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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

#141

Post by grujicd »

mohn wrote: post #119
grujicd wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time I had a problem with remote control. It woukd stop working from different positions, but from time to time, not always. It took a while for me to realize there’s a heating radiator behind my back in that directions. And it went hotter or colder depending on thermostate. I guess at one point its IR output would overwhelm IR output from remote control.

When I first read this comment I was picturing a hot water radiator behind you, so it sounded unlikely based on the blackbody radiation curve for ~320 K. But now I realize you're probably talking about an electric heater. Given that their heating elements get so hot that they're putting out visible red/orange light, it seems very plausible that an electric heater could produce enough ~940 nm IR to drown out the signa…

As I try to recall, it was not typicall remote, the problem was between Nokia 6310i and IrDA transmiter, since that's how you connected phone to the PC back then. Looking at wikipedia, that IrDA was small range, probably low powered, so maybe even very low IR source in the background could create problems? IIRC problem was with the water radiator, which surprised me a lot back then. But we did use electric heaters as well at the time and my memory could be wrong.

Btw. that Nokia 6310i from 2002/3 is still used today by mother-in-law, and original battery still holds for 4-5 days!

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#142

Post by evanb »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #80
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get the same problem with geostationary satellites, e.g. for satellite TV. There's period of about 10 days every spring and fall where, for up to 30 minutes every day, the sun transits 'behind' a satellite within the beamwidth of the dish and totally overwhelms the signal at the LNB.

So an eclipse…of sorts

In this case, transit is the right jargon.

A transit is when the foreground object doesn’t completely hide the background object.

An occultation is when the foreground object hides the background object.

These two situations are collectively called occlusions.

An occlusion is an eclipse if the the observer falls in a shadow.

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

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#144

Post by evanb »

avs733 wrote: post #105
milliondollar wrote: post #69

F'n A. Reading the comments on this thread makes me love humanity. So much ingenuity, raw engineering horsepower, creativity. Goddamn, you are great people and you should be proud of yourselves. Reading this makes me believe we will survive as a species.

you'll appreciate this: I worked with a factory that spent several years tracking down a quality problem. Eventual cause was wind direction...whenever they were down wind of the local cattle stockyard during a hot day.

“I don’t know, sounds like bull shit to me.”

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#145

Post by pgt »

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.

Well done

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#146

Post by eitland »

fastssd wrote: post #93
eitland wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bookmarking this thread on pinboard because of all the good pointers here.

Add this to your list: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9mk2o7/mri_disabl... spoiler: Helium messes with MEMS oscillator, causing iPhones to stop working (the clock signal is basically flatlined)

Done, thanks. Will have to read it after work.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#148

Post by dreen »

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.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel built a rail tunnel in England which has the sun shining straight through it on his birthday

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#149

Post by mdp2021 »

xsmasher wrote: post #40
vidanay wrote: post #26

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.

It is reported in the book Absolute Zero Gravity, about having happened in a military context, while others here mention a bank: the only reason to believe it may have happened so infrequently that some call it a urban legend is that in the past that infrastructure was rare. The rest - failures in the workflow of instructing and monitoring "innocent" personnel and contractors - is an "overly" normal factor.
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