hello kitty, or developers that need to learn some humility
I spent some more time working with the trainee today, and nearly blew his mind with dd. It helped that his beloved WinXP failed him miserably. He was trying to duplicate a WinXP-64 CD so that he could burn his own, and whatever craptastic windows tool that he ended up using gave him a 168MB ISO image. When he tried to boot off of it, it failed to work, and he couldn't figure out why. So I suggested that maybe his ISO was bad, and I showed him how dd can be used to do the same thing. Unsurprisingly, dd generated a 558MB ISO, which worked fine. After some choice derrogatory comments from me about how his beloved preferred OS sucks, he seemed to finally be seeing the light. I hope.
So fast forward to later in the day when the lead engineer from a specific group asks me to get a dump of specific SBIOS registers. I have no clue how to do this, I admitted it up front, and asked for help. So the guy calls me on the phone, and tries to talk me through it, in exceedingly broken, bad English. He doesn't actually explain any of it, and yet assumes that I can just infer the missing details on my own. I told him that I wasn't really understanding this, at which point the guy laughs at me on the phone. Now, I've watched this guy bumble his way through trying to use Linux a few months ago, and it was excrutiatingly painful watching him spend upwards of a minute to perform a simple task that I could accomplish in seconds. Yet, I didn't laugh at or mock him. Anyway, he ended up sending one of his flunkies over to get the register dumps, and his flunky has no clue how to do it either. He bumbled about for nearly 20 minutes, even asking me at one point how to do it (err, if i knew how, you wouldn't be here, idiot). So he wanders back to his boss for help, comes back and finally figures it out. Except that he needs to get 1024 different registers, and doing that manually would take a while. So apparently his craptacular DOS app has no means of specifying a range of registers, and this fool doesn't know how to script it in DOS. He asks me how to write a batch script, but the last time I wasted my time writing batch scripts was about 15 years ago, so I couldn't help him. Again, he trudges back to his boss for help, and returns. Unfortunately, his script was semi-broken, since he couldn't figure out how to get the resulting output to get redirected to a file. He was trying "foo.bat > foo.txt" but that was resulting in a zero size foo.txt. He bumbled around with this for nearly an hour, and again gave up, and went to his boss. So what does all of this have to do with hello kitty? The USB key that he brought with him with DOS on it had a huge, honking hello kitty image on it. The mind boggles.