ДАВАЙ-ДАВАЙ

YASV (Yet Another SAP Victim)

sapfail My home loudspeakers (MB Quart 280) are slowly dying. One of the tweeters makes strange noise, they are about 20 years old anyway, so they deserve a replacement. I have studied the market a lot. One key is of course WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor), so I settled my choice on a 2.1 system, with two floor-standing modern panel speakers, plus a sub-woofer hidden behind the TV set. Continue Reading »

¶ Posted 14 September 2009 § IT ‡ Comments (0) °

Another normal day at the office

normal_office_day

¶ Posted 10 September 2009 § fun ‡ Comments (3) °

superbe concert de Coldplay à Berne

coldpay J’avais un peu souci avant d’y aller. Ce serait formatté, propret, huilé, bref : du pop à succès. Eh bien non, ce fut du grand spectacle, avec émotions et très prenant. Au beau milieu du concert, Chris Martin et son équipe descendent sur le terrain avec 2 guitares, traversent la foule, montent sur un podium de 4m², et entonnent quelques airs sympa (y-compris Billie Jean), le tout sous la pluie battante. Viva la Vida, c’est aussi un bon antidote contre la crise, à consommer sans modération.

¶ Posted 03 September 2009 § audio ‡ Comments (1) °

Preparing for the winter

Yeah, this is my office colleague trying his winter jacket, even if it’s still summer here.

kusi

No wonder why almost everyone think IT guys are nuts.

¶ Posted 02 September 2009 § fun § IT ‡ Comments (1) °

How can IOC be so much near their shoes ?

The IOC decided not to grant sailing an 11th medal for the 2012 Olympic Games. This means that there will be no catamaran in the 2012 Olympic Games.

capsize

These people should watch the news, they will then find out how cool multi-hulls are. Look at the pictures of Alinghi from my friend Claude. Take a seat first, amazing stuff.

¶ Posted 20 August 2009 § Sailing ‡ Comments (0) °

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 in SQLite, 9% in MySQL, and only the remaining 1% would need Oracle. Maybe his assertion is a little bit exaggerated, well, he’s an Oracle DBA with more than 10 years experience, so he must be right in some way.

¶ Posted 19 August 2009 § IT ‡ Comments (0) °

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”.

¶ Posted 14 August 2009 § IT ‡ Comments (1) °

NAD 3150 volume control fix

nad_3150_volume_balance My NAD 3150 (cheaply bought 5 years ago from an auction site) was scratching when adjusting the volume and balance control, sometimes loosing output completely. I have unsoldered and dismounted the control, cleaned it with a contact spray and compressed air, then resoldered it. It now sounds much better, will see if this fix will last. What’s cool is to see how easy such a fix is possible on a 20 years old electronic device. I guess that today’s devices would be impossible to fix so easily.

Now the next problem is the tweeter of my right loudspeaker (MB Quart 280). Looks like I will dump them. Even if I would find a replacement tweeter, the suspension of the boomers is probably already long dried.

¶ Posted 10 August 2009 § audio ‡ Comments (1) °

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 their containing directory structure. Rsync rocks !

¶ Posted 05 August 2009 § IT ‡ Comments (0) °

LSE acted, now it’s your turn.

broken_window 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 fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE (London Stock Exchange)’s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day.” wrote Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his Computerworld blog.

Microsoft develop software since forever – or at least 20 years. They have done a few achievements, like Visio (oops, somebody else did it), or Excel (oops, the Spreadsheet was invented by Visicalc). In fact, they haven’t produced a lot of real new stuff. They only inflicted poorly-designed, insecure and expensive products to the masses.

Now, everyone using personal computers think it is normal to pay a lot of money to get unstable and poorly designed products. Last example : PC vendors pushes us large, 16×9 screens. Our screen get wider, or less high, if you prefer. At the same time, Microsoft gives us (oops, sells us) Office 2007, with 1/4 of the screen height used by the menus. Go figure. On my side, I have dropped the ball in 1997, now using Linux on the server, and Linux and OS X on the client. Thinks about it and act, like LSE. And by the way, here is the uptime of my customer’s main NMS server. 2 years, 9 months and something. No issue so far.

¶ Posted 06 July 2009 § IT ‡ Comments (0) °