James D. Stallardblog

Wish me luck, I'm migrating a SAN this weekend and resetting all the user and shared data permissions to the way it should be done. The job has taken us about 4 weeks of solid work to design and write the scripts and on the night, we will be re-permissioning over 11,000,000 files and folders and migrating 1300 users in one hit.

Another all-nighter methinks!

Update: Done and dusted, and home by 10 - and a total success with the number of calls to the helpdesk the following day being under 20. Thanks are due to Aron, Jeff and Graham for their hard work and testing.

I have a Hungarian chap working on the house for me at the moment. Roland recent took a trip home and told me a story about his return trip:

"While in the UK, I bought a steering rack and piston liners for an old Aston Martin my friend is fixing up. The parts were in separate suitcases as we came through UK customs.

The first case contained the the steering rack and as it went through the x-ray scanner, the security man looking at the monitor went white and looked very shocked. After discussing it with his boss (who also looked stunned), they asked me what they were seeing, and I told them it was a steering rack for an Aston Martin.

They turned the screen around and it looked just like a machine gun.

Then the case with the piston liners went through and he went white all over again. I told him they were piston liners and he showed me the screen.

They looked just like a grenade launcher."

Even in broken english, that is the funnniest thing i've heard this year

Years ago, I worked for a europe-wide dotcom that was in negotiation to buy a bit of software called "Ecometry".

The software itself was designed to put a catalog-based sales company on the internet, and although we weren't a catalog outfit, the software plainly wasn't fit for purpose (it couldn't even handle multi-currency VAT) and the kit they ran on (HP e3000) was a dead-end product with no realistic lifespan or roadmap; a golf course had been visited and the sale had been made in the club house.

I was bloody livid and said so, loud and long, but that's not the point of this tale...

Part of the promotional material we were duly bombarded with was a box of large, round, blue badges, about 3 inches across with garish yellow lettering on them; "The POWER of E" they said. There was even a little flashing red LED in the middle of the E. Given the prevalence of the drug extasy in the clubbing scene at the time, a less appropriate bit of marketing flummery could not have been invented.

Not wanting to miss out on one iota of the raging irony, a couple of the guy pinned the badges to their favourite clubbing outfits and went on the razz - only to be denied entry to both of the clubs they tried on the grounds that they were part of the drug problem. The second club's doormen actually called over a couple of locally loitering bobbies who took a pretty dim view and gave the lads in question a thorough bit of finger-wagging disapproval.

Amusingly enough, the report of the incident back to our management was enough to eventually kill the deal and the rotten product was never purchased.

"Would you say that you worship Satan, or do you simple respect his no-nonsense approach to discipline?" - Dogbert

Well, what else do I call it?

Would a dead gecko still stick to the ceiling?

If you put two chameleons (or squids) next to each other, would they try to change to each other's colours and create a biological feedback loop, or just both turn brown?

Answers on a postcard please, enquiring minds would like to know...

UPDATE: Some enterprising students researching robotics have created a robot gecko that can climb walls. The robot's "feet" are made of a material that closely matches the structure of a real gecko's feet which tells that that if a never-alive gecko can stick to the ceiling, a once-alive one should have no trouble.

No update on the chameleons/squids tho, but here's hoping for some more scientists with grant money and nothing better to do.

I got the nod today that W2K8 is out and the download (all 3.8Gb for both processor versions) has already started. You (probably) heard it here first, so go get yours!