Posted: Mon 21 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, Work-related |
Over the weekend, it looks like one of the company’s sites was hacked. Well, originally it looked like some fucking idiot had decided to make it so that *everyone* could delete stuff, and many other things, which I managed to get fixed just fine. Of course, Arsehole Boss, our *cough* “Chief Technical Officer” had no bloody idea what to do, how to sort it out, or anything, so it ended up that I had to fix it. On my XDA, through the web-browser, over a shitty low-speed connection. And it still took less than quarter of an hour to fix.
Today, though, it’s turned out that yes, all the administrator passwords for the site admin had been altered. Fortunately, the major passwords to allow access to the server back end, but of course our Chief Technical Officer has no idea how to get in to databases etc., or how to fix anything like this. Luckily, the rest of us know what we’re up to, so today has been spent fixing problems, changing passwords, blocking access to certain users, IP addresses etc., as well as deleting or blocking certain people (like [ex-SysAdmin]) so that there’s no chance of them being the problem.
And yes, I am aware that in a lot of companies the CTO knows fuck all about the exact technology being used etc., but in this case, with a small number of employees, let’s not forget that Arsehole Boss is also the person who recommended we use this system in the first place because – and I quote – “It’s easy for any idiot to use”. So you’d at least hope that he might know what he was doing with this particular system. But ooohhhh, no. You’d be wrong…
Posted: Mon 21 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky |
Annoyingly, it looks like the Webstats4U (formerly Nedstat) web stats package is having problems.
While I have access to the logfiles for proper reports, I do use Webstats as a quick indicator through the day of how D4D™ is doing – it also gives me a quick dump of how people are getting to D4D™, and a bundle of other stuff too. So it’s fairly annoying when it’s down and/or playing silly buggers.
I wonder if they’ll give any news or information about why it’s down? There’s nothing in their news at the moment…
Posted: Tue 15 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Work-related |
(Hello, Google!)
One of the things I’ve found to be great about my current phone is the ability to set MP3s to be used as ringtones. I know, it’s nothing new, nor is it special, big, or clever. But it is great fun. For instance, it means I can go to TV Cream’s theme pages and download a shedload of stupid themetunes to use as ringtones.
This morning I was using the theme from “Roobarb”, which is utterly fantastic, but bloody loud. This afternoon it’s the full theme from “The Flumps”, which is equally fantastic, less loud, more subtle, but keeps you humming it way after the phone’s finished ringing.
Although it’s always funny to then hear other people in the office humming it, and not actually realising why. I used to be able to do the same with the Dallas theme-tune too – just wander around humming it, and soon it’s got people all over the office doing the same. Pure comedy, if slightly malicious…
Posted: Tue 15 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Technology, Thinking About..., Thoughts, Travel, Web Development, Work-related |
Since getting the job offer a month ago, I’ve made a lot of changes in the way I work. Primarily for my own security (i.e. so the passwords and data for the other sites I work on aren’t readily available) I removed all my private work and data from the work PC, and instead stuck it on a USB stick. I also now have Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.
What I don’t (currently) have on a portable stick is all the text editing stuff, photoshop, and that kind of thing. That doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really need to be portable. But the information itself is all now held on portable devices.
It’s been interesting working this way too – plus it means that effectively I can do my stuff on any old PC, wherever I am, and it won’t even affect the PCs settings.
I’m currently debating upgrading the USB sticks (At the moment I use two 512M Sticks, mainly because of a fuckup I made earlier in the year) to one or two 1Gb sticks, and at that point I can also put on portable XAMPP as a complete development environment (database, PHP, Apache web server, the lot) and portable NVU as a text editor, and then I’ve got everything I need for my work on one or two USB sticks. Of course, with a bit of rationalisation (and a bit of “dump the old crap on the portable 30Gb drive”) I could do it with the two current 512Mb sticks. One for the tools, one for the data. Hmmmm.
Anyway, I find this kind of thing interesting, because it does change the way I work. It makes me wonder about logical extrapolations, where you have a complete operating system on a USB stick/disk, and PCs go towards being dumb terminals that don’t have their own drives/storage at all. Instead, you carry your ‘computer’ around with you, and just slot it in (or connect up the USB cable) and bang, your own operating system wherever you are.
Posted: Fri 11 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Own Business, Work-related |
Aaargh – it’s been one of those days, work-wise.
Do you ever have a day where you come up with a really good idea, one that could (in theory) make something a hell of a lot easier? And then spend some time thinking about it, and fail to see any problems?
So of course you start to make this idea into reality. And it becomes more complicated. Suddenly – no matter how long you thought about it first – problems come in that you hadn’t considered. And the problems are actually quite complicated, and make things a lot more difficult. But hey, the idea was still really good, and you still think you can do it, so you go on, and (in this case) write some more stuff to fix those problems.
And then another set of issues come up, and you think “Ah, bugger. That’s getting ugly and nasty now. I’d best go back to the easy (but dull, and rather uninventive) way I was going to do it originally.”
So, having been busy for most of the day, you come out of it with absolutely nothing worthwhile, except for learning that even really good ideas can suck utterly in practice.
Yeah, that’s the kind of day it’s been.
(Of course, I’m a tenacious twat, and really really bad at admitting defeat. So I’ll probably see if I can suss out the second set of problems over the weekend, without making it into a truly ugly piece of code.)
Posted: Thu 10 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Photography, Technology, Thinking About... |
Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to be banging on about iTunes, Picasa, JPEG vs Raw, and so on again. Because it’s all come up in the last week, Workflow has been on my mind a bit (and there’s some work-related stuff behind the scenes as well) so it’s all ending up as a bit of a brain dump.
Personally, I can be bloody disorganised. Well, that’s not strictly true. I usually know where things are, what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and how I’m going to do it. It’s just that I can be very “last minute” about things – particularly when it’s all to a deadline. It’s something I know – and acknowledge – about myself, and that I know I need to fix, or at least learn to handle better.
So anyway, I working on organising myself a bit better. But that’s not what this post is about. Oh no. Instead it’s about file structure, and file organisation instead. You lucky people.
You see, Gordon has said a couple of times that certain bits of software (iTunes, Picasa etc.) mean he no longer needs to know where files are – the software keeps track of it for him, and – for him – that’s fine. Unfortunately, doing that kind of thing drives me utterly fucking crackers.
Because I know where I put stuff, and I know (pretty much) what is where. I know that all my music sits in c:/music, but then I know that under that it’s kept in a file structure, so it goes c:/music/[band]/[album name]/[tracks] , and I never, ever have a problem finding where the stuff is that I want. To me, that’s organised, because I don’t need to fuck about thinking “is it in that folder? Or is it (iTunes, I’m talking about you here) in ‘compilations’? Or in some utterly random other place?”. I don’t need to use Google Desktop Search, I don’t need to Search for files. I think I use the “Search for files” function in Windows maybe once a year. If that. I know where my stuff is.
With photos it’s similar. Everything sits in c:/photos. I know, it’s unimaginative. But it’s easy to find. Then I name folders with where I was, or the subject of the photo series, and all the photos from that session/day/trip go in. If it’s been a holiday, you’d find it in c:/photos/[trip name]/Day [number] . I’m bad in that I don’t rename the files individually to say what’s in them – I should, but I don’t. But I know what’s where, and I can usually find the images I want when I want them. And again, to me that’s what being organised is about.
Yesterday, Gordon wrote
WHERE the files are doesn’t matter. HOW iTunes structures the folders doesn’t matter. As long as you can find the MP3s in iTunes (which is where the ID3 tags come in) then why do you care that an album is stored in ‘compilation’?
To me, it does matter where the files are. I want to be able to find them, to use them outside of that one specific application. For my music stuff, I can play it on the PC using RealPlayer, but I also use another program to write the music files to my MP3 player, or yet another one to write them to the phone so I can use that. For my photos I can use one program to view the thumbnails so I can select what I want, I can use Photoshop – or Paintshop Pro, or ImageMagick, or Corel, or whatever – to edit those photos, I can write them to a CD/DVD as backup, or I can transfer them using FTP to another site. Because of the way I work, I do need to know where the files are. I don’t want to be wasting time figuring out where Application A has stored them so that I can find them with Application B, C or D and use them in that.
So yes, it’s my workflow. Maybe I should be more flexible, or something. But because I do use different programs for different things, I want the files that I use to be in the same place, in my own organisation. Not in some arbitrary thing that one program uses, and then insists I have to use because it uses it. It’s a personal perspective, but I don’t like having workflows and decisions forced on me, whether it’s by Arsehole Bosses, or programs.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur. Maybe I’m a control freak. I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that at no time soon am I going to be letting a fucking program tell me it’s storing stuff according to its own structures where I can’t find the bloody stuff easily without using a search to do so.
Posted: Thu 10 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Work-related |
(via Gordon)
I swear, BossBitching.com is not one of the sites I’ve written of late. Honest.
Although God knows, I wish I’d had the idea…