* Posts by Jacqui

563 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007

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Swiss boffins jump in Lake Lugano for Cray super

Jacqui

grow algae intentionally

and use this to make biofuel!

ESA preps space junk radar

Jacqui

Where is Sam Gunn Unlimited

when he is needed....

GCHQ spooks give biz chiefs crash course in thwarting hackers

Jacqui

IT directors

would not attend a meet with this bunch as most of them are prolly failed PFYs they have fired.

If you can, do - if you can't join GCHQ :-)

Bruce Willis didn't Buy Hard: His girls can't inherit his iTunes

Jacqui

Aging wanabee soul singer...

tries to get some press - any press - so he can publicise his music!

Sad - times must be hard if he is so hard up he is doing adverts for broadband - and I liked "secret agent man".

Jacqui

Hipsters hacking on PostgreSQL

Jacqui

Re: Not quite the dog's 'nads...

At work, I built a full text/html/pdf/richtext template engine into Pg as well as some rather cute parrallel processing stuff that is very NDA - its an ideal platform especially with things like windowing functions :-)

A long time ago, we used to be an Ingres and oracle shop - Then CA killed Ingres and Oracle's move from a DB provider to a systems/service provider killed its relationship with us and our clients.

We started using PG when it was little more than "Post Ingres". In those days the code was beta, unofficial and very unstable but showed a lot of promise. Today it is the most stable relational platform I work with.

The authors comparison with mysql is technically a joke and lacks any commercial comparison.

Also he fails to mention the many very powerfull mysql to PG migration toolkits out there include my own

"best of the rest" mix and match jobbie.

And comparing Oracle or PG is no longer even possible.

The last Oracle based system we were involved with was for a SMS/MMS + micropayments vendor and the official bugfix/closure from oracle for daily system crashes on what was supported hardware/os/sofwtare was "just reboot every night". Yep, a 24x7 business critical system had such bad memory leaks it had to be rebooted every night and this was an acceptable solution. Not a workaround while they tried to find out why a "Proven" hardware+os+release was fatally unstable but the fix - closed - end of.

At least with PG, we dont have to reverse engineer the code and patch binaries! And Sun is just as bad at support as the old Oracle.

IMHO platforms like Oracle are commercially a major business risk as support (unless you are tier1) is pretty much non existent these days.

EnterpriseDB is good as a general all round supported platform but if you want to do something special then you have to weigh up the alternatives and given our niche market E-DB has not been the best fit for our client base - yet. Saying that, I only hear good things about them but this article reads like a puff piece written to plug EnterpriseDB.

Has the author recently bought shares and is trying to make a quick buck? From the article it is painfully obvious he has no idea what is it talking about either technically of commercially.

Regarding commercially issues such a sthe cost of sysdamins and the ability to certify and train them are business critical. The "Prosperity" of Pg can be seen in the salaries offered for good PG and Oracle DBAs.

In the UK is seems that PG is now as good salary wise as Oracle which says a lot about its acceptance as a commercially accepted solution.

Disney sitcom says open source is insecure

Jacqui

Re: Disney -- a small business!

No I meant those such as my employer - at the time we instigated a major bit of FLOSS software we were six employees building a telecoms reporting system that ended up being the biggest print job in europe! The interface between the reporting system and Oracle was FLOSSed and today is still going strong.

Our technical director left some time ago and still supports this FLOSS project.

Jacqui

Jacqui

freetards?

I looked for the orlowski (paid shill) byline :-)

Seriously, there are commercial advantages to FLOSSing a code base. Extensions, testing and feedback can make a project that is beyond the scope of a small business or ondividual possible.

Jacqui

Exposing China's vast underground economy

Jacqui

Re: Real name policies

Or even walter ego? :-)

Beer mats to tout tat to mobiles over wireless NFC

Jacqui
Happy

flash unit + flat coil = silence

Works on cards and passports - should work on beer mats :-)

Could be fun - tape under table and when triggered it makes the beer map go POP!.

The hi tech version of flipping a mat and catching it :-)

Jacqui

Hooper's copyright hubs - could be a big British win with BBC backing

Jacqui

simples

Remove any publishers TV or print licence if they are proved to be a "pirate". Oh noes, we cannot do that because UK businesses such as the beeb would be out of business in less than a month!

No the orphaned works act is a loophole so that the beeb can use a third party to remove metadata and then define the images as orphaned works and steal them legit. They can even charge the owner fees for use!

b-tards.

Story gone

Jacqui

Re: Part of Sammy's ad campaign apparently

So, the image says samsung memory should be though of as an serious RTA with casualties (ambulance) etc.

Q to samsung marketing execs - what sort of muppet considers a FUBAR'd pickup and ambulance to be a good image? Is samsung memory as bad as their CD drives - i.e. do they consider memory bricking itself if used by anything other than windows as a "feature" ala thier CD drives? :-)

OK, I will admit I can see some japaneese execs going for the manga characters in the foreground but IMHO they look way too "smelly homeless wierdo" to me.

Jacqui

p.s. I think I met the guy in the middle some 20 years ago[0[ - he was an IBM consultant, wore sandals (even in winter - he called it blue toe weather) and only drank real ale and was a CAMRA "founding member". Nice guy.

[0[ it may have been his dad :-)

World celebrates System Administrator Appreciation Day

Jacqui

Beer Ice cream

If there was a sysadmin at work or at a customers I woudl provide them with the above :-)

Jacqui - who is a week overdue replacing a dying rack based gateway IDS box with something the size of a power brick and has to ensure switchover is seamless.

Fear not, Linux admins: There are TOOLS to help you

Jacqui

webmin is OK

or configuring DNS zones - it takes some of the grunt work out of generating IDs etc.

But for systems such as postfix or apache configs its a real PITA.

For me its far far easier to configure down from defaults and apply simple to understand configs.

Its also OK for configuring a basic shorewall but I like to add rules by hand as its more flexible.

and you get to add comments :-)

Jacqui

Climategate cops: We'll NEVER solve email leak hack riddle

Jacqui

Sheldonitis

Why is it that scientists seem to belive they know as much about your discipline as their own and assume advice regardings security backups etc does not apply to them?

IMHO the anglia lot seem to have muppetry down to a fine art.

Boffins build eye-controlled interface out of game-console cams

Jacqui

open tech

Pity the research is not fully open. I know a few people at reading makerspace who are involved in

building tech for the disabled/blind/... who may be interested in replicating this.

With the lowering of video card GPU's its possible to do the sort of calcs via a battery powered device previously thought impossible or not cost effective.

Do you work in IT at RBS? Or at the next place to get hit ...?

Jacqui

banks and tossers

Are there any bank staff who are not complete and utter W^HBankers?

Nokia after the purge: It's so unfair

Jacqui

nokia is the new sendo

so long and thanks for all the ....

Microsoft are prolly laughing all the way to the bank. Odd how delivering fubar software is better for a sofware company than if they delivered something decent!

GiffGaff in data spaff, goodybag gaffe: ICO says its 'avin a laff

Jacqui

el reg - you are having a larf?

I have suffered outages under GG, BT, virgin and and voda. GG were the only one to fess up.

Virgin stil come up with insane excuses every time I have an outage.

I have also suffered through incorrect billing and money grabs by BT (10ukp/per minutel over three months due to "penalty charges" because I did not make enougth calls!) and nthell deciding to stick previous line owners charges onto my second bill when they could not contact them!

I had to take then to small claims to get that back and they never paid up!

Then we have voda stating (at the time) terms that there is a 50P per day data charge but charging me ~3UKP/hr when I transferred my sim to a known silent android phone on evening.

The reason I went with GG was the same android phone has a fixed cost of 10UKP per month - voda were eating over 20UKp per DAY and when I complained they hung up on me then started seding me and a WSP silly threatening letters when I wrote about the situation and the inane excuses they had given me.

GG are angels in comparison to the rest - I can only assume the author has some form of vested interest - the big players are not above paying journos backhanders and we know enough about journos less than perfect morals :-)

Kogan 'taxes' IE7 users

Jacqui

UK == IE6

There are a number of UK companies who still insist on IE6 compatability. A few months ago we did a portal demo to a certain UK telco who only had IE6 on thier corporate presentation system.

In the end they did the demo using a company laptop and the point that IE6 browser share is nominal but they still consider IE6 as the standard browser for internal systems and request internal systems are designed for it.

New UK curriculum ramps up lessons in SPAAAACE

Jacqui

teachers have been VC'd

When the VC's got hold of the AA, they set sales targets for all patrolmen. Being good at disagnosing faults at the roadside (and being able to get people home) was no longer valued instead they were expected to spend at least half thier day parked up trying to sell-sell-sell. All of the good mechs left and the AA is now the POS we have all come to despise.

Likewise, teachers (and police) are driven by "points mean prizes". Being a good teacher is no longer being able to imbue kids with an interest in a subject. It's a box ticking exercise and anyone with a modicum of a science background got out years ago when the profession died.

Today, science is being taught by people with no formal science qualifications - at one local school the science teacher has a RE qualification and another local school has an english teacher forced into teaching science.

And I live in a part of surrey heath which has good schools that people want to get into :-)

Why MongoDB? It's the developers, stupid

Jacqui

Re: Definitions

"What are "operational" and "analytical" databases?"

These are terms used by management. They think in terms of strategic and business goals and often ignore technical considerations. This is not wrong just acting on incomplete information.

The problems occur when management no longer trust technical information sources.

Mr Sulu causes DDoS panic after posting link on Facebook

Jacqui

GT on BBT

In the erotic dreams of Howard Wolowitz. FWIHH he has a wicked sense of humor.

Regarding Howard himself

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2144511/Big-Bang-Theory-star-Simon-Helberg-wife-Jocelyn-Towne-welcome-baby-girl-called-Adeline.html

How to get a job in Australia

Jacqui

Some aussies really hate the brits!

Some friends moved to .au - he was "head hunted" (he is a specialist painter and decorator) while over on hols with his family. While at a BBQ (where else) a friend of the family suggested he contact his boss who was lokking for someone with his skills. The boss was desperate and pretty much hired him on the spot! He went to london spoke to the commision and they confirmed all his worries were unfounded - he was a "very desirable".

The company offered him a senior post on the assumption he would train up new staff etc.

So the family sold up and moved to the land of the barbie!

Then all hell broke loose. When he arrived at the office on Monday he was told that because his qualifications were no longer recognised by .gov.au, He had to start work as an apprentice. No pay for the first year etc. He was quite rightly fuming and checked with .gov.au and they confirmed it even though he had letters stating his qualifications and experience were not only acceptable but "highly desired".

He relations until they could get funds back from the uK for a flight home.

Thankfully they had not transferred thier dosh from selling the Uk house to the land of the crims...

And Micheal and Mary were fastidious about double (and triple) checking everything - the aussies can and do say/write one thing before you leave and then change thier mind after you arrive!

Council builds £2.8m shared database of vulnerable kids

Jacqui

This guy sadmits that staff

allow people access to the data via "shoulder surfing"?

The IT manager admits they currently left staff from agencies read data "over someones shoulder"?

Would someone like to explain to me how he and the other rmanagement consider this valid, moral or legal, Ignoring the very basic fact that there would be no possible audit trail?

IMHO sack him, the staff who continue to let unauthorised people look at vunerable kids data and sack the management who allow them to do this - no pay and NO PENSION!

Getting rid of anyone who treats vunerable kids data like this should save the council some dosh!

Strong ARM: The Acorn Archimedes is 25

Jacqui

I remember playing

moon lander of a core memory PDP an sunderland poly (now uni).

And programming using h-cards and making backups of coursework on paper tape and 8in floppies.

And my first micro was 6502 - a couple of us used to hack the C= pets to hell and back :-)

Jacqui

Re: Amazing performance

"Sadly for Acorn, the power was matched by absurd prices which instantly meant it stood no chance supplanting either the Amiga or ST. It cost over 2x the price of the integrated versions of each of these which meant nobody could afford it. "

IIRC the schools had a "Must provide kit at half RRP" requirement for suppliers so RRP for kit targetted primarily at the edu sector was price doubled so they did not lose out on the majority of sales.

Of course, this just meant that parents ended up paying double pricing for "edu" targetted kit or ude kit suppliers went bust.

Vauxhall Ampera hybrid e-car

Jacqui

30+MPG

Currently have a beaten up LDv400 van - is less than 70bph and can do 70MPH (just).

Why such as large engine for what is supposed to be an e-car?

Crazy Texans dunk servers in DEEP FRYERS

Jacqui

Re: Pah!

Cray found the same problems that these folks must have hit - laminar flow.beomes an issues at high heat transfer rates - the fluid does not move near the surface and at limit can end up "boiling". WIth cray the fix was "obvious" - instead of immersion use fuel injectors and use droplets of a specified size and use evaporation.

Of course there was more to it than simply pointing injectors at the chips - and the cooling fliud would have to have certain characteristics that the quoted oils do not have.

Pipex 'silence' condemned punters' emails to spam blackhole

Jacqui

removals fees?

I would not be shocked to hear that the large ISP's are paying a removals or admin fee. If you run a well known RBL, admin fees are a good revenue earner - until people drop your BL.

SORBS "admin fees/charitable donations" or the spamhaus fee fiasco anyone?

Titsup WHMCS calls the Feds after credit-card megaleak

Jacqui

So they are hosting on a PP IP range?

Domain name: websitewelcome.com

Administrative Contact:

Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.

Whois Agent (ntlfqyxhc@whoisprivacyprotect.com)

+1.4252740657

Fax: +1.4259744730

PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St - F1

C/O websitewelcome.com

Bellevue, WA 98007

US

I thought only scammers and hackers used PP?

UK mobile broadband carriers compared

Jacqui

O2 dongle

Bought an O2 dongle from tesco driect for ~15UKP.

When I reg'd I got an extra 1GB of data so dongle+2B for three months for 15UKP.

Then when I looked to add data it was more than 15UKP for a 2GB monthly update.

Way way cheaper to just buy another dongle even ifthey stopped the extra 1GB on reg offer.

Jacqui

p.s. Og dongle in Camberley is blindingly fast - handy when NTHell have a days outage :-)

But tried it at a customers Midhurst and even a "good" signal was slower than a bit of wet string.

Call of Duty hacker behind bars after college burglary

Jacqui

youth offenders

Specialist running YOI's have commented that sentences less that two years are meaningless as the kids are not inside long enough to change their ways. And we are talking about first time offenders and children at that.

Putting him in a real prison for what will probably be just over eight months is waste of our (taxpayers) money. I thought we had laws about proceeds of crime and withholding keys that could be used? Why can't they lock this guy up (contempt of court) until he hands over the offshore account details?

AWS CISO needs permission to visit his data centres

Jacqui

like banks

companies only put this sort of security theatre in place after something nasty has happened

I wonder if the cleaners have the same level of security - of like other high-sec places, do they provide limited sets of two factor auth and teh cleaning company pass out access details to the rolling staff.

bragging about your security is prolly the best way to ensure some journo gets a job as a cleaner and has pics of one or more of your DC's before the week is out.

'IT is no place for the little ladies', says Dell mouthpiece

Jacqui

Re: Shirley not

"For the same reason I don't know whether little girls are predispositioned to like pink and hence there are vast numbers of pink products marketed to little girls, or do little girls like pink because everything marketed towards them is pink."

FWICR, a couple of centuries ago blue was for girls and pink for boys - there is no inherited color preference.

Regarding programming, most females of my generation learnt to read/execute and write code when they were 10 or younger! The programs were called knitting patterns. variables, iteration, recursion, block scoping etc were all included in a complex pattern - even reverse polish! When I was studying I remember discussing this with a little old lady of 80+ on a train into london who was busy knitting a jumper as we chatted. Her comment was "doesn't everyone know this though - its so obvious"!

And the multi-tasking gender bias. Anyone can learn to multi-task. Any decent cook or chef has to do it.

There is a rule that you can best manage up to six things at once- more than that and most people start to lose track. The "rule of six" is used when designing magazine covers, blocks of flats, user interfaces etc.

There are differences between us - but not as many as some people seem to think there should be. :-)

2,000 dot-word bids rocket ICANN onto $350m cash pile

Jacqui

.biz == spam

We already have the situation where some MSP's blacklist any email from a .biz related rDNS IP or domain. All these "vanity" TLD's will have the same ethics as .biz - they will take money from anyone so they can recoup thier losses and we will simplay add all the new TLD's as rules to our content filters or worse to our blacklists.

Pessimist - Moi? :-)

Virgin Media cuts Pirate Bay access for millions of punters

Jacqui

Lets get this right - I assume the majorty of the crap on these sites are not dissimilar to the CD's the newspapers give away in sunday issues but without the sony rootkit :-)

'Geek' image scares women away from tech industry

Jacqui

When I was in my 20's

I would tell folks I was a secretary rather than say I was a software developer. At parties, being truthfull would be the kiss of death - a true tumbleweed moment - blank face - excuse me - goodbye, then some sly looks from the other side of the room - social death.

Things have changed (slightly) I still remember when being female and brilliant at your job was not just unexpected but hated with a vengance by many male (and some female) staff. I still remember having to get others in meetings to propose my solutions so they would be considered.

My current employer is putting it bluntly the best.

Bendy, twisty keyboard wins Microsoft input tech competition

Jacqui
FAIL

Warning will robinson!

following the link to staff member ben hughes website may hurt you eyes - unless you are after fake watches and fake designer shoes :-)

Hmm site is still owned by Mr Hughes but is hosting this crap. (html redacted)

a href=".../watches-rolex-watch-c-1_10.html">Rolex Watches

href="...">Fake Watches

href="...">Replica Watches

href=".../watches-rolex-watch-c-1_10.html">Rolex Watch

href=".../watches-rolex-watch-c-1_10.html">Rolex

href=".../christian-louboutin-boots-c-9.html">Christian Louboutin Shoes

href=".../christian-louboutin-shoes-c-23.html">Christian Louboutin Sale

href="...">Christian Louboutin

href="....">Christian Louboutin Shoes

Not exactly a good advert is it?

UK2.NET smashed offline by '10-million-strong' botnet

Jacqui

UK2 and spam

I have seen a number of Uk2 hosted spammers but yet to see one I have reported taken down.

I wonder if this segments of thier customer base has finally irked the wrong sort of peeps.

Google founders, James Cameron, go asteroid mining

Jacqui
Joke

Ben Gunn

Where is he when we need him :-)

Martha Lane Fox hits caps lock, yells at small biz websites

Jacqui

BBT - penny blossoms

This episode of the big bang theory captured the expectations, stupid mistakes and realities of the "web shop" magic bullet.

I wonder if any of these website meet OWASP guidelines - going by experience I suspect the web devs think the guidelines are "a handy set of code/shortcuts".

TV?

Jacqui

We have FreesatHD

after a period of well over five years without a goggle box - this has hundreds of channels and there are still evening when we just want to watch somethign and there is "nothing on".

Thankfully we have a few terabytes of recordings and our DVD collection that means we usually have whatever we want to watch already stored and prolly in a higher quality than issues by the likes ofthe beeb.

Our TV licence has been renewed but only for six months. After that we are seriously considering uninstalling the freesatHD system and giving it to a friend who has reception problems.

Home Office 'technologically clueless' on web super-snoop law

Jacqui

Re: Of Course They're Cluless

"To get back to my point, in 1994 I worked for BT, and they decided that they would have a single call logger to log all the internal BT telephone traffic. I warned them that they wouldn’t be able to do it because it there was too much data. After a lot of “yes it will”, “no it won’t” panto, they did try. Surprise, surprise there was too much data and they had to have two monster call loggers with a front-end processor before it sort-of worked. OK, OK, things have moved on a lot since 1994, but we were only talking about internal BT traffic"

My employer did a call logger and traffic analyser for BT for all business lines. It generates a four to seven page report detailing usage, patterns and automatically makes recommendations and was at the time the biggest outsourced print job in Europe :-)

The exchange fed loggers which cached CDR data for selected lines which was pulled by our system.

It initially ran of a couple of sparcstations and a (then meaty) sun server or two. The sparcstations were used for otehr projects but were reconfigured to join the "server pool" when thier "day job" was complete. The project came in underbudget and was runing before deadlines and is still runnng today almost ten years on.

So, CDR logging and traffic analysis can be done on large(ish) scale if you know what you are doing but recording and analysing calls (voice and data) is a much bigger undertaking.

Not bad for a staff of between four and seven :-)

Jacqui

Windows XP support ends two years from now

Jacqui

Mant SMB's still use XP

Some are still stuck with 2K and some still have NT running due to card support.

Paedophiles ‘disguise’ child abuse pages as legit websites

Jacqui

Slush for brains

So, what these muppets are saying is that on what maybe quite legit web sites there are caches of illegal content held in paths not indexed by the main web site - and this is (shock horror!) a noo terror and they need more funding to combat it.

Get real - people have been hacking CMS' and stashing illegal content for at least a decade.

This is only making the news because the IWF want some extra funding. Its not news, its a funding application by a private firm from the public purse.

Rutgers student guilty, faces 10 years for webcam spying

Jacqui

Blighty

Ravi should study in blighty - he would have never been prosecuted in the UK, the uni would have covered it up to keep a paying customer and even if it went to trial, a judge would have given him a slapped wrist as gay bashing is acceptable in many large cities (such as London) - even the Met police get away with it these days.

Molesworth and the New Latin

Jacqui

leaks - the *real* bit bucket

At uni/poly we had a Harris S6 mini - in a tall rack case in the middle of the machine room.

Yup Engineering got DEC's - compsci got antique (even then) Vulcan's :-)

Anyhoo this POC^Wmachine was proudly being shown off during open day to the goggle eyed prospectives for next years course. I was working on a terminal just outside next to the sole plotter and a friend was on call as sysadmin and lecturer helldesker.

Anyway one of the brighter students noted a plastic bucket stored in the bottom of the Harris cabinet and asked why it was there. Lecturer was in obvious panic so he turned to my mate Tony Smith (not of Reg fame!). rather than explain there was a hole in the roof that the uni was too skint/lazy to repair he explained how computers operate on bits. Everybody nodded. He then asked if everyone had seen a "pachinko" machine (again everyone nodded including lecturer). He explained that computers are like very very complex pachinko machines and eventually the bits fall out of the bottom of the machine into said bucket. Part of his duties is to empty the full bucket back into the top of the machine. Again everyone (including lecturer nodded).

I had a really hard time not breaking out into hysterical laughter.

Jacqui

Re: Re: Perfectly readable

Yes - but only if you are a fan. IMHO Its about as readable as The wasp factory and the ending has a similar twist.

Wake up, small biz: Learn to speak internet

Jacqui

linkedin

for B2B LI seems to win over FB but even this is packed full of blatant adverts.

Just look at the surrey business network postings. If you drop the social media experts, accountants and web designers and everyone else who only posts adverts then the community drops to around 10 people who are prepared to help each other out. The rest are simply desperately pushing their wares or literally saying "gizza job".

It takes a *lot* of time and effort to run a web presence and most small businesses are focussing on doing the important things - keeping clients happy and earning dosh. I have seen far too many small businesses go under because they believed that IPM,.SEO and other PR bullshit was the "magic bullet" for thier woes.

$work gets most new clients via word of mouth - this is IMHO by far and away the best way to get new business and they come pre-vetted :-)

Anti-phishing DMARC adoption gathers (free) steam

Jacqui

IBM EMEA

NOt long ago I was getting botnet and infected email from US and .eu parts fo IBM and some other multi's. Contacting them to explain the porblem did SFA.

SPF did the trick even if I had to initially hack DNS to add it myself on my DNS server :-)

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