth transition of those projects.
I don't know that Perl will interpret awk code, but there is a program called a2p that will convert awk code to Perl.
Why not write it in awk? Grab a copy of "The AWK Programming Language", there's loads of examples of flat-file databases in there.
For that matter, some would say perl would do the trick as well.
But also, I'm puzzled by the "must not be written in Java" aspect. Why an exclusion based on the programming language - surely a tool that does the job does the job regardless of the language it's coded in. I can see the "not web-based, not complicated", but for a simple app that does the job, it shouldn't matter what it's written in.
"I want to build a house, but without using a hammer or a saw of any kind" - I just don't understand that thought process.
Some people need to make things have cosmic meaning - it doesn't mean they do.