41–50 of 175 posts
It used Unix timestamps (seconds since 1970) and assumed they could only be 9 decimal digits. When the time reached 10 digits, the last digit was quietly dropped.
(It was fixed within a few days.)
My personal anecdote. I like playing online games, and as you know latency is the killer. I enjoyed playing in the evenings after work, and inexplicably I started noticing my latency spike from around 50ms to > 1s. Extremely frustrating.
I had no idea what caused this so I set up a simple ping command and had it save it to a graph.
Well, the next day I noticed the pings were steady throughout the whole day, then in the evenings I'd get these chunks of bad time. It turns out when my wife would watch Netflix in the other room (and it was only Netflix), it'd cause something to go awry with the router and latency would spike for me. (The really weird thing was that it was a combination of a Roku, Netflix, and a wired switch - change any of those and the problem went away).
Later during the pandemic, I also diagnosed drop-outs on my network due to kids in my neighborhood being online during school hours. Like clockwork I'd get a bad network from around 10pm and it'd be fine ending around 3 or 4. On school holidays and weekends my network was fine.
We once had a customer who would call us in a panic a couple of times a year saying our inspection equipment was experiencing unusually high false rejects and they were generating very high scrap rate. By the time we got a technician on site the next day, everything was working flawlessly and the customer couldn't reproduce the problem either. This went on for almost three years with various levels of escalation to t…
This is like a real-world equivalent of the "cleaning lady unplugged the machine" urban legend.
We once had a customer who would call us in a panic a couple of times a year saying our inspection equipment was experiencing unusually high false rejects and they were generating very high scrap rate. By the time we got a technician on site the next day, everything was working flawlessly and the customer couldn't reproduce the problem either. This went on for almost three years with various levels of escalation to t…
We once had a customer who would call us in a panic a couple of times a year saying our inspection equipment was experiencing unusually high false rejects and they were generating very high scrap rate. By the time we got a technician on site the next day, everything was working flawlessly and the customer couldn't reproduce the problem either. This went on for almost three years with various levels of escalation to t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The end of that article is a good reminder of the units command, I've been using Google for units conversion for so long that I forgot about the standalone units . It even comes standard with OSX.
I love the GNU units program so much. I think I use it at least 4 times/week. It's useful for kitchen conversions and also quick nuclear fuel burnup calcs. For example I used it on this blog post covering the long-term sustainability of nuclear fuel resources on earth. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
Also electrical engineering and estimates of the feasibility of brute-forcing cryptographic primitives using the mass of the observable universe as fuel.
A little bit disappointing to discover that the code from the article does not actually depend on the phase of the moon. I'm really interested to see the other stories here where it actually is the case that the phase of the moon is affecting people's code.
We once had a customer who would call us in a panic a couple of times a year saying our inspection equipment was experiencing unusually high false rejects and they were generating very high scrap rate. By the time we got a technician on site the next day, everything was working flawlessly and the customer couldn't reproduce the problem either. This went on for almost three years with various levels of escalation to t…
like stonehenge, but with industrial sensors
Amazing story!