alecm
alecm
@alecm@alecmuffett.com
8,058 posts
314 followers
  • Meeting Minds: A Commercial Grid Geek talks to an Academic Grid Geek

    I had a nice long AIM chat with my friend Chris last night; Chris has spent a few years working in academic computing grid and cluster research, and with my new grid-focused commercial role we’ve been swapping notes about our respetive jobs, and the respective cultures thereof. Last night’s chat turned-out more different than I’d…

  • “Could you please find the password to a livejournal account?”

    Oh my… Through the nature of my hobby/research I tend to a lot of these things but this one is quite egregious, and my first blog-based one: [www.crypticide.com] I don’t know if you could help me or not and I’m very sorry if I bother you by asking you to do this favor for me……

  • Romans, Pyramids, and Wedding Bells

    Grim and Holly got married. Some people said “at last”, and they have a slight point – some expected this sooner, others thought it moot – but none of this detracted from the depth of the celebration. The ceremony was at Matfen Hall in Northumberland on Sunday afternoon, at a ceremony to which I had…

  • Bush website adopts isolationist stance

    [www.theregister.co.uk] International access to the official re-election website of Us President George W. Bush (www.georgewbush.com) has been blocked. Surfers from outside the US trying to reach the site receive an “access denied” message. … It’s true. I just tried it: Access Denied You don’t have permission to access “http://www.georgewbush.com/” on this server. …but like ElReg…

  • People – even mullet-wearers – project their ideal on to Jesus

    [news.bbc.co.uk] So what colour was Jesus? Jesus has been named the top black icon by the New Nation newspaper. Their assertion that Jesus was black has raised eyebrows in some quarters – so what colour was he? … First – if the past 2,000 years of Western art were the judge, Jesus would be white,…

  • blast from the past

    So in regards to a previous posting about DataPower I got a thank-you e-mail from Rich Salz – a name that I’ve not really seen much since I gave up on being a USENET admin in 1996-ish, but which is familiar to we older generation of geeks in the days before USENET became DejaNews, latterly…

  • The blog of one is a tragedy; the blogs of millions are just a statistic.

    It’s bizzare, having a highly-pageranked blog. I get pagerank points for password cracking, security documentation, and a variety of other stuff – photos, artwork – as well as having a widely-read blog with links from lots of other widely-read blogs, so that helps overall contributes to my site’s high hitrate. The amusement comes from the…

  • did ye ken’ john peel?

    <unhappy> [news.bbc.co.uk] Veteran BBC broadcaster John Peel has died at the age of 65, while on holiday in Peru. </unhappy>

  • Realism in Product Marketing

    Oh! It is so refreshing to have a breath of fresh air: [www.datapower.com] As enterprises deploy sophisticated XML-enabled applications, they face several adoption hurdles: * Poor performing applications – Powerful applications rely on complex processing of large XML files. XML is a text-based encoding standard that slows ordinary processors to a crawl, rendering applications unusable.…

  • Authorship, and Corporate Politics

    If you are involved in corporate politics – especially in the IT industry – I really recommend the following. Go read the following Q&A interview with SciFi author Neal Stephenson; specifically go read the pitch and response to question 2: 2) The lack of respect… – by MosesJones Science Fiction is normally relegated to the…

  • today has not been a good day…

    …in fact it’s been rot13(“fuvg”). I woke up with backache – a muscle beneath my left shoulderblade was tense and refusing to loosen; a Radox bath gave me 10 minutes relief but once I fed the cats it seized completely and left me flat on my back on the kitchen floor. I crawled, literally, back…

  • Blue Man Project – Alternative Video

    Pointed out to me by Rob Diamond – [www.blueman.com] well worth a look.