• An email to someone at another company bounced back.
• Someone forgot his or her password and/or password.
• A mobile user has poor wireless and/or mobile broadband connectivity.  “I’m at the airport…”
• A mobile user was sitting at home during a power outage.  Wish I were making this up.
• The application is down for scheduled maintenance, as requested and scheduled by the person complaining of the outage.  “You never tell us anything!”
• The person submitting the ticket was told by a coworker that someone on a previous shift had some sort of problem sometime between last night and last week.  “He needs this to do his job.”
• Users were sharing credentials, and then the account was closed when the account owner was terminated for whatever reason.  “How else can I do it?”
• User attempted to log into a system that was decommissioned five years ago.  It *was* a good hostname.
• All of the access points in a large warehouse were physically moved, creating large dead spots.  Of course, no one saw anything or knew how it happened.  Gnomes!
• The cnn.com website was down.  Guess who had to send an outage notification to 16,000 users?
• The application administrator tried something that broke the dev instance, and then proceeded to ‘try’ it in all of the other instances, too.  Because you never know!
• A developer with production access ran a “harmless” SQL statement.  It couldn’t be that – it’s only a SELECT statement!
• The application administrator decided to “secure” the ERP by disabling system accounts.  Since no one could log in, it was really secure.

How about you?  I’d love to hear some other good definitions of “down.”

Video: Fired NMS employee speaks out about errant F-bomb on Chrysler Twitter account [autoblog]

Scott Bartosiewicz was fired from the ad agency NMS, which was itself fired by Chrysler.

The real problem (as usual) is one of process. Whoever thought that giving one or more people direct access to a major (or any!) client’s identity was a good idea shows an astounding amount of amateurism. I would have expected tweets to be submitted for review and approval, but hey, I’m just the guy who keeps the lights blinking in the datacenter. I don’t even have cool hair or trendy shoes.

If this were a blue-collar area, everyone would snicker at the git er done mentality, but add that hair and those shoes, it’s a software problem!  At least, in Mr. Bartosiewicz’s mind, it is.

Bottom line is, whenever I see something stupid like this happen, I’d look first for a process failure and not a broken tool.

Overalls?  Check

Huge beard?  Check

Plus sized? Check

“Big Iron” enthusiast?  Check

Yeah, I think there’s a good chance this guy is a fellow Unix admin.  Good to know we have career options!

]]> http://www.lanigera.com/wordpress/2011/02/career-options/feed/ 0 http://www.lanigera.com/wordpress/2011/02/qa-hates-you-interview/ http://www.lanigera.com/wordpress/2011/02/qa-hates-you-interview/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:18:33 +0000 tkyle http://www.lanigera.com/wordpress/?p=170 QA Hates You kingpin and all-around good guy Brian Noggle was recently interviewed by Matt Heusser at softwaretestpro.com.

Read the article and listen to the interview here.

Update: The podcast will not load unless you’re logged in to site.  It’s a free registration, or you can hit BugMeNot.com.

DB2 9.7

MySQL 5.0

Oracle 10g

SAP DB

SQL Server 2007

How many different platforms is your team supporting?  I’m guessing the most accurate answer is probably, ‘too many!’

Of course, there’s nothing funnier in IT than the movie “Office Space.”  I once had a research psychiatrist tell me that she thought it was a funny movie, so I corrected her, dryly explaining that the movie was actually a documentary about life in IT.  Here’s the famous “What Would You Say You Do Here?” scene, parodied by CRC Data Protection.

Here’s another great one.  Incredibly, it is for IBM’s mainframe division!  It parodies the lonely life of the mainframe sales team, done in the style of “The Office.”

Unfortunately, Kevin failed to mention a potential downside of having one of these babies. Namely, your developers and consultants will assume (even more than they probably already do) that whatever junk code they throw at the machine will run flawlessly. And if it doesn’t, it must be the DBA or Unix team’s fault.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it seems a bit strange that one vendor (EMC) is asking its customers to harangue another vendor (Oracle). This is the bad part about using best-of-breed – there’s always the potential for finger-pointing. Why remind customers of this right when a competitor is going vertical, instead of highlighting how much better value you might be able to provide?

My big takeaway is that Oracle has positioned itself as a soup-to-nuts vendor. That is, they will be able to sell you every part of the system, from the SPARC server running Solaris, to the StorageTek tape backup, to the Oracle database, to the business application, which just happens to be written in Java.

This isn’t too terribly different from what Jonathan Schwartz was saying recently, that Sun provided the technology stack. Except that Sun had no applications to tie into – particularly since so many Oracle customers jumped ship and ran to Linux in the last decade. Obviously, Oracle now has plenty of reason to try to convince everyone to return.

Whether or not the strategy works, I still think Solaris is the best operating system on the block, and would love to see a reinvigorated SPARC platform as a viable option.