A little background, perhaps: Last night I attended a Winter Party at a bar called The Sterling, in the ground floor of the Gherkin. I have absolutely no problem with the organisation of the Party itself, but more complaints about the Venue. I drink in various bars quite a lot. I’ve worked in a few bars. I observe how bar staff operate, and how their tills work. There’s a few longstanding massive problems with pretty much every till/billing system I’ve ever seen in a bar. ...

It’s only a few days after Black Friday, and eBuyer have experienced their very own Black Monday. I’ll set the scene. This morning, I had an email mailshot advertising a £1 sale of clearance range items on eBuyer. Sounded like an ideal plan, especially if there were any hard disks up for grabs. I never actually got that far though. I followed the “sneak preview” instructions, duly “liked” eBuyer on facebook. 10:30 rolled by, and oh look. Error 500 from eBuyer. Refresh. Try again. Same error. Connection terminated. Session reset. Page returned no data. ...

I came out roughly of my own accord, I think it was sometime in November 2000, but I can’t be that precise on the date. It seems a long time ago now. I say ‘roughly of my own accord’, because as the story will unfold, some might say I was outed. As a mere technicality, I came out to my internet group of friends a while before this. I remember that a lot more clearly as being a few days before my 13th birthday, or was it my 14th? Anyway. ...

So you wanna be a good sysadmin? I don’t blame you. It’s fun, and it’s lucrative. Especially if you do it right. The difference between a good admin and a bad one are many and varied. Most importantly, it boils down to a level of devotion to the company. And a knowledge that is expansive. Not that it has to be all-encompassing. One of the important things to know is the limit of your knowledge. Know your comfort zones, and know your limits. ...

I’ve been writing Java in one sense or another for a few years now. I learnt stuff at university, then used it in a few jobs. I’ve written Beans and Applets, and various bits of stuff in between. It’s fairly safe to say, that I like Java. One thing however, that’s been a pretty consistent bugbear in all the time I’ve been writing Java, has been the classpath, and dependency resolution. Luckily, all that can now change. ...

Right. This is important. I want you stop what you’re doing and read this. It won’t take long. I’ve just witnessed another act of homophobic bullying amongst school children. Sadly this time, they weren’t in uniform, so tracking down the school responsible is going to be somewhat harder. What I can tell you is that there were 4 boys, three black, one white, and all very troubling. The thing that troubles me most, as gay man living in london, is that if these kids are to be believed, then we are all under threat. ...

So there’s this saying, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a bored engineer”; I tend to think that it’s true. I’ve had very little to do at work lately, which has been in equal parts frustrating and annoying. I like having stuff to do. I like having plans for the future, but at the moment, there’s very little. Anyway. I popped into Westfield the other day, and caught a Free BBC Prom. Very cool. Then I had a poke around on my mobile and realised two things. ...

It has recently been brought to my attention that a number of users of cloud-based hosting services tend to use an “integrated” backup solution provided by the cloud host. This is probably some form of snapshot-based backup of a server’s state. I quite like the idea of doing this, especially if there’s no impact to the server being backed up whilst the snapshot is taken. However, I can immediately see one big problem with it. ...

Personally, I hate the idea of using a desktop as a server in a production environment. I’m going to define the term “production environment” first. If you’ve got an environment, any environment where the service provided is relied on by anybody, for any reason, then that’s a production environment. If it’s just for you, and you don’t mind when it all goes wrong and the shit hits the fan, then that’s fine. ...

This is a little ranty, but it’s really pissed me off lately. That’s right. It’s you. The ones with image hotlink protection, and the ones who rewrite URLs to do strange and special SEO things, but who don’t actually think about what happens when you send someone a link to something. (For the uninformed, hotlink protection is that thing where you get sent a link to an image, but the site owner is being draconian, and redirects you to google, because your referer wasn’t their own site, so the image must have been stolen, and put on another webpage (!)) ...