* Posts by batfastad

894 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2009

WD slims down SSD to squeeze into little Black drive range

batfastad

Installation complexity!

> The word "building" indicates the level of installation complexity.

> You need to get inside your PC or notebook to install it and may well need a somewhat specialised allen key-type screwdriver to fasten the locking nut that holds the end of the card once it is plugged into its socket.

I'd say it's almost identically complex as installing a 2.5" drive, perhaps even less so. Often you'll have multiple screws, buffers, caddies, proprietary-clip-on-SATA-right-angle-mungers etc.

When working in IT it's easy to forget how difficult things can be for the typical punter but I don't think the installation of an M2 drive deserves the ranking of "complex".

£189 for 512GB NVMe M2 drive... now that is tempting!

Don't believe the 5G hype! £700m could make UK's 4G better than Albania's

batfastad

Shoddy.

Just offloaded my trusty old 1st gen Moto G and now able to experience 4G for the first time. Central London and with 4G on my new phone spends more time connected through GPRS than 4G and my actual signal for calls/SMS is intermittent.

Turn 4G off then I get perfectly adequate 3G HSPDASPPAH+ (or whatever it is).

I didn't think it was actually possible for the UK to get worse at infrastructure.

Gluster techie shows off 'MySQL of object storage' Minio projects

batfastad

Re: anyone using mysql for simple key value store

> is probably using the wrong product.

Possibly. Though the memcached interface to InnoDB with MySQL 5.6 is pretty great. And you get replication of the data for free, persistence and you don't have to operate a separate key-value infrastructure unless you need to.

MPs suggest introducing web blocking to tackle suicide rates in UK

batfastad

Re: And so it begins...

@Hollerithevo: Yes I appreciate the Gov appears to at least be thinking about taking positive action on this issue.

Blocking of legal content is censorship.

A few years ago it was blocking illegal child pornography. Yesterday it was logging all accesses to completely legal content because terrorists. Today blocking legal suicide information off the internet because they likely think you can't be trusted. Tomorrow...

batfastad
Black Helicopters

And so it begins...

Nanny is at the door. She wants her peons back.

They'll be attacking the judiciary soon enough. Oh...

Major outage at broadband biz 186k

batfastad
WTF?

Re: Accounts overdue

@Dave Pickles - You might be on to something...

http://status.as8401.net

> Broadband Services Subscribe

> Investigating - If you're currently experiencing an outage with your broadband service please be advised that you will need to find an alternative broadband provider as we are unable to continue to supply your current service.

> Please direct any queries to support@186k.co.uk

> Other services, such as website hosting and e-mail are unaffected.

> We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

> Dec 13, 09:36 GMT

WDC loads its belt-fed drive cannon, blasts out disks 'n' cards galore

batfastad
Flame

Instant Secure Erase

"Instant Secure Erase" doesn't sound very secure to me.

Better to do a few rounds of ---------------------------------------------------------->

Uber is watching your smartphone's battery charge

batfastad

W3C API

Genuine question. Why would the Uber app, or any native app, be using the W3C battery API when it's a native app and therefore presumably it has full access to battery status... and lots more besides!

DISCLAIMER: I'm not an Android dev so don't know how the native APIs work - are they just be wrappers around the (developing) HTML5/W3C APIs then?

Thank you for installing SimpleCalculator. This app needs permission to access your camera, stored media, microphone, location, phone call and message history, internet browsing history, stored finger prints, payment details...

LeEco Le Pro 3: Low-cost, high-spec Droid takes on the big boys with a big fat batt

batfastad

Massive

Why are all phones from the last 12 months absolutely massive? I'm not interested in anything with a 5.5" screen.

Still rocking an original Moto G here and would like something a bit bigger, actually thicker and heavier would be fine as well if that can cram in a larger battery.

IETF plants privacy test inside DNS

batfastad

dnscrypt?

Is this not the same as dnscrypt?

https://dnscrypt.org

https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy

Anyway ICRs are harmless, the government said so.

Outlook outage outrage

batfastad

Free

So just ask for a refund.

WDLabs goes Pi-eyed and sees triple

batfastad

Re: Correction

Thanks. That caused me a WTF as well.

Power 'issue' fells UK web registrar's servers

batfastad
Coat

Small number of customers...

So 100% of their userbase then? :p

Seriously, these are in the same bucket as 123-reg and Fasthosts for me.

Pwnfest drops a nasty surprise on VMware

batfastad

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Good old HTML 4 default table styling... I have missed you!

Google BigQuery TITSUP caused by failure to scale-yer workloads

batfastad

60% of the time

... it works every time!

Some! at! Yahoo! knew! about! mega-breach! as! early! as! 2014!

batfastad

Of course

Of course they did. Look at those who had the largest shareholdings at the time and work down in descending order. Sell, sell, sell!

British defence minister refuses to rule out F-35A purchase

batfastad

Well

So at least the "killing other humans at long-range" department has still got funding.

Windows Server 2016 persistent memory support supercharges storage IO

batfastad

Re: Reminds me of...

Or the Gigabyte i-RAM from 2006... http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/storage/6200-gigabyte-gc-ramdisk-i-ram/

I remember we got one of those for a particularly busy (and poorly optimised) database and it was just the coolest thing. I remember thinking "this will be the future - no moving parts".

UK minister promises science budget won't be messed with after Brexit

batfastad

> we repatriate a bunch of EU budget

LOL! Repatriate to the nearest wall in the form of a warm yellowy liquid.

I've been in the Remain Hard camp for a long time because I do not think UK politicians and civil servants can be trusted with anything more than a box full of paperclips. Actually treasury tags are probably safer. Any actual money, budgeting or policy decisions on anything further ahead than the next election should not go anywhere near Westminster. Remove all sovereignty whatsoever from UK.gov.plc.ltd.uk immediately and give it to the Walloons.

Gov.UK goes TITSUP

batfastad

TITSUP

means TITSUP.

And so we enter day seven of King's College London major IT outage

batfastad

Re: See it all the time

If it's anything like most managed racks DC/colo offerings I end up working with (against), it will often be sheer beauracracy preventing the drives being replaced, not alerting. Beauracracy of raising a ticket with global service desk, often using some weird Excel macro form, global service desk routing it to the right NOC, admin shipping a replacement drive, NOC finding the replacement drive in the loading bay after a bit, needing a new ticket to schedule the work, needing a new ticket for engineer access, replace the drive, shipping the drive back, the drive was never shipped back, etc.

When I'm at a company with a facility in or around London I always prefer actually going there. It's a train ticket and a taxi, it's an afternoon out of the office, but it's done in a day. Not two weeks of "to me to you" with overworked underpayed on-site NOC.

Blighty's Home Office database blunders will deprive hundreds of GB driving licences

batfastad

Internet Connection Records.

See title.

GlobalSign screw-up cancels top websites' HTTPS certificates

batfastad

https everywhere!

It always works.

Yahoo! halts! email! forwarding! to! outside! email! addresses!

batfastad

WTF

See title.

Given that I every day I get at least one spam from a contact's Yahoo! e-mail address, this is probably a good thing. It's "last one out the door turn out the lights" time at Yahoo! me thinks.

Google may just have silently snuffed the tablet computer

batfastad

Netbooks

I always really liked netbooks. Fair enough, the early netbooks were pretty dodgy. 7" screens with gigantic bezels, CF cards masquerading as SSDs, weird screen resolutions, custom Linux OS that would never be updated etc.

I bought a 10" Asus 1005HA-P, 4GB RAM, Atom processor, 2.5" HDD, 10+ hr battery life and just over 1Kg in mass. Rocked that thing for years, perfect for travelling, cheap enough to be considered disposable, expensive enough to have a bit of grunt, ran a full OS (albeit Win XP) so could actually get stuff done in GIMP/Office/text editors etc. I could never see the advantage in a tablet over that netbook.

It died after 4 years of hard travel. I moved on. Asus Zenbook and now a slightly larger Dell XPS 15 with dedicated graphics. Bought an Android tablet which gets chucked around by the kids but I have never felt the need for a tablet. An ultrabook and phone do the job for me.

Nissan reveals self-driving chair

batfastad

Cool

They did this vid earlier in the year... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1D07dTILH0

We live in a golden age!

Ordinary punters will get squat from smart meters, reckons report

batfastad

Take back control!

Brit politicians and civil servants sure know their stuff. Take back control!

People wonder why nuclear suddenly got all expensive on us?

50 years of virtually no investment in virtually all of the country's infrastructure except for a few marquee projects. It's cheaper to build it before you need it instead of 30 years late.

The 4-5 year lurch between red and blue parties in Government in the UK seriously holds back long-term investment and planning of the evolution of core infrastructure. Every few years a new task force or re-branding of a Gov dept, going around in circles. Sigh.

batfastad

Dumb meters!

It turns out all these dumb meters monitor is the total energy consumption of your house. Larger consumer savings could be gained by buying smart sockets or by spending the money on modern and sustainable energy generation capacity, not just chucking some windmills about and installing remote kill-switches in everyone's houses.

Is there an API accessible by the home owner? Am I able to programatically switch provider/tarriff based on spot market prices etc? Unfortuately these are better described as dumb meters.

We've not had a meter reading meatbag around here for years, because it turns out I am a human and able to read some numbers off a screen and type them into a website or write them onto a form and put it in a free post envelope.

BBC to demand logins for iPlayer in early 2017

batfastad

BBC

Whenever anyone complains about the quality of the BBC's content vs commercial/subscription output just point them to Sky One's Friday night schedule... 9pm: A Day In Greggs!

You think educational/intellectual quality of the BBC has gone down? Unfortunately I feel they're just mirroring the general standard of society.

I'm amazed it's taken so long for them to start trying to lock down iPlayer use to be honest. The costs must be pretty significant. I know a few people who complain about the License Fee and that they don't own a TV but are happy enough to gorge themselves on the latest Dr Who/Strictly/whatever.

batfastad

My first thoughts as well about get_iplayer. I have a feeling it's doomed.

Ofcom blesses Linux-powered, open source DIY radio ‘revolution’

batfastad

Potato

If it sounded better than my last DAB experience which had the sound quality of a potato underwater then I'm all for it!

The problem with DAB is that a high proportion of annual radio listening time is when the receiver is moving around or in remote locations, an order of magnitude higher than with DVB. And DAB is pretty terrible at coping with either of those things.

If anyone can point me in the direction of a portable pocket-sized DAB radio that can get through a whole test series of Test Match Special on a pair of AAAs then I'm sold! But until then, LW it is!

Unimpressed with Ubuntu 16.10? Yakkety Yak... don't talk back

batfastad

XFCE

That'll do.

Half! a! billion! Yahoo! email! accounts! raided! by! 'state! hackers!'

batfastad

So...

So everyone still employed by Yahoo! at this stage may as well get their coats with the last person turning the lights off on their way out.

Delaying this announcement for two years will have given any execs with a decent shareholding ample time to get rid.

What's Chinese and crashing in flames? No, not its economy – its crocked space station

batfastad

test docking procedures

Snigger.

WTF is OpenResty? The world's fifth-most-used Web server, that's what!

batfastad

Re: lighttpd..

> That Microsoft IIS is now way ahead of Apache by market share of sites is surely of rather more note?!

Nope. It means that the main use of IIS is ad funnel sites and domain parking pages that noone ever looks at. I remember M$ did a deal with GoDaddy a few years ago to give them all they could eat M$ licenses if they switched their domain parking pages to IIS.

Bad news: MySQL can dish out root access to cunning miscreants

batfastad

Recent versions of MariaDB are diverging away very quickly from the MySQL/Percona/Facebook/WebScaleSQL pack.

As much as I dislike Oracle, I would stick with Percona or upstream (Oracle MySQL) for now.

Oracle to be fair has done some outstanding work with MySQL 5.6 and onwards, it just seems like it took a few years for it to be fully Borged.

How long it will take before it's fully Borked though!

Spinning that Brexit wheel: Regulation lotto for tech startups

batfastad

Sigh

Brexit is now the focus and excuse for failing politicians and policies for the next 20 years. Brilliant.

If someone presented Brexit to our change board they would have been absolutely fscking torn to shreds. Brexit means Brexit means Brexit? CALL THAT AN IMPLEMENTATION PLAN??!!!!

Brexit must not break the cloud, Japan tells UK and EU

batfastad

Re: Jesus wept

> "Being out the EU means we can subside strategic industries once again!"

With what exactly? £350m of magic Unicorn droppings?

What do microservices do to data stores? Netflix is built on them and had no idea!

batfastad

Re: containers != microservices

> Also worth pointing out that Netflix only adopted containerisation recently, previously they were on AWS EC2 exclusively.

You can't run containers in a VM?

Physicists believe they may have found fifth force of nature

batfastad
Coat

Sixth surely?

Because... bacon!!

NVMe over Ethernet startup flashes 'system' as it preps for decloak

batfastad
Coat

Malwankar

Snigger.

Apologies, my inner child made me post. I'm on my way ----------->

VMware: We're gonna patent hot-swapping your VMs' host OS

batfastad

Re: Glee!

I can agree with that. It blows my mind that I can run almost 4,000 VMs in 6U of UCS chassis and still have CPU to spare.

My point is:

- Webapp running in a single 64GB VM

- Webapp running in a single 64GB physical host

- X hundred containers of your webapp running on a 64GB physical host

You might improve your CPU utilisation but your webapp throughput will not improve as much as you think just, because, containers.

batfastad

Glee!

> I can gleefully run 5000 containers on a standard 2 socket server today.

Yes. 5000 containers. Doing fsck all.

Chuck a bit of work at all of them and send us a picture of your glee!

I bet your typical webapp would get maybe 10% more req/s throughput contained vs VMed... if that. Benefits of containers are rapid spin up/tear down and full stack of microservices/endpoints on a single host. Not improved throughput.

Seriously though, happy to be proven wrong of course.

HMRC's IR35 tweaks have 90% of UK's IT contractors up in arms

batfastad

> just to be devil's advocate but technically Apple and Amazon et al comply with the law. doesn't mean it's right, just shows that the law is sometimes insufficient

Yes, legally, they comply with the law, in a completely legal fashion. They have done nothing illegal, nothing against the rules and therefore nothing wrong. That's my opinion anyway, as someone who abides by the law and therefore does nothing wrong :)

batfastad

As a contractor myself, I do pay my fecking taxes. I pay the fecking taxes that the fecking law requires me to. Not a fecking penny more, not a fecking penny less.

Do you pay more fecking taxes than the fecking law requires you to? I bet you fecking don't.

Domain name bods NetNames netted by CSC Global

batfastad

Mad

I've never known anyone in this post-dot-com-bubble-burst era charge such high fees for domain registrations, renewals and transfers. The fact that they have lost so much money when their markup on wholesale registration fees is in the 1000% range is, well, impressive!

Zero-day hole can pwn millions of LastPass users, all that's needed is a malicious site

batfastad

Re: Why?

I have several hundred online accounts too. And re-use a base password for most of them that don't really matter, forums etc.

But on top of that I have a memorable and repeatable method of mixing extra characters, numbers and symbols into my base password. So I end up with a site-specific password of at least 25 characters, mixed in with all sorts of pseudo-random. The hash (assuming the site is hashing - grr!) will be different on every site and I only have to remember the base password and my "salting" method.

batfastad

Why?

Why would anyone, ever, give their passwords to anyone else?

Me? For most general sites, non-e-commerce, I have a resonably long and complex base password as a salt then add a salt permutations and patterns of characters from the URL to pad the length. For anything a bit more sensitive, with payment or address details, then I have a more complex base and more rounds of my salting.

Unique and complex password for each site and memorable/repeatable, for me at least.

Secure enough now? Probably. Secure enough in 10 years' time, maybe not.

But at least they're not stored on someone elses servers using unknown reversible encryption.

Docker and storage – solving the problem of data persistence

batfastad

Re: Containers

But where's your postgres data? And how does a 64GB container compare to a 64GB VM?

batfastad

Containers

For me containers are for serving code, not for data. If you end up running database or document/file/object store instances in containers then you're doing it wrong. I still believe it's easier to have your data in VMs instead of containers.

We have several applications that are pretty scalable running on ephemeral AWS nodes, created when that was the only option, and it's so much simpler operationally. Data backends are not as elastic as frontends, true, though we try to use object/file stores when possible so the scaling is not our problem. Patching and application upgrades have always been a case of just blowing away the VMs and deploying new, so you phase rollout. You also avoid all that legacy and cruft that people dump into directories and never clear up.

I don't see the advantage of running 5x database containers in a VM vs 5x database VMs. Though if someone can explain that to me then happy to reconsider.