The original original digitalocean was a mechanical turk of Perl and bash scrips with cronjobs and a giant mysql db. It would randomly shout things like "RUN THE ARIN REPORTS" (Not a slight btw, it was janky sure, but it worked..) :)
What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
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Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#12I've seen some 1980s shit running THIS YEAR. I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs…
Old isn't janky... hmm... to me janky means duct tape and bubble gum.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#13I'll weigh in outside of Twitter. Back when I worked for a large telecom, we decided to move a datacenter from a mid-west, barely staffed site out to one of our larger datacenters. This was a year-long several-hundred rack problem that culminated in a hellish weekend of running cables and powering things up. It was "all hands" in IT and didn't matter that I worked in a capacity that kept me far away from hardware mos…
I too have a need to keep old computers online and it's frustrating when the CMOS battery dies and all those super important motherboard settings that make it boot from a hard drive in the first place are lost, over and over on every reboot.
Not everyone knows that old computers do not necessarily boot from the hard drive by default.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#14Linux before 2005.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#15us‑east‑1
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#16I'll weigh in outside of Twitter. Back when I worked for a large telecom, we decided to move a datacenter from a mid-west, barely staffed site out to one of our larger datacenters. This was a year-long several-hundred rack problem that culminated in a hellish weekend of running cables and powering things up. It was "all hands" in IT and didn't matter that I worked in a capacity that kept me far away from hardware mos…
Nice! Somewhat disappointed that the solution wasn't dialing with the correct area code instead of local (or somehow acquiring the local line matching that number and setting up call forwarding), but recognizing drive geometry settings is even more awesome!
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#17Oof. As someone who has never participated, every time a post like this shows up I'm reminded of how weird the twitterverse is. Such a microcosm of weirdness, the handles, the academic references (I don't care if you went to MIT for undergrad), the ego jockeying, the shared language of "almost-memes" like 'not all heroes wear capes', 'this is why we can't have nice things', and 'this is what peak performance is' etc…
Speaking of BNL/CERN, there is the code SixTrack which is/was used for both RHIC and LHC for collimation studies and long-term tracking. That's the worst I've ever seen. There were a few files of "normal" length but the main sixtrack source file was fifty-five thousand lines long and featured a custom-written preprocessor's directives throughout (since Fortran has no preprocessor, or for some other erason) that allowed different features to be enabled at compile time. And this was used to design the LHC collimation system and to check the machine's dynamic aperture. I should also add that this is recent/still the case.
P.S. agreed about Twitter, I always wonder what these people are like in real life.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#18I would have said Excel, but that would be a lie. You can do a lot of stuff with Excel when done right. So I'd say the following: Convoluted Excel sheets without documentation doing things the ERP system that is in place is supposed to do. Especially ones that are not feeding data back to said ERP.
The next financial apocalypse will definitely be caused by an errant VLookup without the appropriate ISERROR around it
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#19A pentium 4 laptop hooked-up to a makita battery and a couple of PCMCIA serial ports of which a few were connected to 'thin client' serial terminals (axel branded?) and a variety of chemical sampling/testing machines connected to the rest, including the parallel port for a results printer (with tractor paper).
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#20I would have said Excel, but that would be a lie. You can do a lot of stuff with Excel when done right. So I'd say the following: Convoluted Excel sheets without documentation doing things the ERP system that is in place is supposed to do. Especially ones that are not feeding data back to said ERP.
The next financial apocalypse will definitely be caused by an errant VLookup without the appropriate ISERROR around it
Ha! I see you got the shirt as well!