1. Get into office. Assume coffee is there. 2. Check Nagios. 3. Quick look up the screens to check the usual jobs are running. 4. If all's cool, continue day as normal.
The important bit 'check Nagios' can be phrased as 'make sure everything's running'.
Ok, mod me down for this if you will, but why not just vote with your feet and go to a different ISP?
In these days of webmail and portable email addresses/domain names, why don't more people do this? It's still a buyer's market, and there's still lots of mom-and-pop ISPs who'll be glad of your business.
All the talk of 'taking legal action' smacks to me as being what's typically wrong with the entire attitude of everyone today. Compensation culture and all that - where there's blame there's a claim.
Well, this is timely - I put together a revival of a bulletin board I ran in the late 1980s which can be dialled into, running on a 32kbyte Acorn BBC Microcomputer Model B.
You can find out more about my 'efforts' here, and some photos of the efforts here.
One thing springs to mind - Google needs to crawl or mess with information. Certainly here in Wakefield (north England) the best people to provide journey planning is the operators themselves.
I frequently plan journeys using our local system. This 'knows' service outages and diversions (sometimes which happen at short notice) and provides me with a useful plan. It works if the 1910 from Leeds broke down just down the road, and I'm asking which bus is the next one. It works if the 0917 to Doncaster is late, and will take it into account when finding me a connecting bus. It helps that the local transport is "managed" by the local Passenger Transport Executive, I assume there are others like that in the world.
I just don't think Google will be fast enough with transport companies to do this. In most cases it's not even as if the providers advertise service outages to third parties since it might just be one or two buses which are awry.
Anything by Nicholas Fisk is good for that age bracket, but especially 'Highway Home' and 'Trillions'. Very accessible sci-fi for kids, although if you've already educated them in Pratchett and Heinlein you're probably way ahead of this.
I don't see why it's such a big deal for CentralNic to do it, really. UK.com is their domain for them to do with as they wish.
I worked for CentralNic day-to-day for a few years, and the company last enabled this in, er, 2000 I think. It lasted 3 days, during which we were subjected to a barrage of emails from people saying 'wah wah what have you done you've stolen my site' because they'd forgotten to put the 'co' in 'co.uk', and IE had attempted to be clever and autocomplete with '.com'.
I think the change now is probably because they're doing a bit more with portals, and it makes sense for them to increase the eyeball level by doing this.
We've been doing photo sharing for a few years longer than Flickr, and had this problem for a while. We ended up writing some filters which score suspicious-looking jpeg files (things like image dimensions vs filesize for one).
It wasn't uncommon for us to get a 200x200 jpeg which was about 10M in size, and find RAR headers in it. Given the volume of photos submitted it's a bit hard to scan everything but we score it and it works 99% of the time.
Of course, there's the pillocks who'll upload a photo called "winxp-sp2-cr4ck3d.r01.jpg", and oddly enough they're pretty easy to spot;)
It's nice building stuff on your own but this sort of hardware doesn't cut it when you're talking about servers, and I suspect with all the manpower the cost-per-server is actually *more* than if you'd bought it in its entirety.
Places like Sight Systems will quite happily spray-paint a case for you or even etch a logo into it, and the 2U cases they do will happily house reasonably cheap P4 boards (they even do fans for them).
Plus, 4U cases which take standard ATX PSUs are now less than £100 in the UK (you get to do the math if you don't live in the UK). Quite why "bloke makes a rackmount server using rackmount bits" makes Slashdot I don't know.
ISTR that there were a pile of them already "reserved" by telcos the world over by.tel and this is how they got them on-side.
I think the.tv guys were involved too.
(caveat: I did some work for the 2001 proposal in a former life, and have no knowledge of what's happened since then, so this may be complete bollocks now).
Slashdot Mirror
prot's been telling us that for years.
Others have mentioned Nicholas Fisk - my father brought me up on them as "good starter sci-fi" :)
http://blog.joel.co.uk/index.php?itemid=235
My T42p went back to them lots++ of times over the three years I had it. Eventually they gave me a refund.
(..putting the 'NO' in Lenovo.)
1. Get into office. Assume coffee is there.
2. Check Nagios.
3. Quick look up the screens to check the usual jobs are running.
4. If all's cool, continue day as normal.
The important bit 'check Nagios' can be phrased as 'make sure everything's running'.
I'm wondering if there's mileage in an anti-trust suit against the Beeb for this...
Ok, mod me down for this if you will, but why not just vote with your feet and go to a different ISP?
In these days of webmail and portable email addresses/domain names, why don't more people do this? It's still a buyer's market, and there's still lots of mom-and-pop ISPs who'll be glad of your business.
All the talk of 'taking legal action' smacks to me as being what's typically wrong with the entire attitude of everyone today. Compensation culture and all that - where there's blame there's a claim.
Hur hur. Penetration.
Blog entries passim starting here, with pretty much all the posts here.
(in short, 15 repair tickets so far and counting, replacement's arrived and is bust...)
You can find out more about my 'efforts' here, and some photos of the efforts here.
"Wah wah wah wah wah my free lunch is a bit cooler than the other people who pay for the ovens wah wah wah."
I frequently plan journeys using our local system. This 'knows' service outages and diversions (sometimes which happen at short notice) and provides me with a useful plan. It works if the 1910 from Leeds broke down just down the road, and I'm asking which bus is the next one. It works if the 0917 to Doncaster is late, and will take it into account when finding me a connecting bus. It helps that the local transport is "managed" by the local Passenger Transport Executive, I assume there are others like that in the world.
I just don't think Google will be fast enough with transport companies to do this. In most cases it's not even as if the providers advertise service outages to third parties since it might just be one or two buses which are awry.
Geocities, 1996. 'Nuff said.
Anything by Nicholas Fisk is good for that age bracket, but especially 'Highway Home' and 'Trillions'. Very accessible sci-fi for kids, although if you've already educated them in Pratchett and Heinlein you're probably way ahead of this.
Do you get free cookies with it, or maybe even the recipe? ;)
I think it was probably Cthulhu attacking the whale. Elder gods get really pissed off when they're awoken from their slumber.
[Disclaimer: Vested interest]
I don't see why it's such a big deal for CentralNic to do it, really. UK.com is their domain for them to do with as they wish.
I worked for CentralNic day-to-day for a few years, and the company last enabled this in, er, 2000 I think. It lasted 3 days, during which we were subjected to a barrage of emails from people saying 'wah wah what have you done you've stolen my site' because they'd forgotten to put the 'co' in 'co.uk', and IE had attempted to be clever and autocomplete with '.com'.
I think the change now is probably because they're doing a bit more with portals, and it makes sense for them to increase the eyeball level by doing this.
But, er... doesn't seem such a big deal.
We've been doing photo sharing for a few years longer than Flickr, and had this problem for a while. We ended up writing some filters which score suspicious-looking jpeg files (things like image dimensions vs filesize for one).
;)
It wasn't uncommon for us to get a 200x200 jpeg which was about 10M in size, and find RAR headers in it. Given the volume of photos submitted it's a bit hard to scan everything but we score it and it works 99% of the time.
Of course, there's the pillocks who'll upload a photo called "winxp-sp2-cr4ck3d.r01.jpg", and oddly enough they're pretty easy to spot
There's some pics from UKUUG linked at groups.fotopic.net/ukuug05.
Maybe it's possible that Yahoo's going to do some sort of tie-in with Shazam (v useful service, especially when a song's niggling you).
Well, 'duh'.
Loads of companies have shown us that it doesn't matter how thick the brick wall is, they'll still run at it full-pelt until it falls down.
"Rise, my young apprentice..."
(eek).
It's nice building stuff on your own but this sort of hardware doesn't cut it when you're talking about servers, and I suspect with all the manpower the cost-per-server is actually *more* than if you'd bought it in its entirety.
Places like Sight Systems will quite happily spray-paint a case for you or even etch a logo into it, and the 2U cases they do will happily house reasonably cheap P4 boards (they even do fans for them).
Plus, 4U cases which take standard ATX PSUs are now less than £100 in the UK (you get to do the math if you don't live in the UK). Quite why "bloke makes a rackmount server using rackmount bits" makes Slashdot I don't know.
Oh well. Maybe I'm just getting old.
"And in related news, Longhorn's webserver fell on its arse after 50 geeks attempted to look at the eye-candy simoultaneously..."
Does this mean that there'll be no more legal threat amusement from Sweden?
My life is no longer complete. Bah.
ISTR that there were a pile of them already "reserved" by telcos the world over by .tel and this is how they got them on-side.
.tv guys were involved too.
I think the
(caveat: I did some work for the 2001 proposal in a former life, and have no knowledge of what's happened since then, so this may be complete bollocks now).