Phasor Burn

Boggles my mind how this kind of shoddy work is accepted….

We went thru the trouble of setting up https and secure ldap for sugarcrm authentication. All to be negated by the sugarcrm login page using GET to pass that information along.

They should be using POST for login. Never ever use GET for login operations. Gah.

By using GET they guarantee anybody with access to the web server logs or web proxy logs can see this information. We’re pseudo-ok in that only root can view the logs on this particular server, but still. My mind boggles. What a bunch of idiots.


"GET /crm/index.php?
action=UnifiedSearch&module=Home&search_form=false
&advanced=false&module=Users&action=Authenticate
&return_module=Users&return_action=Login
&cant_login=&login_module=
&login_action=&login_record=
&user_name=tmiller
&user_password=xxxxxxxx
&Login=++Login++&login_theme=WhiteSands
&login_language=en_us HTTP/1.1"

Found this while reading an article about franchises.

Second Cup is different from say, Tim Hortons. At Tim Hortons, all you have to do is take money and give a product in return. Take money, give a coffee. Take money, give a donut or a soup. Second Cup is more communal. It’s a neighbourhood thing where you meet people from the community. You get to know everybody. I’ve been here for just four months, and I know a lot of people already and they know me too. It’s about dealing with people and building relationships. It takes people skills to own a Second Cup whereas it’s more about taking orders and doing math to own a Tim Hortons.

I dunno. I’d almost rather go for the making money hand-over-fist model of Tim Hortons than the have-dialog-with-neighborhood-riff-raff at Second Cup. Too bad both franchises have such crappy coffee. I guess I could run one and never actually use the product myself

Still looking for the not-computers-100%-the-time future sideways career shift. I mean, sure I like playing with systems and making them do my bidding, but there’s something missing, something more I want to do, but I don’t know what yet. I do know I’m not cut out for going back to school, and I’m 99.98% self taught in UNIX type stuff … both things kind of limit me. But I digress.

This article says being cranky can actually help boost productivity. Yay, I always knew there was a benefit to being a prototypical cranky bofh-wannabe system administrator . . .

Apparently, F22 Raptors had difficulty crossing the International Date Line recently, all their navigation etc computers crashed.

Here’s a quote, supposedly from a cnn transcript of a broadcast earlier today :

You want everything to go right with the frontline fighter. $125, 135 Million a copy. The F-22 raptor is our frontline fighter, air defense, air superiority, and it can drop bombs. It is stealthy and fast. You want it to go right. On the international deployment to the pacific, it didn’t. At the international date line, whoops. All systems dumped. When i say all systems I mean all systems, navigation, part of the communications, fuel systems, and they were — they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers — tried to reset their systems. Couldn’t get them reset. Tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. Certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. Turned out okay. Fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code; somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes.

A comment from the slashdot article

Re:I have worked on Commecial and DoD avionics
(Score:5, Insightful)
by nonsequitor (893813) on Sunday February 25, @11:36PM (#18149088)
I too have worked as a contractor doing avionics work. What really surprises me in all of this is that there was no hardware watchdog, or way to reset the box on the way back. I used to work on multi-function displays, ADIs, HSIs, TCAS, etc… The adage goes that no information is better than old information so after going blank, it should have come back up in less than a minute. The fact that the failure state entered by crossing the dateline was persistent after a reboot is criminal negligence, these are people’s lives here. Pilots have breakers for everything, they would have cut power and restored it after exhausting all other options, the fact it still was not operational says a lot, none of it good.

You’d think this sort of thing would have been found in simulations first. Even running production avionics with faked gps inputs etc would have been sufficient. Just you wait until Jack Bauer gets to the bottom of this one . . . (Come on, it’s GOT to be the plot of next season’s 24, no?)

CBC National “Slow Newsday” Flashback to 1993

CBC Archives original here

Sadly, the net went to hell in a handbasket after the neverending September. Before that, every September saw flood of noobs entering university and getting access for the first time. A month or so later the old-hands had bitch slapped them into proper netiquette etc for the most part.

This pattern wasn’t able to continue after September 1996 (I think, could have been a year or two earlier). That’s when the general populace started to get online in relative droves and brought the whole mess down several magnitudes in coolness, collective iq, etc. However, without all of these joe junchpails getting online, the net would never have moved to commercialization and all of the cool stuff that followed on from the money train thereafter.