my email is dishless
Geek
In my not too ample spare time, I work for the University of South Australia's Centre for Sleep Research as a geek-at-large. We are based off-campus at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and as such we have our own Internet connection to the Uni. Well, we had our own connection, but not any more.
I was trying to finish off a COBOL assignment(!) yesterday over lunch, which involved connecting to one of the Computer Science department's student boxes. This was working fine until my three remote terminals froze. They didn't come back immediately, so I checked out our connectivity in general and found our connection seemed to be down. This happens every now and then so I set up a ping -i 60 to let me know when it came back and got on with my real work.
People started milling around and complaining that their email was down
and so on. After about half an hour it was decided that someone should get onto the Uni proper and find out what the hell is going on. Calls were made and the Uni said they were on to it. There wasn't much else to do but get on with actual work, so pretty much everyone left for the day.
As some background, UniSA has just decommissioned the Underdale campus, despite that the replacement student facilities have not actually been finished yet - oh well. Also, the lab is also in the process (for the last few years) of moving to the City East campus as our building is going to be demolished, sometime in the future.
Anyway, a few hours later we get a call explaining what the problem was. Some guys had been sent out to take Underdale's satellite dish down - the one that provided Internet access to the campus. Then these guys thought they really would kill two birds with the one stone and take our dish down at the same time.
Which was great, but we were kind-of using it still and while it's easy to take a dish down, it's a lot lot harder to put one back up. So maybe we'll get our access back today, maybe we wont. Yay!
Comments
michael j gratton, you are a champion of public service watch-dogging. i truly cannot think of a more excellent geek-at-large. do it for the peeps, mang!
Posted by: ann on April 14, 2005 09:42 AM
Sounds like they had a Halting Problem :)
(Mental image of rogue dish-mantlers running off the end of their loop condition and wandering the streets of Adelaide, pulling down anything large and round and pointed vaguely skyward, until enraged sysadmins/GALs/SkySports addicts finally trap them and put big balls of silicone on their spanner heads...)
Posted by: Joel on April 14, 2005 09:03 PM
COBOL? COBOL? *has a panic attack*
People... still... code... with COBOL? Lord help us all :(
Posted by: Daniel O'Connor on April 17, 2005 05:03 PM
Heh. That's the second biggest halting problem I've ever seen!
Not that I'm defending it, but COBOL still (apparently) accounts for 50% of the code in production today. That number is shrinking, obviously.
Anyway, the lecturer justified the use of COBOL because of the parallels between COBOL file handling and SQL (which gets picked up for the rest of the semester). I can see the parallels, but I have a bad feeling that the SQL part of the course is going to be a repetition of the previous part (but hopefully going into some more advanced usage patterns) so why bother teaching COBOL in the first place?
Posted by: Mike on April 17, 2005 07:23 PM
Fraction of code in production compared to fraction of code you're actually likely to encounter... very much not the same thing.
Just 'cause there's a lot of it out there doesn't mean it's not still obsolete for teaching purposes.
All the COBOL maintenance gets done by men with salt-and-pepper beards charging hundreds of dollars an hour *because* it's obsolete. It's a closed ecosystem out there and opportunities for younger programmers to enter it are pretty much nil. Which, I imagine, suits everyone :)
Posted by: Joel on April 17, 2005 08:21 PM
Sigh... and I so dearly wanted a sand-and-pepper beard.
Posted by: Mike on April 17, 2005 11:29 PM
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