Tag Archives: stupidity

Silicon Hell

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Bought a new PSU.

Ripped out the old PSU.

Fitted the new PSU.

New PSU has rather less power cables than old PSU.

New PSU has exactly enough power cables to power my two hard drives, two optical drives and one floppy drive.

Old PSU had all this, plus an extra floppy drive power connector to power the Firewire controller card. New PSU does not.

Firewire controller card can’t drive the iPod without aforementioned power connector.

Ripped all cabling out, sacrificed floppy drive, tried to stretch floppy power connector to Firewire card. Couldn’t.

Moved Firewire card to spare PCI slot nearer drives. Cable now (just about) reaches.

Fire up PC, Windows says of Firewire card “This device cannot start. (Code 10)”.

Scream.

Reboot, reset ESCD data in BIOS. No joy.

Reboot, manually assign IRQs in BIOS. No joy.

Reboot, auto assign IRQs in BIOS, resetting ESCD data again for good measure. No joy.

Cry.

Rip out power cabling, sacrifice optical drives, move Firewire card to original slot, stretch power cable to card. Reboot.

Windows magically recognises Firewire card. It just completely refuses to recognise the iPod when I plug it into the dock. The cabling’s fine, because the iPod is happily recharging its battery. I am at a loss.

I am definitely buying a Mac.

[And as if by magic, it’s started working again. No reinstall, not even a reboot. How weird… Still getting a Mac though.]

Safety Tips for Cyclists

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  • 30mph is probably an inappropriate speed for a bicycle
  • Blind corners should be taken considerably slower than this
  • Cellphone conversations can be distracting at the best of times
  • Especially if you don’t have a hands-free headset

And so I hurtled around the corner of the underpass at excessive speed, chattering away to a friend on my phone (thus cycling one-handed), pulled a sharp left, encountered an unexpected pedestrian, swerved, lost my balance, and did one of those slow-motion falls where you know you’re going to fall, and you know it’s going to hurt, and the whole thing happens in slow motion but you can’t do anything about it.

I escaped with cuts and bruises, a battered ego, and a determination to turn my phone off next time I go out on the bike…

Understanding Microsoft

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From an interview with Microsoft’s General Manager of Platform Strategy, Michael Taylor:

When you look at the issue of buffer overruns, eight to 10 years ago in software development, you did not know how much space you might need for something so you just create a big buffer zone to allow things to happen. Who knew that people could go exploit that and use that buffer space to do malicious things? #

8-10 years? Hmm…

In 1988, the Morris worm used a buffer overflow in a Unix program called fingerd to propagate itself over the Internet. Even after this incident, buffer overflows were virtually ignored as security issue. #

Somehow that explains a great many things.

Communication

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Meanwhile, back in the office, a BBC headline caused something of a double-take: Messaging spreads office gossip.

Yes, IM can be handy for spreading office gossip, but so can email, newsgroups, web forums (fora?), memos, post-it notes, text messages, blogs, telephones, faxes and (gasp) talking out loud to one another.

Logging IM conversations as we do emails is the proposed solution. Where do we stop? Will we ever get to the point where we’re required to log even verbal conversations?

Inconvenience

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I managed to lose my wallet somewhere between a bar and my home last night, which also means I lost a wad of cash, two debit cards, two credit cards with several thousand pounds of available credit between them, my National Insurance card, my casino membership card, and I suppose I’ll have to buy a new wallet as well.

I have spent most of the day on the telephone.

Forget ID cards, how about RFID-enabled wallets? I’d love to know where it’s got to.

The police were very helpful:

“Did you lose it, or was it taken out of your pocket without you noticing?”

“How on earth would I know that, if I hadn’t noticed?”

“It’s either Lost Property, or Theft. You have to tell us which one.”

“…”