Hacker News: chrisjsmith

New comment by chrisjsmith in "DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop"

chrisjsmith — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:53:19 +0000

Oh pedant, I thoroughly apologise for my ignorance. May my vegetables all die, my breath smell for eternity and my armpits flood with hair and engulf the earth.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop"

chrisjsmith — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:44:31 +0000

Does it matter? Governments are bullies.

http://www.vvsss.com/grid/xkcd-on-crypto.gif

Here in the UK, we already have to hand over our keys or be chucked in jail.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Live coverage of the last Shuttle launch (STS-135, Atlantis)"

chrisjsmith — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:22:13 +0000

As far as we know. The Russians weren't always that honest about who they blew up by accident.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Reasons to jailbreak your iPhone, iPad"

chrisjsmith — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:09:42 +0000

If these are the problems you are trying to solve, just don't buy something with iOS on it.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "What's yours stays yours. - Dropbox Terms Update"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:35:34 +0000

That looks painful. I'd rather like to move it to an SOA and split it into logical feature partitions and use service composition and windows workflow to integrate it all. Typically, I don't think anyone wants to pay for that though.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "JQuery 1.6.2 syntax error? You may be the victim of SEO."

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:32:24 +0000

"Vista Security 2012". It can't touch the root certs as you need elevated privileges to do that. The entire thing hijacks the user's shell via the registry. You can log in as another user on the machine and it appears not to be infected.

Quite well designed really :-)

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:28:24 +0000

Agree about Notes being as awful. I had to suffer that from '99-'02. Looked like it improved after that but you can't polish a turd as they say.

I've watched SharePoint go with a spectacularly large boom when some muppet renamed the AD domain... That was a fun two days of my life reverse engineering it believe me. Thank goodness they did write it on top of the CLR as it's easy enough to decompile then to work out what the hell is going on.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "What's yours stays yours. - Dropbox Terms Update"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:22:37 +0000

VS2010. Mainly the fact that the user interface is painfully slow[1] (either that or I'm unreasonably fast which is rediculous as Vim can keep up with me) and it just dies about 5 times a day on a good day. It might be the solution size though - it's got about 0.5 million lines of C# in it. Still it should work.

[1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:12:38 +0000

Fair point. I'll give you that.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "What's yours stays yours. - Dropbox Terms Update"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:57:00 +0000

Visual Studio is an awful product. It's bloated, performs badly, expensive and extremely unreliable.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Washington Post Hacked: 1,270,000 Emails and User IDs Compromised"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:55:45 +0000

Don't they run Django? Is there something we should know about?

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:46:54 +0000

Forget the UI. It's not important.

It MUST be common user functionality both for private and corporate users.

People have completely unjustified trust for these cloud-based services when in the face of it, they screw people's data up all the time. You should be able to maintain an offline archive of all of your data to guard against vendor failure.

To be 100% honest, at least here in the EU, I think they should legislate to make sure that a) you can get your data back when you so desire and b) the data should come back in an open format.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:41:41 +0000

Because there are consultants. That is the only reason!

New comment by chrisjsmith in "JQuery 1.6.2 syntax error? You may be the victim of SEO."

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:41:04 +0000

SLL certificates bring nothing other than a false peace if mind. I've seen fake antivirus software that goes to great lengths to provide verified (!) SSL encrypted pages to steal your credit card details.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "MongoDB is the New MySQL"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:39:05 +0000

I'd say that's not necessarily an advantage. Sharding is incredibly complicated to get right considering all factors such as balancing and recovery.

I'd rather partition the data based on function onto distinct clusters, you know like eBay do.

You can update the indexes in a transaction too, so that's not necessarily an issue. MySQL has problems with this due to locking but the MVCC implementation in PostgreSQL allows much better concurrency.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365"

chrisjsmith — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:33:52 +0000

You HAVE to buy Outlook to get the PST file out by syncing your local outlook with the Exchange Live server which is unacceptable. You can't access the data any other way.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365"

chrisjsmith — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:39:56 +0000

That will end up in pain and tears for thousands of students and staff alike.

My trial of Office 365 lasted 45 minutes i.e. until I realised how much pain it is to get data back out of the Outlook and Sharepoint implementations. They just don't want you to do it.

It's the WORST lock in I've seen in any product.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "MongoDB is the New MySQL"

chrisjsmith — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:32:55 +0000

The irony of this is that it's actually quite easy to build a document store on top of PostgreSQL that performs very well indeed. I tried it. I used a similar approach to the one described at [1]. You get the advantage of years of experience (never underestimate this!), MVCC, transactions, consistency and replication as well.

(yes I know it doesn't "perform" as well as the other NoSQL stores but performance is not without tradeoffs [2])

[1] http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

[2] http://www.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/Ferra...

New comment by chrisjsmith in "JQuery 1.6.2 syntax error? You may be the victim of SEO."

chrisjsmith — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:42:26 +0000

I think the rediculous thing is more that he spent that much time making a blog post because he made a mistake whilst obviously trying to do something quickly without thinking.

New comment by chrisjsmith in "JQuery 1.6.2 syntax error? You may be the victim of SEO."

chrisjsmith — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:18:39 +0000

I think the blogger was being an idiot. You should check the authenticity of what you are downloading, not just snag it.

It's like eating a kebab dropped in the street.