Terminally Incoherent

I found this story during some random browsing. I think it was originally posted in comp.unix.admin and archived from there. I found as part of a larger compilation of unix horror stories gathered from Usenet. It’s pretty amazing what to what end you can abuse a unix and still have it running, and what you can do to rescue a totally fubar’ed system if you put your mind to it. It is slightly dated (supposedly was originally posted in 1986), but still interesting.

This is slightly long so I’m posting the rest after the cut (it won’t show up on the front page). What would you do in this situation? Post your thoughts in the comments. I left my suggestion underneath the story.

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I found this one one of those random image sites some time ago, and I still can’t figure out what the fuck is it:

author unknown

I did some googling and I can’t find any info on any species of hairless primates (well, other than us humans). But maybe I’m not looking in the right places. Is it just a monkey that went bold? Is it suffering from some genetic condition? Kinda like some sort of reverse hypertrichosis?

I need some zoologists and/or cryptozoologists come here and give me some answers now.

Here is my little pet peeve about Firefox tabs - with the the default theme it is sometimes hard to see which tab is currently active at a glance. The difference between normal and boldface tab title is just not that pronounced. It just doesn’t jump at you, which is in my opinion what it should be doing. I want to be able to instantly tell “where I’m at” without thinking.

In order to make my active tab stand out some more added this to my userChrome.ccs:

.tabbrowser-tab[selected="true"] > hbox,
.tabbrowser-tab[selected="true"] > .tab-close-button {
background-color: #DD8800 !important;
color: #fff !important;
}
.tabbrowser-tab[selected="true"]:hover > hbox,
.tabbrowser-tab[selected="true"]:hover > .tab-close-button {
background-color: #FFAA00 !important;
color: #fff !important;
}

This will make the active tab dirty orange-ish color, and will make the text white. Yes, I like orange - it fits with my color scheme here, so STFU! Feel free to play around with the color codes. You can even make it raging pink if you like.

I have this little dream. I wish that people would know as much about their computers as they know about their cars. Our lives would be so much better then. No more dumb support calls, no more dealing with clueless lusers, no more larting.

I’m serious about this. Most people can talk about their cars using full sentences, and proper terminology (you know, like engine, gas tank, fuel gauge not thingy, whatchumacallit that that thing with the error message). For example, you can ask just about any driver out there the following questions and in most cases they will give you informed answers:

1. what car do you drive?
2. what’s your car’s millage?
3. how many miles to a gallon do you get?
4. how many gallons fit in your tank
5. is it a 4 cylinder or 6 cylinder engine?
6. what company made your car?
7. what kind of engine oil and/or break fuel do you recommend?

It doesn’t really matter if the person is a mechanic, race car driver, trucker, commuter or a soccer mom. Most people will be able to answer at least half of these questions, even if they are not really that much “into cars”. Now let’s try a similar set of descriptive questions regarding computers:

1. what kind of computer do you have?
2. what is your CPU speed?
3. how much memory do you have?
4. how big is hour hard drive?
5. what kind of operating system are you running?
6. what company made your computer?
7. what kind of anti-virus software would you recommend?

In my experience, most people can answer only one or two questions from this list of the top of their head. Why is that? The information in both cases is not all that much different. Both car and computer specs are just numbers, acronyms and brand names. I always find it funny how the same person can remember a hundred different meaningless factoids about their car, and a hundred more about their dream car, and about the car they are going to buy in 2 years if they can afford it, but never bother learning few really basic facts about their computer.

People often complain that sysadmins and IT people are arrogant and look down on the people who know less than they do. But think about this: if you asked someone what card do they drive, and their answer was: “Um… I don’t know… How do I check that?” wouldn’t you think less of them or assume they were joking?

When you call a car mechanic you kinda expect them to ask you about the make of your car, year of production, millage and etc. You also don’t just tell them that you saw a blinking like on the dashboard and forgot to write down what it said. But when people call tech support, they seem to expect that we magically guess what kind of machine they have, what kind of operating system they run, and what error did they get 3 days ago. Sigh…

The crux of the problem is this: it is generally not socially acceptable to be completely clueless about cars. However it seems to be perfectly acceptable to be clueless about computers and electronics, to the point that people like to brag about their incompetence. For some reason people think that it is kinda cute not to understand the tools they use to do their job every single day…

My boss called me today with a Quickbooks question. Of course the fact that I’m not an accountant, I do not use Quickbooks, and that I have only a vague idea of what it is used for didn’t cross his mind. After all, I’m a “computer guy” so I should be able to somehow magically figure out the inner workings of every piece of existing software in a matter of seconds, without really understanding the underlying business logic.

His question was how to find out who made certain changes to the file on a given day (they are investigating some fraudulent charges or whatever). I didn’t know so I googled it, and it turns out that Quickbooks has a feature called Audit Trail which allows you to track all the changes that were made to the file. Of course if you disable it, nothing is tracked, and the software conveniently discards are the identifiable user information when saving changes.

I figured this feature would be somewhat useless. If someone was to commit fraud, they would surely disable this feature to hide the evidence, right?

Wrong.

Apparently some people really suck at crime. The audit trail report pinpointed exactly which user cooked the books and when. So I guess this story has a happy ending after all. The dumb dude who was defrauding money is probably going to the “federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison” and I apparently do have magical powers that let me understand software at a glance.

And as all good stories, this one also has a moral: if you generally suck at dealing with technology you will probably also suck at white collar crime. It’s a fact.