Under Development

Posted on 11 Jul 2007 at 15:59

Small children and expensive bits of kit don't mix, as David Robinson discovers when he finds his four-year-old grandson isn't quite ready to join the family firm.

The saying 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is one of which I'm quite fond. I've dealt with hundreds of incidents over the years that could have easily been avoided if only the custard had followed that dictum.

One thing round here that didn't need fixing was Mrs R's HP LaserJet 1320. Grandson Aidan, who's four, can now open all the office doors by himself and, when he visits, wanders around as if he owns the place Maybe one day he will. Recently he visited our workshop and pestered engineer Garry for a while. When he came back he pointed to my desk and asked, "What's that?" - the 'that' being a screwdriver. Shortly afterwards, there came a horrible rasping from the laser printer. Aidan was standing there, screwdriver in hand, looking sheepish.

The only way to stop the racket was to turn off the power. When asked what he'd done, Aidan resorted to a small child's standard defence and burst into tears. We reassured him that he was not in trouble, but told him we did need to know what he'd done. When he'd calmed down, he showed me how he'd 'fixed' the printer by poking the screwdriver into the cooling fan vent. That really had fixed it.

Garry dismantled the printer and found the noise was caused by the cooling fan having lost a blade courtesy of the unscheduled interaction with screwdriver. The fan unit pushes into a plastic housing and, once in place, is a loose fit. Having lost the blade, it was rattling around at high frequency, making a noise out of all proportion to the damage and the size of the fan. The fix was a new fan that cost a tenner from www.cpc.co.uk.

The Gog delusion

Of course, there are plenty of things that, while not 'broke', are in need of some kind of fix. If things had never been improved on, we'd all still be wandering around wearing animal skins like the Gogs, eating berries with our bare hands because nobody had recognised the benefits of a bow and arrow. In computing terms, we'd still be using CPM and transferring files with the awful peripheral interchange program (PIP), Digital Research would be king of the operating system hill and the late Gary Kildall would have been a million times richer than Bill Gates. What a world that would be.

By the way, the Gogs are Aidan's favourite cartoon, featuring prehistoric people who never speak properly but just grunt (rather like teenagers). See www.toonhound.com/gogs.htm if you're not already an aficionado.

Incidentally, if you want the low-down on how MS-DOS became the predominant PC operating system instead of the then-market leader CPM, see www.cadigital.com/kildall.htm, which has a fair rendition of the story and is much more informative than the content on Wikipedia. The site also reports that when MS-DOS was completed, Microsoft "submitted a copy to IBM for testing, who found over 300 bugs". Clearly, they started as they meant to go on.

SQL needs a sequel

One Microsoft product that needs fixing is SQL Server Express. What a memory hog! We're evaluating a new accounting system called Interprise Suite, which uses MS SQL Server (either the 'real' one or the Express version, depending on how many users you need) as its back-end database. For our own custom applications, we mostly use a SQL database called Nexus (www.nexusdb.com).

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