[RevServer tips] Spreading the load or why wise developers use asynchronous workflows

[Bob Sneidar]

Eh heh. Sounds a lot like urban legend to me. ;-) Ima going to have to look that up. Still, not unbelievable. My first day in the fleet I talked a second class petty officer into troubleshooting a particularly nasty problem with the control console for the "billion" dollar missile radar I was supposed to be trained to work on. 

After looking at the signal flow, and determining that the problem had to be on a particular card, I said, "We gotta put the card on an extender and check the signal here and here." So he got the scope and I pulled the card, inserted the extended and plugged the card in. 

We powered up the console, but after about 10 seconds I said, "What's burning?" You guessed it. The card I had just plugged into the extender... BACKWARDS! It seems that while the card slots were keyed to prevent this very thing, the extender cards were not. Opps didn't go over well the next day with the work center manager. I didn't get to touch the equipment for the next six months. 

Bob


On Aug 5, 2010, at 2:36 PM, Jeff Massung wrote:

> While we're bringing up old "war stories" and measuring lengths...
> 
> I have a friend who works for Boeing. Just to give a little physics
> background, satellites are not in perfect orbit; they are continuously
> falling to the Earth and need course correcting every so often.
> 
> This one particular satellite used a particular program to course correct
> and the thrust units were measured in thousands (2000, 3000, etc). A new
> hire who was working late got the call for a course correct went to the
> machine, typed in the appropriate thrust amount and which rockets and hit
> enter. Was prompted "are you sure?", hit yes, and bye-bye satellite.
> Un-beknowst to the new guy, the program implicitly did the multiplication of
> units for him (he was supposed to enter 2, 3, ...).
> 
> Nothing like firing a few hundred million dollars out into space your first
> week on the job, eh? ;-)
> 
> Jeff M.
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