Posts by steamdesk_ross 15 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2017
I hope I don't have to migrate to something else... but as a desktop user I was let down acouple of years ago when they re-architectured for their Version 10, switching from C++ to an Elektron framework I believe, and I'm probably going to be let down even more going forward.
Are there any good alternatives out there? Better still, good alternatives that can import an Evernote DB dump?
... or you will become powerless against them.
Who put the Alexa box on their windowsill and left it turned on 24/7?
Amazon told you, "Just put this box on the windowsill, it will listen to you 24/7 and will react when you want it to, but not when you don't".
And then you're surprised that it hears everything?
And then you act even more surprised that the company best known for the world's most successful targetted marketing uses the data it gathers to target its marketing better?
More fool you.
I've had it for 18 months because in our rural location we would typically only get 1-3Mbps, not enough to accomodate the "work from home" directives. 4G wasn't quite up to the job, reception is flaky here and often dropped to 3G. Starlink was a life saver. It has proved very reliable for, so much so that when I started working from the office again and only really used broadband at home for gaming and video streaming services I still couldn't bear to give it up and return to a landline or 4G provider. In fact, I even gave up the land line completely during the interval, although I did wait 6 months to decide if I could take that step. The quality is fine, my only fears are around the cost - they more or less have me over a barrel - and its longevity (presumably if it doesn't prove a money maker the plug will get pulled at some point).
"(Looks sideways at the employer's GitHub repository.)"
But the whole point of using GitHub is that everything is distributed and generally recoverable - you can lose the master but not lose your history. Of course, if you're the kind of person who pushes *out* to production from the repository server instead of pulling *in* from the production servers themselves then it could make life a bit trickier for a short while.
I thought it was a pretty fair response. As I read yesterday, attributed to A C Clarke, "You might be able to think of a dozen things that can go wrong. The problem is, there's always a thirteenth." It's not whether things go wrong that matters, it's how you deal with them when they do. Of course, you should avoid like the plague a software developer who gets more than their fair share of things going wrong ("You make your own luck").
Still, "best practise" and all that. Real programmers know that hiding behind a framework like ISO9000 multiplies your dev time and costs by a huge factor but usually doesn't actually decrease the "incidents" count as much as hiring better developers in the first place does (and ensuring that the client listens when the devs say something can't or shouldn't be done...) We have a running joke in our office that "best practise" is just whatever the next wannabe has tried to sell as the unique factor in their company's operations - then we wait 18 months for the client to come back to us, tail between legs, after one too many long duration outages, or dealing with a pile of complaints that all say "the new system is so much slower than the old one" or "I *need* this feature that is no longer there".
^^^^ exactly what I found. By the time I'd factored in managing the scheme, accounting for it and so on, I would have done better to give my staff a hand-out with the proviso that they spend it on a bike. Our local independent bike shop owner also told me afterwards that if I'd walked in with the same amount of money in cash, he'd have struck a better deal with me.
My rule of thumb is that because of the red tape that gets in the way any kind of grant or scheme that is going to net the business less than £5K is not worth the time and effort of applying for it.
I'm glad I found this article. I checked my 123-reg account and found that they had added the .uk version of my primary email domain, and had set it to auto-renew. I've been with 123-reg for a long time, and it is a lot of hassle to switch elsewhere, but I'm very tempted to do that. If only it didn't feel like all the alternatives were just as bad!
My recent experience with a major cloud provider is that proper DB separation isn't something that is particularly easy achievable or well documented, especially in their "off the peg" auto-scaling environments. You still really have to roll your own mechanisms to achieve this. For our project we ended up blowing a large amount of a recent project budget on implementing this better than the environment was pushing you to. That came as quite a surprise, I'd have thought that by now DB compartmentalisation would be de riguer!
I strongly suspect that a large number of service providers who really ought to have absolute DB and CDN separation don't. I won't name names, but having researched this in depth I think that this same mistake could happen for some of the largest:
financial/bookkeeping service providers,
note/document storage apps,
CRM systems,
mail providers,
DDOS prevention providers.
... all of these I investigated when I was trying to get advice on how best to do this ourselves. It's very hard to find any companies which advertise that they use proper DB separation/encryption so that client data is compartmentalised. Why wouldn't you advertise it? Because you know that you are sat on monolithic DBs and CDNs which *can* be compromised in a big way by a single small mistake.
People seem to keen to blame third party javascript code and/or a hack on the website but given the long and precise date range over which data was stolen, Occam's razor suggests to me that a one-off theft of a single DB might be the truth. Of course, that would also suggest that they *were* storing CVV codes in their DB. But it does seem more likely to me than the notion that they had a compromised, busy public website on which a data leakage hack was able to operate unspotted for such a long time...
I can see where this is going. Just like Xamarin, within a couple of years the "live" system won't match much of the documentation, every month new feature releases will break your old systems, and you'll need to spend weeks and weeks learning silly little tricks because the implementation of features isn't consistent across the board. Soon the basic Git install will be a 2Gb ISO that includes every version of Java made since 1996.
Yay! Once again Microsoft raises the wrong bar, and we developers get to charge more and deliver less, more slowly, because the barriers to entry into our profession have gone even higher.
... some kind of DNS problem:
Name servers:
ns2.lloydstsb.co.uk 141.92.103.254
ns4.lloydstsb.com
ns5.lloydstsb.net
WHOIS lookup made at 09:50:47 12-Jan-2017
$ nslookup
> server ns2.lloydstsb.co.uk
Default server: ns2.lloydstsb.co.uk
Address: 141.92.103.254#53
> onlinebusiness.lloydsbank.co.uk
Server: ns2.lloydstsb.co.uk
Address: 141.92.103.254#53
onlinebusiness.lloydsbank.co.uk canonical name = onlinebusiness.lloydsbank.co.uk.edgekey.net.
> onlinebusiness.lloydsbank.co.uk.edgekey.net.
Server: ns2.lloydstsb.co.uk
Address: 141.92.103.254#53
** server can't find onlinebusiness.lloydsbank.co.uk.edgekey.net: REFUSED
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