Posts by Dave Ashe

How to avoid getting hoodwinked by a DevOps hustler

Devops.

What?

O Rly? O'Reilly exits direct book sales

Re: Impeccable, best of breed

Its a pity microsoft can't keep up with the ecmascript specification!

Is this possibly the worst broadband in the world?

This could be the answer..

3G dongle from Three, 20 Meg - faster and more reliable than BT by a mile.

Which qualifications are worthwhile?

Qualifications? Maybe. Experience = Must-have

Ok, sometimes qualifications are important in certain areas and *can* help as always get you a job, i'm not dismissing them but...

What employers really are looking for is experience, which trumps qualifications which go out of date very quickly anyway in IT most of the time, and certain skills cannot be taught quickly or easliy like problem-solving.. For example .. why the application server crashes randomly and how to create a quick workaround so it doesn't any more so the customers can get on with using the system..

There is a lot to learn and it will take years and years to learn it, either you pay loads of money to do this or learn it yourself (which is the number 1 skill you must have in IT, be able to teach yourself new skills)

My advice is to try and get your foot in the door in a company, and have something to show; a project to show your skills, whether done on a course or on your own.

Belgian finds missus was born a MAN after 19 YEARS of marriage

This is sad

She is a woman, physically just like a woman because of hormones and surgery, he doesn't need to be an idiot about it and throw all the toys out of his pram..

I would quite happily have a transsexual partner, whats the big deal? Most of the ones i've met are more feminine than most women and actually want to be women.

And the fact that he said if he was fit enough he would have physically hurt her is one step too far (translated on the dutch news website at the end of the story).

Ssssh. Apple quietly mashes monster MacBook Pro

This is BS

The 15" is nothing more than a macbook air with a higher resolution screen. No way to upgrade the ram or anything as its all soldered onto the mainboard.

Now the 17" is dead, i'll be picking up the highest spec I can hopefully at bargain prices.

Seriously, the resolution on the 17" is way past HD quality and its difficult to discern any pixels at all even when looking very closely. There would be no way any 17" user would upgrade to retina because it would be entirely pointless!

'Fileless' malware installs into RAM

How to protect yourself

Disable Java in Firefox using Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar.

'Kill yourself now' - Torvalds throws openSUSE security tantrum

OpenSUSE?

What a bag of spanners, who uses OpenSUSE any more?

Ubuntu or CentOS FTW!

Yahoo! scared! of! dot! brand! squatters!

Re: Yahoo's biggest problem....

Sorry, Ya-who?

Price-comparison site: OCZ reviews 'questionable'

OCZ higher than average failure rate

The reason they have to post their own "reviews" could be something to do with the 1000's of complaints that their SSD's brick after only a few months of usage.

I had the same experience, OCZ Vertex II dead after only 6 months of usage. Avoid!

Whats the point in RMA'ing this disk now? It will crash in another few months..

Luckily I had a backup and only lost a few photos.

Yahoo! threatens! Facebook! with! patent! spanking!

A sad day for innovation

When companies have to litigate instead of innovate its a sad day for the tech industry.

Can't they do something more constructive, like make a more tightly integrated spam-free environment that people would want to use?

Node.js Native breakthrough: cloudy C++ on steroids

Its fine for client-side scripting but server-side? Give me a break, its already been tried - it was called server-side javascript aeons ago..

Ohh, you're so clever..

No, actually you are completely wrong, its running a state of the art AJAX-intensive customer management system with datagrids, trees etc. on high-end servers.

This is just the sort of idiotic comment i've come to expect from lame internet trolls like yourself.

Just for the record, you were probably not even working on the internet pre-2000, and were still in your nappies.

99% of the situations don't require node.js - I had a customer where Cisco ACE was not performing well (it was kicking users off for no apparent reason)

I coded a loadbalancer using php, apache and mysql and it is working very well now for over a year now.

Why would I want to even go there, re-learning a new framework, new tools, new webservers (node.js can't work on its own, it needs some other kludge of servers for production) it just doesn't make any sense to me.

A correctly configured installation of apache, mysql and php works well enough for anything you can throw at it - you can even have in-memory variables shared between processes using apc or memcached if you really need high performance - and for the most part mysql is fast enough since immediate queries are cached in-memory as long as you have configured it correctly.

I've had enough problems with the java jvm in production environments never mind using javascript!

The Sandy Bridge Hackintosh

Is it worth the time spent?

Thats the question you have to ask yourself, you'll be spending a looong time to get it working.

I opted to buy the apple hardware second hand / refurbished, it was a lot easier.

Antennagate Redux: Consumer Reports condemns Verizon iPhone 4

The antenna is fine

I don't know what all the fuss is about, the only place I don't get reception on the iphone 4 is in the basement in M&S - just like all the other phones i previously had.

Every smartphone has the same 'death-grip' functionality.

Who are consumer reports anyway? I've never heard of them before this...

Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language

Have you seen any F# code?

Looks like a cross between COBOL and BASIC.

(from wikipedia):

* Async workflows sample (parallel CPU and I/O tasks) *)

(* A very naive prime number detector *)

let isPrime (n:int) =

let bound = int (System.Math.Sqrt(float n))

seq {2 .. bound} |> Seq.exists (fun x -> n % x = 0) |> not

(* We are using async workflows *)

let primeAsync n =

async { return (n, isPrime n) }

(* Return primes between m and n using multiple threads *)

let primes m n =

seq {m .. n}

|> Seq.map primeAsync

|> Async.Parallel

|> Async.RunSynchronously

|> Array.filter snd

|> Array.map fst

(* Run a test *)

primes 1000000 1002000

|> Array.iter (printfn "%d")

Steve Jobs spotted not hating Eric Schmidt

Merger

Wouldn't be surprised

Google's vanity OS is Microsoft's dream

I will go out and buy 10 google machines

Just to prove you wrong :-)

Running code over the network is the future, google is going in the correct direction

Microsoft arms half-wit developers with PHP handgun

Is this article some kind of sarcasm?

Pure genius, i didn't get it at first, but now he's basically..er, i'll leave you to figure it out :-)

Zend plugs PHP into Amazon cloud

Just what i was looking for

Thanks for posting this, great news!

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

They portrayed themselves as the upholders of freedom

What about the freedom to create music and sell it to make a living?

Or the freedom to create an amazing film and sell it for the art that it is?

When everybody is copying everything it doesnt work.

If you dont recieve recompense for your work it destroys your ability and even in some cases motivation to create something great! You cant work for nothing.

I see the lull in quality of art, music, movies etc. all attributed to in-your-face mass distribution of anything and everything for free, we have become the "i want it ALL for free" culture, you only get what you pay for!!!

People have to make a living from their art, whether its software, entertainment, information products or anything else!

Microsoft conjures imaginary 'Apple Tax'

Hello?

Apple macs ARE PC's, albeit more expensive ones - that is all.

You cant compare them apples for apples :-)

You can run linux on both, windows on both, osx on both (as per the reg article posted a few months back) so whats the problem?

Buy what you want! Whats the problem?

Microsoft says they tax their hardware, well, somebody has to do some research and development.. I'm saying this as a pc user..

Google money machine defies common sense

Pay Per Click

Funny, i was just thinking about this, ever increasing amounts of free email space, search queries and other free online apps like google docs, google's only real business model is advertising, without it, there would be no business at all.

Adblockers are the biggest problem for google, for that reason online advertising is not going to be a viable market for google, it will have to come up with a better way of making money.

Will the government have to bail out Google as well? Wait and see, i think long-term this may be the case, we're in big trouble if they can't survive this mass-cull of credit.

I think that advertisers are generally getting wise to pay-per-click as well and going more for article writing, SEO, blogging, twittering, social networking, mailing lists etc. to get traffic to their site.

Hadoop - Why is Google juicing Yahoo! search?

Open the box, Google

Google should really be open-sourced throughout, they are more of an infrastructure company, yes, someone tomorrow could copy the entire stack, load it up on a load of servers, but why should they care?

Maybe the infrastructure should be open so that anyone can run a Google server (with obvious rules about data tampering) thus not taking away from the brand, but having your own little Google on your adsl modem where you can set how much bandwidth it can use, they can still keep their services, maybe anyone can open their own search engine and share the revenue from advertising with their adwords system, just some ideas - maybe Google is listening :-)

Zend offers PHP cure for Java bloat

Java the hut - its COBOL for the 21st centuary

Java is pretty insane to write, requires code generation tools even when working with 'lightweight' frameworks like spring, hibernate etc. which i have had the 'pleasure' to work with in the past.

Java is a good language for low-level coding like, say, coding an emulator but not for web apps, its like trying to fit a square-shaped peg into a circular hole.

PHP is designed from the ground-up to build web apps, its not simply just a perl-like language with asp-style tags - theres a lot more under the hood if you look at the features of v5 it has a lot more oo features than java under the hood that don't require the longest line of code in history to use reflection, its just $object->$var

To open a file its file_get_contents($filename) - in Java you need 3 different types of streams incased in each other just to open the file never mind get its contents.

Java is bloatware, i'm sorry to say it but its the COBOL of the 21st centuary, c-programming is more pleasurable, even c++ is easier to do something simple like open files.

While the rest of the world has already moved to PHP, the dying underdogs of the forgotten world are still using the most awkward web-application language ever.

Ubuntu promises DIY Amazon cloud

Thumbs up

Best news i've heard all year about cloud computing, i will be installing a machine with this as soon as it comes out.

BT threatens to pull plug on better broadband

Don't we already have a fibre network?

Isn't it called virgin media? Shouldn't that monopoly be de-regulated, and allow other players to use the infrastructure?

Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility

First we had the jesus phone..

Now the jesus browser! Now with web 2.0!!!

I've tried it and it is more like a browser you would use in a kiosk with only an address bar and tabs along the top (NO menus) plus a really useful (NOT!!) browser history as your default page.

It uses less memory than firefox, is a bit more stable, but... it cant run firefox plugins and the rendering engine IS NOT 100% accurate, more like opera at rendering pages, getting the odd bit here and there wrong.

I already tried safari for the pc, now this is a bit better but why the default Microsoft look'n'feel?

there is a GoogleUpdater.exe Process running silently in the background all the time.. I don't trust google being in my browser, they're already all over the web..

Hadron boffins: Our meddling will not destroy universe

What i don't get is...

.. how is re-creating the conditions of the 'big bang' exactly SAFE?

Here's the multi-core man coding robots, 3-D worlds and Wall Street

Interessant

Thanks, that was very interesting.

Windows Vista has been battered, says Wall Street fan

I remember when XP came out

Loads of people moaned about it being slow, needing much more memory and faster hardware to run.

Fast forward to today.

Vista is way ahead of its time, so much so that older hardware isn't good enough for it.

Vista isn't perfect but its slightly better in a couple of areas lacking in XP, security and look & feel, but remember XP? It was slightly better at the time but at least they didn't put a bloody tellitubbies look and feel on it this time, it looks well decent, and gives osx a run for its money.

All the problems they are having will be fixed sooner or later, i'm going to get a new laptop and try it out i've heard mixed feelings about it but i know a couple of people who've had no problems and some that have had driver issues but thats same same compared to when XP came out.

We'll all have to upgrade sooner or later, its 2008 and we're still running an antique UI back from the days of windows 95 (for those that turned off tellytubby land)

I'm going to try it first for myself then i'll blast it only if i've had problems with it not before.

(btw I have a lot of linux server boxes and swear by it but they still don't cut the mustard in terms of compatibility with windows desktop apps, and i'm used to windows.. like a lot of server admins)

Dissolving the plastic bag problem

Its the problem of where the plastic bags end up

In the ocean, marine life get caught up in it - not a pretty sight. There is a soup of plastic from hawaii to japan (see http://www.alternet.org/water/76056/)

Disolving it with bacteria is a better idea than sticking it at the bottom of a landfill site, as the composted plastic bags can be used to grow trees, food, etc. by using special types of mushrooms to convert the resultant mess into a habitable breeding/growing ground! (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY)

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

I've barely used my connection and its s**tslow

I have an XL connection, and its slow slow slow slow slow..

I've barely used it - streamed one video and its choppy, websites are slow, super duper throw it in the bin broadband...

The economy: A big Arab did it and ran away, claims PM

Send him back to Scotland?

Don't send him back up here, things have been going well since SNP got in, please i'm begging you don't send him here, send him anywhere but here.

Freesat launches in UK

Gufsat..

..says it all really.

I got rid of my TV a long time ago - it has went downhill since the last time i visited someone who still has one. There is far more interesting things to watch on the internet.

Spread your database connections with PHP PDO

Aha, but..

I agree that PDO is a waste of time, but who in their right mind uses php and mysql with windows? linux is where its at, no?

Anyway, why abstract out all the databases - why not just pick one like mysql and stick to it? Then you can get the most from that database platform.

Top security firm: Phorm is adware

Proxy

A simple web-proxy like glype will sort phorm out, it encrypts the url so they can't track what you're browsing. So opens another revenue stream for proxy websites :-)

SCO details bleak future

Can i now sing the ha ha song?

Ha ha hah, ha ha ha ha, ha-ha ha ha ha!!

ha ha hah, ha ha ha ha, HA HA HA HA HO!

Serves you right for trying to kill linux.

ICANN to throttle domain tasters

Used to be a whole YEAR!

I remember when you had a whole YEAR to pay for your domain name (if it wasn't a year, it was close to that anyway)

I used to register a name, have fun with it for a year, decide whether to keep it or not, those were the days!!

IPFI chief says it's time to hose down the networks

Another reason why record sales are falling..

There is a new revolution going on in music, I don't know if any of the bigwigs in the record industry have noticed that a lot of people are writing their own music - Ok, its not all great but at least 50% is better than the crap coming from the major record labels.

They do it because they can, and its fun, and most release it for free. There is plenty on MySpace, just do a search for a little-known genre such as trip-hop and you'll find 1000's of artists releasing their own music.

The same is true of other user-generated entertainment, look at youtube and other video sites, loads of great content there.

When you're dog is dying, you've got to put it to sleep, don't let it suffer any more..

The same is true of the record labels.