the foobar zone

It's only occasionally that an article crops up which is so completely clueless that my hackles are raised. But some drivel in the online issue of The Weekly Standard has really hit rock bottom in terms of factual inaccuracy, idiotic bias and nationalistic tunnel-vision.

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!

I mean, what are these goddamn news agencies talking about in their stories about a fire in a bus depot, that makes it necessary to bring in the terrorist aspect?

I'm a firm believer that it being 2007, it should be possible - nay, easy - to pay bills on-line using a credit card. So it's a little surprising to come across systems which don't yet accept credit cards on-line.

For us europistanis, it's mightly irritating that by default, Macs come with a US style keyboard attached to them. It's irritating that there are pathological differences between latin-1 style keyboards in the first place, but who made the decision to swap keys like @ and "? What misery you have wreaked on the world?

[this article originally written in 2000, before the widescale implementation of dsl and other broadband technologies]

Lots of people ask why I regularly let off steam about dialup SMTP as a method for downloading email from their ISP. Here's a quick outline of my main gripes about it.