Above is the picture of the RFID device in my new UK passport. The outer wire loop is 72mm * 42mm which is by far the largest RFID device I’ve seen. It appears that they want the passport to be RFID readable from distances that are significantly greater than those which are typically used […]
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I’ve just read an interesting post at Making Light about seat-belts [1]. In Australia seat-belt use is mandatory, you can be fined for failing to wear one – and the police (who help clean up the mess when someone dies on the road) are apparently quite aggressive about enforcement. Even aside from the legal requirement […] In a comment on my post about Designing Unsafe Cars [1] Noel said “If you don’t know how to make a surgery, you don’t do it. If you don’t know how to drive, don’t drive. And if you don’t know how to use a computer, don’t expect anybody fix your disasters, trojans and viruses.” Later […] November 24th, 2009 | Tags: Most Popular | Category: Misc Computer | 7 comments - (Comments are closed) The LA Times has an interesting article about problems with Toyota and Lexus cars [1]. Basically there are problems where the cars have uncontrolled acceleration (there seems to be some dispute about whether it is due to engine management or the floor mat catching the accelerator pedal). When that happens the brakes don’t work (due […] Update: TumbleDry has a good analysis of the Square Trade report [0]. It seems that there are significant statistical problems in Square Trade’s analysis and a possible conflict of interest. Square Trade did a survey of laptop reliability and wrote an interesting article about the results [1]. One thing to keep in mind when reading […] November 23rd, 2009 | Tags: Most Popular | Category: Misc Computer | 4 comments - (Comments are closed) Sometimes computers fail. If you run enough computers then you encounter failures regularly. If the computers are important then you need to plan for the failure. An ideal situation is to have redundant servers. Misconfigured clusters can cause more downtime than they can prevent and it requires more expensive hardware to properly implement a cluster […] November 22nd, 2009 | Tags: Most Popular | Category: Misc Computer | 3 comments - (Comments are closed) When writing a shell script you need to take some care to ensure that it won’t run amok. Extra care is needed for shell scripts that run as root, firstly because of the obvious potential for random destruction, and secondly because of the potential for interaction between accounts that can cause problems. One possible first […] November 20th, 2009 | Tags: Most Popular | Category: unix-tips | 18 comments - (Comments are closed) Last night I was in the middle of checking my email when I found that clicking on a URL link wouldn’t work. It turned out that my web browser had become unavailable due to a read error on the partition for my root filesystem (the usual IDE uncorrectable error thing). My main machine is a […] November 20th, 2009 | Tags: Most Popular | Category: Misc Computer | Comments are closed I run a number of MySQL databases, the number of mysqld installations that I run is something like 8, but I may have forgotten some. With the number of servers that I run on a “do nothing except when it breaks” basis it’s difficult to remember the details. The number of actual databases that I […] Everyone who does any significant amount of sysadmin work will break a server. Most people who have any significant experience will have broken several. Anyone who has never broken one should be treated with suspicion by other members of the sysadmin team, they probably haven’t learned the caution that most of us learn from stuffing […] November 13th, 2009 | Tags: Most Popular | Category: Misc Computer | 8 comments - (Comments are closed) |
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