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The code worked differently when the moon was full

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Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#121

Post by labster »

vidarh wrote: post #120
mark-r wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a guy who was a computer tech early in his career. One of his rounds was on a military base, and they had just moved their computer room up one floor. They started having problems with their tape drive, it would just randomly pop up an error while they were using it. He tried mightily to diagnose the problem but couldn't figure it out. Finally he took a break and walked to the nearest window and looked out. He…

I sent my Commodore 64 for repairs more than once only for them to find nothing wrong until we realised it was the buildup of static electricity from being stored under our big TV - it "broke" when we didn't use it for a while but watched lots of TV. It'd be "fixed" by the time it took before the repair people got around to it. The symptom was that it started "typing" automatically.

That’s one downside of static typing.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#123

Post by MengerSponge »

labster wrote: post #121
vidarh wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sent my Commodore 64 for repairs more than once only for them to find nothing wrong until we realised it was the buildup of static electricity from being stored under our big TV - it "broke" when we didn't use it for a while but watched lots of TV. It'd be "fixed" by the time it took before the repair people got around to it. The symptom was that it started "typing" automatically.

That’s one downside of static typing.

boooooo

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#125

Post by mirekrusin »

eitland wrote: post #84
xsmasher wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like a real-world equivalent of the "cleaning lady unplugged the machine" urban legend.

I thought it was an urban legend and then somewhere in 2005/2006 I first spoke to one guy who claimed it was a bank in Tønsberg, Norway. Later I worked with a IT manager who also confirmed it was such-and-such bank in Tønsberg. I have forgotten the name of the bank but I am still on friendly terms with him so I could ask next time I see him. (My first draft of this post said that the first bloke had claimed to be in…

Maybe she overheard they need to sort out bugs and she was like "bugs? in a computer? not on my watch! grabs hoover".

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#126

Post by vidarh »

eitland wrote: post #84
xsmasher wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like a real-world equivalent of the "cleaning lady unplugged the machine" urban legend.

I thought it was an urban legend and then somewhere in 2005/2006 I first spoke to one guy who claimed it was a bank in Tønsberg, Norway. Later I worked with a IT manager who also confirmed it was such-and-such bank in Tønsberg. I have forgotten the name of the bank but I am still on friendly terms with him so I could ask next time I see him. (My first draft of this post said that the first bloke had claimed to be in…

I knew someone who had it happen at his office either ca. 1995, in Oslo.

It was very much not a proper server room, which made it more understandable that they'd not realise there was stuff there that shouldn't be turned off.

I suspect there's been plenty of real-world incidences of stuff like this, and that many have never been noticed.

I've certainly pulled the wrong cable myself a couple of times over the years, even after thinking I'd been very careful, and being aware that I was dealing with servers that should stay up.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#128

Post by ciaron »

I used to work in aerospace. One of my projects involved running avionics bench tests at a customer facility, basically the avionic subsystem of the aircraft in a big room on shelves. We were using a laptop for data logging and started getting dropouts in the data every 5 minutes. This was worrying because a) this hadn't happened at our site on similar equipment and b) this was a final customer-facing check before doing a real test flight.

We spent about a week trying to debug the system and the software and at a certain point while I was just sitting and thinking about what to do next, Flying Toasters popped up in the data logging PC (the lid was normally closed because of the space on the bench).

The Windows screensaver was hogging so much CPU that the datalogger couldn't keep up.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#130

Post by huhtenberg »

johnfn wrote: post #44
xsmasher wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like a real-world equivalent of the "cleaning lady unplugged the machine" urban legend.

I was going to say it was the real world equivalent of, like, Redwall, or one of those other fantasy books where an event happens once a year when the sun shines in exactly the right spot to illuminate some secret writing.

There is the Anthem Veterans Memorial that projects an image on the ground on November 11th at 11:11 and at no time else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_Veterans_Memorial

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