Blind leading the deaf
More like the blind leading the deaf.
219 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Mar 2013
It's secure https won't last for long
(index):1 The SSL certificate used to load resources from https://www.tsb.co.uk will be distrusted in M70. Once distrusted, users will be prevented from loading these resources. See https://g.co/chrome/symantecpkicerts for more information.
I have used Spotify for years and love it, especially that I can have it running on my computer hooked up to my amp's with speakers everywhere including some meaty JBL's in the garden and control it from my phone. Was having a barbie one evening last summer and whacked on Dark Side of the Moon, which my neighbours heard, liked and asked me to turn it up, which I did from my phone. JBL certainly stands for Just Bloody Loud.
Over the decades I have crossed the fence a few times from Dev to Sys Admin to Jack of all Trades to DBA and finally back to Dev.
This had been a curious journey but left me with an understanding of most sides of the fences. But the bottom line is that many things are 24*7 mission critical and I have been on a fair few panic conference calls when things have gone tits up. I remember one when I was DBA'ing with too many people on it, but with a Dev I was homing in on the cause of the issue but the Global IT Director kept butting in and wittering on, so I told him to either shut up or f*** off. He did shut down up, but telling your Global IT Director to f*** off can be a high risk strategy with regard to one's ongoing employment. We diagnosed the issue and I created the missing indexes, albeit on the fly with zero change control but sometimes a DBA it is required to do such things when the company is losing wedges of money every minute. The next day the Global IT Director sent me an email giving a cash bonus, a pay rise and invite to lunch. The only advice he gave me was to use the word please to prefix any request for him to f*** off.
The moral of the story is that Dev's & DBA's need to be able communicate and get on well with each other, because it is inevitable that every now and then the proverbial will hit the fan and the solution will need the skills of both.
I spent a year wandering around Asia just before the web became mainstream and certainly before the iPhone appeared. I kept in touch with back home by mail, yup mail that used pen, paper and envelopes. I used the Amex post restante service which was great, but needed pre planning to advise people which Amex office to use in advance.
Probably the best thing that happened to me was ironically when my camera, which used film that needed processing and printing, self destructed. From then on I was free to enjoy things with my human eyes and not through the lens of a camera.
I remember reading an article in the Bangkok Post about the web and thinking wow!! this is going to change the way humanity interacts with each other and the world, and it certainly has.
Nostalgia is nice, but I can no longer imagine the world without the web which I think it is great, but so is clean water and food - the scarcity of which was why I spent more time on the khazi that one would hope for. An iPhone would certainly have helped me pass away the time spent on the shitty, shit holes that often are the only khazis available in that neck of the woods.
But it can depend on what one wishes to achieve and that is where chart based encryption and its variants come into play.
If one is producing a company annual report and there is some data that is unflattering that one needs to report on then a 3D pie chart with 100+ segments is ideal. It visualises the data but it is nigh on impossible for a human to mentally extract much insight from it.
Bar charts with axis not starting at zero are great for biasing human insight.
And the classic for obfuscation is simply loads of high res colourful, but irrelevant images. The human eye is naturally drawn to the pretty pics as opposed to the unflattering data.
I recently used the phrase corporate standards mob in an email to describe the group of people at my place who insist on using a font not default an any operating system.
Soon after we got proposal for an iPhone app to manage our corporate standards. They proposed doing it in a font non standard to iOS with an additional proposal to manually install this non standard font on our 5,000+ iPhones around the world
Would be even more efficient if they eliminated those pesky human passengers and replaced them with robot passengers. They would not need hand luggage and could remove their legs for storage in the overhead lockers allowing a greater passenger packing density.
I made a guitar fuzz box by deliberately overloading a 741 integrated circuit operational amplifier to create distortion. This was the first silicon chip I ever used and I got it from Maplins. IC 741 op amps are still manufactured and used to this day.
When I was a kiddie I used to buy components from Maplins like transistors, resistors & capacitors and make things like radios and electric guitar effect pedals.
I loved browsing through their catalogue.
I am no expert on them but would think that early on most of their business was mail order which could have been easily migrated to internet sales. It is really sad they did not successfully make that transition and ended up selling overpriced tat in shops.
Good security is good and should always be implemented from day 0.
But silly badly implemented security is bad.
A while back I was setting up a production 2 node data engine cluster and somebody had decided to put a firewall between the nodes with no ports open. Obviously nothing worked. But they had direct non fire walled connections from both nodes to the Dev box so I had to route all the inter node traffic via the dev box until the firewall between the cluster nodes was removed.