Theres a BUG in my Computer!

There's A Bug In My Computer!

I had a computer come in to the shop just the other day that first off would not power on. It had a bad Power Supply Unit. Then after replacing the PS it was giving a beep error. It wasn't the standard memory beep error, so I went straight to the processor. I took the heat sink off only to find 3 dead roaches attached to the heatsink and processor. There were also 6 live roaches huddled around the CPU, and they began to scatter when I took the heatsink off. I wanted to take a picture of it for proof, but I also didn't want to leave the site of the computer and risk an infection of my shop. I panicked a little, but the first thing I could think to do was throw everything in a garbage bag, tape it up, and set it outside. I have never had to deal with bugs before. I always knew there was a possibiligy of having a real "bug" in your computer system, but as of the 3 years I've been in business , I had never seen this situation. I called some tech friends and they all said to just have the client come get their infected machine, but I didn't feel like that was the right answer.

So what I did was took the system outside on my table, and attached a garbage bag to the backside of the system case. I then used my high powered leaf blower to blow out the roaches that I could into the garbage bag...bombed the garbage bag and tied it up tightly. Then I began stripping out all the computer components such as hard drive, video cards, dvd drives, and processor.... spraying each component and the live bugs that were in them with roach killer. Each component had roach poop and eggs on it! Then removed the motherboard.... OMG. This is where a bunch was! During this process I counted a total of 19 cockroaches and successfully killed all of them before they escaped. The bugs were hiding in the cracks of the case and under the metal casing, under the motherboard, inside the cd drive, inside the power supply.... everwhere! They just kept coming out! It didn't stop at just 19!

I then put all the electronic equipment in static bags...put the static bags in a garbage bag,... put that garbage bag inside of another garbage bag, and then bombed the heck out of the machine.

At that moment I called a Pest Control company, and they came and exterminated my building that night, so hopefully if one of those nasty roaches got loose than it should die! I hate bugs! I guess I'm going to call the insurance company and see if this is covered by insurance, or if I need to bill the customer for the exterminating.

UPDATE: The Next Day:
I noticed a cockroach still alive in the heatsink and fan. I bombed it again, and successfully killed it. I also noticed 2 very small roaches scurrying in the static bag that held the hard drive. I squashed them inside the bag. So far I had not seen any in the shop.

Any suggestions are appreciated on this matter. Please contact us by going to www.cgrafiks.com/contact.htm. Thank you.

THE FIRST "COMPUTER BUG":

NOTE: The first documented computer "bug" was declared in In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a primitive computer). On the 9th of September, 1947, when the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay #70, in Panel F. The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log. (See the picture above.) The entry reads: "First actual case of bug being found." The word went out that they had "debugged" the machine and the term "debugging a computer program" was born.
Although Grace Hopper was always careful to admit that she was not there when it actually happened, it was one of her favorite stories. Grace Hopper also reported that the term "bug" was used to describe problems in radar electronics during WWII.

DIAGRAM OF FIRST NOTED COMPUTER BUG LOCATED ABOVE.

REFERENCES: http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm

Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug

Change in Trends due to Technology

Change in Trends due to Technology

* The first computers were almost the size of a house.. .now they are as small as a notepad!
* The wrist watch is now replaced by a Cell Phone or Computer
* The US Postal Mail is almost replaced completely by Email. (Who sends letters anymore?)
* Instead of waiting for the newspaper to be delivered once a week (how slow~)... we can now
check the news in real time via the internet and RSS Feeds.
* The Public Library and Card Catalog were practically replaced by Google, Yahoo, and other
Search Engines.
* Cash Registers and Tenders in our shopping centers have been replaced by electronic express
lanes where we can check out all by ourselves.
* We can order products directly from the comfort of our own home and have them delivered
directly to our door without ever having to go to a store, stand in line, or touch germy money!
* The telephone system is slowly being replaced by online telephones such as Vonage, or
Magicjack. Yahoo Messenger can allow you to communicate visually and audibly with family
in other states for free.
* You can now watch cable tv episodes if you miss them by going to www.hulu.com.
* We can rent DVD's directly from www.netflix.com and stream them over the internet within
minutes of ordering the movie!
* Instead of buying an entire music cd from a store like Walmart or BestBuy for $20.. you can
now buy an individual song directly from ITunes on the internet for $1 each!
* We can even order pet medicine such as Frontline and Rabies Shots online at vendors like
www.petsmart.com.
* Our radios, music players and cameras and alarm clocks are now all included in our cellphones
or "Smartphones".
* Robots are taking peoples jobs in factorys and on assembly lines.
* Our body parts can even be recreated by electronic parts now~!

Technology has advanced so much in the past 20 years. I am sure that I only covered a small portion of how technology has changed our lives. Can you imagine what it will be like in the next 20 years?

TELL US:
If you think of more ways that electronics have changed our lives please tell us at www.cgrafiks.com.

Gmail went down ... Everyone Panic!

I guess that Gmail went down sometime the other day, and it caused the world to go into panic. It was down for 100 minutes according to many sites. Reference the OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG for more information. According to google this is what happened in summary:

Google took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. They say that they do this all the time, and Gmail's web interface runs in many
locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline. However, in this case they had slightly underestimated the load placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the
appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the
request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system
"stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the
remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded,
and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a
result, people couldn't access Gmail via the web interface because their
requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail
processing continued to work normally because these requests don't use the same
routers.The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds
(we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem
was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional
request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google's
architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail
web interface came back online.What's next: We've turned our full attention to
helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again. Some of the actions are
straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router
capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are
more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don't have
sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there's a problem in one datacenter, it
shouldn't affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully
(e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should
just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load).
We'll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail
reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users,
and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity