Sam, who sits opposite me at work, tells me that the latest firmware update for the PS3 was bricking boxes yesterday until they recalled it. Her better half didn't manage to download it in time, lucky for them.
Apparently calls to Sony support (in the uk at least) were met with the response "we'll come and collect it".
I guess my nearest and dearest were actually saving me a headache when the didn't buy me one.
I wasn't going to add my 2c to the debate rumbling behind the OpenSSL defect, (summarised nicely here) Plenty of knowledgeable folks have raked over those coals already.
But then I came across this story, I don't know how old it is, Hardworking Locksmith In Prisons and it struck me that the OpenSSL problem was essentially the opposite of the locksmiths one.
On the one hand we have a security technology which was compromised because its secrets weren't known and understood well enough, and on the other we have a security technology who's flaw is that it relies to a large extent on practitioners keeping secrets.
So the award goes jointly to the guys who compromised OpenSSL without knowing what they were doing, and the guys who compromise our homes and offices just because they do.
I'm still not sure whether I'm happier to rely on knowledge or ignorance for my security though.
Its old, but I only saw it the other day, and I laughed.. (If you can't see the video, perhaps you're reading this on a feed reader, click this link to you tube.)
Well yes, I've spent the past week or so trying to apply a load of stuff that I want to do from the world of Java to the word of LAMP, or php to you and me.
I should also say that before I embarked on my career as a java-weenie I'd spent four years man-and-boy programming perl, so the php itself wasn't any kind of hurdle, my challenge has been to see if I could introduce all of the application architecture patterns which I know and love from Java world.
So what things have I uncovered?
1/ IDE - the Eclipse PDT, with zend debugger, is excellent. Not quite as robust as Eclipse java tools, there are still some flaky moments and the code completion can't always work out what class $this->thing actually is, but that is all made up for and more by subclipse and the zend debugger. Keep up the good work PDT guys. For others who want to investigate I followed these instructions.
2/ OOP Yes, PHP5's OOP is pretty decent, but (obviously) it is weakly typed which I find annoying coming from a strongly typed background. And surprisingly I had to write my own classloader, which was fun and instructive and it seems to work fine, but why? I haven't started using exceptions yet, hopefully they'll be familiar.
3/ ORM Oh yes, this is cruicial to my plans Mua hahaha, and it seems so far that the excellent Doctrine ORM is well up to the task, if not quite in the same league as Hibernate. One thing thats puzzling me is where the transactionality has gone, but perhaps thats because I haven't read the manual fully yet.
4/ Logging, oh wow- log4php - in incubation at Apache this is the php sibling of log4j it works fine and smells very familiar.
5/ Unit testing, haven't tried it yet but while I was talking through my researches with the guys who will have to suffer the consequences of my decision making they said phpunit, which certainly sounds like the right thing!
6/ MVC I'm not keen to adopt a big framework wholesale, for reasons which I can't be bothered to explain now, but its been relatively painless to knock together an OO MVC framework using Doctrine, homespun controllers, and Views generated by the Smarty template engine which at least lets us bind, using simple {$my.attribute} syntax, display elements to objects from the model, not sure how far Smarty will suit at this early stage but its looking promising for now.
I have no stirring conclusions at this stage, but its looking good, stay tuned and I'll let you know how it all turns out.
We've finally re-arranged the office, turning what was the programmers room into a photography studio. Now we have room for eight more people, they'll get a flat-pack desk and drawers as part of the induction pack ;-)
Warning, I'm not advocating that you *you* do this! Determined to have a free (as in beer) operating system on the new servers I tried to put Ubuntu on them, but I couldn't get dell's open manage to work with the storage controller :-( so I've gone to CentOS 5.1 instead. Its more of a pain to get going with but probably a better bet in the long run.
Anyhow OpenManage installed fine, but being an untrusting guy I couldn't ship them off to the colo without knowing that I would spot a drive failure, so we simulated a failure by pulling out the cable. What do you know? It worked as advertised, and after pluging it back in again and rebooting (the R200's we've got don't have hot-plug drives) it rebuilt the drive quite happily.
Time to do the other R200 and the PE2950III, the 2950 has 8 hot plug 2.5 inch bays, we've only got 3 drives in there right now in Raid-5. How the hell can raid 5 possibly work?
Unless the third drive is like schrodinger's cat, in which case it would be a complete copy of whichever drive happened to be missing, my power of imagination is defeated by the idea that any 1/3rd of my data can be created from the other 1/3 and some meta-data bout the missing stuff. If thats the case why do I need the missing drive at all? It all makes no sense to me, but I'm happy to trust it!
The office was a frenzy of excitement yesterday because the black perspex was delivered for the photography. So I took this picture of a baby's Converse Allstars on it with my phone. Nice? I think so. Imagine what we can do with an actual camera.
When I was in Manchester the other day I was struck by the resemblance between it and Half-lif2'sCity 17, largely as a result of the Beetham Tower. The top images is Manchester, the lower image is City 17
Went to collect my teenage daughter from her guitar lesson today for the 1st time, so I got Nikki to show me where it was on google maps. I took a good look at the satellite view so's I'd know exactly which house to go to, and how to get to the right street. Neither of us knew what the address was, and even if we did we're satNav luddites. Imagine my surprise when I got there to find the same maroon car parked in the same place in the drive as was in the satellite photo.
I couldn't resist posting this picture, as you may guess we've got more shoe photography going on in the office today... but this time its going straight into the asset library, from where I plucked this beauty.
I still can't work out how to make Adobe Version Cue work with a linux samba fileserver, VC seems to use java and mysql, but for some reason even running the server on windows I can't select the network shares as the data location. :-(
I think I'll just admire the shoes and wait for inspiration ...
Today we had a visit from an extremely prominent Scottish Politician with a local (to us) background, which was weird but fun. At Quango X we were sheltered from the politicians by several layers of civil (and sexy, and grumpy, and anal-retentive, but not all at once) servants, so it was odd to meet One So Exalted on equal terms, he was pretty normal, but my cynicism nags me that perhaps he was being professionally normal. Anyhow I liked the guy.
Is this starting to sound like a Douglas Coupland novel? Perhaps. I'm currently enjoying JPod, read it you geeks...
We've also taken delivery of the subversion/asset library server, I set up samba and svn on friday, and any hints on how to make Adobe Version Cue use a linux/samba fileserver would be *much* appreciated, or how to integrate Bridge with svn. Comments *please*!!
I also set up our "pool" laptop for tethered photography directly into the library, we're starting to get perilously close to professionalism :-)
All in all another step closer to the dream, just gotta buy a rack full of servers now....
Well, things are settling down here at the not-so-new-anymore-New-Job. The changes we've made in production seem to have had a beneficial effect in de-stressing the boys and girls (pictured above) and, touch wood, we're making progress.
This week sees the introduction of new release management procedures and the start of a two week push to get all of the code into subversion, and all of the tasks into JIRA.
All of which is slightly hampered, I have to say, by the fact that the server its all supposed to go onto isn't due here 'till the 27th. But I'm an adaptable guy, we're using a pc that used to be someone's prized gaming rig to tide us over. It was either that or put it on the windows sbs domain server, but if I break IIS, Exchange or Active Directory I'd have to hire someone to fix it, and I wouldn't be happy with that prospect.
A week or so ago we managed to make four releases in three days for four different clients, and there was no hint of panic about them. Hooray!
The only stress we had to contend with was the self imposed stress of no one in the whole office being happy with our own new site! What's there now is a complete re-write from what was originally requested.
But hey, if we've got scope creep and change-of-mind syndrome sorted out for the paying work we can live with our own deficiencies for now.
And last but by no means least a long awaited update to our own Drive Business site, which as of today is still waiting for most of the case-studies to be completed, but at least it has a news section. I have to say I like the magazine style of the case-study that is there but I'm not sure that one big image of the PDF is quite such a smart move.
Oh, and we're still growing. More boxes from dell and ikea cluttering up the space, and more effort is being expended on building furniture and editing the organisational chart than is being exerted on the project plans. But such is the Way of the Small Business Employee.
Right, better get back to work now, whip-cracking to be done.
Iomart have screwed us up royally today. The Glasgow based hosting provider who's website boasts "100% uptime guaranteed" Have screwed up.
On thursday we got an email from subsidiary easyspace saying:
As part of our ongoing improvement to our Network and Infrastructure, we are in the process of moving services between datacentres. This migration is a simple physical move between two facilities and while no action is required by you, some customers may experience website and/or email downtime. In order to minimize customer impact, the move will be carried out over a 6 hour period from midnight on Saturday 26th January 2008 until 6.00 am Sunday 27th January 2008.
6 hours, complete by 6am you note.
It went on to say:
Mail & web services with the following IP Ranges will not respond during the outage: 84.22.184.XXX 84.22.161.XXX 84.22.162.XXX
Imagine my surpise when a machine with an address in the 84.22.180.xxx range wasn't responding at noon today, 6 hours after this downtime was supposed to have ended.
(In the past two months we've also been aware that they've wiped complete DNS zones for two of our clients, claiming unpaid bills or something when nothing of the kind was true.)
Whats worse is that I've spent all day trying to get in touch with them and they aren't answering the phone, or responding to emails, or support tickets. Our account manager is out of the country and not answering his mobile. I drove the 30 miles to their head office, it was empty and shut up for the weekend.
Iomart, you bastards.
1/ I wasn't expecting this machine to be affected 2/ Two days isn't enough time to do anything about contingency even if we had expected it 3/ What the fuck is going on? I can't even get in touch with you. Our clients are loosing money.
So in summary, you useless shower of twats, forget any more business coming your way from this direction.
Anyone else reading this, I suggest you look for a reputable company, I know I will be come monday morning.
Update: Its now 8 days since the "event", and although Iomart are reading this blog, we still haven't had a satisfactory explanation. Actually we haven't had any explanation at all. Way to do customer service guys.
Amongst the most significant differences between the Old Job and the New Job is the fact that we have designers and we do photography for clients in the office. Here 200 assorted pairs of new season shoes wait for their moment in the spotlight.
That was the question I jokingly asked twitter the other day, @sgala said "make IT happen". How right he was!
In one week I've: Tried to support my guys while they launched a new client store http://shop.ghost.co.uk/, or should I say officiated at its birth. Thankfully after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between anxious client and harassed project manager it snuck into action last night.
I've had to rebuild and redistribute PC's in the office to keep the wheels of industry turning while I sort out my purchasing budget.
I've fixed some annoyances with the internal DNS server and a certificate problem that had stopped us from using Outlook when we weren't in the office.
I've set up a dead letter email account in M$ Exchange for diverting bounces to, first time I've touched Exchange. It isn't Apache James.
I've installed JIRA and provided some initial training to project managers and developers, but there's still a long way to go. At least we're starting to get most of the immediate tasks and all of the new stuff into some kind of workflow.
I've set up the tomcat/IIS ajp "thing", and set up a proxy in IIS, for JIRA. I've never touched IIS before either, and boy was it wierd compared with the king of webservers Apache httpd. I've chaired a meeting with my managers, and another with the same folks for project status updates.
I've been to a sales meeting at a potential client's printing works, we got lost on the way there but it was interesting and hopefully worth our while.
And last but not least I've been exercising my sysadmin and dba skills (how that will make my SLC former colleagues laugh!) getting tough on slow performance by optimising httpd and applying new indexes to speed up worst offending queries. Now http://www.allsaintsshop.co.uk/ and http://www.qubeshoes.co.uk/ are flying along in fine fettle for the peak of the christmas shopping season.
So Santiago, you were right it seems like I have just made IT happen. :-)
