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Issue 23
 A virus attack becomes a diplomatic incident, Ed plays a blinder, and VB.NET has a surprise for Carl and Denny.
Monday
We’ve had a virus attack, and it’s done a thorough job of trashing our filing systems! The cleanup squad’s in, and we’re praying that it didn’t trash the backups, or propagate itself before we shut down the mail server. Mike says that if our French TEL partners find out it’ll be the BSE crisis all over again, so he’s sworn us to silence, cut the TEL intranet link and blamed the outage on BT. The AS/400 lot have heard about it and are crowing about ‘dangerously penetrable platforms’, which has resurrected Mike’s suspicions about Phase III counter-bids and moles. Meanwhile I’m keeping a floor-level profile, tell Ed to do the same, and thank goodness that Carl and Denny, Brian Wood’s canteen confidantes, are away on a course.
Tuesday
By terrible luck Ed and I are in Paris today for a TEL planning session, and we get a barrage of questions about why our system is down. With remarkable smoothness, Ed spins them a comms failure story that’s so convincing I almost believe it myself. I then launch into my .NET Remoting presentation, which keeps them quiet until lunch, when Ed and I excuse ourselves and eat in a nearby bistro. In the afternoon Ed announces that binary encoding can sometimes be preferable to XML. Jurgen bites, and the rest of the session is spent debating the importance of open standards. Pleading early flights, we make our escape - we’ve survived, with Ed playing a blinder, although of a rather dubious kind.
Wednesday
Disaster - the French have found out about our virus and cut their end of the intranet link, blaming it on France Telecom. Mike’s convinced the AS/400 lot are responsible, and is out for blood. It’s exactly the wrong moment for Carl and Denny to arrive back from their course wearing Mickey Mouse badges with ‘C#’ felt-tipped on them, so of course they do. I rush them off to the canteen, tell them I’ve seen them talking to Brian Wood, and say that if they’re his moles they’d better start job-hunting, because Mike’s after them. Looking at me as if I’ve completely flipped, they say they’re not moles, but are members of the British Computer Society, and often discuss BCS matters with their branch chairman, B. J. Wood Esq. Feeling a total idiot, I skulk back to the office.
Thursday
Our system’s back up, but the intranet’s still down at the French end. Load Adjustments II testing is cancelled, so I’ve brought forward my internal ‘Upgrading to VB.NET’ session. A few jaws drop as I work through the list of changes. Fixed length strings and non zero-based arrays (both favourites of Sammy’s) are banned, as are late binding and null propagation (Ed’s specialities). We’ll also need to weed out references to -1 instead of True, a problem I put down to the ‘binary is best’ influence of Carl and Denny. At least the dreaded Gosub..Return is finally dead though, and I get a laugh with the news that VB objects will now be able to inherit directly from C & D’s precious C++ classes. Sometimes progress is sweet.
Friday
The intranet shutdown has become a diplomatic incident, with the MD himself involved. Finally the link returns, although not before a confirmation letter from our security consultants has been faxed to Paris. There are rumours of bad feeling at Board level, and Carl claims to have heard about a split, with us, Italy and Spain looking for new French and German partners. Denny, however, says that the French are fed up with Greg and his pals empire-building at TEL HQ, and are trying to get us, Spain and Germany thrown out. They’re both almost certainly wrong, but talk of a break-up makes me realise how much I’d miss the TEL project - not just for the European travel, but for the excitement of working on genuinely leading-edge systems. Let’s hope the Big Cheeses settle their differences, and let us techies get on with our jobs.
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Issue 23 - Contents
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Issue 1
Issue 2
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Issue 6
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Issue 23
Issue 24
Issue 25
Issue 26
Issue 27
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Issue 29
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Issue 33
Issue 34
Issue 35
Issue 36
Issue 37
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