Category Archives: IT

Preparing for the winter

Yeah, this is my office colleague trying his winter jacket, even if it’s still summer here. No wonder why almost everyone think IT guys are nuts.

Oracle SQL Developer

I’m no big fan of commercial database product. Oracle is a complicated beast, and I have never completely understood why big companies use such a complicated and expensive product to store small databases. A DBA friend of mine said that 90% of the databases he has seen in the last 10 years could be done [...]

Let me repeat : Windows is not a server OS

From a big company like Swisscom, you would expect a stable web site. Sadly, they use Windows and the dreadful dotNET to deliver their content, so the uptime is not what it used to be. But as they once said “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.

Getting all logs recursively

I needed to find and collect all log files of a product, but I wanted to keep the directory structure they where in, so find wasn’t really the solution. Our rsync friend does the job much better : rsync -avm –include=*/ –include=*.log –exclude=* /opt/product . all log files under /opt/product will be collected locally, with [...]

LSE acted, now it’s your turn.

A few years ago, the LSE (London Stock Exchange) needed new servers. They decided to use Microsoft Windows. They only forgot one little thing : Windows is not and has never been a server product. LSE needed one full day of downtime to understand it. They are now dropping Windows : “Anyone who was ever [...]

UPS Package Exception

I have seen a lot of softwares producing exceptions. Ranging from Java, to Perl, C, etc. Apparently, UPS managed to produce an exception from a software product (Adobe Lightroom) still packed in a box. They must have found a new way to crash Windows.

summer time reboot for SAP

At a customer site, they came to the idea to use SAP. Now that we will soon switch our clocks to summer time, it’s good to know that this million-$ cool SAP application need to be rebooted to handle the DST-switch. Welcome in 2009, the year of modern software. Found on their web site : [...]

iphone calendar color sync works

At least, Apple fixed an annoying issue : the calendar colors of iCal are replicated to the iphone calendar application. But I still miss a week view. Pocket Informant has their iphone version reviewed by Apple, and maybe 3.x will have it. Hope so.

Samsung SE-T084M DVD almost unusable

The DVD drive of my old Dell Inspiron 8600 died. Doesn’t want to play anything anymore. Annoying for the kids playtool. So I bought an external, USB DVD player with all possible features for only CHF 101.-. Bad idea : this drive is almost unusable, as it draw too much power from the USB connectors. [...]

Microsoft logic at work

I’m still surprised to see so many people accepting that kind of crap. Question : “move or copy ?”. Possible answers : “yes or no”. I guess even people having english as monther tongue would find it bizarre.

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