Tim's Bits and Pieces

I'm stopping using Firefox (and other Mozilla programs like Seamonkey and Thunderbird) over this whole Brendan Eich scuffle, and you should consider it too.

Continue reading...

At work I recently spent some time working on getting our hosted Trac to run faster. I found one simple little trick that gave up to a 20% speed improvement, so I thought I'd share it here.

Continue reading...

We where talking about merging today and one of my co-workers pointed out that some of the advantages of Distributed Revision Control Systems (DRCS), are actually more of a case of "distributed rcs rules because I never read the manual for svn and drcs is complex enough that it forced me to read the manual". For example Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) writes about Mercurial:

Continue reading...

Professor Proposes Laws Against Insecure Computers:

Continue reading...

A song about Internet Explorer. I don't actually have to develop for IE, but whenever a customer finds a bug before our testing team I'm the first to hear about it.An interesting thing I've observed from these various bug reports is that nearly every display bug happens in only one specific browser; can you guess which one?

Linux Magazine: Intrusion Stories:

Continue reading...

Today my company sent out a bunch of emails about a service update to our customers. Approximately 16,000 emails. To make things easy for customers who wanted to ask questions about the changes we set the reply to field on the emails to be our support email address. This was a mistake. The first problem is that out of 16,000 people a reasonable number are going to be out of the office a week before Christmas, but that was OK, you just delete the dozen or so new Cases with "Out of Office Auto-reply" in the subject. No, the real problem was the infinite loops of auto-replies that our case management system created with some customers ticket systems.

I just reminded myself how dangerous 'rm *' is. I deleted the copies of all the posts on my blog from my local system. Fortunately I had backups of all but the most recent 8 posts, and I could recover them easily enough, but this has reminded me to make my "daily" backups more regular than once a fortnight, and convinced me to add 'alias rm="rm -i"' back to my .bash_aliases.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

You might have noticed that I haven't posted for a while. I blame Progress Quest, a truly exceptional MMORPG. It's got an engrossing plot, phenomenal graphics, truly zen sound, and is generally all round great. I've spent over 10 hours playing it Today alone.

Continue reading...