Be humble

There is only one time that living a little closer to the city appeals to me.  It is when the pig manure spreaders start to roll and today is one of those days.  A ripping snorting humongous tractor just pulled into the field across from my wee corner of the world and started spewing brown stuff from the tank it is towing.  The doors and windows are slammed shut with great haste and now we wait for the odor to permeate the house.

This list has been again reduced. Only the following are left:

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=516691

Google, the internet’s leading search engine, filed its much-anticipated plans for a initial public offering last night, igniting widespread excitement about a possible recovery in the technology sector four years after the bursting of the dot.com bubble

I suspect even people who do not like dogs will find this face hard to resist.  Thanks Jody.

In my day job, part of my colleague’s responsibilities is to maintain a farm of servers for off-island businesses.  I won’t bore you with why it is critical to maintain uptime on these servers - suffice to say that is is.

Being concerned and responsible, an adequate generator system was installed and adequate UPS support is provided to allow for switch over to the generator following failure of the utility system.

Thus, today, when the grid went down we were unconcerned.  A quick dash down 4 flights of stairs in the dark, a change of one switch and then a turn of the key on the generator and all was well..well, sort of.  The server room burbled along as happy as could be with no problems.  However, connectivity to the Internet was gone thus making it impossible for remote to the servers.

Question - what did we forget?  ..we neglected to include the data converters (at the end of the fibre) in our generator circuit.  Pop the data converter into a fully charged UPS and all is well again.

A good test of our system and one we learned from.

Full article

Security firms are alarmed at the speed at which a security hole announced by Microsoft has already been exploited by code found in the wild.

More for my own reference so I can find it later.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115876,00.asp

IBM and Stanford University have announced a new research group dedicated to the emerging science of spintronics, with the goal of creating prototype CPUs that complete computations through magnetism instead of today’s electrical charge.

Full story

The cards would not be made compulsory for at least seven years and only then after a parliamentary vote. But if, as David Blunkett hopes, people are eventually obliged to have an ID card, those failing to produce one could be escorted to a police station to have “biometric” data such as fingerprints and iris scans checked against a national database.

In the past year a friend has been called by his bank inquiring about the use of his credit card.  In each case, his credit card was being used in a place that was out of his ‘normal’ spending area.  Once was in Florida, once Spain and one was in another European country that I have forgotten.  This guy never uses his card over the telephone or Internet and has only used it in PEI and Nova Scotia.

I was thinking about this Sunday night when a server at a local restaurant disappeared with my credit card, telling me, “I will take care of that for you.”