Here we are almost at the end of the second week of 2014, at least it hasn’t been to boring. Although the Security Camera system is still down I’m working on it’s replacement system, it will probably be completed today at some point. Over the past few days it’s become more apparent to me that there are quite a lot of office politics being played out round here, in some respects it’s actually worse than most of the other sites that I’ve worked on over the past 20 years or so. There have been some strange unexplained goings on in the IT department, moving equipment to other parts of the world – quite possibly to throw it in a skip doesn’t seem to be an efficient use of resources. However that is what has been done, quite possibly at the cost of £4-500 per PC – then they have to have hard drives fitted and an OS installed before they can be used. Still as I’m a contractor I’ll just make the best of the situation and keep my pudding muncher closed, well on that matter anyway!
Something that happened last night also showed me just how little I really know, at around 16:30 there was a knock at the door and one of the designers came into IT asking for an “Android Cable”. After some interrogation (like what does the cable connect) I managed to glean that what was required was a USB to micro-USB cable, required to connect a smart phone to a PC and copy files between the two devices. So much for the secure environment I thought to myself, along with things like dropbox – there just seem to be so many ways of us losing our highly secret data on the chip and pin cards that we make.
Finally the last of the Sun servers are about to be virtualised and removed from the site, although going from Solaris 6 to 11 in a single step does seem to be a bit extreme. And as it’s also going from Sparc to x86 what could possibly go wrong, I mean we have the x86 binaries that were released along with the Solaris 6 Sparc binaries, So 2014 in with a bang and as one of my good friends would have said “Onward and Downward”.