The Grumpy IT Admin

Just to be clear on how much I don't like developers here's a question for you. Why does sliced bread never fit in toasters? Because designers never use them. Its the only explanation I can think of, if they used them in the real world with loaves of bread brought from Tesco they would realise that normal sliced bread is 2 or 3 cm longer or deeper than the meager slots they provide. Developers are much the same, they never seem to test anything in the real world with real users. That is why even nowadays you come across so many applications that assume the user is in the local admins group and can write to the Program Files and Windows directories. If they tested these things properly they would pick these things up and wouldn't need to rely on Admins to fix it so their programs can actually be used. Web apps are supposed to be the answer to this. They can be run anywhere by anyone. Or can they? If the use ActiveX then no, we are talking windows only and you nee...

What is it with developer that they feel the need to do completely stupid things without a though for the consequences, just as long as it works? Are they just lazy perhaps? I have come across a couple of instances in the last couple of days where developers have created shares on servers and left them wide open to abuse by anyone being a bit nosey on the network. When I say wide open, I mean barn door wide open. Yes they put the Everyone group in with full control on both the share and NTFS permissions. Yes that’s right, I couldn’t believe it either; they even went to the extent of removing all the other users from the NTFS permissions. Complete and utter thoughtlessness and madness.  I quickly created some groups added the users I was aware of that need access and added that in to the shares and NTFS permissions after I reset it all to defaults. This not surprisingly caused some problems as users that were expecting access no longer could and the support/developer people got th...

Not much going on at the moment. The errant EQ is up and running OK, and no suppliers have managed to upset me, apart from the usual external developer. They seem incapable of developing in any meaningful way, they develop on their own systems, they move the new bits to our QA systems, then they go live and everything stops working. Do they do any load testing, no. Do they have any meaningful way of testing their LOB in any way for incompatibilities, no. Do they have any way of taking advantage of a 64 bit OS, no, they run .NET in 32 bit mode. Do they have the ability to exploit modern multi-core processors that they rely on in the physical servers they insist we use, no it is all single threaded applications all the way. Do I laugh, no because it is my fault it doesn't work. It is my hardware, my OS, my storage and my network, nothing to do with the supremely efficient and well manged code, even after they update it, yes they log on to our servers and update our live systems,...