Punometer
El Reg ought to have a "Most Punned Comments Section of the Week"
Thanks for the great Monday morning groans eveyone!
Posts by DJV
2670 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
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High on bath salts, alleged Norse god attempts tree love
Dwarf planet Ceres has TEN bright spots, astroboffins say
Bone-tastic boffins' breakthrough BRINGS BACK BRONTOSAURUS
Project Spartan: We get our claws on Microsoft's browser for Windows 10
'If people can encrypt their cell phones, what's stopping them encrypting their PCs?'
Got a killer Microsoft or Oracle cloud deal? Start sweating
Dear departed Internet Explorer, how I will miss you ... NOT
Saturday 21st March 2015 12:02 GMT 
Re: IE 4. Oh gods, no...
Where I worked we had one guy brick his desktop twice after installing IE4. We banned it throughout the organisation after that. I think we relented after Netscape got completely bloated and IE had reached version 4.5 and was found to be slightly less of a PC-bricking mess.
RIP Sir Terry Pratchett: Discworld author finally gets to meet DEATH
UK call centre linked to ‘millions’ of nuisance robo-calls raided by ICO
Life, the interview and everything: A chat with Douglas Adams
Snowden 'ready to return to US', claims lawyer
Telly behemoths: Does size matter?
Sunday 1st March 2015 15:04 GMT 
TV Size
Back in the early 1970s I worked for Rediffusion as an apprentice TV engineer and, due to my lowly status, was often used for delivering the rental TVs to new customers. One day we had to deliver a hulking great (well, it was the 70s) 26" Ferguson colour TV to a couple who were renting and living in a single tiny room in someone else's house. There was only space for a "bed" (a double mattress on the floor) and a small chest of drawers. The TV went on the latter. A 12" portable would have been more appropriate.
RIP Leonard Nimoy: He lived long and prospered
Reckon YOU can write better headlines than us? Great – apply within
El Reg chefs whip up Post-Pub Noshographic
Fight back against illegal GCHQ spying with PAPERWORK!
In praise of China’s CROONING censors: Company songs NOW!
BEHOLD the magnificent lunar backside in our MOON VIDEO
This optical disc will keep your gumble safe for 2,000 YEARS
Monday 9th February 2015 14:52 GMT
Verbatim? Shudder...
Had some 5.25" floppies from them when I had a CBM Pet + 2031 disk drive back in the early 80s. They all failed after not very long. In the late 90s, a place I worked for had some Verbatim 3.5" disks. They were well dodgy as well. So, unless their attention to quality has vastly improved recently, I wouldn't place any bets on their 100Gb stuff lasting more than 10 years at best.
YMMV
Breaking news: BBC FINALLY spots millions of mugshots on cop database
Lost SPACECRAFT believed FOUND ON COMET
Switch it off and on again: How peers failed to sneak Snoopers' Charter into terror bill
Tuesday 27th January 2015 14:26 GMT
Re: Write to your MP
Yeah, mine too.
Except I get the impression mine's rather more devious than the "Tim, nice but dim" image. She likes to get her mug in the local papers at every opportunity while doing extremely minor "attendances" at things like openings. However, most of the local constituents don't understand that she is stabbing us in in the back when she votes in parliament (she's pro fracking and was an architect of the gagging law amongst others).
Game over? Sony FINALLY offers compensation to MEELLIONS of PSN hack victims
Alan Turing's lost notebook goes under the hammer
MARS NEEDS BROADBAND, insists Elon Musk
Monday 19th January 2015 13:37 GMT
Internet on Mars?
No problem with latency if they just send a copy of the whole thing - it's small enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
‘Whatever happened to Vladimir Putin?’ and other crap New Year prophesies
Future imperfect: A UK broadband retrospective
Saturday 17th January 2015 11:34 GMT 
BT Preregistration
Oh hell, yes, I remember that - I think I'd signed up to mine for more than a year before they even thought about upgrading the local exchange. By the time they got around to announcing that they were finally going to upgrade it (at some point possibly 6 months in the future but, hey, we're BT so we will take as long as we want), NTL (as it was then) had got their cable broadband system up and running so I went for that instead.
Kim Jong-Un shoot-em-up Glorious Leader! yanked
Thursday 15th January 2015 13:52 GMT
Re: FTFY
Indeed, I'm just a one-man, self-employed, work from home, web developer but my backup solution verges on the paranoid as I've been bitten in the past:
1) I have 2 local web/data servers - they have 4 hard disks in each of them. The main OS is on the smallest drive so that, if I need to reinstall or update the OS (Ubuntu Linux Server) from scratch I can do that on a replacement drive so that the original drive can be put back in if problems arise. The other 3 disks hold data only. The backup server can be converted into a main server quite quickly.
2) A daily backup of the OS configuration files is made automatically via a CRON script (this helps if I need to swap which one is the main server).
3) The backup server constantly replicates the main one's files using CRON scripts which run at (half) hourly intervals - the more important ones get the more frequent backups.
4) The database does an almost instant update and the "home" page on all the web browsers I use (which displays links to all the sites on the servers and their live equivalents) displays a large red message if the two databases are not currently in sync.
5) Once a day the entire database is backed up. Four times a day the database tables that contain my rather more important time recording information are backed up.
6) Every hour a script runs which backs up anything changed on all the code in the past 48 hours and zips it up into a file on a different disk within the same server - this means that if I mess up something then versions that existed earlier in the day are still available. These files are also replicated to the backup server.
7) After finishing work each day I run manually scripts which copy any changed files from the "web" working disk to another disk on the main server. A dated full (once a month) or incremental (all other times) zip file is made of the code files for the site. Some of these go back 10 years. Again, these will get copied across to the backup server as soon as it runs the associated backup script.
8) Every 2 or 3 days I upload the latest versions of these files to an externally located server as offsite backup.
Paranoid or what?!
Professor's BEAGLE lost for 10 years FOUND ON MARS
2015 will be the Year of Linux on the, no wait, of the dot-word domain EXPLOSION
Broadband isn't broadband unless it's 25Mbps, mulls FCC boss
Boffins spy I in your little eye
Doctor Who's tangerine dream and Clara's death wish in Last Christmas
Ghosts of Christmas Past: The long-ago geek gifts that made us what we are
Apple scuttles NTP flaw in OS X – with 'first ever' silent auto update
Tragedy strikes Vulture News Central but details remain scrambled
El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.
Thursday 11th December 2014 21:06 GMT 
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