Tag: tech

Insane Terms and Conditions

Whilst waiting for my comment to be published on the Daily Mail web site, I took a quick glance at their terms and conditions – just to ensure that there wasn’t some obvious rule that I was breaking by calling attention to their hypocrisy. I didn’t find the “you can’t disagree with us” rule, but… Continue reading Insane Terms and Conditions

Why Corporates Hate Perl

Over on O’Reillynet yesterday I wrote the first part of a series of posts entitled “Why Corporates Hate Perl“. I’m working through some rough ideas that might just form a talk of the same title at next year’s YAPC::Europe. I didn’t think that anyone would take any notice of my random thoughts, but this morning… Continue reading Why Corporates Hate Perl

Showing Appreciation

I’ve mentioned here before that I run a small free software project which supplies simple web programs. The programs are quite widely used, but we generally only hear from the users when things go wrong. It was, therefore, nice to get a mail from someone who hadn’t had any problems and just wanted to say… Continue reading Showing Appreciation

Anniversaries

It’s been a week of anniversaries. Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of the first London.pm meeting. And last night we had our tenth anniversary meeting. But for me personally, today is an even bigger anniversary. It was twenty years ago today that I started my first “real” job. I hope you won’t be too bored… Continue reading Anniversaries

More Password Idiocy

When will web sites start to be careful with people’s passwords? Oh, I know that a few sites get it right, but it seems to me that the vast majority still don’t have a clue what they are doing. Here is today’s example. I got an email this morning from a company called RAM (that’s… Continue reading More Password Idiocy

Drizzle

When I first read about Drizzle last week I assumed it was some kind of joke. It turns out that it isn’t, so it just makes me a little depressed. Drizzle is[1] a cut-down version of MySQL. MySQL is the database server than has been known to make grown database designers cry because of its… Continue reading Drizzle

Twitter Hierarchy

For most of the last year, I’ve been working behind a corporate firewall which blocks most social networking sites. It’s therefore only in the last month or so that I’ve been able to use Twitter all day every day. It seems to me that many of Twitter’s users have slightly distorted the sites original purpose.… Continue reading Twitter Hierarchy

Password Antipattern

I’ve come across the “password antipattern” twice today. And I had different reactions to it each time. I thought it was worth trying to work out why that was. Let’s start by explaining what I mean by the “password antipattern”. There are many bad ways to handle users’ passwords which I’ve discussed at length before,… Continue reading Password Antipattern

(Not) Buying NT Tickets

I just saw that Russell T Davies is speaking at the National Theatre. I’m a big fan of his work, so I decided to buy tickets. I wandered over to the NT web site and found the event I was looking for. I added a couple of tickets to my shopping basket and went to… Continue reading (Not) Buying NT Tickets