Viewing profile — spongle

Our senior tech guys do the patch Tuesday meeting but a big chunk of our kit is internet facing. If you're offline or behind a (decent content filtering) firewall then the impact i…

It's equivalent to puppet from a conceptual point of view. Puppet is better library-wise but its had longer to mature. Not much in it though.

It was a small company (family farm machinery outfit) but their requirement is far more common than a massive software deployment. There are literally millions of servers churning …

It's important because it is the last bastion of simplicity in the UNIX world. It's open, a single cohesive system, is cleanly documented, cleanly engineered and small enough to re…

No I wouldn't unfortunately. I would, probably controversially, use Windows Server 2012 on mid-range HP DL or ML series kit. Since Windows 2008 R2 and the scriptability provided wi…

Indeed. HP's Z workstations are pretty good though.

According to the logs, quite a few telnet attempts until about 2003 then it tailed off. Connection was up for around 2-3 hours a day. No incoming calls and wardialers as the modem …

Probably quite a low percentage however it seems to be used as the proving ground for new tech such as IPv6 and ISC seem heavily into it so it's still really important regardless o…

I set up a dialup gateway for a company with NetBSD 1.3 in 1998 on a compaq pentium 90 desktop with 32MiB of RAM. I got a call last year (!) from the owner saying it stopped workin…

It was UTF8 so no guarantee about character versus byte size.

Like they know what the hell is going on? Most people don't know the difference between Windows and Word. This is just going to confuse them further which is not a great way to win…

I really don't get this. It doesn't make sense at all. Its like going into McDonalds and finding a Burger King stall inside it. This is going to be an experience as smooth as a 197…

Whilst this is a post of derision, I do think people only know the highest level abstraction mankind can accomplish these days. It's embarrassing really. There is elegance in simpl…

Until you bust a tooth :( (this had happened to me twice)

Spot on. If I could upvote this a hundred times I would. I had a certain well know recruitment agent basically begging for me to go and work for them a couple of years ago. The age…

Probably no privacy laws there ;)

Yep we canned it because of that, plus it was unreliable and our code and architectural review scared the shit out of us.

Why do people even still use paypal? Fucking infuriates me. It's safer to transfer your money in cash in a transparent bag with "steal me" on it.

Indeed. The problem Is that nutters vote nutters in. A big chunk of the UK consists of nutters. Look at the EDL for example. I've lived places where idiots like that are worshipped…

I do have giant projects (which is what I'm referring to) unfortunately.

Well I'll have a lot more time on my hands so perhaps it isn't a bad thing. Perhaps the fragmentation it will cause will destroy closed media on the internet as a whole. Nothing ba…

You're definitely not an idiot. I applaud your approach and wish you all the best in the future.

Well having been through plenty of formal education, I can assure you the point of education is to make uniformly cut cogs and make teachers and universities money. If you don't tu…

Yes Django developers can get your hourly dose of not responding alert bubbles, HRESULT crashes and upper case menus as well! I spent a couple of hours with visual studio python to…

Actually as a solution architect I have to deal with all sides of the problems: people attacking, audit companies, penetration testing companies and software engineers leaving gapi…