the foobar zone

Apple's Time Machine is a great system for managing client backups in a sensible way. Problem is, it depends on connectivity to a locally mounted disk, which doesn't really suit me. The reason it doesn't suit is because I don't want the constant hum of an extra disk drive while I'm working. Extra noise is bad. It also costs more to run, given that I have one or two servers powered up anyway.

So, today's job was to upgrade a pair of D-Link switches in the office.  They're relatively recent jobs: a DGS-1216T and a DGS-1224T.  Both managed and gigabit ethernet capable, with various bells and whistles.

The boxes had been irritating me for some while because the VLAN configuration web interface had clearly been designed by some stupid web developer who only used IE6.  As a result, you could only create new VLANs if you used IE6, or if you turned off CSS completely. Nice one, guys - I just love your testing procedures!

Oops, Cisco rightly messed up this morning by publishing the home page of their web site without the letter 't'.  It's amusing enough to see their opinions on a "Daa Cener", but this was one better: the entire HTML source for the page was buggered up, not just the visible text.  Stylesheets went missing, images failed to load, links didn't work.

Of course, Cisco aren't exactly saying a whole lot about why this happened, but I'd give a fair guess that some poor webmonkey messed up a regular expression on some whole page output filter.  Oh dear.

What with my recent move to Mac-istan, I'd really like to be able to ditch my last two remaining PC dependencies, namely Visio and an accounting package which generally works well and has some remote comprehension of the vagaries of the irish tax system.

One in 10 web pages laced with malware - Google, screamed the The Register, in one of its characteristic gutter-press style headlines.

Now, you've always got to take El Reg with a pinch of salt. God bless them in there: sometimes they write stuff worth reading, but other times you're left scratching your head and asking yourself why in bejaysus they write such a load of complete bollox. Tabloid headline syndrome or something? Sure looks like it to me.