Posts by LesB

A shocking omission

Where's "Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying"? (Nice to see it's got a 4.68 rating on Goodreads)

How to get ahead, errr a head

Surely it's a body transplant rather than a head transplant? Well, for those of us who keep their brains in their heads, anyway...

Back up for me...

Now working in Newcastle city centre.

Three's last tweet said it was back in London, with everywhere else due to be connected this afternoon.

Giraffics?

Maybe that's what he thought he was playing with?

Over-confidence, or something

Most service providers have a publicly accessible status page carefully hosted well off their own network. The only way you'll see a service status from Mimecast is if you log into the admin portal, which was a wee bit tricky for most of today[1]. When I did finally get logged in, the status messages suggested that all was well, there were no recent problems and world peace had been achieved. Well, I may have made up the last bit.

I suspect it's been so long since they had a significant issue that they assumed they couldn't....

[1] And last I looked, it was only working on even numbered services[2], which many people won't have been trying to connect to...

[2] Customers have two services to use, one even numbered, one odd numbered. In the event that one breaks, it's supposed to fail over to the other. In this instance, it didn't.

I saw what you did there...

Sapphire and steal, eh? Nicely done.

The disappearing computer problem...

This is, of course, a well-known phenomenomenum[1]. It happens so frequently that I suggested getting a cardboard standup thingy of me, rather like those cardboard cops they have in some shops to deter thieves[2].

Most users are convinced that computers are frightened of me, and start behaving as soon as I appear.

[1] Sorry, it's one of those words I'm never sure when to stop spelling. Like banananana.

[2] Well, I assume that's why they're there.

New sync services needed....

It's not so much Reader itself going away as the API used by various desktop and mobile apps to sync feeds across multiple devices. Some of those apps will still work, but without the sync (such as NetNewsWire), others seem to have been designed as Google Reader clients (such as Reeder), and seem likely to break horribly...

The long-established FeedDemon won't be developed any further (http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.html), others may follow.

There's definitely scope for a service to sync RSS - I'd pay for that...

I saw what you did there

Surely it's inevitable that cloud services would be nebulous?

Muphry's Law strikes again

It's a well-known phenomenon...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

Applause, etc

One of the more entertaining boss destructions

I think you have the wrong hat colour

Best practice always used to be to talk to the vendor first. These people seem to be saying that they'll only share their findings with their customers. Or to put it another way, if you want the information, you'll have to pay them.

White hat? Hardly. Possibly not black hat, but maybe brown....

Linguistic differences can be such fun...

I recall when the "nonce" was proposed on the WP development mailing list[1], that somebody or other did post a link to urban dictionary as a hint that this might not be the best word to use, but it didn't catch anyone important's attention...

I suspect that devs who speak UKEnglish kept quiet for amusement purposes. Much the same way that apparently nobody told George Lucas that "Yarael Poof[2]" wasn't an altogether ideal name for a member of the Jedi Council...

[1] Called WP-Hackers[2], presumably so people can laugh at the occasional persion joining to offer credit card numbers, or ask for help getting into someone else's email account...

[2] Name seen in credits, character only in the background.

[2] Yes, *we* all know that hackers doesn't mean that, but since lots of other people don't, it's a losing battle...

George is happy because he hates George

Old George Lucas hates his younger self, and is doing all he can to destroy all that his younger self did.

This, like those "Special" (or whatever) editions, is part of that fiendish plan.

No new rumours, at least...

There's no real information either way about the announcement (or not) of a new iPhone model. El Reg's source bases its not very informative article on the speculations of a Gartner analyst whose comments can be boiled down to "well, they usually do that, so they might not this time".

Personally, I tend to put Gartner comments into one of two broad categories:

1. The bleeding obvious

2. Total bollocks

However, they seem to have got wise to this and are branching out into a new category, which I think I'l list as

3. Too woolly to tell

@Tim Spence - Data volumes, and costs

I am a home user, and I currently have over 400GB backed up. A lot of that consists of RAW files from my digital cameras (big files, you know) and my music files (combination of iTunes purchases and rips from my own CDs, which I'd hate to have to do again). I don't back up apps, but I *do* backup downloaded installers for applications I've bought - not all of these can be easily replaced.

What I *choose* to back up is my decision - there's no degree of self-deception involved. I certainly don't make any money out of my home computer use, so I don't fall under the "business" heading, either.

Your view appears to be that if you don't need something, nobody else does either, and if they think they do, they're wrong, so there.

I'll be departing from Mozy. Based on my current use, and a finger in the air projection of future growth, my renewal cost for two years would rise from a very reasonable $207.90 to an excruciating $1,049.79. I'd have been prepared to pay more for the service, but not *that* much.

Now there's a problem

Most of the time, I'm quite happy to think of BT as the source of all that is dark and evil in the Universe, and whenever I'm in London, I shudder if I have to get too close to Barad Dur[1]. But now I find myself cast into doubt.

BT upset Alan Sugar. Can they *really* be all bad, in that case? I do hope that whoever got the "do you know who I am" treatment gave him the deserved response of "there's a shouty bloke here who doesn't know who he is".

[1] Or the BT Tower, as *they* pretend it's called

Pedantic question

"Both server and desktop versions of Windows 7 are affected by the bug."

Say what? Do you mean Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 are affected, or is there some new server OS Microsoft neglected to mention to me?

Yup, works for me...

I've had mine about a month now. Like El Reg, I went for the WiFi only version, and I've had no cause to regret that.

The key selling point for me is that Amazon are careful to charge slightly less for eBooks than the currently cheapest physical versions (if the book's in hardback, the eBook will be slightly cheaper than that, if it's in paperback, it'll be cheaper than that), which is where things went wrong with Watersone's tie-in with the Sony Reader. This tends to take books that are currently top-selling paperbacks below £3 for the Kindle version, which combined with instant delivery is a good deal.

Magazine subs work nicely, too - obviosuly this works better for text-focused mags (Asimov's and Analog work well for me), and are generally well-priced.

On a recent three-day business trip, I was happy to have the Kindle (size of one paperback) rather than the physical version of the latest Peter F Hamilton book (size of one brick), and have more to read after that without any extra weight.

O'Reilly eBooks transfer nicely over USB, too.

So far, there isn't anything I don't like about it.

There are lies, damned lies, statistics and surveys

Leaving aside the failure to round 5.9% to the nearest integer[1] this is all a bit silly.

40% of "workers" have tried in-flight WiFi? Really? You don't think that might be a little unlikely?

How about 40% of users of a service that's targeted at highly mobile workers who may be very keen on working from anywhere? Which is probably a much smaller proportion of the workforce, don't you think?

[1] Hint: try 6

It's a cunning plan (allegedly)

Obviously this is really part of a plan by McSplafee. They've grown bored with merely bricking machines at the OS level, having proved they can do it with ease and in huge numbers.

So now comes the new idea: by becoming part of Intel, they can work towards bricking machines at the hardware level!

A brilliant plan, assuming you work from the presumption that McGaffee is in fact the incarnation of Dilbert's Mordac, the preventer of Information Services. It's a great step forward for them.

Not sure what Intel get out of it, other than getting to sell you another new motherboard every time McZapee eats your chipset....

Not a good move...

As Wibble[1] says, removing the mail client from the Home version is not a Good Thing. MS have made a lot of fuss about (finally) producing a Mac mail client that's Time Machine friendly, then decline to offer it to anyone who isn't prepared to pay far too much.

I think I'll pass on this one.

[1] Good name. Wish I'd picked it first.