Like German Tourists...

...the stupid are everywhere.

It's an old joke from the days of Red Dwarf, and I'm sure I've used it before many times. However, reading utter uninformed crap from a school teacher, regarding free and open source software warrants the usage again, in my mind.

I can understand that some one has a difference in opinion and I can understand the right to complain. What I don't understand is why you'd write such a thing if you appear to know absolutely nothing about the subject†.

The thing I most love about the article is that it ends in such a childish way. The 9 year old nerd in me loves that.

† Scrub that. All you need to do is take a look at the BBC's open comments to see why.

Windows DFS shares, junctions and permissions

Here's another one that caught me out today, but I've never come across before.

Under a DFS share, any linked shares are created as junctions. It appears that the permissions on these junctions do affect the permissions of the data within the linked share. Whilst this is logical, given how junction points work, what really threw me was that the wonderful, wonderful GUI didn't reflect this and the permissions on the junction point had been inadvertently changed.

It's not like you ever need another reason to chalk one up for the command line, but there we go!

Moving sucks giant donkey cock

Having never actually moved, in memorable life, I clearly had no idea what I was letting myself in for. About 15 days ago I started the process of moving into my new house with a few guys I know from school. Bugger me sideways it's ridiculously hard work, and ridiculously shit. We were only moving from Bath to Bristol, and that was bad enough. I dread to think what its like moving from one side of a country to another, let alone to another country altogether.

I had wanted to write a massive Clarkson-esque rant, but quite frankly I can't be arsed. Moving is fun. The act of moving sucks giant donkey cock.

Not exactly elegant, but pretty much how I feel about the whole thing!

On the off chance there was an important non-work related email, PM, or whatever I apologise if I've not yet responded. Unfortunately between all the mailing lists, and even with 99.8% accurate spam filtering, I have rather a lot of stuff in my inbox to sort. If was really important, it might be quicker just to mail again.

Throttling baby penguins with packet shaping

Bandwidth throttling, or packet shaping, is becoming a more common feature that many ISPs give you, the consumer, for free. This is killing the planet. Bear with me and you'll see sense.

During UK working hours, and peak times in the evening many will see traffic being shaped (and these periods are being increased). Effectively this means that the only period where any legal and unhindered downloading can occur is between the hours of midnight and 9am. At the company I work for, we all work from home - which means pulling down ISOs and other media from companies like Microsoft, etc. during the day - which we can't do any more without the line being throttled. During the day this kills us as our VoIP phone system can get stuttery, connections to servers becomes unreliable or you get poor responsiveness.

This now increasingly means that I'm keeping PCs on during the night to get the stuff I need. For our small company multiply this by 3. Now take into account illegal downloads and the population of the UK. Now multiply this across the world.

I'd be willing to bet that the environmental impact of upgrading the infrastructure to the home would be less than that caused by the number of computers eating electricity.

So, ISPs - Stop killing the little baby penguins.

Importance of a good pass phrase policy, and a lesson in humility

This early evening I made a mistake. It was a user mistake. I'm ashamed to admit it, but in my defence it's been a long day and I've been driving and doing stuff for my older relatives, so I'm feeling a bit beat.

Basically what I did was type in a passphrase, into what I thought was a particular application, but actually I had a different one selected. This selected application was adium, and the window selected was to one of my mates. This sort of mistake can happen to anyone; not just users, but admins as well. As much as I trust the mate in question, I can't take the risk, especially since it was over a public network.

This actively demonstrates the importance of having distinct passwords for each application and service, and just why each service should have a set of distinct rules for the complexity of a password. I follow this rule ridiculously - many of my passwords are randomly generated, whereas the one in question was not (and I'd been meaning to change it for quite some time - so this had done me a favour). Immediately it was changed and I was safe, although feeling very, very, very, very, very stupid.

So, whilst it maybe convenient to use the same account details, it's not a very wise idea at all. This will be one story I'll use in the future to explain why a good password policy is important to our customers and clients, at work. After all, users will love an idiot moment from one of their [mostly] infallable admins, and it's unlikely that they'll forget it (however, at the end of the day, we're all human).

However, this kind of leads me on to a little rant. Why on earth, in this day and age, do some services still email your password, if you use the "I've forgottten it" facility? This means one of two things;

  1. They store it in plain text
  2. They store it in reversable encryption (i.e. not a hash)

I would've thought that people would've learnt by now. Apparently not.

So here I am, publically admitting that I'm a dick, but proving the point and success behind a good passphrase policy (you don't have to be a company to have a policy). Now, if you'll excuse me but this paranoid, obsessive, control freak is going to obsess and tripe check each account! Again. And again. And again. Argh.