Sunday, June 22, 2008

Jodrell Bank

What a mess. And isn't this just classic The-Way-Britain-Is-Run-Today. Bureaucrats who can't even add up land real science with an £80M shortfall, then decode to close one of the premier facilities in the UK. They've clearly made a mistake, and no-one will actually put their hand up and say "it was me", and no-one will step in and sort out the mess.

Third-rate administration.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

So why hasn't the UK appealed ISO/IEC DIS 29500 - the attempt to get OOXML, Microsoft's 6000 page "open" document format through ISO?

The Norwegian story, in summary at


here
or

Steve's own blog account


Is, quite frankly, shockingly disgusting.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

I wonder how many sysadmins spend some time looking at the logs on their internet-connected machines. I have several such machines and I can guarantee someone is knocking at the door whenever I choose to look at the log.

The other night, a nice Chinese machine was running through a script of silly login names, getting rejected. The day before, a Japanese machine was doing the same thing. They're all wasting their time, because the machines are well locked down, and run only what they need to.

Do you know what ports are open on your net facing kit?
Seven builds on Vista's "solid foundation?"

Well, shucks. Windows, it seems to me, has at least two problems. The first is that it won't scale - either up or down. It runs on chunky AMDtel hardware, and that's it. My HP iPAC (WindowsCE) never ran windows (and, incidentally, is confined to the WPB now - it won't run WPA encryption)

Boys, it has to scale. And to get that to work, you probably have to rewrite things in a modular way from the bottom.

Monday, May 19, 2008

http://wubi-installer.org/

The easiest way to experience Ubuntu Linux.

Dropped it on my laptop. Installed, added itself as a boot, and even my WPA wireless worked.
It was a flashy looking Fujitsu-Siemens Server, with LSI Megaraid and other tasty bits of hardware. I couldn't be bothered to rootle through the manuals.

Within 20 minutes I'd configured the 4 mini-160GB drives into a RAID array with one hot spare, installed Ubuntu Server 8.04 in an LVM Virtual Volume, installed MySQL server and rebooted.

The whole thing just worked. Another 10 mins and it was populated with data.

Fabulous.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

I have to say that I think splashtop ( http://www.splashtop.com/index.phpis about the most exciting idea I've read about for many years. An instant-booting "desktop" mini-os that provides you with a browser which works.

Don't bother booting your OS - just start this one.
Well, here's a way to post something, even when I haven't written it.

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12444054231136344423


Newsy stuff from the RSS feeds I read.