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5851

Web Link Captor / Re: Latest Web Link Captor Release - v1.08.01 - December 24, 2011

« Last post by IainB on December 12, 2011, 04:28 PM »

In terms of "other uses", I'm not sure, but I wondered if this app. might be relevant: Boxie - Fix Music File Names (from id3 tags)
I wanted to take a look at their website but Malwarbytes tells me it is a dodgy URL, so I didn't.

5852

Web Link Captor / Re: Latest Web Link Captor Release - v1.08.01 - December 24, 2011

« Last post by IainB on December 12, 2011, 03:32 PM »

In the output preview section, is there a recommended way to transfer the output elsewhere?  With the appropriate tab selected Control+A, Control+C, and Control+V at the destination?

yeah i suppose i really should have a Copy To Clipboard button shouldn't I?

-mouser (December 12, 2011, 06:49 AM)

Maybe also consider implementing a design concept of structured integration with CHS, rather than ad hoc extensions?
So you might get, for example (from this thread so far), options to:

• INPUT: recognise and pick up the search terms from CHS, if they were already in the CHS database.
• PROCESS: include CHS database records (of some definable type) in the search for matches.
• OUTPUT: output results to CHS.

That could save a lot of duplication of effort and mucking about when using the WLC (assuming that you already had the relevant data in CHS and wanted the output in there too.)

On another point, I would be very interested in ß testing WLC if you were opening it up for "...additional uses in creating different programs that do different things but use the same paradigm of letting user assemble and configure chains of batch scripts to run" (as you had intimated above).

5853

General Software Discussion / Getting InfoSelect v5 to work on Win 7 64-bit Home Premium

« Last post by IainB on December 12, 2011, 02:17 AM »

(As posted to the InfoSelect Yahoo! user group forum.)

Spoiler

InfoSelect Yahoo! group member  harmonexxray (Bob) had suggested that I post this experience to the group.
He had separately emailed me to say that:
"I noticed that in one of your posts you mentioned that you were able to install IS8 on Win 7 64 bit.
I use IS5 and was not able to get the installer to run on Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit. I tried changing the compatibility mode but no luck."

IS5 is currently unsupported by Miclog.
After some email discussion with Bob and playing about with IS5 (which happened to be the first version of IS that I bought a licence for in 1998) I established that:

1. If you already have IS5 installed and working in your old XP or other old system, then just copy the IS5 program directory and database files across to similar-named folders (or whatever suits you) on your Win7-64 PC.

2. You could also copy the C:\windows\IS.INI file across, but that may not be necessary, as IS5 will create it if it is not there.

3. If you do not have IS5 installed, then get it installed on  your old XP or other old system using the install file from Miclog:
    http://www.miclog.com/ftp/is/5/is50022.exe
    You have to take this step because that install file apparently will not run on Win7-64.
    What you need are the installed files and folders, that's all. You could ask someone to install it on their old system if you cannot install it yourself, and then copy the files/folders from their PC or get them to email you a zip file containing them.

4. Once this has been done, you should be able to run IS5 OK. It should ask for the Reg. Key on startup, and then continue OK. However Bob had been having the "asks for password every time I start the program" problem.

    I have not been able to replicate the repeat request for Registration Key password that he mentions. I suspect that this is due to the run priority not allowing is.exe to write the Key to the Registry.
    If this is the case, then this problem can probably be avoided by changing the is.exe file Properties: change compatibility to XP SP3 Admin. (Try it and see.)

5. Spellcheck and Thesaurus: The other problem that can occur is that spellcheck and/or thesaurus does not work.
    To have the FULL spellcheck (Ctrl-G) function and Thesaurus (Ctrl+Shift+G) working, you must have these files (listed below) in the is5 program folder. This is what they are/do:
    (established by a process of trial and error)
    151.lex - English Thesaurus.
    171.lex - American-English Dictionary - you select which dictionary you want in the is5 Options.
    271.lex - International English Dictionary (UK-English)- you select which dictionary you want in the is5 Options.
    100.sup - spell-check support.
    200.sup - thesaurus support.
   (Note that the thesaurus only seems to work if you have the American-English Dictionary selected. I currently have no fix or workaround to that.)
EDIT 2011-12-13 0108hrs: As per the IS5 Help file:
       Attn international users: Please note that the thesaurus is only available in American English.

        These files are here for you to download if you do not already have them:
         is - InfoSelect v5 (and later) English spelling and thesaurus files.zip  

And that's it. Let us know how you get on or if you find any mistakes in the above.
By the way, all the necessary files mentioned were obtained from Miclog, so you should not have any difficulty sourcing them directly. You might have to hunt around for them a bit, that's all.

Hope this helps or is of use.

5854

Web Link Captor / Re: Latest Web Link Captor Release - v1.08.01 - December 24, 2011

« Last post by IainB on December 11, 2011, 03:46 PM »

+1 from me for what Ath wrote.
Quite elegant!

Just curious:
On the input: would it be possible to direct the proggy to recognise and pick up the search terms from CHS, if they were already in the CHS database?
On the searched sources: would it be possible to have the proggy also search CHS for matches? (I think this would imply that the data to be matched was in the Clip data, and the related URL reference would be a string (or strings) in the Notes column/field or the Clip data.)

5855

General Software Discussion / Re: rename pdf, word, etc files based on their text content

« Last post by IainB on December 11, 2011, 08:16 AM »

is there any tool that will rename files like pdf, word, etc based on their content text?
ie, if a specific match of a regex exists in the content of a pdf file, then rename the file with that match

-kalos (December 09, 2011, 02:45 AM)

Without knowing more of what lies behind your request, it may be difficult to see how to help.

I think you might be able to get this done in some shape or form by using a reference management system that can handle PDF files. From that perspective, I would suggest that Qiqqa might be worth a look. I haven't played with the latest version, so I can' t really say any more about it.
Qiqqa  could maybe even be modified to provide a feature that you have asked the author to put in, if it wasn't there already.
Also, you might find that the capabilities of something like Qiqqa enabled you to discover a new/changed requirement to this current requirement.
Adobe may have something to help here too, of course.

5856

Living Room / Re: Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.

« Last post by IainB on December 11, 2011, 07:04 AM »

@Paul Keith:
Curation:

Spoiler

I apologise if I seemed a bit harsh on "curation" and its derivatives, but it's difficult for me to see clearly after my eyes go all red on seeing so much BS/buzzwords and then glaze over with hate for the spin merchants or whoever exposes us to such seemingly anti-rational gobbledegook. And maybe as a a result I did only make a cursory review of the Scoop-it thing - but hey, I could probably be forgiven for that, because  my patience had already been sorely tested by that stage.

In any event, it seems to me that the emperor still has no clothes despite my having spent some considerable cognitive surplus on the subject and consuming a lot of aspirins in the process. Maybe it's just me or my eyesight that can't see/understand it, but it seems that you have not yet been able to provide sufficiently coherent definition or fact to be able to establish whether the term "curation" and its derivatives are anything more than undefined hyped-up BS buzzwords that an implied 97% of scientists bloggers believe to be true.(A logical fallacy - an appeal to the consensus.)
That latter bit is in reference to your:

...it seems enough people find use in the idea...

- which is an implicit appeal to the consensus.

Maybe the earth is still flat, and maybe Hitler was grossly misunderstood, and maybe eugenics/Communism/Fascism/[insert religio-political ideology or pseudoscience here] is the way ahead, and maybe there is anthropogenic global warming, and maybe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, but I remain incredulous regarding these things until they are able to be substantiated as unequivocally true.
Oh, and Jim Slater or the Enron guys weren't really all such con-men as history makes out to be.
And don't get me started again on Maslow's apparently disproven theories or his concept of "self-actualisation"
Or the pseudoscience of phrenology.

And please don't ad hominem me for referring to people with limited reading ability and/or low reading age. That's just a plain wrong thing to do, and another logical fallacy. What I referred to was quite valid, and I can substantiate it.
My training in written marketing communications taught me to always aim for a reading age of preferably 11, but 14 at most for media communications (using the Flesch–Kincaid readability test). This is not cynical, it is based on pragmatic research:

(From Wikipedia Flesch–Kincaid readability test)
The F-K formula was first used by the US Army for assessing the difficulty of technical manuals in 1978 and soon after became the Department of Defense military standard. The commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the first state in the US to require that automobile insurance policies be written at no higher than a ninth grade level of reading difficulty, as measure by the F-K formula. This is now a common requirement in many other states and for other legal documents such as insurance policies.

Flesch Reading Ease scores:

• 90.0–100.0: easily understandable by an average 11-year-old student.
• 60.0–70.0: easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students.
• 0.0–30.0: best understood by university graduates.

(Mind you, I have come across not a few university graduates who seemed to have been particularly challenged in this regard.)

My training is to use the F-K Readibility Scoring method in most of my writing/documentation. For example, this post/comment of mine is approx 39%, so it's not likely to be fully understood by a number of readers and who may well even have lost interest and stopped reading before this point. I have already had one person in the DCF comment that I am "...the man who writes the longest and most convoluted posts in the entire forum". I think this was from the same person as used a logical fallacy without realising it and, when I mentioned it, seemed to think it was a matter of opinion as to whether it was a fallacy.(!)
It's always likely to be much easier to read some sharp and simple notes than it is to read someone's articulated thinking. Articulating your thinking (as opposed to an opinion) or reading someone's articulated thinking requires thinking and work. But that didn't stop me from at least trying to understand what it was that you were writing about in this thread, however difficult I found it. I figured you would not have made the effort to write what you did if you had been uninterested in communicating your articulated thinking on the subject. I really appreciate that you did that.

Gamification:

Spoiler

The quote re Why Financial Literacy Fails (from getrichslowly.org) made interesting reading.
The trouble I had was that it was a relatively facile article. There seemed to be too much fuzzy thinking and opinionating in the article (which is actually the sort of thing that made me stop reading that blog site a short while after starting to read it a couple of years ago). For example, when a statement is constructed with "I think/believe that such-and-such is the case", what is usually being described is an irrational opinion/belief - where "irrational" means not having any substantiation as to the truth of the statement.

Thus, just as my ears prick up when I hear someone using BS buzzwords, I become cautious when people say "I think..." or "I believe...", because what seems to invariably tend to follow is a stream of unsubstantiated opinion masquerading as "thinking" - which it often categorically isn't.
If I find myself using these same expressions, I watch myself carefully.

The article provides no definition for:

• Financial Literacy
• behavioral education
• Behavioral Finance
• Personal finance

- and yet these terms are used and bandied around in the article as though they actually mean something.

There's nothing wrong with the article that couldn't be fixed by a complete rewrite.
However, for me the article was like the parson's egg - "good in parts".
The good bit was where it said:

And in August, I wrote about a new wave of folks who are exploring the gamification of personal finance; they’re trying to turn money management into a game.

That could lead to a useful definition:

Gamification: The process of turning an aspect of, or a process in our lives into a game, in order to enable us to manage these aspects of our lives more effectively and efficiently.

Of course, there is no "new wave of folks who are exploring the gamification of personal finance". I have been involved in creating such games for students to play (on a mainframe computer) as learning games since the early '70s. Things have moved on a bit since then - e.g., I can practice placing buys and sells on the stock market through an online game system run by my New Zealand bank, which is similar to a game sponsored by the Wider Share Ownership Council in the UK in the mid-'70s.

Despite all this, it tends to be the case that the operation of accounting systems - and especially banking/insurance systems and processes - are a closed book to the majority of the population (who have not studied the theory of accounting and national payments transaction processing). I have a very cynical view that this state of affairs is maintained by the banks and insurance companies because they can only really maximise their profits by maintaining an impenetrable transparency of their operations. The last thing they want is a theoretically perfect Keynesian market where all consumers know what products and services are on offer at what prices, and from which financial institutions. That means that it is very difficult for the typical consumer to know/understand what the heck is going on with their money in the financial market.

5857

Found Deals and Discounts / Download Microsoft Learning Suite Free

« Last post by IainB on December 10, 2011, 08:13 AM »

This could be useful: Download Microsoft Learning Suite Free

5858

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 10:58 AM »

@40hz: That comment of mine was deliberately and completely tongue-in-cheek.
I blamed you and @Carol Haynes as I thought you were both completely undeserving of any blame and could appreciate the joke.
Yes, "red whale" was my invention. It's a very large red herring.
To criticise someone else for spelling errors whilst at the same same time making a spelling error oneself seemed an amusing thing to do - a joke about oneself.
I have to admit fabricating the bit about @superboyac and his making an OP about Angelina Jolie, for the purposes of making a joke. AJ is to me a typical representative of the great deal of wrong that is done to our daughters - to create/manipulate women in this world to conform to a stylised male ideal sex object.

5859

Living Room / Re: Huh? Thailand can put an American in jail for posting internet content??

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 10:32 AM »

Sorry, I don't think that I said in any of my comments above that I actually thought:

• that the lèse majesté law;
• that rendition;
• that allowing extraterritorial enforcement of local laws (e.g., laying charges against sex pedophile tourists returning home from a perverted holiday in Thailand);

- were necessarily good things per se.

I was not seeking to justify these things or be an apologist for them, but was merely trying to communicate an understanding of them from the likely Thai perspective as applied to the US citizen who was nabbed on re-entering Thailand.
For these purposes, my opinions on these things are largely immaterial and quite separate, and I do not wish to expound on them or argue for the "rightness" of my opinions.
These things are as they are.
Thus I would not necessarily be in a position to disagree with the majority of views put in this thread.

5860

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 06:34 AM »

To be fair this topic isn't about the second hand paperback market either

-Carol Haynes (December 09, 2011, 04:37 AM)

Yes, that kinda puzzled me a bit.

By the way write has a w in it

-Carol Haynes (December 09, 2011, 04:37 AM)

Sorry, I couldn't resist doing that. I think I was in a Puckish frame of mind at the time.
(By the way, have you cleaned up those misspellings on your website yet?)       

5861

Living Room / Re: Huh? Thailand can put an American in jail for posting internet content??

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 05:10 AM »

But I just can't...

I just cannot get past that what one does in one country is done in that country, and for another country to prosecute you for that is overstepping its jurisdiction.

-Renegade (December 08, 2011, 09:17 PM)

Oh, sorry, I missed that.
If a US citizen goes over to Thailand on a sex tour and has sex with children, and then goes back home to the US, will he be liable for prosecution in the US for paedophilia and/or sex with a minor?
Certainly, that is the case for Australian and New Zealand citizens.
That is an example of "...what (crime) one does in one country is done in that country, and prosecuted for in another country." That would not seem to be overstepping any jurisdiction.

The difference in this Thai case would seem to be in the nature of the adjudged crime. The law of lèse majesté only exists in Thailand, but in this case it was breached by an American Citizen publishing something on an internationally accessible medium - the Internet - so it was accessible from Thailand. The Thais do not run a totalitarian state and would not want to have to resort to censoring access to the Internet for all Thai citizens. The offence was not an offence in the US, so the US authorities could be of no help.

What to do?
Presumably where he might have been when he infringed the law was irrelevant to the Thai authorities, so that when he stepped into their territory, he was now in their jurisdiction and they took advantage of that fact and simply nabbed him at that point.

That would presumably make sense to the Thai authorities, though you might not like it.

5862

Official Announcements / Re: Cody got into the electrical cables again .. Server went down on 12/8/11

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 04:33 AM »

Is the cloud actually at the point where you can run a real application in the cloud? Like a forum? A data driven application? I mean like a decentralized solution that you can still run off of traditional DNS, and not a uber-massive DDNS redundant server beast. Just a simple little solution that's decentralized and will let small sites (e.g. 1 server) run?

-Renegade (December 09, 2011, 02:44 AM)

Well, you could migrate DCF to Google groups, I suppose...
That's distributed and backed up all over the place, I gather. Not sure if that means that it is in the "Cloud" though.

5863

General Software Discussion / Re: CNET Download Installer Changes

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 04:20 AM »

@Renegade: Ah, thanks for all the notes and the links. I am better-informed now. I think I understand what you are saying:

• It is the OpenCandy model.
• It is not a parasitic model, if it is used in the way that CNET are apparently now suggesting they use it for genuine revenue-sharing.
• As such, it does make commercial/business sense and is a 4 x win approach (all players stand to benefit - Developer, 3rd party developer advertiser, CNET (distributor), User) through the incentive mechanism of revenue-sharing.
• The proportionate revenue shares are not yet defined, due to a current lack of transparency by CNET, who will be collecting the revenue and determining the shares.
• Developers will have to trust CNET to be fair with the revenue-sharing.
• Some developers abhor the OpenCandy model and feel very strongly that it is wrong/unethical, others (such as yourself, for example) feel very strongly that it could be a workable, fair and decent approach to revenue-sharing.
• CNET had made a mistake in the way they initially started to implement this idea, but they now seem to have adopted a more "sensible" approach.

Is that about right?

Seems reasonable to me, except that I wouldn't trust CNET further than I could throw them, after their antics that led up to their well-earned dissing by the the press and others, and their subsequent slimeball BS email to developers. But hey, that's just my opinion.

A coincidence: I was reading some of Aesop's fables to my daughter last night. One of them was about a court held to determine the true ownership of a honeycomb that the bees claimed was theirs (and that they had made it) and the drones, who claimed likewise.
(The bees had made it and the drones were just lying about having made it.)
The presiding judge was a wasp, who said he couldn't tell whose it was and suggested that the bees go off and build a honeycomb and the drones do likewise, and then he (the judge) would compare the manner of construction of the new honeycombs with the disputed comb, and whichever of the new combs was most like the disputed comb would determine its maker as the rightful owner.

The bees happily agreed to do this, but the drones said they couldn't be bothered (because they actually couldn't make a honeycomb), so the judge decided in favour of the bees by default with the words: "It is clear now who made the comb, and who cannot make it; the court gives judgement in favour of the bees."

MORAL: We may know a tree by its fruit.

5864

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 01:22 AM »

On another topic, as I said above, I like this topic (Amazon and publishers) and I like the ebook topic in general.  However, this particular topic is so fragmented that when it comes up in your unread topics, you don't know what to expect, and the conversations are very interweaved and especially later if someone peruses it or tries to find something, there really won't be a good way.  Is it possible to separate these into topics in the future, or just make it obvious that this is a mish mash of information?

-wraith808 (December 08, 2011, 10:23 PM)

I like this topic too. I find it very interesting. Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude and ignore your earlier comment that you found this thread confusing, it was just that I couldn't see how to easily make it less so.
I think that what has happened is that the scope of the discussion has enlarged as our discussion has kept nudging its contextual boundaries outwards. I notice that happening to quite a few discussion threads in this forum, but I don't think that is necessarily a "bad" thing per se. We could split this discussion up and branch it off somehow, I suppose.

Personally, I would blame @40hz and @Carol Haynes for any confusion. They are repeat offenders and keep digressing all the time and throwing red whales into the discussions, and they often have spelling mistakes in what they rite. It's got so off-topic that I nearly lost sight of the fact that this thread was originally started off by @superboyac in December 2009 on the subject of "Why are there not enough pictures of Angelina Jolie being used in forum posts?" (I'm with him on that one.)

I kid you not. You couldn't make this stuff up.

5865

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on December 09, 2011, 12:56 AM »

This copyright craziness is killing any enjoyment in life.
...
...all sorts of nice things are gone now because of all this.  ARRRGHGHGHGH!!!!

-superboyac (December 08, 2011, 11:04 PM)

Well, it'll not happen instantaneously or overnight, and I suspect that we will be able to buy new and 2nd hand paper books for a long time yet - unless their digital competition acquires the stock and burns it all, that is.

I must admit that when I realised that CDs were going to replace my vinyl LP collection, I was a bit sad when I gave them to a local charity shop, but I was delighted when they started to bring out most of that old music, digitised on CDs - and it sounded better! In fact Motorhead's "Killed By Death" had never sounded so good.

5866

Living Room / Re: Huh? Thailand can put an American in jail for posting internet content??

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 11:26 PM »

I'm feeling an almost +1 for IainB's comments above...

What happened to this guy...

-IainB (December 08, 2011, 03:29 PM)

But I just can't...
...
So, as I do plan on getting back to Thailand at some point, LONG LIVE THE KING~!

-Renegade (December 08, 2011, 09:17 PM)

Yes, I quite understand.
I'm hoping to be able return to Thailand at some point too, so...

LONG LIVE THE KING!

I think if the UK had a similar lèse majesté law, then it would have been a good thing. Then we would not have had to have been subjected to all those awful Daily Mirror and News of the World and other media reports and exposés of the royal family's goings-on over the last umpteen years - including extra-marital affairs, bonking, toe-sucking, drunkenness, mistresses and lovers, divorces, bulimia, blatant and unethical deception for financial gain trading on the royal name, profiteering, financial profligacy and squandering, misguided proselytising, tree-hugging and general daftness, all performed ultimately at the State's cost.
I would most definitely exclude the Queen and the Duke from that list - she is simply superb at what she does and is a truly beautiful person, and he is magnificently forthright and honest. It's their family that seems to be mostly a waste of space.

Small wonder the Queen looks so much older than her 45 years.

5867

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft goes all Apple with a Kill Switch for Apps under Win8

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 10:33 PM »

It's all a matter of credibility and trust.

-wraith808 (December 08, 2011, 10:26 PM)

I agree.
I'm not that credulous though.

5868

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 09:33 PM »

Well, it seems the real business model is Balkanization of a given market.
That means eliminating open standards and non-proprietary storage formats. Which I guess now includes paper books.

-40hz (December 07, 2011, 06:43 AM)

Yes. Absolutely.
And even if the approach might have failed in other media previously, it seems that you can't keep a good Balkanization tool down.

5869

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 09:31 PM »

Its an interesting choice of acquisition though - I would have though that one of the areas that the Kindle really isn't good at is children's books - simply because the technology doesn't have a large enough screen or colour for pictures.

-Carol Haynes (December 07, 2011, 04:22 AM)

That's an interesting point.
As @wraith808 said:

My daughter was very skeptical about this whole e-book thing.  Then I took her into Best Buy to look a the Nook color.  She fell in love with it.

-wraith808 (October 25, 2011, 11:27 AM)

So the Nook (not the Kindle) sounded like a really good idea - for kids at any rate. I asked my daughter Lily (aged 10) about it and she's mulling it over. She and I went out a couple of days ago to a secondhand bookstore and a children's bookstore (new books) and she bought a whole stack of real hardback and paperback books with her birthday money. I idly wondered at the time whether some of these might be available as ebooks.

5870

Living Room / Re: Huh? Thailand can put an American in jail for posting internet content??

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 08:54 PM »

The point I was making is that it is difficult for Americans to take the high moral ground against other countries when the US Government often seems to display little respect for law (international or otherwise) or human rights.

I could level the same argument against the UK government too...

-Carol Haynes (December 08, 2011, 05:54 PM)

Yes. I wish you were wrong, but sadly, this would seem to be an accurate couple of generalisations.

From a distance, I've tried to keep up with US and UK/European politics and cultural changes over the years.
The last time I went to the UK was in 2003, and I didn't like what I saw - but at least I was prepared for it.

I think this probably holds some truth as well:

We aren't so far from the Patriot Act oursleves - and I suspect Tony Blair was rather sorry to have not thought of it before George W.

-Carol Haynes (December 08, 2011, 05:54 PM)

Since at least the late '80s, successive UK governments seem to have been pushing to get the National ID card - or something similar accepted - and there has apparently been a huge increase in camera surveillance. Police stop and search for any arbitrary or specific reason now appears to be de rigueur. It's looking more and more like a Fascist police state.
See: Mark McGowan - This Is Not A Protest
There was another YouTube vid (I can't find it) of an American guy wandering round in the Barbican square with a sign that read "This is not a protest" (OWTTE) and using a loudhailer to talk to the people around him, and he had people filming it. He was an entertainer. The pseudo-police ("security officers") tried to stop the filming, tried to throw him out, but failed, and eventually the real police arrived and chucked him out. For causing no disturbance and for entertaining people. He was very funny and his main offence seemed to be that he made a complete laughing-stock of the pseudo and the real police.

I reckon that mocking Fascism - or any similar horror of a religio-political ideaology -  is a healthy exercise of free speech.

5871

Official Announcements / Re: Cody got into the electrical cables again .. Server went down on 12/8/11

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 08:36 PM »

Looks like someone probably screwed up big time - and it will probably be human error, because automated power UPS/generators work just fine otherwise.

The backup generator / UPS system subsequently experienced trouble backing up the critical load, and at 03:16 UTC on 08-DEC-2011 a section of our datacenter went offline due to power loss.

This tells you what happened, but not why.
Would be interesting to know what they determine the cause to be.

5872

Official Announcements / Re: Cody got into the electrical cables again .. Server went down on 12/8/11

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 07:49 PM »

I was very curious as to what Softlayer had by way of the things I listed above:

• dual/backup air conditioning systems.
• dual telecomms links (using two different telco suppler networks).
• onsite single or dual backup diesel power generators - which automatically kick in when the power dies/fluctuates.
• interim UPS (batteries) for server systems. (This supply allows sufficient time for the generators to get up to full capacity after they automatically kick in.)

So I got onto the main website and clicked on "Chat with a real person" and type-chatted with one "Austin P".
He pointed me to: Data Centres

From that, it looks like a really well set-up and professional outfit. They seem to have all the usual power and battery backups sorted.

So, what was their explanation for the outage that hit you?
And did it hit all their customers similarly, from that data centre?
Enquiring minds need to know.
Customers hit by the outage would expect to be told.

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Official Announcements / Re: Cody got into the electrical cables again .. Server went down on 12/8/11

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 07:14 PM »

the crazy thing is we are paying for an expensive hosting company (softlayer) specifically because they are supposed to be one of the most reliable companies with the best redundancies, etc.

-mouser (December 08, 2011, 04:19 PM)

Well then, I would recommend (if you don't mind, and I'm not trying to teach you to suck eggs), from l-o-n-g experience of IT service contacts on both sides (customer/supplier), that you carefully scrutinise your contract and/or SLA (Service Level Agreement) for conditions and in particular penalty clauses in the event of deteriorated service or loss of service.

If there are any penalty clause provisions, then I think (from memory) you could legally claim either of:
(a) actual or reasonable notional consequential costs, or loss of revenue/profit arising from the outage.
or:
(b) punitive damages ("And don't do it again!" type damages)
- but not both.

If there isn't any penalty clause, then you may have unwittingly signed a contract with no teeth for the customer in the event of an outage such as this. A contract for "All care and no responsibility".

If you get no financial recompense for the outage, and if you believe that you are:

... paying for an expensive hosting company (softlayer) specifically because they are supposed to be one of the most reliable companies with the best redundancies, etc.

- then I'd suggest that you may have been paying out money under false pretences for as long as you have been using that supplier, and should swap suppliers because of that fact alone, and ask for a full/partial refund.

If you told your account manager/rep. that you were considering this, then it might be interesting to see what sort of response that gets.

• A favourable (to you) response would probably indicate that they are interested in holding onto your business.
• An unfavourable response would probably give the lie to any notions or expectations of "customer care and QOS" that you might have held regarding this supplier.

As to the outage itself, if it really shouldn't have happened because the supplier - to your knowledge - had all the appropriate redundancies/backups in place, then - by definition - that could means that there was a process failure somewhere.
In my experience the main thing that usually gets in the way of a good service manager providing his services to meet an SLA is a pencil-head (usually an accountant). So be on the lookout for that as a possibility. They may have been cost-cutting and hoping to get away with it.

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Living Room / Re: LHC Researchers Expect First Glimpse of the Higgs Boson Next Week

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 06:26 PM »

Yes, I found this about the theoretical Higgs boson in Wikipedia:

Spoiler

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. Its existence is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in the Standard Model. Experiments attempting to find the particle are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and were performed at Fermilab's Tevatron until Tevatron's closure in late 2011. Recently the BBC reported that the boson will possibly be considered as "discoverable" in December 2011, although more experimental data is still needed to make that final claim.

The Higgs boson is the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not been observed in particle physics experiments. It is an integral part of the Higgs mechanism, the part of the SM which explains how most of the known elementary particles obtain their mass. For example, the Higgs mechanism would explain why the W and Z bosons, which mediate weak interactions, are massive whereas the related photon, which mediates electromagnetism, is massless. The Higgs boson is expected to be in a class of particles known as scalar bosons. (Bosons are particles with integer spin, and scalar bosons have spin 0.)

Theories that do not need the Higgs boson are described as Higgsless models. Some theories suggest that any mechanism capable of generating the masses of the elementary particles must be visible at energies below 1.4 TeV;[4] therefore, the LHC is expected to be able to provide experimental evidence of the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson.

Interestingly, there are apparently two groups of scientists:
(a) Higgs: those scientists who are believers in the SM (Standard Model) predictions and who apparently:

... expect the LHC experiment to be able to provide definitive experimental evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson.

and

(b) Higgsless: those scientists who are non-believers in the SM - and who thus hold instead that the HM (Hiiggsless Model) is the Truth and who apparently:

expect the LHC experiment to be able to provide experimental evidence of the non-existence of the Higgs boson.

Scientists! They're a funny lot aren't they?     

I don't know how many of either group might be climate scientists.

5875

Living Room / Re: What were these architects thinking?

« Last post by IainB on December 08, 2011, 05:46 PM »

Well, it's certainly different. I'm not sure, but I think I quite like the look of it, though I don't know about living in it.
Maybe they based the design on the concept of a tesseract?