Ack, this post started out as one topic and turned into another. Sometimes I ramble like that, and sometimes I decide the ramble is better than the original post. I forgot to change the title, though, and by the time I realized it Google had already grabbed it. So to save a 404 error this is a placeholder. 🙂 You really want: “…and by l10O359 you mean 1|O0359.” 🙂
In interacting with a domain registrar this morning I received a message that looked approximately like: A few things come to mind: 1. This code is 27 characters long. The longer the code the more chance you have of someone improperly copying it, or not being able to read it over the phone. This applies both to the customer and to the support staff. This code has 62^27 combinations, which seems like overkill. An eight character code using only uppercase letters would be sufficient for 208 billion combinations (26^8), and is way more usable to us humans. 2. This code mixes uppercase and lowercase. Uppercase is often more readable, and support staff can always assume that when a customer says …
Masked thieves storm into Chicago colocation (again!) | The Register DO NOT HOST WITH CIHOST. Yet another reason they suck. (I am a customer of theirs). CI Host – Chicago Down [MERGED] – Web Hosting Talk – The largest, most influential web hosting community on the Internet Gunpowder Plot – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Remember Remember the Fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.
Documentation is often dull and drab, optimized for getting information to those in need as efficiently as possible. Yet once in a while there’s something that makes dorks like myself chuckle. Like fun example data in the Atlassian Confluence documentation: The characters are from Fight Club, if you aren’t familiar with the movie. Nothing says you can’t entertain while you’re informing, even if it is just movie character names.
How many servers do you have that, when rebooted, need to have their applications started by hand? I have 3, out of 250. And that’s just because the databases sometimes don’t come up, depending on how the machines went down. When I can restart a server and have everything happen correctly and automatically it saves a lot of my time. Especially if it’s an emergency situation, or 5 AM when I might not be thinking straight. If I’m responsible for an application I will always rig it to start on boot. If I’m not I’ll always urge the application admin to make their application startup procedure automatic. But hey, if they want to be called at 5 AM to run …
Burning Questions • Saturday Subscriber Count Drop? I know my customers would be all over me if I lost a day’s worth of data, but then again they pay me. I guess you get what you pay for. Whois May Be Retired, Says ICANN I can’t imagine a world without whois, but that said it’s a pile of crap. I hate having my private information hanging out there.
BC catches world record sturgeon – Sports – CKA A 3.4 meter, 360 KG sturgeon. Nice! A movement for green life after death HD DVD players hit $99 at Wal-Mart, Best Buy | Crave : The gadget blog I am now going to predict the death of Blu-ray, since most people vote with their wallets when no other compelling reason is present. Intel’s Itanium 9100 “Montvale”: Eh — Server Specs They’re still making Itaniums? Why? Eye-Fi » Home Oh, hell yeah. Automatically upload your photos when your camera is in range of your wireless access point. Buying one now… Marrying The Hatchet Offtopic, but an interesting advice column article on spousal abuse of the husband. Marrying The Hatchet – Hate …
“Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new.”
“If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.”
I was reading Raj Dash’s post “41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks.” Reason number 30 sticks out to me: Unfriendly URLs. He’s talking about blogs, specifically, but this is a battle I fight every day with web applications. When we build new services and deploy new applications we have a choice. Do we make the users remember some awful URL, or do we use DNS and web redirects & aliases to simplify things? Here’s an example from my life. Someone in my organization thinks it’s okay to make people remember this URL in order to do their time reporting: https://barney.company.com:9001/OA_HTML/US/ICXINDEX.htm If I’m on a machine where I don’t have that URL bookmarked I won’t be able to find it. …