h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyone who's ever worked in corporate IT will know that you just can't go and hack around in the computer systems that people use (You're excepted, Pastey). No, you have to show a bit of due care and respect for things. Not only might you cause systems to go suddenly offline, or corrupt a load of data - both of which will seriously miff staff and customers alike - but you may have a legal or moral responsibility to follow best practice.

And so it was that the IT industry developed procedures to help us. We need to understand exactly what we need to change and why. We need to get approval from the people who use the systems. We need to test things properly. We need to communicate to users if we're taking systems offline to make a change. We need to consider all the risks involved, and what fallback plans we have if the change doesn't go to plan.

Well, I say the industry developed procedures to help us. At the start the process was designed to stop us. They called it 'Change Control'. At one of my former employers, a utility company, it worked like this:

Everyone who wanted to make a change to the computer systems would fill out a long and detailed form stating what change we wanted to make and when, how we'd tested it, etc. We sent the form to the change control manager who compiled a long list of them and circulated this weekly to all staff. Every Wednesday afternoon, the whole IT department (pretty much) congregated in the staff canteen - it was the only room big enough to accommodate us all. We then talked through the changes one by one.

The changes at the top of the list were those raised by friends of the change control manager, Dave. These were usually rushed through and approved without any discussion from the floor:

"Change number 001 is yours, Trevor: Hacking the database so we don't have to fix that software bug? Yes, that should be fine. Approved!"

"Change 002: Hi, Debbie. Testing your COBOL billing system change in the live environment? Sounds sensible to me - Approved!"

After these 'high-priority' approvals, there followed a very long exposition of every other change on the list in the finest detail. Nervous young programmers would request permission to put their programmes live while the old hands would sneer "Over my dead body" and proceed to pick holes in everything that was presented to them:

"I see your test exit report doesn't cover the scenario where the data centre operations room becomes the focus for a zombie apocalypse", or

"Does your financial interface take into account the probability of the Bank of England adopting the Polish Zloty as its currency any time soon?"

Not only were these meetings interminable, but IT effectively stagnated. There were reasons, though. The corporate billing system ran on software which was over 30 years old and with all the functional design of a bowl of spaghetti. Nobody understood it, and to make any change at all was a huge risk. If anything went wrong and the millions of bills weren't sent out, the company lost a significant amount of money in respect of the interest on early payments.

That story was from 20 years ago, but, even though procedures have developed to help us make the improvements we need, today there are still a bunch of people who oppose any change with a vengeance. It's one of my jobs to foil them.

COBOL?????? Change Controls??????????????? You have just undone three years of intensive and very expensive brain care analysis.

Even just using the word analysis has caused me palpitations.

Some of the software in my company is brand new and shiny, and some is 30 years old and would come out badly in a comparison with spaghetti. We're extremely careful before making a change.

COBOL stood for COmmon Boring Old Language, didn't it?

Crock Of Bol-something, I think

Can Only Be Operated Luckily

All of which explains why an uninoformed user like me can't ever hope that changes won't be to my detriment.

Take Chrome's quick-search. It erases half the first word I type. Then it searches for what it wants to look up. I have to wait before I can search for what *I* want.

But hey, it's really fast! And then there's the captcha code, torturing the visually- and hearing-impaired in the name of security...oh, well, carry on.

I love the spaghetti analogy.

A friend of mine is a managing consultant for a software company that contributed to the Veterans Administration software system that rolled out a few years ago (with the usual difficulties of a huge dbms that links to lots of other databases)(kind of like the new healthcare system).

He says not only are vast parts of the US government payroll system still written in COBOL, but some of the programmers who wrote the payroll system are dead (of natural causes!), and others are retired but still get the occasional call from their ex-employer to ask questions about the code.

No doubt, back in the day they too had managers who were terrified of changing stuff.

I agree with you Dmitri. I hate the modern attitude the search engines have these days - what you're searching for is a very rare word, so I'm going to search for a much more common word, because that's what everybody else is interested in.

In my day, Search Engines did what they were told and didn't answer back!

Deb

Combining the wisdom from Gnomon and Lil's posts:

'We've got problems with the search engine!'

'Quick! Call Tech Support!'

Brrrring....

'Shady Rest Retirement Home. How may I direct your call?'

More likely

"We have problem with the sort module, do we amend the code in this module or in the upper level?"

"Knock once for yes, and twice for no."

Computer Seance

For those that like a more "pure" search engine experience, one that doesn't assume you mean, "lady gaga" when you're looking for "lady galadriel", one that doesn't track you and put your searches in a bubble based on previous searches...


Try http://duckduckgo.com

Thank you for that.

Yet, when I search on duckduckgo for djaffa cakes it assumes I mean jaffa cakes. I'd prefer it to tell me that it didn't find anything. Then I could rephrase my query more easily into something I want to find rather than something it thinks I want to find.

(I pick this as an example. I'm not really interested in djaffa cakes, although the search for djaffa on its own yielded some interesting results.)

I'm actually rather upset that Google and other search engines seem to have abandoned some of the great moderators I once used, like +[term], -[term], and the difference between [term] + [term], and [term]+[term].

Having to match an exact phrase and exclude certain words can really narrow down a search.

When I search using these modifiers anymore, I can't tell if they're working or not as google seems to try harder to modify my search phrase for me and correct my spelling.

Amen to all that. Also, there should be an easy way to say, 'Eliminate Amazon, imdb, goodreads, and other commercial sites that are just trying to sell me something, while I look for the information, drat it all.'

Personally I love google search. I put in Shakespearean stuff and they give me pictures of naked ladies.