“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

I wanted to relate a story that happened to a colleague of mine.  She maintains servers in two separate datacenters. All the servers are on the same domain.  So, in theory updating the password in one datacenter does so in both datacenters.  And this is the way it has been for the past year. Things worked as expected.

Recently she noticed however that after updating her password, the one datacenter was still using the old password and the second datacenter was using the new one.

In a proper domain this shouldn’t be possible, but apparently it was.  She spent some time confirming it before calling the IT department.

When she explained the problem to IT, their response was, “That’s not possible.  We synch the servers every hour and run an exception report every night that would show that.”

IT managed to fix the problem (after finally acknowledging it.)

However, the troubling problem though to me is not that the passwords got out synch. Sometimes the impossible does happen. What’s more troubling is that the sync apparently never fixed the problem and the exception report never showed an issue in over the month the problem existed.

The moral here?

It’s not that the impossible sometimes happens (though that would be good for a future blog post).  It’s when your alerts and warnings fail, perhaps it’s time you look at your alerts and warnings since they’re obviously not doing you much good.

Not much to say here other than this link may have saved me a lot of work.

I would have saved myself even more work if I had paid close attention to the last step:

Don’t miss this step, it’s very important: Select the new document; PressCtrl + A; Press F9.

Just to add, what this does is make sure the correct images get merged in.

Years ago Thomas J. Watson at IBM thought up a single word slogan: Think!.

Later Apple countered with Think Different!

I’ve always been fascinated with how people think.  One thing I’ve learned over the years is most people don’t think nearly as much as they think they do.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Actually in many ways it’s most likely an evolutionary adaptation that for the most part works.

For example, if a million years ago, you suddenly saw your ancestors all running away, you’d probably leap up and follow them without waiting to confirm there was a sabre-toothed tiger hot on their heels.  By not taking the extra second or two to think, you were able to pass on your genes.

But, in today’s highly evolved society, often that exact same reaction is not the right move.

I was reminded of this today getting off the train in New York City.  I tend to sit in the middle of the car (a lot of thinking has gone into this actually!)  So when I get up, I always have a choice of which way to go to get off the train.  Now, in a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter.  Since I’m equidistant from both ends of the car, it shouldn’t matter which way I go.  But often it does.  Today actually I was a little forward of middle.  I turned back to see more than 1/2 the car lined up behind me heading towards the rear of the car.  In part this was because the stairs from the platform towards the station are in that direction.  

Everyone was standing still.  I walked forward and was out of the car and to the stairs before the rear of the car had barely emptied.  I’m not sure what the hold up was. But the fact was, more than 1/2 the car apparently saw someone else get up, head towards the back so they did.  They never took the split second to look forward to see if that would be any faster.

Now you may be saying big deal. And you’re right. Getting off a train car a few seconds ahead of other people usually isn’t.

But, I’ve heard of similar things happening in more critical situations. How many times have you listened to the flight attendant or movie announcer point out fire exits and then promptly forgot about them?  How many folks make notes of all the exits in a building when they enter?

A study of fires and incidents in public facilities often shows that folks tend to do one of two things. 

One, they go where everyone else is going.  Again, this makes sense at a basic level.  There is the underlying assumption whether they realize it or not that they’re following the person in front of them because they assume the person who is moving must know something they don’t.  Of course it never dawns on them that the person in front of them may simply be moving in that direction because of the person in front of THEM.  The tragic side effect is that often you get crowding, trampling or simply wedges by the exit.  Often you’ll find a number of deaths occur near the most visible or most used exit to a facility.  In many cases this is due to wedges of people getting stuck trying to get through the door.

The other thing that people tend to do is head towards the exit they know about.  In fact this is most likely what causes the person at the front of the pack above to start moving in the direction they’re moving. 

Unfortunately, building codes generally assume that in an emergency, folks will exit all available exists (or some subset) in roughly equal numbers.  Experience shows in a crisis, this is rarely the case.  (I do believe this assumption is also starting to change and some building codes are changing to reflect that.)

(as an aside, one of the more remarkable survival stories I recall from 9/11 was a small group of people that essentially MADE their own exit by cutting a hole through a fireproof wall to another area where they could escape from.  So, sometimes consider making your own exit.)

Now, since I hate to end these passages on a somber note and because I want to relate this more to the IT industry, I’ll point out that often the successful businesses are not the ones that do what the heard does.  They do it differently. 

So, two exercises left to the reader.  Next time you go to a movie theater or restaurant, take a note of the exits and decide which one you will head to that you might have not noticed before.  Or if you’re stuck on a train or in a long line, stop to think if perhaps there’s another way people are overlooking.

The other one is more fun and one friends did in high school.  At the next group photo, pretend to see something and point to it.  See how many people follow along because obviously if you saw something, they must see something.  Then ask the last person who pointed what they were looking at.  I’ll bet in most cases you’ll hear “whatever it was they were looking at!”

I’m reminded of an old, very geeky joke:

A mathematician, a scientist, and an engineer all take a room at a hotel.  They each wake up separately to discover a small fire in their wastebaskets.

The scientist sits for a minute, calculates the amount of heat being created by the fire, determines the amount of water required to put it out, fills up his ice-bucket to that precise amount and tosses it on the fire, putting it out.  There’s no excess water and the mess is minor so he goes back to sleep.

The engineer looks at the fire, grabs the ice-bucket fills it to the top with water, figures there’s more than enough water in it, toss it on the fire with a margin of water to spare.  The fire goes out and he goes back to sleep.

The mathematician looks at the fire, looks at the ice-bucket, determines a solution exists and goes back to sleep.

When solving a problem, sometimes knowing a solution exists (or doesn’t exist) is half the battle.

I’m currently trying to win a programming contract to update a gentleman’s website. One of the requirements may be to integrate with some sort of payment service.  So, some quick research showed such a solution “existed”.  I had achieved the level of mathematician.  The service suggested is  Paypal’s https://www.paypal.com/ipn service. 

But it’s one thing to show a solution exists, I had to actually work with the solution to make sure if the time comes, I can implement it.  So, spent a few hours tonight working with the code example provided by Paypal and a database I created to test the proposed solution. After a couple of minor errors, I was able to use the test sandbox to call my callback URL and record the responses to the database.  I had achieved the basics. But this was also the hardest part.  So I have achieved the level of scientist here.

Now, if the customer gives me the go-ahead, I’ll have to expand the code to actually parse the request string and other details and integrate it with his code and database.  That said, that part is actually fairly trivial in many ways as I will control the entire process there.

So I haven’t quite achieved the level of engineer, but if the time comes, I will.

So that fire is out.  On to the next one.