Articles
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Microsoft opens office in Poyais
A few months ago, I woke up after a long sleep-in to find A looking a bit confused. She had just received a phone call from “Microsoft” who had detected a problem with our router. At least, it was a problem on our router, or perhaps a problem from our router. Either way, apparently there was some malicious problem with the computer here — which one, they did not say — and they were apparently calling to resolve the issue; in English, no less!
I shrugged it off as complete and utter bollocks, and life went on.
After speaking with my father in Australia today, it turns out he's received a few of these calls too. For him, it was “Microsoft” on Castlereagh Street in Sydney, although with a terrible phone line and some almost incomprehensible Asian accent it could have been anywhere.
The similarity between the two incidents seemed too much of a coincidence — it seems like our friends from the Republic of Poyais have returned.
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History of the web
The media are abuzz about a new gallery at the National Media Museum in the UK which is opening today. The new exhibit is called Life Online, although they're also referring to it as LOL, probably to keep the kiddies happy.
I'm curious as to how accurate the exhibit is, because museums tend to embellish facts to keep things interesting. If they mention that the Internet was created for nuclear preparedness, I'd walk away. Since the focus is more “web” orientated, I'd probably be a bit disappointed if they didn't mention Gopher as an early iteration of the web.
I'd be really disappointed if they didn't at least mention Doug Engelbart's extraordinary demonstration from 1968, which showed groundbreaking stuff created by him and his team at SRI that we take for granted today (watch it if you haven't)..
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Dear Google
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Neighbourly consideration
🏠Living in an apartment building can be difficult. It's important to get along with your neighbours and respect each other, but everyone has different ideas on just how far that goes and what that encompasses.
Most of our neighbours are lovely people and keep to themselves. Unfortunately a small few just aren't considerate, probably for no reason other than they've never thought about how their actions affect others. To this end, I offer a short list of things you can do to ensure that you are a considerate neighbour for a peaceful coexistence with your neighbours in the apartment building.
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Progress
Everything's a computer these days, and with so many of these devices being connected to the Internet it seems that engineers are getting lazier. Being a software engineer myself, I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't become a plumber.
I worked a full day yesterday despite it being a Saturday, mostly performing code deployment and system maintenance. For those of you who work in the industry, you'll know that it basically means sitting around waiting for progress bars. I've returned home and want to decompress from my day of waiting, only to find more progress bars waiting for me!
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Barcelona
A surprised me this (long) weekend with a trip to Barcelona for my birthday. I'd been before very briefly on a road-trip back in 2006 with Scott and loved the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of the city considering the size.
As per usual, no real plan existed for the weekend, so we relied on random wandering and the occasional geocache to navigate to interesting spots, so there's not a considerable amount to say really, and I haven't sorted through the photos yet. I tend to avoid playing the tourist and try to live like a local on holiday, so city trips tend to be more about shopping, eating, and exploring the life within the city, rather than queuing to see monuments.
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Audit season
Ahh, Easter. A time for many — my nieces included — to eat obnoxious amounts of chocolate (thanks, by the way, Datalogic for providing this year's stash).
For others, it's a time to reflect on a guy who was purportedly nailed to a large cross after throwing one hell of a party with lots of booze, but was later found with a traffic cone, at which point one of his mates (Tom) earned himself a nasty reputation for putting his fingers where they don't belong (although he was probably still hung-over).
Many people just see it as time off work.
For me, it's a bit different.
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Too long
Apparently the reason I'm so slow to get blog posts out is because my posts are always really long or difficult to assemble. That's pretty much true, so let's keep this one short. Do you prefer quality over quantity, or vice versa? I prefer quality, which tends to become quantity. Woops‽
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A Festivus for the rest of us
Another year, another free box of chocolates from the suppliers at work. This year I managed to fly my parents over from down under for Christmas in the snow (albeit unintentionally). Could there be any more snow and ice?
Now that they're here, I intend to prove my theory that there's a Belgian Beer for everyone, and my ultimate goal is to get my Mum (who doesn't drink alcohol aside from the rare glass of wine) to admit that's the case.
I wish you all the best for 2011!
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Christmas and so forth
Christmas is very fast approaching, and Brussels is becoming decidedly cold again. It's that time of the year when most people in the office are mentally on holidays, whilst still being physically present, so trying to get things done tends to grind along at snail's pace.
If you think you're cold, we've recently had the windows replaced at the office. Late-Autumn/Early-Winter is clearly not the first choice when deciding on when to replace office windows, and I can tell you: it's pretty cold for those who just sit at their desk most of the day. Brrrr!
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IPv6 is coming
It's taken its sweet time getting here, but IPv6 is quickly becoming not only a reality, but a technical necessity. After debates at work with the network administrators over whether it's really needed (they don't think so), I figured it's time to take my own (little) stand on the Internet and prove it's not the scary step into the big unknown that people think it is.
My involvement with IPv6 goes back to 2002, after participating in the experimental 6bone network. As ISPs are still very slow to take up IPv6 support, I've ran a dual-stack IPv6 network with Internet connectivity through the free Hurricane Electric Tunnel Broker service on and off since. For those of you not willing to play too much, an alternative has popped up known as Teredo which essentially does the same thing, and support is built into Windows Vista (or you can do it under Linux using Miredo, which has proven to work well on our proxy servers at work).
But this isn't enough.
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Happy Obama Day!
After what feels like a sempiternal reign of incoherent belligerency, we can finally say goodbye to that imbecilic Texan simian and his band of merry idiots, and welcome something fresh — hopefully something successful.
Now Barack, I might be just one voice in an enormous sea, speaking from outside your country's borders irreverently, but let me say this as clearly as I can so that it might be picked up by a whitehouse.gov flunky: Don't screw up.
I don't particularly care about politics within the United States especially, but considering how inextricably tied the world is to your country — financially or otherwise — and the current state of society at large, it seems you have a hell of a mess to clean up; In particular after your predecessor. I don't envy your task ahead, but please: Don't screw up.
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Christmas is nearly over, finally
It's Christmas time again. It comes around every year, and for some reason this year I really couldn't care less. I don't think I'm becoming a scrooge, but rather I think it has something to do with the fact that Christmas started four months ago and I'm sick of hearing about it.
But never fear: for in a few day's time Valentine's Day promotions will start, and before too long Easter will rear its ugly head — all obscenely ahead of schedule.
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Goodbye Walibi
Tonight we visited Walibi for Halloween. For a change, “we” not only means friends, but sadly half of my office came along tonight as a gift from one of our vendors.
I'm sorry Walibi: You had me, but you lost me.
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Ghost Towns
☢Ghost towns have always piqued my interest. There's something interesting about how a large number of people can gather together to build a town, or even a city, only to have some unforeseeable event render the area deserted.
Because of the Victorian Gold Rush, I'm familiar with quite a few ghost towns from an Australian perspective, however sadly there's not much left due to the Australian Government's policy of destroying them.
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Brussels Summer Festival
Since 2002 the city of Brussels has organised a bunch of live music events around town each summer, and last year it came to my front door. Despite certain folk petitioning against its return, it has once again graced my neighbourhood and presented me with some new talent to consider.
As always, this year I missed several events, and certainly the festival lasts longer than the three days presented here. Nevertheless, once it arrives on my doorstep I cannot ignore the Brussels Summer Festival.
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Welcome to the Republic of Poyais
☎Scams will always exist as long as the general population of the world remain stupid and ignorant. I attribute any rise in the number of scams to be directly related to the state of the economy — any increase from the “normal” level of scams usually corresponds directly with any economic uncertainty within the market.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last twelve months, you have surely noticed that there is a bit of a problem with the global economy. If you haven't noticed then you must have at least noticed that scams are on the rise; Ingenious as some of them may be, now is a good time to use your brain.
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The audits
My audits are in full swing at work this month, which is why I'm fairly quiet lately. Each year I get dragged into several audits because of my line of work, including an internal audit, an external audit, and a federal audit.
Needless to say, it's a pain. More-so, it's a terrible detriment to the environment. The photo shown here is one security report from our system in a format that our external auditors prefer. Each year, a small tree gets printed, each page signed by management, and approved by the auditors, all in the name of Sarbanes-Oxley — Ha.
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Fixing other people's code
I'm sick of fixing other people's code. I love the open-source community for all of the free and high-quality software that's out there. I've even contributed my own little bits and pieces, mostly in the form of patches, here and there.
What I hate about the open-source movement are the egos. The problem is that the people who started a project end up actually belittling the project because of their own arrogance. Suggest something, or even provide a patch, and these particular people will tell you that your idea is wrong, that you don't know what you're doing, and so forth. On the other hand, they may never respond. I can understand this to a certain extent; I work in IT, and we're all control-freaks at some level.
Over the next year or so, I'm going to start rewriting my blog from the ground up, because this is ultimately the only way I can get the performance and feature-set I want without hacking at someone else's system. This also means my little DVD collection database will be frozen and remain incomplete until I rewrite that part too.
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DVD Overload
I like movies.
I hate cinemas.
I'm a home theatre kind of guy.
While I may not actually have the fantastic home theatre setup now, my DVD collection has grown significantly over the last two years. People around me have taken notice, and it's become a common gift for me, especially since I'm a difficult person to buy presents for.
This collection has grown to the point where it's become somewhat of an addiction: I'm now faced with a queue of DVDs I've bought or been given as gifts that I still haven't watched!
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