Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • Slackers and IT

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    Go read “Science Fiction Is for Slackers.” As a rule, science fiction may be the laziest of all genres, not because the stories themselves are too facile—they can be just as sophisticated and challenging as those of any other genre—but because they often revel in easy solutions: Why walk when you can warp? Why talk…

  • Separating Bash Histories

    Years ago, maybe 2011 based on the age of files, our Systems group moved our Linux home directories to a central system. My only real complaint about this move was finding anything I needed in my Bash history. See, I am terrible at remembering things and often make typos. It is easier to go back…

  • Athens Tech Blogs

    Our office resides in Athens, GA about an hour from Atlanta. A work news post noting Atlanta tech blogs was strange to me. There is plenty HERE. Why ignore all the great local stuff? And I do not mean my blog. I post too infrequently to really matter and mostly ignore technology of late. Four Athens is a…

  • AMLS Rec Engine

    Now anyone can tap into the Amazon Machine Learning Service (AMLS)? I’d love to see Ellucian’s Banner product make smart recommendations based on AMLS. Students register for university classes through Banner. I could see Banner leveraging AMLS to figure out that students who like certain classes might be interested in other classes. There already is a market trying…

  • Facebook Ads

    I hide ads all the time as an attempt to improve my experience. (I also have gone through the Ad Preferences page to ensure I get what I want.) When I hide them, Facebook Ads offers a link titled “Why don’t you want to see this?” with various options clearly missing an obvious one. They…

  • TED Talk: The Internet’s Immune System

    I really enjoyed this TED Talk on hacktivists the first couple times I watched it a year ago and a few months ago. Not sure why I have not yet posted it. The beauty of hackers, says cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari, is that they force us to evolve and improve. Yes, some hackers are bad…

  • Snow Storm Effect On Traffic

    Tuesday afternoon a bit of snow hit Georgia. We get them occasionally even down here in the southern United States. Usually they hit the mountains. Everywhere else, we just shut down for a few days. Unfortunately, we do not have all of our Atlanta schools on one system or all of our south Georgia schools…

  • Leading Zeros In A Batch Timestamp

    As “plumbers” for 17 databases and over a hundred application servers, we really do not have the time to sit there and watch them all. We design things so problems are pushed up to our attention. We are still getting point of predictive alerts to failures like we were on RHEL/Weblogic/Oracle, so usually we only…

  • SQL Server Alias Naming Breaks Convert Function

    The vendor installs the application which includes creating the database and schema (SQL Server 2008 R2). The schema defined a certain column as varchar(128) that the application code expects to return an integer. If one of the entries for a client is a non-integer value, then HTTP 500 Internal Server Error failures prevent users from…