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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?

#81

Post by pwython »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #76
GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #38

In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They tr…

Hmm. Makes a good story, but it sounds a bit apocryphal. What kind of new employee unplugs anything in a server room without significant vetting? Perhaps they hired an idiot, but most new employees wouldn't be that aggressive.

I'm imagining that sever room to be a dumpster pile in itself, and perhaps they were moving equipment around and forgot to plug the relic back in.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#82

Post by dylan604 »

jcpham2 wrote: post #13
mdip wrote: post #3

I'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.

Why not just replace the CMOS battery so you only have to do it once every 4th blue moon vs everytime the thing reboots?

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#83

Post by analog31 »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #38

In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They tr…

The entire World Wide Web was protected by a similar sticky note, for a time:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#84

Post by Minor49er »

I worked for a job search company that bought all of their listings from a third party. Every day, they would get an XML feed of active job listings that was a few GB in size, from what I remember. To update their database, they had a program (written in C++ for speed!) that would go through each one of today's postings and scan the old list to see if it was new, then write update instructions to a SQL script that would be executed at the end of the run. (According to a senior developer there, they didn't just interact with the database directly because the database couldn't handle updating large amounts of data (???))

It would take about 8 hours every day for the program to run. So for 8 hours of every day, the company would be returning stale listings. I rewrote it in PHP and brought the time down to ~20 minutes, which could have still been significantly improved. But I didn't stick around for too long after that.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#85

Post by dylan604 »

dotancohen wrote: post #67
harrybr wrote: post #43

I worked at a well known UK newspaper about 6-7 years ago. I found out that the daily print newspaper was edited in quarkXPress without a CMS. After publishing the newspaper each night, a team of night workers would come in and copy-paste articles into the tablet edition CMS before morning (for iPad & android tablet subscribers). Entirely by hand. The main website was on a totally separate CMS so the next day, news a…

This is janky. Most of this thread describes OLD tech, but this is janky tech.

If you haven't worked at a place that entirely runs from a giant Excel file created by Janice who worked there for 2 years back in the 90s, then you just haven't lived.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#86

Post by Merad »

Pretty tame compared to some stories out there, but I recently worked for a company that had the most amazing process for importing customer data when customers migrated to our SaaS from a competitor.

First the data dump provided by the customer is run through a VB6 conversion program that imports the data to an Access97 database. Then the Access db gets opened using a legacy VB6 version of our product from roughly the year 2000 where they verify that everything was converted and imported correctly. Then they run the Access database through a second VB6 conversion program to migrate it into SQL Server so it could be used with the current SaaS product.

The source for the legacy product was at least in source control, but only one engineer still working for the company had ever touched that application at all. From what I was told the source for both of the conversion programs was lost years before I joined. The company's ability to import data for new customers was 100% dependent on this rickety pipeline.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#87

Post by dylan604 »

mickeyp wrote: post #54
sambeau wrote: post #39

When I worked at BBC online in 1999, I had the job of encoding radio and TV clips for the website using the free version of RealPlayer.

I remember it was nearly impossible to download the free version of RealPlayer back in the late 90s. They'd do everything they could to hide the link or obscure its location in an attempt to upsell you. Funny that the beeb would rely on the free one, too!

Today, many many things in online video related "things" rely on code released by the beeb, so at least they gave back!

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#89

Post by ethbr0 »

earthscienceman wrote: post #32
bettysdiagnose wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 allow…

I imagined some people would crop up with experience at RHIC/CERN. I never touched the SixTrack code directly but I've heard legend. The compile time features was a constant on all the projects I touched there and was such a hilarious relic. "The code is flexible! Just know these completely undocumented flags or spend months grokking the dense/obtuse/scattered source files and you can make the code do anything you wa…

RHIC/CERN seems like the perfect storm of incredibly intelligent and motivated people, coupled with time pressures and a lack of software development knowledge. Add in the fact that their "business" logic requires a PhD, and you've got an extremely limited subset of software developers who even could work on the code.

Most places, you'd figure people just wouldn't be smart enough to Rube Goldberg their way into a functional program. But someone who does high energy physics as their primary job is assuredly capable of torture a compiler as thoroughly as they want.

F.ex. look at the issues: https://github.com/SixTrack/SixTrack/issues

> remove gamma_e from calculation of kick by elens. the gamma_e factor comes from moving from the electron frame to the lab frame. It is actually compensated by the lorentz transformation applied to the electron current density

You know you're in for fun when the docs start with "SixTrack is wonderful, but it is bloody complicated." https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LHCAtHome/SixTrackDoc

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#90

Post by ethbr0 »

mickeyp wrote: post #40

I have many stories. Here's a fun one. I worked for a company a long time ago that traded with companies all around the world. A lot of their customers were small businesses in rural Africa, South America, etc. and they in turn had local banks they used to facilitate payments to and from. A large number of these banks did not have a reliable internet connection, or if they did, they most assuredly didn't use it for p…

> instructions that were clearly invented in the typewriter era and then hoisted, kicking and screaming, into the digital age with nary a change

Based on experience, any time I see a static number of fields of a specific type on a digital record, I assume it's because that's how many blanks there were on the preceding paper form.

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