Archives

Categories

Some Good and Bad Ideas for Recruiting

Eweek has an interesting article about Microsoft’s latest bad hiring idea [1] (their previous one was hiring a model to try and give the idea that IT work is cool [2]). They have created a web site hey-genius.com to try and get people who consider themselves to be geniuses to work for them.

One significant […]

Google Earth – Almost a Great Program

My mother just asked me to get Google Earth (link to download page [1]) working on her machine so she can see where my sister [2] lives.

So I download all 20 megs of the sucker (of course it had a horrible license agreement that precludes packaging for Debian or any other sane distribution) and […]

Gear Acquisition Syndrome

I have just read an interesting post about Gear Acquisition Syndrome [1] as applied to the guitar industry. Apparently it’s common for people to spend a lot of time and money buying guitar equipment instead of actually playing a guitar. I think that this problem extends way beyond guitars and to most aspects of human […]

Comparing Debian and Fedora

A common question is how to compare Fedora [1] and Debian [2] in terms of recent updates and support. I think that Fedora Rawhide and Debian/Unstable are fairly equivalent in this regard, new upstream releases get packaged quickly, and support is minimal. They are both aimed at developers only, but it seems that a reasonable […]

ISP Password Change by Untrusted People

After dealing with Optus phone support [1] in regard to a routine request for a password change I have been thinking about better ways of managing password changes for a large ISP. The first criteria is that the user must have a password that is difficult to brute-force attack at all times. Changing a password […]

Duplicating a Xen DomU

A fairly common request is to be able to duplicate a Xen instance. For example you might have a DomU for the purpose of running WordPress and want another DomU to run MediaWiki. The difference in configuration between two DomU’s for running web based services that are written in PHP and talking to a MySQL […]

Citing References in Blog Posts

A significant problem with the old-fashioned media is that as a general rule they don’t cite references for anything. Some of the better TV documentaries and non-fiction books cite references, but this is the exception not the norm. Often documentaries only cite references in DVD extras which are good for the people who like the […]

Dead Links

I’ve found a reasonably good free spider for checking for dead links, www.dead-links.com. When I told it to spider my main site www.coker.com.au it worked well and informed me of several dead links that I fixed. When I told it to spider my blog it reported an error 404 and didn’t give any useful output. […]

George Monbiot’s Solution to Emissions Trading

I previously posted about Interesting Ideas from George Monbiot, one of which was to establish individual emissions trading.

Gyros Geier disagrees with this and cites the current emission trading schemes as evidence. There are several fundamental differences between George’s idea and the current implementations of emission trading.

The biggest flaw in current emission trading schemes […]

Photography and Censorship at APEC

World News Australia reports that Police forced three tourists to delete photos of a fence. Apparently the officers in question believed that such photos would be a threat to security.

It’s interesting to note that the first sentence of the World News Australia report is “Officials say police who forced three tourists to delete photos […]