My day job, as an infrastructure consultant, necessitates that I need to know lots of different passwords, almost all of which are very important to keep secure - they give me access to business critical systems. Outside of that, I have countless accounts with websites, for shopping, networking, bank accounts, and discussion forums. As somebody who [...]
A bit of a ‘meta post’ this one. I’ve been doing some tweaking and fiddling to the website over the last few days. Primarily this means there are some new ‘Chicklets’ and items in the sidebar that may be worth a browse. I wanted to just put a short post together explaining what they are, [...]
One of the things I absolutely despise about Microsoft Windows is it’s counter-intuitive interface. Perhaps this is because of my years as a Mac user, but I find it infuriating that simple things like dragging a file to Outlook doesn’t create a new e-mail with that file as an attachment (as Mail.app does on OSX). [...]
Despite some wariness when the product first came out in the US, I’ve been extremely happy with my iPhone since buying it. The recent 1.1.3 update brought along a few extra features that were missing (most notably multi-recipient texts), but the device has slotted in to my life extremely well. I can’t wait until the [...]
One of the developers I support recently came across the following error message in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (SP4): Server: Msg 8104, Level 16, State 2, Line 1The current user is not the database or object owner of table ‘table_name’. Cannot perform SET operation. Unfortunately, there’s little out on the interwebs about this beyond references to a [...]
Oh dear. History appears to be repeating itself. Some years ago Sun bought the Clustra database product. I was a big fan, and had a great relationship with the company. The sale made sense, but Sun just didn’t know what it had bought, and buried it deep inside another product. I held out a bit of hope [...]
As a systems administrator, I really should have known better. Yesterday, the machine (”dexter”) that hosts leyton.org, and a number of other sites and domains, died a painful death. It’s power supply (PSU) blew. Not content with simply taking itself out, it actually knocked out the entire power strip to which it was connected, taking [...]
There is a peril associated with dependency on a gadget. When it misbehaves, or you forget it, you can find yourself at a bit of a loss. My Garmin Forerunner 305 is a case in point: I forgot it on my first Cross Country race, and today I decided to go out for a quick [...]
I’d like to say that I’m no longer surprised by the need of so many IT professionals to re-invent a perfectly good wheel, but, well, I’d be lying. I am continually and utterly taken aback by the need by many in Information Technology to prefer to re-invent solutions to a well-known problem. Years ago, when I [...]
Bits and pieces
All go at the moment, so only time for a brief update: Wedding plans are proceeding well. We’re being cautioned by friends to stay calm as the day approaches, and I think we are managing that quite well. Got quite excited picking up the rings, as well as getting to see the finished product for something [...]