Posts by Dr Who

Research has found

That a new born gnat grows at a faster rate than a full grown elephant.

My thoughts exactly. Looks more like a pretty untalented unenthusiastic bloke with a copy of Photoshop's impression than an artist's impression to me.

What's all this two weeks business? You've either got an infected machine, in which case you need to clean it up asap, or you haven't in which case you don't need to clean it up.

Nothing has changed in terms of the measures a sensible end user should be taking to protect themselves against these and other nasties. Run up to date software including anti-virus, don't open unknown attachments and the rest.

In fact, apart form shutting down a couple of command servers, which in the greater scheme of things is irrelevant, and convincing some idiot to headline their news with it, nothing at all has changed. There are nasty things out there and there always will be, so protect yourself.

I completely don't understand what this whole thing is about. What am I missing?

Inflatable balloon that goes like a rocket, but with high endurance, and delivers a large payload at the end of it all. Hmmm.

Build brand loyalty by developing trust, by communicating, and by providing exemplary customer service. People expect stuff to go wrong, it's how a company deals with problems that matters.

We use Rackspace over Amazon because their motto is Fanatical Support, and they mean it. In the ten years that we've been using them the odd thing has gone wrong of course, but the support has always been first class.

Don't pretend your rubber dog turd is better than the next guy's rubber dog turd. Instead, supply it with a smile and savour the whiff of success!

If "the cloud" refers to virtualised computing environments, be they private, public or hybrid, then I am a fan.

Containerisation is an incredibly powerful tool for the development and delivery of applications in the virtualised world. Docker appears to have found a way of bringing containerisation into the mainstream. If you haven't looked at it yet, it is worth having a look. https://www.docker.io

All the signs are that this is not simple spoofing

I've been getting spam from AOL users. But it's from people I know and the other addresses on the recipient list are to their genuine contacts. This means their account has been compromised in some way rather than straight forward (and far less serious) spoofing of their email address to send to random recipients.

If there's one thing the Mounties should know, it's no use shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Jonathan Porritt once gave a lecture at my school which he opened with something along the lines of "I expect you think that we greens are all a bunch of woolly hatted lentil stirrers". In the intervening years (of which there are far too many), apart from not actually wearing a woolly hat or publicly stirring lentils, he has done little to convince me that he is not.

"in the event the doomsday box system goes titsup"

If the BRASTRAP can go titsup, then there must also be a system component called JOCKSTRAP to allow for the inevitable cockups.

In a nutshell, a Docker container contains an application *and* all of its dependencies. So say the application depends on a LAMP stack with specific versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP, you wrap those versions into the container. You can then move that container to any VM or physical server without worrying what the AMP versions are on the base install of the VM.

This is a huge step. Currently if you want to move an application from one VM to another, or you want to run mirror servers, you first have to build a second VM to the same specification as the original in terms of application dependencies. Even with things like chef and puppet this can be a time consuming task. Linux containers abstract away that problem without (so it is claimed) a significant performance overhead.

"All state information security systems were unprepared for such a brazen violation of the law."

Aha I see .... their security systems were only prepared for the more friendly kind of aggressor who does not brazenly violate the law but asks politely whether he can invade your country, and certainly wouldn't tamper with your phone systems unless he had your explicit permission.

Timing is everything

Just when Samsung are ramping up their efforts to break free from the chocolate factory. Tizen (tizen.org) it seems is the new Android. If they can do it, this would surely be a very good thing given the average consumer's current choice of being locked in to one of Apple, Google or Microsoft.

"According to EMC, the staff cuts are down to its internal rejigging to decrease the effects of back-end loading of customers orders in each quarter."

Eh? What? There is a fine line between english and gibberish, and I think that in this case the line has been reached, crossed and left a few miles behind.

This is a clear case of a 42GB memory stick being illegally converted into a 42DD mammary stick with optional encraption (altough I'd go for plane text if I were you).

One million lines of code

That's an interesting defence. "Look mate, this system is huge. It cost loads and loads of money. It's so complicated that my head spins just thinking about it. So, when it fails I want it to fail big! No trivial little glitches that nobody even notices for me - oh no. Ask the banks, they understand. If you've paid for serious software then you want to see serious failures. I want my money's worth."

Talks eh ...?

Harrison Ford : For a million bucks a minute I might consider it.

Mark Hamill : Please, please, please give me a part! Even as en extra. I'll do it for free. No actually, I'll pay you. I am BEGGING you. click. Hello? Hello?

"Some research I have seen in the last year or so has started to show some evidence of that ..."

Now there's an investment winning business case if I ever heard one.

Every time there's an issue in the cloud, there are plenty of people taking the "told you so" line. This appears to be an example of the reverse. Running your own data centre is all very nice and you can certainly touch everything, but it's very expensive indeed to provide the sort of N+1 or 1+1 redundancy that is standard fare in colo or managed data centres. I'm not taking sides here, just trying to balance the argument a bit.

Another Happy Camper

Service, peformance, and reliability for Rackspace in the UK has always been outstanding both for dedictated servers and VMs. Over the last six years they've always lived up to their Fanatical Support mantra.

In Google we trust! God bless Amazonica!

The real king of networking

No mention of Banyan Vines and its legendary StreetTalk directory services. Light years ahead of its time although a bit overkill for very small businesses. Multi-site, native WAN connections via dedicated routing cards, and host of other features made it scale with ease which is why any large business building a serious enterprise wide network was using it.

Banyan's supreme achievement however was the utter crapness of their sales and marketing which managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Truly a triumph of dreadful business strategy over brilliant technology.

Oraforce

Yes indeed. Oracle could prove useful for servicing SalesForce's back oraforce ...

Deloitte FFS!

Deliverable : IT Cloudiness

Methodology : Advanced Nebulosity

KPIs : Successful implementation of foginess, opacity, smoke and possibly mirrors

Billable : £90 million (incl VAT payable in advance)

Clegg ... a tough nut to crack

Stephen needs professional help

"Indeed, Stephen sent us no fewer than 75 images of his lab"

That goes way beyond straight forward nerdiness.

Bruce!

Fetch me Bruce and his Black & Decker right now!

And who the f**k made the decision to decommission the shuttle fleet?