What's new pussycat?

See this is why I think there should be time limits on when people can be prosecuted. So he's going to have his life ripped apart because some 14 year old groupie threw herself at him and lied about her age 40 years ago? It's bollox.

DLT lost his home when he went through it.

Trying to work out WTF someone's tried to send to me. At work, of all places. One of the receptionists has just given me a card from Royal Mail. Can't deliver the item because there's a fee to pay.

I've ordered stuff to my home address and everything's arrived. I can't think of any reason why someone would send me something and not pay for it. I imagine if someone wanted to make sure I received something, it would have been sent via recorded/registered/special delivery. It's obviously a large letter as the fee due is £2 (of which £1 is the handling fee).

So...options are:

1. Do nothing. The item will go back to sender (if there's an obvious return address), or get destroyed.
2. Ring the depot to see if I can find out who it's from (provided they'll give me that info over the 'phone)
3. Go in person, or go online, and pay for the item. It's only £2

Bear in mind, it's unlikely to be anything "special". It could be a patient letter, a bit of "junk mail" or similar.

I've had this. The Posr Office won't give you any details about the letter/parcel over the phone.

Only just occurred to me that today we chain up shopping trolleys and only release them to become beasts of burden. Once, we did that to people.

I was watching some Family Guy short clips on Youtube. I spotted one with Bob Ross in it. I had no idea who he was. Decided to watch a video on YouTube. This guy is a frikkin genius. His technique was so simple, I felt like I could recreate them despite it being 2am.

He's on Netflix last I looked.

Ants! More to point, where are little lighters getting in? Also, where has the ant bait thingy I thought I had gone?

The ants took it away before they invaded.

Seriously though, we had an ant problem a month ago. The ants were in the utility room and kitchen by they had started to venture into the dining room. Ended up with ant powder on the floor along the skirting board and across door thresholds. They stopped soon after.

Reminded me of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TipQ2suNIfs

British Airways IT chaos was caused by human error - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40159202

I know nothing about UPSs, but aren't they supposed to be the backup for your standard power supply? And why would it knock out backup generators and hardware?

It's cobblers, frankly.

1) They should have 'geographical redundancy' I.e. have two datacenters with their kit in it, so if one fails (e.g if the power to the building gets taken out or whatever) the other takes over. This is standard practice.

2) UPS's are designed to allow systems to carry on operating (or at least shut down in an orderly manner) if the power goes out. They also have systems inline to 'smooth' power and deal with power spikes. THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE FOR. This is standard practice.

3) They will have, in each of their datacenters *cough*, multiple racks of servers. Not all those racks of servers will be fed from the same power supply path. Therefore whatever you do to one path will not affect what happens to the others. This is standard practice.

4) Each of the servers in those racks will have multiple redundant power supplies. They will be fed from different lines. So if you do get a massive catastrophic spike on a power line, the fuse in one PSU trips, you 'sacrifice' that PSU and the server carries on - possibly in lower power mode with less performance - using the other PSU. This is standard practice.

You start to get the picture - enterprise hardware and architectures are designed with distribution of function and multiple levels of redundancy in them, to allow them to survive pretty much any damaging event. Taking out a server, or a rack of servers, or a roomful of racks, or even an entire datacentre, should not bring your entire operation to a grinding halt for days. BA are a billion pound a year business, they can afford to do this properly. I work at a business that's a whole league below that, and the only thing that'll actually take out our services is if Manchester gets hit by a 50 ton meteorite, at which point I'll almost certainly be dead and won't give a stuff about IT any more.

IMO, this is complete balderdash and should be given no credence.

What I strongly suspect has happened is

a) There's actually been some sort of attack, and they've been caught by it. They weren't spending enough on security. This would be especially interesting since, I believe, businesses are required by law to disclose this kind of stuff.
b) They've skimped, and don't have proper redundancy systems in place. They didn't have proper hosting/hardware. They weren't spending enough on infrastructure.
c) They've outsourced their IT, someone did something understandable-but-wrong, and it broke something critical. They weren't spending enough on expertise.

Either way, the root cause of this is almost certainly some executive/manager looked at a number on a billing sheet somewhere and said 'that's ludicrous. Do it for half that or I'll find someone else who will'. As a result they didn't do the job properly, and got bitten by it. That executive is almost certainly never going to be publicly shamed but it will be interesting to watch executive departures at BA over say the next six months.

We are a small company, with a small staff and only 2 production servers, but we have a geographically redundant 2nd data center with hardware to take over in the event of a failure in the first (it is on the other side of the street in another building). That also covers the "fire" problem, of ensuring that the server rooms are in different "fire areas" - if the building goes up in flames, then there is a physical firewall between the two room to stop the fire spreading and engulfing both rooms.

UPS's are there and checked regularly.

Not just the servers, we are replacing the air con in our primary server room, both of the units are on separate power circuits.

All the hardware is also shielded, the power cables are run through surge protectors and none of the servers are attached to anything with cables, all external connections are using non-conductive optical fibre cables.

All servers come with redundant PSUs, ours are cross connected to different UPS devices, so if one UPS fails, the other should take up the load on the 2nd PSU.

We have a redundant internet connection (50mbps fibre optic, 10mbps copper, both synchronus)

That is for a small company with next to no budget for IT!

https://littlealchemy.com/

Incrediby addictive.

That a hung parliament (which I expect to have) will make Brexit a very messy process indeed.

Maybe they will realise what a stupid idea it is, and stop.