Laptop screen brightness

I was in a meeting room with the Boss. During the course of the discussion, I told him that instead of giving verbal explaination it would be better if I can show a demo. He handed over me his laptop and pulled a chair besides me.
I connected to my machine via Remote desktop and started showing him a demo of our new project. After 2 mins I noticed that he is not able to grasp the idea, here is the conversation

Dilbert: Boss what happened.. is there any problem?
Boss: Yes.. actually I am not able to see the items clearly.
Dilbert: (Angled the laptop towards the boss) Is it okay now?
Boss: No actually there is a lot of glare from the window I am not able to see the screen clearly
Dilbert: Ok then lets sit facing the wall instead of the window so that there is no glare
Boss: Well actually हमारे बच्चे ने उस दिन कुछ keys दबाये | उस टाइम से ये screen एकदम काला हो गया है हें |
Dilbert: मतलब ?
Boss: ये देखो ना सब काला काला दिखता है
Dilbert: (Ohhh ! so you you don't know how to increase the screen brightness??? !!!) Ok wait a sec
Dilbert: (Fn+Home to increase brightness) Ok does it look bright now ?
Boss: Waaw !

My boss was working with a dull screen for a lot of days b'ca he didn't know how to increase the screen brightness !!!

Wren & Martin read this !

An informal chat between me and my boss....

Alice: So, how is your son?

Boss: Ya she has become very naughty.

How to RDC to a machine ?

The boss wanted to open a RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) to a computer named thisismymachine

Here is how he attempted it

Start->Run->thisismymachine





Waaw... so he was expecting windows to be smart and rdc to the machine by just typing the name in the Run dialog !!

This was the error




Well he did make some really funny gestures at this point, unfortunately I can't put it here...

IE6-Firefox-Mozilla HTML rendering issues

This is in continuation to the research project post

The boss finally got IIS up and running after 2-3 months of research. Well let me put it this way, he toiled hard to set it up for 2-3 months, then one fine he gave up and asked Asok to see why is it not working. Asok cleared the mess in a few minutes and bingo !! the website showed a IIS default page !!! The boss finally had a website running ! :)

Next day the Boss started working on a new HTML page [the default page of the website]. He added a few lines of text and a few hyper links [this took him about a week]

The Boss now wanted to see how the page looks on different browsers! Mind you this was not a page full of Java scripts and jazzy AJAX stuff; It was a simple HTML page with a few headers and hyper-links. Also, the target audience for the web page was about 100 internal users. However the Boss has loads of free time !

He checked how the stuff looks on IE 6 [its the default browser on his machine].

I always use Firefox [and he doesn't know how to install it] so he came to my desk and asked me to hit the website URL. Yukksss !!! what an ugly page !!! and an icing on the cake... at the top of the page there was this dirty heading text with green highlight.

[My mistake, I shouldn't have expected the Boss to have an aesthetic sense. ]

IE6 and Firefox done, he now wanted to test it on Mozilla. He went in our secured server room hunting for a Linux machine which had Mozilla installed. [The easier way would have been to install Mozilla either on his desktop or on an existing Linux machine; Again, he has the luxury of infinite time.]. After 2-3 hours of desparate search mission he had his hands on a Linux box with Mozilla pre-installed [It was a Debian PPC 64 machine, but don't remember it for sure]

It was 5:30 - 6 pm. I was in the server lab doing some installation on a new windows box. He came in and started working on his new found linux box. [I was observing all the activities he was doing :)]. He started the Mozilla, and typed the website URL. [Yuuks I had the sight of that web page again!! ]. For next 2 minutes he kept staring at the monitor. He went out of the lab to to his desk and came in again. He closed Mozilla, restarted it and again hit the same page. Once again he seemed very annoyed with what he was seeing. He made 2-3 trips to his desk and back into the lab.
[I knew he was confused about something, and I was more than sure I am about to hit a jackpot of "technical jokes" so I walked up to him]

Dilbert: Boss what's the matter ?
Boss: Strage heen.. I am curious to know why the web page is showing up like this in Mozilla ?
Dilbert: (Had a look at the monitor) Yes I can see every thing is looking very ugly
Boss: Yes.. but it looks good in IE6. Just now, I checked it 2-3 times from my desk
Dilbert:(I think it looks ugly in any browser) Ok.

Dilbert knew the problem but acted innocent .. so the conversation continued

Boss: See in Mozilla everything looks so big...
Dilbert: (To add more confusion) Yeh.. I can see... may be its the monitor size?
Boss: yes may be but my desk monitor is 19" and this one is 17". I wonder why the 17" monitor is showing bigger text than the 19" one.
Dilbert: Hmm... really strange !!

The boss then went to his desk and searched the web [I don't know for how many days] to see why Mozilla displays text DOUBLE the size of Firefox and IE6. For the next few days he kept broadcasting the newly discovered phenomenon "Mozilla shows bigger text than IE6 and Firefox".

So all you readers want to know why the text on Linux-Mozilla was insanely bigger than IE6 ??

Guess what ? the screen resolution on Boss's desktop machine is set to 1280 x 1024 and that on the Linux machine in the lab is set to 640 x 480. Isn't it only logical that everything will show up double the size ?

ROFL !!

Time Machine....!!!!!

Almost 1.5 years back, I joined this company. And since then my Boss sees to it that he keeps his team entertained.

On 5May2008, our Boss forwarded me a meeting request. It was for a conf call. There was a list of people who were to attend it. I found the subject of the meeting a bit wierd, as we have stopped supporting the product.

So, I went to check the date, and found that the Date of the meeting was : 17Nov2006.
(On this date, I had not even send my resume to this company for job. I clearly remember, that I sent my resume on 18Nov2006)

So, all the blog readers, pls let me know, if you have a time machine, I am all set to attend the meeting which took place 2years back.

Wake up Perl Experts !!

I (dilbert) am not a Perl expert, I use the language once in a while. One fine day I decided to brush up my Perl skill and started reading Perl Black Book

After I breezed throught some easy chapters, I hit an important milestone, the usage of my, local scope. This was something I had forgotten.. so I read it with great interest. I read the examples and the concepts become clear to me.

Asok (perl expert) was working at Wally's desk. I pinged him and just to trouble him I asked him to explain the difference between my and local, and he did it perfectly. Then Asok and me decided to check if boss knew these concepts (since the boss claims himself to be a technical expert).

I called up boss and we had this conversation

Dilbert: Hello
Boss: हल्लू
Dilbert: Tell me one thing, what's the difference between my and local ?
Boss: (A pause of 2 secs) See my is actually used for local variables. And local is different.
Dilbert: (Controlling his laughter) what does that mean ?
Boss: See local is mostly used to getting system/environment variables.
Dilbert:(Had enough of this nonsense) Ok. It would be good if you can give me some code samples.
Boss: Ok


Dilbert and Asok both have a good laugh about this. Within minutes the boss comes to Dilbert's desk (to give some "garbage" suggestions)

Boss: See my and local are there, but now Perl has come up with a new concept called our ! हाँ !

Dilber,Asok: (Putting up a straight face and controlling the laughter) Hmm.. ok

After the boss had left the scene, Asok and Dilbert broke into laughter :D:D:D



Larry Wall needs to be updated that our a recently added keyword!

Control + C => It kills.

This case happened in a hospital's Intensive care ward where Patients always died in the same bed and on all Sunday morning at 11a.m, regardless of their medical condition.This puzzled the doctors and some even thought that it had something to do with the supernatural. No one could solve the mystery as to why the deaths took place at 11 AM.So a world-wide expert team was constituted and they decided to go down to the ward to investigate the cause of the incidents. So on the next Sunday morning few minutes before 11 a.m. all doctors and nurses nervously waited outside the ward to see for themselvesWhat the terrible phenomenon was all about. Some were holding wooden crosses, prayer books and other holy objects to ward off evil........Just when the! Clock struck 11...And then......then.....then........Santa Singh, the part-time Sunday sweeper, entered the ward and Unplugged the life support system & plugged in the vacuum cleaner.
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Liked the joke? Well, we are lucky enough to have a local Santa Singh in our team - Our dear BOSS.
This is what he did :

It was 8pm. Everyone was eager to go home.
However, no Dev or QA was allowed to go home today as a critical build was going on. Unless the build succedds, and QA approves it, no one can leave the office.
Some Devs were so tensed, that they preferred to monitor the log line by line.
They were monitoring the log, and whenever a component was compiled sucessfully, they were dancing as if it was one day match, and Sachin was batting and hitting boundaries.

And all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all of a sudden ...... Sachin is out ...... I mean, the following line appears in the build log :
Someone sent me a ^C. Terminating the process.
And the build stopped.
Everyone was horrified. Asok had fired the build, and so the phone on his desk started ringing. The incident was reported, and Asok started the investigation.
He found that while doing some private research, THE BOSS had sent a ^C to the build and it was killed. It was a clear cut loss of 1 hour .
All the teams, who would have packed up for the day at 11:30pm, had to wait till 12:30am.
The Issue got escalated, and the super boss scolded the BOSS.
The Boss then came to Asok, and Asked
"एक बात बताओ ^c करनेसे बिल्ड kill कैसे होता है ? "
Do you have any answer? If yes, pls explain him.

Zombie

If you check the dictionary meaning of the word zombie.
The English word means : The Living Dead.
In terms of computer process it means :
On Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table, this entry being still needed to allow the process that started the zombie process to read its exit status. The term zombie process derives from the common definition of zombie—an undead person. In the term's colorful metaphor, the child process has died but has not yet been reaped.

That's what he is. He is alive just because he isnt dead. He has no expressions on his face, when he walks. When he talks, he talks just for the sake of talking, and never makes any sense.
He is alive(coming to office) just because his parent process(Super Boss) has not yet send him an exit signal(lay-off).

If you have seen him moving around in the office, you wont be scared when you see 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead.

Brownian Motion of the BOSS

Many a times our beloved boss gets up from his cubicle. And starts walking with a blank face looking at the ground. He forgets why he started walking.... And then moves around.... does nothing, returns to his desk, and starts typing mails with one hand.

The path he travelled yesterday can be added to the link below as additional exampls of brownian motion.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion)

The MM\DD\YY v/s the DD\MM\YY debate

In my company * we have a web based leave application system. All planned leaves have to be applied through a web based system. The system then sends an automated email to the boss. The boss can the approve/reject the leave

It was late Dec 2007 and I applied for a 2 days off in early Jan 2008; within 2 mins the boss approved it.

Fast forward to 7th Jan 2008 (my day off from work)

Its 12:30 pm and the boss gives a call on my cell (he always calls me from his cell and never from the office line)
Dilbert: Hello
Boss: हल्लू हम boss बात कर रहे है |
Dilbert: (I know its you... I have your number saved in my phone book) Yes Boss tell me whats the matter.
Boss: Are you coming in late today ?
Dilbert: (Lost !!!) Late ??? I am on leave, I won't be coming to office today.
Boss: But you should have called me up to inform about this unplanned leave.
Dilbert: I have already applied for a leave.
Boss: हें Wait.. I will check हें .
Dilbert: (Shaking head in disgust)
Boss: No I can't see anything in the pending approval list
Dilbert: (By now almost gone red) Boss.. it won't be in pending list, you have already approved it.
Boss: Is it ? I will have a look हें
Boss: No I don't see todays date in the approved list !
Dilbert: (Cursing his fate for having such an idiot as his boss) Ok boss, I will check again and call you back.


Immediately Dilbert gives a call to Wally
Dilbert: Hi
Wally: Hi!
Dilbert: Can you do me a favor login to leave application system with X username and Y password and check if todays leave is approved
Wally: Sure. (Logs in to the system). Bingo !! Yes its applied and approved
Dilbert: Can you sow this to the boss ! he has gone blind. According to him, I have not applied for a leave.
Wally:Ok. I will do that
Dilbert: Thanks. Give me a call later.
Wally:Sure

In the mean time the boss went to Asok's desk.
Boss: See people should plan for leaves in advance हें . If they are not coming to work, they should inform their managers. If some one doesn't come to office by noon without intimation then HR will take action against that person
Asok: Gives a sarcastic smile

Wally sees the boss at Asok's desk and gives him a shout
Wally: Hey ! boss. Can you come here
Boss: Yes Wally.
Wally:Dilbert asked me to login to leave application system with his credentials. And the shows the leave as approved!
Boss: (Totally confused.) strange हें
Wally:(Whats so strange in this ?)

Boss goes back to his desk, re-checks the system and then comes smiling to Asok's desk again..

Boss: हें confusion हें mmddyy and ddmmyy हें
Asok: (He has already given up. Again gives up a sarcastic smile)


The leave application system shows 3 columns
Start date/End Date/Number of days

Now if the boss did get confused (which happens in every matter), then he should have also looked at the Number of days column.

Dilbert had applied for leave on 7th and 8 Jan (2 days). Boss interpreted the leave to start from 1 Jul and end on 1 Aug, however Number of days column still showed 1 !!

Boss calls Dilbert from his cell

Boss: हल्लू हम boss बात कर रहे है हें
Dilbert: (I know its you... idiot !!! I have your number saved in my phone book) Tell me...
Boss: Problem has been resolved हें
Dilbert:Ok (Was not at all interested in what was the problem and wanted to hang up). Ok. Bye
Boss: The problem was with mm/dd/yy
Dilbert: (Has no clue and is least interested)Ok. Thanks. Lets discuss this when I am in office
Boss: हे
Dilbert:Bye. (hangs up)

If you think that a normal person can get confused with date formats, then yes I do agree that 1st time you can get confused, however the boss has been using the system for over an year ! Also if you want to grant some one a leave you need to know the duration/start end date. The boss just approved/rejects leaves based on unknown parameters.

People learn through mistakes. However our boss just keeps doing the same mistakes over and over again.

If this episode was not enough, boss repeated this with Wally too.

To avoid causing confusion/trauma to our boss we (the engineers) have decided not to take leave from 1st to 12th of the month

Boss has found a new format for displaying/writing time

4:30 AM in the morning

LOL !

What is Recycle Bin????

Wally once goes for a vacation and there is some issue in the office. He gets a call from his boss.
Boss: "Halluuu"
Wally: Hello.
Boss: "Tell me something, how do we fire xxx build ?"
Wally:"It simple, connect to machine 'y' , and run the 's' script under 'zz' folder.
Boss:"ok".
Wally:"And delete the folder 'temp' inside the folder 'zz'.
Boss:"heeeeennnn ok".
Wally is waiting for some response, after few seconds seeing no reply from the boss.
Wally:"so have u started the script"
Boss:"Which one?"
Wally:"The script 's' under 'zz' folder.
Boss:"Ohh Ohh I deleted 'zz' folder".
Wally:"Oh nooo, but I had told u to delete the 'temp' folder only".
Wally is disgusted, and about to break down at the other end. But then he thinks that this mishap can be recovered.
Wally:"Did u do a shift+delete?".
Boss:"What is shift+delete".
Wally looking at heavens "thank God".
Now to the boss.
Wally: "No problem we can recover the scripts. Go to RECYCLE BIN"
Boss:"WHERE IS IT?".

Now how do I tell - this is recyclebin ------------------------------>>

Things he learnt from me ....

Being THE BOSS, he is never hesitant to call any of us to his desk, to ask his stupid doubts.
He doesnt care if any one of us is working on a time critical project, or is too busy with some issue.
This is a list of tasks he learnt from me in recent past:
1. How to send a meeting request.
2. How to send meeting request to some people as optional.
3. How to check who is free at a given time by checking calendar.
4. How to insert a diagram in a word document.
5. How to change the layout of the word document from portrait to landscape.
6. What is version stamping. ( He has wasted atleast 4-5 hours of mine at different times, in asking the same stupid fundamental questions again and again)
7. How to change the font color.
8. How to change the font size, and font name.
9. Where do you find a button to change the font color.

There are many more of these....
Thats why I call him S* school of learning computer fundamentals. - That too with a huge salary.
(S* is the company name)

His recent research project...

Being in a Research company, THE BOSS decided to do some independant research.
He wanted a machine(computer) for that. His manager didnt give him any.
So in frustration he went to the lab, took an assembled box and formatted it.
(2 days later Wally came running, asking where is the box on which I had set up Linux=)) )

We excused the BOSS for this mistake . We have to excuse him, after all he is a manager. He is the KING.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After getting (or grabbing) the machine, he started his research. He was trying to install Tomcat on the box for 7 days. After 7 days I asked him, why he is so keen on Tomcat and why isnt he installing IIS? On which he said Tomcat is a better option. So Googled "IIS better than Tomcat", and whatever were the results, sent them to him in a mail, with the team in cc.
He immediately accepted that Tomcat was not better and we should go for IIS.
But there was a twist in this acceptance, after accepting this he asked me to install IIS. (As he doesnt know how to install IIS.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I installed IIS, and stopped working on the crucial project.
After that he was doing reasearch, on the project for around 3-4 months. Here is the research that he told us he did :
Tried variuos combinations of IIS / Tomcat / Apache - he has a list of which version of Apache is compatible with which version of IIS and which version of Tomcat and all that.
He wanted to install base for Java Beans / Perl / PHP / Servlets and Applets on the same machine. (its a 512MB RAM assembled machine).
For this he wasted time of many of the IT resources in the company. When he realized, no one is interested to help him on this stupid task, he even dropped mails to people from different business units for help.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He wanted to do this to help Dilbert, in his project. Dilbert never asked for these all, and never wanted this for his project.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the mean time, Dilbert developed the new system, and launched it too, using some other server class machine. The new system is in production and other teams are using it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recently one day he came to me and told : Asok, I'll keep the assembled box with me. "हम उसपे अपना कुछ प्राइवेट रिसर्च करने वाले है हे "
Pls note,
1. He ends every line that he says with an irritating हे
2. He always adresses himself हम

He wrote this mail to one of the team members (lets call her - R) in US of A.

We wanted to connect to a weekly international conf. call, and there was some network problem with BSNL. So we could not connect thru.

After this he became hyper and dropped this mail to the teammate in US :

Hi R,
Whenever we call the toll free number it says:
"All Lines in this route are busy". This happened last time also. Can you get the toll number rechecked if something has changed.

Thank god he didnt write "इस रूट की सारी लाइने व्यस्त है !"

Did you notice, there is no question mark at the end of the question.

A standard email when he is on leave

Hi,
I am out of office today. Please call me on my cell for any need.

Thanks,
Boss

Poor guy :( no one ever calls him up b'ca things move so smoothly when he is not in office !!

Dilbert.... No one can beat this master piece

This is the mail I (Asok) got from our boss....

Not a problem. my kid has high fever .yesterday she was coughing whole night. he had fever since saturday. we took him again to doctor today for medicine change. she is not going to school these days. this is the last week of her year. if she is better we would have to send her to school today. i had taken leave to take my wife to doctor today. anyway i will be coming tomorrow.

Can you now guess the sex of his(or her =)) ) kid ?
Do you know that, the first char of every new line in English is written in CAPITAL?
Have you ever seen someone writing "I" in small?

An email from my boss

Oh !! I am very surprised at how it got fixed. The log mail disappeared 10 days back and reappeared suddenly. Yesterday I sat on to look for a fix. I was planning to look at the logfile. So I tried to stop the service. The service could not be stopped and after repeated results I initiated a restart of the machine. The machine crashed. I asked IT to fix it. In the morning I am seeing the buildlog and really surprised by the mail. That's all i can say.

Boss

Ok Ok Ok Ok Ok Ok Ok Ok Ok .. this is what he was saying to himself.. when he walked past me..

With reference to one of my female colleague X , my boss made this statement

I asked X yesterday. He told me about this. I asked him if you can do this

ROFL ....