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This [period]'s quote is from Nicola Morrison, ScottishPower online manager quoted on computerweekly.com, here, in a piece which quite frankly looks like marketing blurb placed by a PR agent on a day when the editor was hungover.

Anyway, Nicola have an award for improving customer service not by answering customers questions but by analysing them!

Working with [tech co][1] has ... given us an unparalleled insight into our customers' requirements through the ability to analyse the questions they are asking.

[1] I'm not going to repeat the name of the company involved, I don't want to draw attention to them!

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How apt:

employment rose causing misery for many.

From this, also worth a read.
Have an award.

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In the spirit of the World Cup I'm going to veer off into football for this award, possibly for the only time ever.

I'm not a football fan, I prefer to follow "another code" (rugby union for those who don't speak in riddles) and I've been amazed and appalled at the number of times in this world cup, that the ref has appeared to have his hands tied and his eyes poked out by the victorian attitude to refereeing as expressed by FIFA.

International Rugby has sucessfuly benefited from video replays and from penalty-tries, and indeed from a clock that counts the seconds of play, cleverly pausing for injury or other "time out". None of these things interrupt the flow of the game. None of them compromise his authority.

The introduction of goal line "technology" however, would. That would delegate the decison to a machine.

In both codes the ref's decision is absolute and final, as it should be, and he has the option to exercise his opinion and experience at every stage of the game.

But by FIFA denying ref's access to the *option* to consult a video ref (or tv match official) or the *option* to award a goal for goal line offences we are saying that we do not trust their judgement. If FIFA do not trust the judgement of their referees what does that say for the game? Not to mention the appaling messages the handing of these incidents sends to our kids.

Decisions forced on ref's in this world cup undermine sportsmanship, and for that reason, FIFA, you get the Queen Victoria memorial award for reactionary fuddy-duddy-ism.

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No awards for a while, but today Tim Bray made me smile on twitter with this comment on the HTML5 shenanignas

This is getting weird even by Standards standards.

Have an award Tim.

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Happy Birthday Apache!

I was checking out the 10th anniversary press release

Several Apache projects also celebrated their 10th anniversary

and realised that Apache James is 10 years old this year as well. Way to go James Team, 10 years and we still haven't resorted to physical violence. Check the wayback machine if you don't believe me.

The top level project was established by the Board on January 22, 2003, with these ugly dudes on the 1st PMC:
Serge Knystautas
Danny Angus
Peter Goldstein
Noel Bergman
Charles Bennet

And I read the two documents The ASF was sent, I think I'm going to move to Oakland, or at least adopt their public holidays.

The Mayor of Oakland's proclamation that november 4th is Apache Software Foundation day wierd, but cool.

The Letter from Arnie. Question: Will he be back?

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The elephant in the room for Android, from my point of view as a G1 user, is the woeful bluetooth support.
My previous phone, a w810i, supported a bewildering array of bluetooth uses, but the ones I found most useful were push/pull of my contacts and using the phone as a presentation tool.

Well hallelujah, android 2 platform highlights are saying that the new major version will contain

New BT profiles: Object Push Profile (OPP) and Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP)

OPP is the one I want for managing and exchanging contacts, PBAP is for integrating with my car. Although I have to say it does this already.

I'm also pleased to see that there are a number of usability improvements, in particular for the soft keyboard, which I can't really use very well because of my phat phingers, contacts, email, and a digital zoom on the camera.

Oh and in case you were wondering, I think the ring volume is too quiet, and the battery life sucks. But since those are hardware issues I guess that after a couple of months of living with it Android gets a big thumbs up from me, and so is the recipient of the its-not-an-iphone award.

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I suppose the svn logs would allow us to discover exactly who should get the credit for this, but this morning I was privileged to witness the first application error message ever to offer me any signs of shame or contrition.

Vista had summarily decided to die during the night, which it does now and again and I think is just an excuse for installing the updates that I've *chosen* to not bother with for now, and when I restarted firefox it showed me the error captured below.

By contrast see the second image, which represents the way we are more usually treated.

Mozilla Dude, whoever you are, have an award for expressing your human emotion, and making me feel valued in the teeth of failure. I hope you start a trend.

(this isn't my screenshot I found it here, but its the same screen)



And now the shamless norm..

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This [specify period] sees two quotes, both of them from John R. Levine erstwhile chairman of the ASRG of the IRTF.

The first is redolent of Lewis Caroll:

I think that as soon as you start quoting the dictionary, you've lost
the argument.

The second is priceless given the context:

No, we're not going to define spam

Well done John, you do a great job, keep it up.
Have *two* awards!!

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Is it just me, or would this book review put you off too?

I loved this book. When I read it again someday, I will do it with an erasable crayon in my hand, marking it up like I do my Bible.

Have an award reviewer!

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Updated!

Lol.. CADIE http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html
CADIE gets nomintated :-)

But This one from opera gets the award, it had me laughing quietly to myself (the nearest I dare get to ROTFLMAO in a busy office!) http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/04/01/ I was particularly taken with the "Known Issues" which includes this:

Users visiting Web sites that contain adult content sometimes make unconscious facial expressions.

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The Apache Software Foundation celebrates its 10th birthday today!

Since I became a commiter (on Wed. 26th Sepember 2001) we have weathered a few storms, and there have been more than a few changes, but today the ASF seems to be well set up to face the future, and a future that encourages participation by more people than ever.

Happy birthday ASF, have an award.

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In our task management system today, under the excellent heading:

Photoshop Thongs - URGENT

We find the even more excellent description:

Please remove the "camel toe" (sorry I don't know how else to describe it) from all womens thongs appearing on the site as a matter of urgency

Colleague X, Have an award :-)

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As you can see from the photo I have now got Ubuntu 8.1 and Compiz running on my HP Mini Note. You may also recogise Eclipse as the window on the front left face of the cube.
Awesome.
Whilst getting all this stuff in place I came across this quote (Found here)

This is due to a bug in the "workaround" plugin

Fantastic, you couldn't make it up, and I'm sure you'll agree its a worthy winner.

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(I've phrased the title of this post as a question[1].)

Is it just me or has gmail been experiencing problems recently? Over the past few days I seem to get this message much more frequently. In fact until a few days ago I only really ever saw any error messages if I lost my connection.

I wonder if they've been trying something new? If so hurry up and iron out the wrinkles, what has happened to your QA? Or perhaps its infrastructure, it must be a barrel of laughs keeping all those servers working.

At Apachecon US in New Orleans last November I heard the employee of a Big Name make the self-evident but not so obvious point that if a hard drive has an average time to first failure of 3000 hours and you have 3000 of them then you can expect one an hour to pop its clogs. If you have 300,000 thats one every 36 seconds.

"So," we acolytes asked, in awe, "do you have a guy on rollerblades with a messanger bag coasting the asiles of the datacentre, with his ipod on, replacing these drives?"

"No" our guru responded, "when a certain proportion of the drives in san cabinet fail they switch the box off, and when a certain proportion of the cabinets in a rack fail they toss the whole rack"

Blimey. So if I need a new hdd I guess I need to go skip (dumpster) diving round the back of that datacentre, might pick up a whole san cabinet

Anyhow. I'm having to use the vanilla HTML version more and more, which is a shame because the ajax one is really pretty good, and genuinely useful, not something you can often say honestly about web applications in general or ajax in particular.

On the other hand you get what you pay for, and I can always ask for my money back ;-)


[1] Its an experiment because I read a post[2] by I forget who (sorry!) saying that this was one way to improve search engine rankings. I'll let you know if this post sees any more traffic than any of the other pointless drivel on this blog.

[2]The post was syndicated either on planetapache or on Sam Ruby's excellent planet intertwingly (Great feed Sam, have an Award) possibly both.

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The Church of England Synod voted the other day to ban priests from belonging to the british national party.

I would hate to think that any would be able to reconcile their christianity with an organisation predicated on prejudice, however that aside it does represent the involvement of the Church in secular politics.

For which they receive the antidisestablishmentarianism award.

I wonder if there's an award for using the English language's longest word properly?

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Yay, an award!
Ironically in the week that we redesign it for spring summer '09 www.bench.co.uk is NMA's (New Media Age) site of the week:
http://www.nma.co.uk/SiteInspections/40880/Bench.html

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'Tis the season to be jolly, or jolly busy as we are in the waccy world of online retail.
In fact thats 99.99% of the reason i've been so quite recently.

But naturally, at this time of year, our thoughts turn to such questions as "how many MaxClients should I have?" and "are keepalives better or worse for overall performance?" but the question exercising our minds today has been "what *are* all those ip_conntrack entries?".

Rewind a little... a) I turned keepalives off, and reduced MaxClients, things seemed to be more controlled without all those idle processes ready to receive requests with no warning.
b) We'd always had a low but persistent number of "can't connect", or "no html" errors reported by external beacons, and when we applied test loads this went through the roof.

So today, dmesg says.. ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.

Which brings me to the point of this post, we increased the size of the table in line with the unverified facts, lies, and dodgy misinformation prevelant on the web ;-)

That helped, but now we want to know whats in the ip_conntrack?

Enter the victor of the command of the week award..

grep ^tcp /proc/net/ip_conntrack | awk '{print $4}' | sort | uniq -c

Whos output turns a whole mess of gobbledy gook into something like this:

196 CLOSE
    14 CLOSE_WAIT
 28380 ESTABLISHED
    11 FIN_WAIT
     3 LAST_ACK
   786 SYN_RECV
 18101 TIME_WAIT

Knowedge is power, have an award Patrick Schaaf. :-)

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John McCain apparently said this..

"I'm very happy with where we are," he said before voting. "We always do best when I'm a bit of an underdog."

Ooops, I'd hate to see you do badly then.

Have a Quote-of-the-Election award.

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got an email this morning with this subject...

FW: Redemption through online store

Was The Church now offering Salvation to credit card users online? Maybe not.
Perhaps, I then thought, this is how retailers will avoid credit crisis hell?
I was disappointed, of course, when I read it because it was about integrating with a gift card provider, but it caught my attention, and so deserves an award.

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Feedback on the new www.bench.co.uk site for Bench clothing elicited this response..

On the whole, the site is edgy, youthful and energetic; I, however, am not,...

Thank you ma'am and have an award.

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