Posts by phunksta

Always a disaster soapbox

We know now that the massive outage was due to a "program" that needed 21 parameters and 20 were supplied, leading to a general protection fault. It wasn't tested as thoroughly as it should have been.

That doesn't mean the entire industry is completely coming apart and soapboxing the whole thing to point a quivering finger at "Agile" practice is due.

This happens because there are thousands of bored IT journalists and talking heads, not because there are some "fundamental" problems with how IT works

Not that we can't all do better, but this existential hand-wringing helps nobody.

Really, Microsoft have been making terrible UI decisions for decades now in all of their products.

Kinda tired of pretending otherwise.

Don't get me started on "start pages"

Just a bad TV

Honestly I wish I'd necer bought my Samsung TV.

I can stand the ads.

But itnis frankly just a bad TV. It constantly drops frames. On being challenged by several users, Samsung just shrugged it off.

Smerforce

I was a big fan of Perforce up to a point.

One day we found it had mixed up a code unit, leaving the wrong version in a build although the tooling told us it was up to date.

After a long battle and a good kicking from maangement we finally found the problem and had to manually patch the file into place as the tools refused to acknolwedge that the wrong version was there.

I could have forgiven this, but I contacted their support and sales (as they were a 'free small team' user but may have adopted the tools company wide). After an initial warm reception from sales, we got support who essentially 'gave up' after 1 email back and forth. Perhaps the direct evidence contained that their tools were unreliable caused some sort of internal conflict? Whatever, the support guy 'went on holiday' and the case went cold. Even after pressing the sales director, we were roundly stonewalled.

One of the main reasons comapnies use proprietary software vendors is to ensure when things go wrong that there is someone to ring and get help from. Unfortunately in my experience, when things go wrong, Perforce just go quiet.

try Ulteo OVD

I looked into doing somethingsimilar recently, and Ulteo OVD looked really interestin. It allowed a hybrid linux and windows virtual desktop setup, so you can serve up unavoidable windows apps (needs a terminal server) into a FOSS desktop.

I didn't go with this is the end, but I have issues with maintaining 6 old PC's that the users insist on making 'secure' by installing 7 flavours of anti-malware ;)