* Posts by kevin mulholland

15 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Aug 2009

NASA to work on approved sci-fi books

kevin mulholland

Surely books that inspired NASA would be better

Which books inspired people to join NASA, become astronauts/engineers etc.

I know that lots of ones by Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein would be topping the charts

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

kevin mulholland
Angel

If you believe in some form of afterlife and event programming

when ('trumpet call') rise_to_heaven() ;

when( 'rebirth') become_ant() ;

when( 'zombie apocalypse') eat_brains() ;

etc.

LG Optimus Black

kevin mulholland
Flame

Slightly better than my £100 Orange San Francisco

Got to be worth the extra £300!

Maybe the Orange Monte Carlo (ZTE Skate) would be a better option?

Twin-screen LG smartphone spied

kevin mulholland
Coffee/keyboard

Looks like a n900 keyboard

Does that mean the rumours are true?

Nokia: regular WinPho handset releases through 2012

kevin mulholland
Joke

one every two months

Surely their manufacturing plants can knock out thousands a day.

Or is this part of the MS plan to destroy them?

Shuttle mission: SPAWNING of the SPACE KRAKEN

kevin mulholland
Joke

According to Tom Holt's book "Blond Bomshell"

Squid can be used for supercomputers.

Maybe that's their porpoise in this case?

Motorola's laptop-dock Android phone out on Orange

kevin mulholland
FAIL

Buy one it mayu be better than expected

According to the orange website it is "the worlds fastest phone with a 2Ghz dual core processor & 1Gb RAM"

Much better than the one you can get from everyone else who only supply a 1Ghz Dual core processor

First fondleslab found in 1970s kids TV sci-fi gem

kevin mulholland
Thumb Up

also check 2001: A space odyssey

Tablet computers were available in this film too, though 'made' by IBM

Ten... wireless keyboards

kevin mulholland
Thumb Up

logitech diNovo Edge

Has everything you need, bar the solar powered option

EU to lift flight ban on carry-on liquids

kevin mulholland
FAIL

Its not a problem getting liquids on the plane

Once you are past the scanners, where duty free is normally located.

Breaking the habit

kevin mulholland
Stop

Bit at a time

Was it not possible to 'upgrade' departments one at a time to the new system, this would give you a learning experience of the users pain points as well as not creating chaos for your company come Monday morning.

Departmental manager buy-in, selected expert users in each department to cover the simple stuff; so that everyone does not hassle IT straight away. These are the things to do. Expert users can be give the new kit weeks in advance of the department upgrade,everyone knows its coming, as the can actually see change happening.

Oh, and even though I hate to say it, get a project manager to supervise and organise. They can then take some of the management flak for things not going to plan.

Reduce chaos, increase simplicity, all VM's as similar as possible, push configs to linux boxes via scripts if you have not gone down the puppet route, reduce typing that you have to do when dead tired after 80 hours working.

Don't do things that make the entire company think that all IT do is cause problems and cannot create solutions, you will not win friends.

Save us from our users

kevin mulholland

Creating passwords is easy

There are plenty of programs to do this, give the user a big list to choose from via a webpage, create lots of passwords on the page and then let them choose, its even easier if the passwords are able to be spoken phonetically.

If you want to distribute passwords, send the user a text, then they can keep the password at hand but out of sight, there are plenty of sms gateways out there. Then for the few people that do not have mobiles you can manage by hand.

simples!

Short passwords 'hopelessly inadequate', say boffins

kevin mulholland

iptables is your friend

You can construct rules for ssh brute force attempts, you may be able to do the same for windows. This allows you to keep on using 8 character passwords as the attacker is restricted in time to what they can do.

Elon Musk plans new Mars rockets bigger than Saturn Vs

kevin mulholland
Flame

....nor shalt thou burn rocks.

Surely this means no nuclear fusion?

Men in Green step back from GM's 230mpg Volt claim

kevin mulholland
FAIL

proper figures

Why not report how far you can go on a full charge and a full tank, without any recharges and of course report the tank size, so we can judge for ourselves how useful an overpriced hybrid car would be.