April 27, 2006

Horse 539 - Bugs In the Software

In the early days of computers, I'm talking way back when they would take up entire rooms to be able to calculate German mechanical code and when someone at IBM proudly proclaimed that there "may be a market for maybe 12 computers in the world". Because of the size of componentry, certain environmental factors came into play. The term bug all the way back then quite literally meant that some sort of insectoid had crawlen into the machine and had fried itself.

I think to the old server that we had when one fateful day in 2004 if failed without warning. All of the software updates had been made and a check to the backup menus revealed that there hadn't even been a power spike. Open up the box however and a roach had crawled in and was now computing in glorious 16-bit. We magically had the most intelligent roach that ever roamed the earth.

'tinternet around here crashed quell' catastrophe on Monday and has been patchy since then. We phoned up Optus after much yelling and they ran various speed tests and we decided that the cable modem was working properly. They tried to blame our computer saying that we had spyware running. This was not the case and we told them as much.

Optus sent round a man this morning and after checking our cable, they sent around a few more chaps and they held a tea break with a little white tent out the front before looking at the lines themselves and guess what? There was evidence of BITING. Something had decided to eat our internet.

It reminded me of my Kindy teacher who warned us about electricity and the boy who bit into electricity and DIED. Assuming this story was real (grownups don't tell lies do they?) then we should find a dead obglobits somewhere... it remains to date unfound and tasty I wager.

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