Sep 24 2012

Media Life Spans

Only the geeks traditionally worried about this stuff, but we always tend to assume that various types of media will be usable for many, many years.  This is not the case.  As you probably know from looking at old family photos, they don’t survive well over time.  This is also the case for tape backup (well, putting aside that even a week after it’s written, the odds are pretty good that you’ll have issues restoring from tape – I always did).

I ran across this neat diagram that shows various kinds of media, and the expected life spans.  I thought it was neat to see this all in one place.

Backup Storage Media Lifespan Infographic

Sep 21 2012

Endeavour shuttle’s farewell flight tour of California

The space shuttle Endeavour is flying over California landmarks today, strapped to the back of the 747 shuttle transport vehicle.  It is expected to land at LAX at noon today.

The Los Angeles Times has a nice article: www.latimes.com

Also, you can watch live video on Nasa’s feed: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/6540154

Sep 14 2012

iTunes, Safari, Bonjour updates

Ok, so I have a bone to pick with Apple on this.  Periodically, their software (iTunes, Safari, Bonjour, etc) needs to be updated.  Thank God they don’t do this as often as a certain vendor whose name we will not mention but who has the initials “Adobe”.

Their updater fires up, and tells you “hey we have an update”.  Fine, you authorize that, it downloads and installs.  That should be that.  But wait… it goes back to Apple’s server again and checks for updates.  Um… why?  Stop the silliness folks, and quit BUGGING me when I’m trying to do other things with my computer.

Sep 12 2012

GoDaddy DNS Outage

Two days ago, GoDaddy had a major outage in their DNS system.  This affected probably millions of web sites (they currently have more than 45 million domain names under management, according to wikipedia), FTP sites, email sites, and so forth, whether those sites were actually hosted at GoDaddy or not.  I was among the list of affected users, as you may have noticed.

I do not use GoDaddy for hosting of any kind (I did, but really hated the performance, so I switched away pretty quick), but I have been using them as a domain name registrar for many years, and so I use their DNS that is included for free with my domain registrations.  It’s always been very reliable … until yesterday.

As soon as GoDaddy started having problems, some dork posted on Twitter that he was a hacker and took them down as an experiment in cyber security.  A little bit later, somebody posted a video to youtube ostensibly from the Anonymous collective, claiming that this was an attack because Anonymous dislikes GoDaddy’s support for government regulation of certain parts of the internet.

Yesterday, an article was released by the Times saying that the issue was actually an internal problem that GoDaddy had (a major networking failure caused by corrupted router tables), and that it had nothing to do with hackers.  Today, I received an email from GoDaddy apologizing for the outage, and offering me a credit – 1 month of free service for each of my active/published sites.  The email was signed by Scott Wagner, CEO.  I thought that was a nice gesture, and a very good move on their part.  In my case, I’m not using them for hosting, so the credit does me no good.

Bob Parsons hasn’t been in the CEO seat since December 2011.  I keep hoping that the new CEO will make some changes to GoDaddy’s “image”, and aim for a less juvenile persona than Bob had been pushing.  Bob came off as a Hugh Heffner wanna-be, and I know of several fair-sized companies that won’t deal with GoDaddy (for domain registration, DNS, and certificate authority) as a result.  I think this is a shame, because all-in-all, I think GoDaddy does provide a good and reliable service.  I continue to live in hope.

Aug 28 2012

Windows 8 vs Windows 3.0

Here’s the shiny new Windows 8:

Here’s a moldy oldie (windows 3.0):

File:Windows 3.0 workspace.png

Notice any similarities?

Other than the screen resolution being better on the windows 8 screen shot, they both look flat and uninteresting.  Is Microsoft trying to turn back the clock here?

Aug 6 2012

New look and new host!

Well, after the catastrophic failure in July, I no longer trust the whitebox based hosting I was using for this blog.  So, I’ve moved this to wordpress.com for the time being, and odds are I’ll leave it there for good unless something comes up to indicate that was a bad decision.

I had to change the look a bit, and most of the plugins I had are not supported with this hosting method.  So, I can’t have the music widget anymore 😦

Jul 19 2012

Server Hiccup

Folks – my server had a catastrophic failure.  BOTH disks of a Raid-1 set failed (hard errors) at the same time.  How unlikely is THAT??  Well anyway, lucky me.  We’re now running on a rebuilt server, with two brand new Raid-1 disks.  I have restored things as best I can, and though some of the posting dates since June 5 got a bit scrambled, I doubt that really matters to anyone.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Jul 19 2012

Diet sodas and ordering silliness

This morning I was in the cafeteria at work, and the guy in front of me ordered “egg whites and bacon”.  Now perhaps it’s just me, but that struck me as pretty funny.  I see it as along the same lines as a Diet Coke and a Snickers bar.  You see, the whole point about dietary modifications (whether for health, allergies, or whatever), is that in order for it to work, you need to be consistent.  Otherwise, it’s clearly just a mental game, and not really anything useful.

People will order the mega-bucket of popcorn with EXTRA butter and salt slathered all over it in multiple layers as the counter jock fills the bathtub sized container, and then to defuse the badness, they order a Diet Pepsi.  I always find it hard not to bust up laughing.  I mean really, if you are going to go for junk, then DO it – why screw around?  And give me a steak (rare) on the side please.

Jul 19 2012

Double letters in an attempt to be clever

This annoying habit seems to be more prevalent in the restricted-vocabulary circles, so I suppose this is their only way of standing out in a crowd (yes, this is a snooty post).

My gripe this time is people who add consonants in an attempt to add emphasis (I’m assuming that because they don’t have a very wide vocabulary, alternate word-choice is not an option, but that may well be presumptuous on my part).

Examples would be: Hott, Starr, Raddical, Sexxy, Dogg, Rockking