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SCSI Failures

For a long time it was widely regarded that SCSI was the interface for all serious drives that were suitable for “Enterprise Use” or for anything else which requires reliable operation. On the other hand IDE was for cheap disks that were only suitable for home use. The SCSI vs IDE issue continues to this […]

No Backups WTF

Some years ago I was working on a project that involved a database cluster of two Sun E6500 servers that were fairly well loaded. I believe that the overall price was several million pounds. It’s the type of expensive system where it would make sense to spend adequately to do things properly in all ways.

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Woolworths Maths Fail

The above is a picture of the chocolate display at Woolworths, an Australian supermarket that was formerly known as Safeway – it had the same logo as the US Safeway so there’s probably a connection. This is actually a 24.81% discount. It’s possible that some people might consider it a legal issue to advertise […]

Take Off that Stupid Helmet

Recently I was walking through a park and heard a women call out “Take off that stupid helmet”. Usually I ignore what other people are saying but that seemed noteworthy. It turned out that a young boy (maybe 4yo) was being taught to ride a bike and his parents seemed to think that wearing a […]

The Security Benefits of Automation

Some Random WTFs

The Daily WTF is an educational and amusing site that recounts anecdotes about failed computer projects. One of their stories titled “Remotely Incompetent” concerns someone who breaks networking on a server and is then granted administrative access to someone else’s server by the Data Center staff [1]!

In one of the discussions […]

Sociological Images

I’ve recently been reading the Sociological Images blog [1]. That site has lots of pictures and videos that are relevant to the study of Sociology (most of which have a major WTF factor) and it’s run by people who have Ph.Ds in Sociology so the commentary is insightful. Since reading that I’ve started photographing relevant […]

How Not to Park a Mercedes

Why is that Mercedes blocking so much of the road through the station car park?

It’s because it’s the second car in a 1 car parking spot!

Here’s a front view.

These were taken in the Coburg Station car park on Wednesday. The car park was about half empty, so the alternative […]

Email Passwords

I was doing some routine sysadmin work for a client when I had to read mail in the system administration mailbox. This mailbox is used for cron job email, communication with ISPs that run servers for the company, and other important things. I noticed that the account was subscribed to some mailing lists related to […]

Bugs and User Practice

Wouter points out a mistake in one of my blog posts which was based on old data [1]. My original post was accurate for older distributions of Linux but since then the bug in question was fixed.

Normally when writing blog posts or email I do a quick test before committing the text to avoid […]

Bad Project Management

I have just read a rant by Sean Middleditch about bad project management [1]. He describes his post as “personal, rather angsty, and especially whiny” but I think it’s useful and informative. He makes some interesting technical points about PHP programming (I wasn’t aware that there were so many ways of easily getting things wrong […]