I've recently had to look at some code which handles the process control of a 'slug' catcher in an onshore oil/gas pipeline facility.
The code has 7 different constants defined for everything from density of MEG (antifreeze) to temperature variables...
Sadly none of them have comments... And the language in question does not support variable names (Heh... wish I was kidding). Everything is named by 'block number'. So block number 1234 will have a value of 3.19387 and no comment about what it actually is or does.
The code is efficient and useful as hell, but with only an overview of what the whole function DOES but very little about HOW it does it makes it mostly useless for future changes. In the end it might get junked and re-implemented but for now we've just copy-pasted and simulated hoping it will behave... Time and money constraints:(
There are all kinds of environments and usage cases and I wish there was an easy answer to any of it *sigh*
* One of our customers expects all text on drawings to be in all caps for clarity. * Variables have to be typed in all caps for historical reasons.. (all variables are that way already and the codebase is much too big to refactor efficiently.. mostly because there are no automatic tools available and the code is stored in binary files linked to an ancient database)
Where I work we're all in a small part of marketing and sales. We build industrial control systems for the oil/gas industry and most of us are hardware and software people who spend large parts of our time implementing those systems...
But more importantly we spend a rather large part of our time at a customer site installing, testing, modifying and just in general getting it absolutely 'right'.
One of the things we make the most 'extra' money from is snagging 'variation orders'. In essence seeing a need that nobody saw yet, and asking the customer if they'd be interested in seeing it improved. If you ask the right way, and can explain why it would be a good idea most of the time they'll go with it.... but only if the right person makes the suggestion.
One of our largest customers is Statoil, norway's largest oil company. They loathe our 'sales and marketing' department... But I never bullshit them while at site, and if they ask me about details that sales would rather they not know, I'll not lie to cover the sales dep arse. I'll tell the customer the details they ask for. This has given me a reputation of not suggesting something unless it is a genuine good idea to implement. I wont BS in crap they dont need. My -only- ability to sell in extra variation orders is that trust that I've built over years of working there... If I go sales-person and try to hard-sell it I'll probably never sell a VOR again:p
And by $deity... If the customer say's "Not interested" you fuck right the hell off... a pissed off customer is bad for business...
1. Buy domain. 2. Set up *@domain to forward to your real email account, optionally apply a label (I do this with gmail labels) 3. Register with sitename@domain as email address. 4. Check real email and verify account.
Unique email for each site. No need to guess.
A bonus is that if you start getting spam you can see where it originated by what email it starts coming in on.
I noticed a year or so ago that curse got hacked as I started getting wow phising emails to the email I registered for curse with;) Just redirect to/dev/nul when it happens:p
Bergen University College in Bergen, Norway store plain-text passwords and will email them to you if you request a reset.
Using a commercial system they pay for as an alumni website... I've tried and tried again to point out how stupid it is for a technical college to have such a flaw but they ignore it.
Hopefully there are no other flaws in the site (hah!):p
Just a real world example of arse security in what one would hope was a serious site.
I recently read an 'unofficial' guide to handle the issue of "yes" answers where I work.
Short version: If you ask someone from a culture where 'no' is not something you say, then phrase the question so that they wont have to resort to it.
Like instead of asking "Will you be able to have this finished by the deadline?" ask "Do you see any issues which could lead to a missed deadline?". Not the best example but the best I could come up with while munching pizza:p
The local fire department held a workshop for a group of us a while back (year or two).
To sum it up in a short way:
If it is electrical and on fire, the fuse should already have tripped in any household situation. If it is an industrial system move away. It is not your job to put it out. Let professionals do it.
If you have an alternative like CO2 or powder, use it. If you do not, water is fine as a fallback. In the unlikely event that the power does NOT go out, tripping the fuses manually is recommended but you have to consider if there really is time. Focus on the area around the electrical fire instead of the electrical itself.
But the thing they stressed was that avoiding water altogether was a fairly silly thing in any modern house. Fuses and GFIs should handle the power and the water can handle the fire.
They demonstrated this by hosing down a lamp on fire:p
I'd be happy to extinguish an iphone battery using water.
It hisses like all hell, but not all that bad compared to letting it light everything else in the room on fire.
If you -have- a suitable alternative water isnt the first choice... But in a case where you have a burning iphone on your livingroom table, a bucket of water is a hell of a lot better than fleeing the house and calling the fire department.
Actually, the standard "Do not use water with electrical fires" is based on the danger of electrocution. 'Throwing' water on something would work fine as there is no stream connecting you to the electrified component.
In battery-powered systems this is usually not a concern and water is a fine medium to put it out with;)
Hell, in any modern house the GFCI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual-current_device) should trip long before you're in any danger of serious damage. More likely than not the power has already tripped if there is an electrical fire, or it will trip the instant the stream of water causes leakage current from the burning piece of hardware.
High voltage is of course a completely different scenario, luckily one most wont have to deal with... Like a water cooling system next to a 132kV transformer... ugh...
Amusingly some local tech staff members at a certain norwegian gas processing plant do local hd backups of their network shares and such for this very reason... It takes so damn long to get a backup restored that they have another level of backups locally to avoid having to ASK the central IT for help...
I've paid for spotify since it was released in Norway. 99 NOK per month ever since. I have stopped downloading music as I no longer have a need to get the files that way.....
Hell, they even let me sync directly from the million file library directly to my phone via wifi for listening to on my commute...
Now give me that for movies and TV series please...
Where I work they 'fixed' that slowness by moving to solid state drives....
Amusingly there was a huge thing recently where an oil rig control system got infected with a 'facebook virus' even though a fully updated mcafee said it was clean... Trend caught it though.... Wonderful stuff:p
I'm mostly fine with the antivirus at work... The local firewall though is driving me up the fecking wall.... I usually end up booting to safe mode and disabling the fucker to do my work.... I do not need yet another layer of firewalling when doing tcp faux 'serial link' testing... meh
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I've recently had to look at some code which handles the process control of a 'slug' catcher in an onshore oil/gas pipeline facility.
The code has 7 different constants defined for everything from density of MEG (antifreeze) to temperature variables...
Sadly none of them have comments... And the language in question does not support variable names (Heh... wish I was kidding). Everything is named by 'block number'. So block number 1234 will have a value of 3.19387 and no comment about what it actually is or does.
The code is efficient and useful as hell, but with only an overview of what the whole function DOES but very little about HOW it does it makes it mostly useless for future changes. In the end it might get junked and re-implemented but for now we've just copy-pasted and simulated hoping it will behave... Time and money constraints :(
There are all kinds of environments and usage cases and I wish there was an easy answer to any of it *sigh*
* One of our customers expects all text on drawings to be in all caps for clarity.
* Variables have to be typed in all caps for historical reasons.. (all variables are that way already and the codebase is much too big to refactor efficiently.. mostly because there are no automatic tools available and the code is stored in binary files linked to an ancient database)
Just two usage cases for the caps lock ;)
It depends a lot on the business area I guess.
Where I work we're all in a small part of marketing and sales. We build industrial control systems for the oil/gas industry and most of us are hardware and software people who spend large parts of our time implementing those systems...
But more importantly we spend a rather large part of our time at a customer site installing, testing, modifying and just in general getting it absolutely 'right'.
One of the things we make the most 'extra' money from is snagging 'variation orders'. In essence seeing a need that nobody saw yet, and asking the customer if they'd be interested in seeing it improved. If you ask the right way, and can explain why it would be a good idea most of the time they'll go with it.... but only if the right person makes the suggestion.
One of our largest customers is Statoil, norway's largest oil company. They loathe our 'sales and marketing' department... But I never bullshit them while at site, and if they ask me about details that sales would rather they not know, I'll not lie to cover the sales dep arse. I'll tell the customer the details they ask for. :p
This has given me a reputation of not suggesting something unless it is a genuine good idea to implement. I wont BS in crap they dont need. My -only- ability to sell in extra variation orders is that trust that I've built over years of working there... If I go sales-person and try to hard-sell it I'll probably never sell a VOR again
And by $deity... If the customer say's "Not interested" you fuck right the hell off... a pissed off customer is bad for business...
1. Buy domain.
2. Set up *@domain to forward to your real email account, optionally apply a label (I do this with gmail labels)
3. Register with sitename@domain as email address.
4. Check real email and verify account.
Unique email for each site. No need to guess.
A bonus is that if you start getting spam you can see where it originated by what email it starts coming in on.
I noticed a year or so ago that curse got hacked as I started getting wow phising emails to the email I registered for curse with ;) /dev/nul when it happens :p
Just redirect to
Bergen University College in Bergen, Norway store plain-text passwords and will email them to you if you request a reset.
Using a commercial system they pay for as an alumni website... I've tried and tried again to point out how stupid it is for a technical college to have such a flaw but they ignore it.
Hopefully there are no other flaws in the site (hah!) :p
Just a real world example of arse security in what one would hope was a serious site.
Assuming they know this, which they wont unless they get his plain text password for multiple sites and compare...
GoG and Steam sales are the spawn of evil :p
I've spent more money on those two platforms in the past 3-4 years than I have in the previous 20.... scary thought that is..
I recently read an 'unofficial' guide to handle the issue of "yes" answers where I work.
Short version:
If you ask someone from a culture where 'no' is not something you say, then phrase the question so that they wont have to resort to it.
Like instead of asking "Will you be able to have this finished by the deadline?" ask "Do you see any issues which could lead to a missed deadline?". Not the best example but the best I could come up with while munching pizza :p
Not if you rent with power included in your bill :p
(Not that I'd bother with something like that, but I know people who would... nutters)
You'd be surprised (or probably not...) if you saw the quality of some of the industrial control systems around the world....
Scary as all hell how badly designed some of it is...
I work fixing that kind of crap... I wish I could travel back in time and kill bad engineers...
Yeah, they use a water/glycol/oil at Kollsnes Gas processing plant in Norway.
Working on 132kV systems is nice though. You know that if you fuck up you wont have to get up in the morning... ever again :p
The fuses for lighter outlets are usually fairly large. MUCH larger than the hardware in the attachments can handle.
The fuse in the circuit doesnt matter if the hardware attached cant survive the rated current :(
And as another posted pointed out, fuses can be quite slow comparatively to a short. Car fuses especially...
The local fire department held a workshop for a group of us a while back (year or two).
To sum it up in a short way:
If it is electrical and on fire, the fuse should already have tripped in any household situation. If it is an industrial system move away. It is not your job to put it out. Let professionals do it.
If you have an alternative like CO2 or powder, use it. If you do not, water is fine as a fallback. In the unlikely event that the power does NOT go out, tripping the fuses manually is recommended but you have to consider if there really is time.
Focus on the area around the electrical fire instead of the electrical itself.
But the thing they stressed was that avoiding water altogether was a fairly silly thing in any modern house. Fuses and GFIs should handle the power and the water can handle the fire.
They demonstrated this by hosing down a lamp on fire :p
I'd be happy to extinguish an iphone battery using water.
It hisses like all hell, but not all that bad compared to letting it light everything else in the room on fire.
If you -have- a suitable alternative water isnt the first choice... But in a case where you have a burning iphone on your livingroom table, a bucket of water is a hell of a lot better than fleeing the house and calling the fire department.
Actually, the standard "Do not use water with electrical fires" is based on the danger of electrocution.
'Throwing' water on something would work fine as there is no stream connecting you to the electrified component.
In battery-powered systems this is usually not a concern and water is a fine medium to put it out with ;)
Hell, in any modern house the GFCI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual-current_device) should trip long before you're in any danger of serious damage. More likely than not the power has already tripped if there is an electrical fire, or it will trip the instant the stream of water causes leakage current from the burning piece of hardware.
High voltage is of course a completely different scenario, luckily one most wont have to deal with... Like a water cooling system next to a 132kV transformer... ugh...
Sounds like hardware with inadequate fusing.
Any power adapter should be able to survive a complete short on the output if it is designed properly.
You win...
Amusingly some local tech staff members at a certain norwegian gas processing plant do local hd backups of their network shares and such for this very reason... It takes so damn long to get a backup restored that they have another level of backups locally to avoid having to ASK the central IT for help...
Ugh..
Say that to the poor sod who has to handle communication networks in a combat zone :p
I bloody hate that quiz.....
Half my friends use their kids faces or some artsy pic as their profile pic.... and they change it every other week...
If someone who shares a significant part of my network ever wanted to get in, this would be a simple portal for it.. meh
Ugh..... DCOM...... kill me
That isnt even remotely the nastiest on the net :p
Look up the documentary "Graphic Sexual Horror" about the old (not shut down) site 'insex'...
Hear Hear!
I already paid for the movie, stop nagging about stealing a car...!
To make that point fairly simply:
I've paid for spotify since it was released in Norway. 99 NOK per month ever since. I have stopped downloading music as I no longer have a need to get the files that way.....
Hell, they even let me sync directly from the million file library directly to my phone via wifi for listening to on my commute...
Now give me that for movies and TV series please...
Where I work they 'fixed' that slowness by moving to solid state drives....
Amusingly there was a huge thing recently where an oil rig control system got infected with a 'facebook virus' even though a fully updated mcafee said it was clean... Trend caught it though.... Wonderful stuff :p
I'm mostly fine with the antivirus at work... The local firewall though is driving me up the fecking wall.... I usually end up booting to safe mode and disabling the fucker to do my work.... I do not need yet another layer of firewalling when doing tcp faux 'serial link' testing... meh