@nthony

PCI SAQ time. Hoorah. 21 page deep DEEP joy, and restraint in filling out the exemption notes.

Riding in this morning - I was pondering the mechanics of banking on line. Given the fact that card providers already supply the 3D Secure / Verified by Visa AND the card accompanying electronics.... how hard would it be to enrol some private/public key infrastructure between vendor and banking - meaning you get a hash of the card details valid only to that vendor.

Precise Pangolin 12.04 goes live tomorrow.

Precise - 12.04 was named back in October - and is good to go. It is interesting to see the 6 monthly development cycle if anything gaining speed and experience. No doubt it will bring the usual delights of truely wondrous new features, fixes of things broken, and new exciting issues that used to work.

The question is - while I have been running the beta and release candidates for a month all but now.... reinstall and 64bit is so on the cards.

However - one thing is for sure - the Unity or new Gnome interface will be given the old heave-ho.

Lets just take ourselves on a flight of fancy for a moment. Imagine you won a government contract to deliver an enterprise grade fibre backbone to a country. Backed with sizeable European funding - a major provider of infrastructure services spawns a child process, and the work is completed.

The rather dandy build is indeed a shiny thing - and lowe - a completely redundant circuit to form a loop should there be a failure on the core fibre. Hardware is carrier grade. Costs are high. Service is bespoke, quick, two gig bearers delivering us two patch leads 90 miles to our data centre routers.

Imagine how it would feel if that said enterprise service had to turn off for a bit while it rebooted after some updates.... as a single point of no-there-is-no-plan-B-we-have-to-turn-this-off failure. When you / govt. are wooing DC builders to hang entire facilities (of real scale) off of it... that... its not going to cut it chaps. Seriously.

Even with the flexibility of two feeds. Terminating in two end points. No that’s right - one chassis.

Recently I have been quite surprised. Hats and words have been metaphorically consumed. Breaks with gut reaction, assumption, and things actually seeming to do a good job where I expected them to do an okay job considering their value add for not open source + time + learning curve = solution.

One such of these was an enterprise backup solution that offered 'Continuous Data Protection' (CDP) – a bold statement. Its even more delicious when you take on board that it is platform agnostic, deals in deltas, and the interface to use it through is one of simplicity to the appoint of annoyance (to one who is used to reading detailed logs... I know not everyone’s cup-o-tea). Anyway – breaks due, and given where due – does a fabulous job.

However this is a tale of FAIL not WIN.

It has been a few days now. I initially saw it in tweets on the 1st of April, and thought no more of it. But its real – its not a laughing matter – and yes, sure, its made the news... but between you and me do I actually live in a country where the increase in price of a pasty actually got more media time than a blow to freedom itself?

No idea what I am talking about – then have a read over this article which covers the bases for you in a reasonably balanced manner from the nice people at the BBC on new monitoring laws.

There is something vaguely sinister about the bezeled fronts of Dell kit. I would probably go HP if truth be told - but its just a matter of form and packaging to the same ends right. HOWEVER the current Dell designs... there is something more than slightly H R Giger about it all - Alienesque.

There is a real shame there that there is no uniformity of either design, or something more basic - colour and material. Different parts of range - different finish, colour, material bezels. Why?

Spring. It is happening. You can almost hear it. Blossom on trees, daffodils amidst the grass - bright and blue summer mornings you just want to throw yourself into...

A short rant will now ensue.

Dell machines - Broadcom NICs. Specifically the venerable 860.

STOPPIT. Stop putting into your enterprise grade server platforms, network cards that do not support 802.11Q. If it doesn't support VLAN tagging - then it shouldnt probably be in a server.

This - this is not new news. However it may save someone grief in the future as they try to figure out what is not working as it should.

Struggling a little with RawTherapee of late from mercurial builds (v4.0.7.27 / Olympus E510 / ORF files).

Any sharpening (there are many MANY options) - really (crazilly) exadurating noise in dark areas - more so on images lightened from auto exposure. Curious.

Much playing with profiles follows.

I heard this weekend from friends and family in Kent that the power station cooling towers were being demolished. Visible from just about anywhere on the Northern Kent Marshes it was a landmark in the true sense of the word - allowing you to find your bearings, visible from tens of miles away; distance and direction. Long ago during a lively period in UK political history - the local sea coal mines were deemed uneconomic to operate and they were clo