When the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, gets scammed online.
Well, it’s more ironic than anything in that Alanis Morrissette song.
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
The definition of irony?
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009PowerBook explodes in London office
Thursday, February 26th, 2009That bastion of balanced and fair reporting, the Inquirer has this tale of woe from a mac user.
PowerBook explodes in London office
Yeah, because mac’s just work without any effort, right?
When work and hobbies collide
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008My job took me to the RSA Conference in London this year where the theme of the conference was the life and work of Alan Turing. This painfully shy genius helped turn the tide of the Second World War from a cold hut at the now famous site of Bletchley Park.
As part of the theme, Bletchley provided an Enigma machine as well as a number of other variations, some of where were in use as late as the 1970s.
The collision, of course, is that the Enigma messages were sent via morse code. Thinking about being able to send and received encrypted messages – just random strings of letters – and the whole process of using the machine to code and decode them, gives a whole new level of respect for the difficulties in communication just 60 years ago.
Linux update, KDE4.0 comments
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008I’ve written a few articles about the move of my home PC to a Linux based configuration last year. I’m pretty pleased with the results, and I’ve been able to use that configuration for virtually all of the “work” I’ve done on the PC since then. I still don’t have some things working as well as I’d like – ripping DVDs and conerting them for the Creative Zen is something of a pain.
I still run a few applications under Windows – most notably Tax Calc which I use for (hopefully) about two hours a year to submit my tax return. Let’s see if I can beat that this year!
Looking back it was the beginning of May last year that I did the switch, so this is about 8 months on. In that time I’ve added a second monitor (giving me 2, 22″ widescreen monitors that stretch halfway across my desk). I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 with a certain amount of grief over VMware device drivers. I’ve even installed Ubuntu as the primary OS on my main work PC, though it’s main job is running SSH sessions and VMware hosts, so that’s not so remarkable. The lapdog still runs Windows. Because Corporate IT Says It Will.
The one disappointment so far is that I tried KDE4.0 and decided it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. It’s very pretty, it’s worth a look, and as long as you don’t uninstall the existing KDE3 setup, you can switch back by logging out and changing your session type back. Instructions here – worked perfectly for me.
Getting fired is too good for some people
Friday, June 1st, 2007This take of woe makes me glad that I work someplace where managers have at least some clue.
Email from guy working the weekend:
“I came in today (Monday) to finish up a project I was working on before our big meeting with a potential client tomorrow, and I noticed that there were three or four large air conditioners running the entire time I was here. Since it’s a three day weekend, no one is around, why do we need to have the A/C running 24/7? With all the power that all those big computers in that room use, I doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same time. And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C for the building in that room? I got a keycard from $facilitiesmanager’s desk and shut off the A/C units. I’m sure you guys can deal with it being warm for an hour or two when you come in tomorrow morning. In the future, let’s try to be a little more conscientious of our energy usage. Thanks.
RESULT:
Fatalities: Exchange Server, Domain Controllers, a few Sun boxes that I’m not sure of the usage.
Near-Fatalities: Phone Switch, Apps Servers.
Temperature of server room 7AM Tuesday Morning: 90 Degrees Fahrenheit.
Status of Employee who sent the above e-mail: Terminated.”
Knowing that people who do things this stupid get fired for it: Priceless.
The followup story tells of the sender of the e-mail hiring a lawyer to sue for unfair dismissal. And realizing he’s not got a snowball’s.
Feisty Fawn and Creative Zen
Thursday, May 24th, 2007These days of imaginative product naming lead to the chance to write some odd headlines for the blog.
When I moved my home PC to running Linux, one of the things I didn’t think too hard about was the ability to transfer MP3s and Videos to my Creative Zen media player. I googled, and found lots of complicated instructions about building layered libraries to be able to run gnomad2. Well, I started downloading bits, and realised that, as of Feisty, gnomad2 is a standard software package that can just be installed via Synaptic. Download, install, start. Sync data. Job done!
I’ve actually got almost everything running. I still haven’t tried to convert video for the Zen, and I still haven’t fixed the Pocket PC sync – but, to be honest, Calendar sync is probably a bigger concern than the PPC itself. I can sync that at work.
Death is OK at work but nudity isn’t?
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007This post by Pharyngula sks ‘would anyone regard that ghastly video in the Rivers of blood post to be “not safe for work”? Probably not. We get all hypersensitive about a little healthy exposed flesh, but animals getting their throats cut?’
I used to be bemused by this until I realised that America holds some kind of prudish correctness as the public standard of good behaviour, despite whatever real desires we might actually hold.
I work in IT Security. One of my roles is helping to enforce the policy on what people can, and can’t, surf from their desks. I get a steady stream of queries asking why some site or another is banned. Much of the policy is dictated direct from Massachusetts, where some pretty draconian anti-harrasment legislation means that the company can get sued for allowing a threatening workplace if someone is seen with nude images on their PC. So, we don’t allow a lot of stuff, and the reasons are often non-obvious.
But it all comes down to the same thing in the end: we’re enforcing a policy that originated with senior management who want us to keep them out of jail. Or, in other words, some hastily written, ill-thought-out legislative knee-jerk reaction to something that legislators shouldn’t care about in the first place. But the more laws, the more lawyers. And I guess the lawyers think this is a good thing.
How Doctors Decide
Sunday, March 11th, 2007This article (via kottke.org) about doctors’ decision making is fascinating. I’ve long been interested in how doctors are trained to diagnose illnesses. It seems that much of this ability applies directly to working in IT. We rely far too much on intuition and guesswork, and I have to say that most people in the industry aren’t actually very good at it.
If doctors did diagnosis like most IT so-called professionals, you’d go to the doctor with chest pains, have a quadruple bypass since we just as well fix them all while we’re there, and then recover to find out the pain is still happening from indigestion.
The virtual world???
Friday, March 9th, 2007As this post from Boing Boing shows, the so-called virtual world isn’t really all that virtual. There’s miles of cables and billions of dollars of exotic hardware stringing it all together behind the scenes. Play with the traceroute command from your PC sometime to see the join the dots that has to happen for every bit of data you bring back from a web site. Try typing “tracert www.yahoo.com” in a command prompt window, without the quotes, and hit return.
A Virus from your Sat Nav?
Monday, January 29th, 2007It’s not often I get the chance to write about computers and cars in the same article, but this is just such an opportunity. News has broken this week that Tom Tom has managed to ship a bunch of GO 910 units with a virus on board.
The virus doesn’t affect the Tom Tom’s operation – it won’t suddenly send you off the end of a pier. At least, no more than usual. But when you hook it up to your PC to download maps or perform a backup, that’s when the trouble will start – unless your anti-virus software is up to date and functional.
Compared with the trouble and inconvenience of re-installing a PC, anti-virus software makes a good investment. Check out some of the lesser known solutions like AVG, Panda, or the new kid on the block, Nod32 as well as the big guys with big advertising budgets who don’t get mentioned here. They all work, and will all provide about the same level of protection if kept up to date.