crazyscot

(I need a new icon for this post. My current "weird" icon isn't weird enough. I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't seen it myself.)

So there I was at work, just after 5pm, starting to think about going home. I'm using the WinXP machine on my desktop, accessing the company email (google-hosted via the standard web interface). All of a sudden, as I'm archiving off some old emails, the machine looks like it's shutting down. Uncommanded.

What?

No, it has locked itself. And only (some other user I've never met) or an administrator can unlock it.

Bwuh?????

My incredulous exclamations attracted my neighbour and my boss, who were both as utterly boggled as I was.

I picked up the phone to the helpdesk, who had gone home for the day. The duty chap took the details - was as surprised at the description as we were! - and asked if it was urgent. Thankfully I had already completed the urgent task that required me to run the in-house Windows software, so he took details and said they'd investigate in the morning. Fair enough.

In the meantime my boss went directly to one of the senior IT bods, with whom he has a good working relationship. He was sufficiently intrigued to decide that he would put delay his departure for the day and come and investigate. He has admin access and was able to unlock the machine (which, in the usual Windows way, forcibly ends the logged-in user's locked session); he proceeded to log in and start poring through the machine's logs; he's very intrigued and wants to get to the bottom of this.

But. I mean. What. I don't even know where to start. It was as if my Windows machine - a full first-class PC, not a thin client, nor a Remote Desktop server - had routed its keyboard, mouse and monitor to some other random machine somewhere on the network. This one takes the biscuit, the cake, the 1000lb weight, and the feather duster.

Um. So. While our IT people try and puzzle it out, any ideas, dear f'list?

At work, we have a build system.

Up until today I had treated it mostly as a black box: press the button, software is built. It's entirely homegrown and written in Ruby, of which I speak not a single word.

We have multiple firmware deliverables and unit tests to build; the build system compiles and lints everything within sight (both for the target and for the host), then selectively links subsets of the object code into the outputs. As part of doing so, it builds up a map of the symbol dependencies amongst compile units; if something fails, you get a pointer to the linker mapping log which tells you where it started from, where its meanderings took it, graphical representations of same, and an attempt to provide some hints as to what you might need to do to fix it. If everything does build, it then goes on to run all the local unit tests (and it does so under valgrind, for good measure).

There's more. As well as doing all that, it's smart enough to only recompile the compilation units that have changed, relink the affected outputs, and rerun only the affected tests. So in other words your first build takes ages, but they're much faster and pretty reliable after that. Fully automated laziness, I like it :-)

Today's lesson was to not try to outsmart the buildsystem, for it is cleverer than I am. I thought I was being clever and saving myself time in telling it to build only a subset. This was before I had realised it computes the minimal set of tasks anyway, and I got the runes subtly wrong and it bit me (gently).

I half suspect it is plotting world domination while we sleep.

This house isn't quite so bad now the cold snap has passed. ( Read more... )
We are now renting a PO box. I have updated my contact details post (linked from my profile in case you want to update your address books).

My work are quite keen to recruit more engineers (generally embedded, DSP and hardware) and have a number of positions open, so if you fancy working in a seismically active zone, let me know :-)

crazyscot: You've just crashed my decision-making centres. Hang on a second while I think about that.

naranek: Quote, close-bracket semicolon; drop table salary_requirements!

crazyscot: *collapses helpless with laughter*

naranek: Hey, I had to try. :-)