* Posts by Bill M

219 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Mar 2013

Page:

The only way is ethics: UK.gov emphasises moral compass amid deluge of data plans

Bill M

Blind leading the deaf

More like the blind leading the deaf.

BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'

Bill M

Re: Best BOFH in recorded history

Wow!!!

Are you saying there is a better BOFH ?

If so then please post the url.

Bill M

Best BOFH in recorded history

That is the best BOFH in recorded history

We've found it! A cloud-and-AI angle on the royal wedding

Bill M

Bet it won't ID me correctly

But there again I am not famous and ain't been invited.

Your software hates you and your devices think you're stupid

Bill M

Alastair: Spot on this time

Alastair, Whilst your last article was drivel, this one is spot on. Congratulations!!! Everyone has bad a hair day, so don't worry about your last article. Keep up the good work.

TSB's middleware nightmare: Execs grilled on Total Sh*tshow at Bank

Bill M

Sad

This whole TSB affair makes me very sad.

Newsworthy Brit bank TSB is looking for a head of infrastructure

Bill M

Sounds like the perfect job

Would be hard to do worse than the previous person plus a genuine scapegoat to blame if one actually does manage to do worse..

Can't log into your TSB account? Well, it's your own fault for trying

Bill M

Procrastination

There was no procrastination in my reading the article as soon as I saw it. Shame it was drivel.

TSB outage, day 5: What do you mean you can't log in? Our systems are up and running. Up and running, we say!

Bill M

Re: loading failed for script

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.

Bill M

Re: BeanCreationNotAllowedException

The code is in the Spring Cloud GitHub repo

Capita reports pre-tax LOSS of £515m for 2017

Bill M

Re: there's good news and bad news

NHS payroll - If that stops then people will die.

Bill M

Re: Doubt it'll happen

"Salesman working for Crapita" would be great on your CV. Demonstrates you have no moral compass whatsoever and plenty of companies want sales people with no morals.

Recycling tech biz bosses get years for VAT fraud, money laundering

Bill M

Re: banned from holding a directorship

Some company directors should be sent to prison when they rip people off, but somehow they never are.

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

Bill M

Spotify & JBL's

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.

The Agile and the Continuous: Database Drift ... Neat film title but something to avoid

Bill M

Crossing the fence

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.

VMs: Imperfect answers to imperfect problems, but they're all we have

Bill M

Tebibyte

I have just learnt a new word - Tebibyte

Never ever seen it actually used in the wild though.

My Tibetan digital detox lasted one morning, how about yours?

Bill M

Wandering around Asia

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.

EUROCONTROL outage causes flight delays across Europe

Bill M

5 Hours to switch over to Disaster Recovery System

To switch over to one's Disaster Recovery system should be < 1 hour

** < 30 minutes to make the decision

** < 30 minutes to do the switch over

Take the dashboard too literally and your brains might end up all over it

Bill M

Chart based encryption

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.

BOFH: Give me a lever long enough and a fool, I mean a fulcrum and ....

Bill M

Re: cellphone, mobile, handy

Could be worse, you could actually be a septic.

Bill M

Re: cellphone, mobile, handy

The kiwi accent is remarkably similar to the Namibian accent, especially noticeable when discussing fish and chips, which kiwis & Namimbians pronounce in a far more delightful way that the slovenly aussies.

Bill M

Re: cellphone?

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

Cambridge Analytica CEO suspended – and that's not even the worst news for them today

Bill M

Emerdata Ltd

Have a look at who are springing up as directors at Emerdata Ltd.

Bill M

Re: Let's all blame the developer

I suspected Colin was behind all this, he's a right evil piece of work. But Colin is just a pseudonym that Beezelbub uses.

Brit MPs chide UK.gov: You're acting like EU data adequacy prep is easy

Bill M

Use Facebook

They can simply store and transfer their data using Facebook. I am sure a huge global company like that would look after everything responsibly.

UK's London Gatwick Airport boasts of driverless vehicle trial

Bill M

Re: Eliminate any pedestrian humans

More like a mulching lawnmower that finely grinds and spits whatever it consumes.

Bill M

Re: Eliminate any pedestrian humans

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.

Bill M

Eliminate any pedestrian humans

Maybe eliminate any pedestrian humans walking around by replacing them with AI robots programmed to avoid the driverless vehicles ?

Facebook confirms Cambridge Analytica harvested profile data

Bill M

Brexit !!!

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

Bill M

And there was I thinking they were just greedy bastards

Hate to add to the wanky jargon – but your digital transformation is actually a bolt-on

Bill M

Re: Versions!

0.0 - Zero-day exploit!

Maplin shutdown sale prices still HIGHER than rivals

Bill M

Re: I remember Maplins from when I was a kiddie

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.

Bill M

I remember Maplins from when I was a kiddie

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.

Keep Calm and Carillion: Outsourcers seek image rebrand after UK construction firm crash

Bill M

Re: No positive comments above re outsourcers

Curious as to what you think the solution is ?

Bill M

No positive comments above re outsourcers

Maybe that is because private enterprise has only one primary objective which is to maximise profit.

Whereas public organisations' primary objective is to serve the public

Suspected drug dealer who refused to poo for 46 DAYS released... on bail

Bill M

Full of Shit

He is certainly full of shit.

UK peers: Is this what you call governance of facial recog tech? A 'few scattered papers'!

Bill M

Big Brother IS watching you

I am not a number I am a free man

EE: Data goes TITSUP* for Brit mobile customers

Bill M

Millenials are now physically grown up and full size, so not little.

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

Bill M

Land Rover MK2

My Land Rover MK2 had 2 petrol tanks one with the cap under the front passenger seat and the other with its cap outside by the rear wheel. Security for the outside one was a padlock, simple and effective.

Bosch and Daimler jump in together on driverless vehicle tech

Bill M

Automated DIY

If Bosch concentrated on perfecting automated AI DIY tools then I could spend more time in the pub at the weekend.

Facebook told to stop stalking Belgians or face fines of €250k – a day

Bill M

If it's free then you are the product

If it's free then you are the product

Should AI get to choose a topping in a two pizza team?

Bill M

AI choosing pizza

Yes, but only if it is intelligent enough to order what I want and ignore the other person.

You're decorating it wrong: Apple HomePod gives wood ring of death

Bill M

Roses are red.............

Wot's all this about roses ?

What if I told you that flash drives could do their own processing?

Bill M

Re: Well, that's one thing explained ...

Elon Musk is hoping to send people to Mars.

Q. What will that mean ?

A. More time zones for us to deal with.

Bill M

Re: I'd say CAFS

Yup Bazza, ICL had VME [Virtual Machine Environment] decades before VMware re-invented virtualisation.

Bill M

I'd say CAFS

Back in the mainframe dinosaur age ICL developed CAFS, Content Addressable File Store, which gave search capabilities at the disc storage level. In its day it was blindingly fast. I have been waiting ages for somebody to "re-discover" this amazing technology.

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

Bill M

Java McJava Face

What's wrong with calling it Java McJava Face ?

I'm going to call it that even if nobody else does.

Hyperscale oligarchs to rule the cloud as the big get bigger, and the small ... you won't care

Bill M

It is really hard to get a decent plumber, do you reckon you'd make a good plumber ?

The many-faced god of operational excellence, DevOps and now 'site reliability engineering'

Bill M

I think DevOps & Agile are good

I hope my viewpoint does not light the blue touch paper

DevOps: Bloody hell, we've got to think about security too! Sigh. Who wants coffee?

Bill M

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.

Page: