Rollbacks important

Rollbacks are important in my business. It's pretty astonishing to me how difficult they are, or impossible, on mobile devices.

A building where I used to work

Rumor has it, 33 Whitehall still doesn't have full power. Poor Datagram.

Usenet is what?

Dare I say, up yours Lifehacker? They say:

Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media, giving you speed and reliability you won't find with other file-sharing options—like, say, BitTorrent.

That's funny. I was under the impression that Usenet, or Newnews, is

a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system.

That has some rogue groups dedicated to rather illicit activities. But what do I know.

Terrifying things seen on the Internet

Never a good sign when someone slips this in at the end of their post:

We are moving away from TeamBox.com as our Project Management suite as it just wasn't development oriented as we needed and we currently have no Version Control system.

You may have more problems than can be solved by posting on a StackExchange.

A love affair with XML

As if that wasn't enough, the application itself was causing network issues. While its communications had originally been based on small HTTP messages, that had been changed because of what Fried called “the organization's love affair with XML.” The messages had grown in size up to 3000 bytes—twice the maximum size of an Ethernet packet—so there was a “hockey-stick spike” in traffic and dropped packets.

I was there, and it is true.

Bug depends on phase of the moon

Oops. Scroll down to the end of an interesting RMS interview.

The Paypal Screwjob

Now imagine my surprise when I got an email from PayPal last Wednesday with the subject "PayPal appeal denied". Because I never had to appeal anything with my PayPal account. Reading through that email I discovered that my account was blocked because they've decided that I'm not allowed to receive donations.

This had me puzzled. Because I know that if a big company like Geeknet Inc., the owner of sourceforge.net offers to their users to use PayPal to receive donations, something had to be wrong with PayPals decision to block my account. So I asked for clarification and of course how I could get all the money I have in my PayPal account back. All I got was some lame default answer.

Classic PayPal move - they freeze your account for "suspicious activity" and you're done. Best to set up with a real back that can't arbitrarily take your funds.

You know the waterfall?

Apparently the model was introduced in an article saying how it was such a bad idea. However, there was a pretty picture and so it became a NATO standard. Oops.

Direct deposit considered harmful

Some 64,000 retirees, including 53,000 UFT retirees, who rely on electronic pension payments had funds involuntarily withdrawn from their accounts on Nov. 6, causing all sorts of grief for those counting on the money. The Bank of New York Mellon, which is the transferring agent for the funds, erroneously reversed the October benefits payments to retirees paid through electronic fund transfer. The total came to almost $189 million, according to the City Comptroller’s Office.

And this is why I take my checks in paper form.

User friendly and deletes your data

Apparently there are circumstances where Apple's Time Machine backup product will delete all of your old backups to make room for some new data, like after an upgrade or when attaching a new drive to the system.

This is exactly why I use tapes. See the following dialog:

OS X - "Please insert week 3 user data backup tape, I need to wipe it so that I can replace your backups with copies of OS X binaries though you already have those on DVD"

Me - "No"

Backup horrors

Two words: Offline backups.