Archive for the 'Stuff' Category

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If you can read this, thank your sysadmin

Published on 20080725 in Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day

You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”

The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”
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Africa from the rooftops

Published on 20080722 in Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

If you have a look at the page “Where I’ve been” you will see that I have traveled in most of Sub Saharan Africa.  I travel in Africa for work, which is installing advertisement monitoring systems for one of my customers. more....

How to fight Zombies

Published on 20080409 in Bad Tech and Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Anyone that runs a mail server very quickly learns how to fight spam if he wants to do his job properly. It is also one of the favourite pastimes of the clueless to think up stupid ways to fight spam. Today I saw a brilliant answer to one of these ideas on the postfix mail list. more....

Be careful where you put your grubby little paws

Published on 20080401 in Bad Tech and Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

While we are talking about Jacob Zuma and company down here in SA, the Germans are debating the use of biometric data for identification. One of my favourite groups the Chaos Computer Club of Berlin has pretty much proven that using biometric data like fingerprints, retina scans or facial features are not such a good idea by lifting their minister of interior Wolfgang Schäuble’s fingerprints and then showing how easy it is to fool these sytems. more....

All Software sucks!

Published on 20080330 in Bad Tech and Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Wordpress, the software I use for this blog is great and has a wonderful plugin system that allows people to add functionality that is not originally included in wordpress. Unfortunately many of the available plugins are not so wonderful and often do not work as expected (advertised). more....