the weekly whinge

Asda's website shows us the true mathematical genius of cloud computing

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So I don’t usually post links to stuff like this, but if you haven’t seen Vivian Maier’s street photography, you really must.

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This Dr Dobbs article caught my eye when I was looking for a Windows Mobile NTP client (long story). I read it with some alarm as the introduction implies that they’ve found a fundamental problem with NTP and then became steadily more incredulous as I read the article to find that they were talking about periodically running – on mission-critical systems, of course – ntpclient to synchronise with a single time source.

They’ve basically written up alarmist crap that’s worthy of the Daily Mail about the fact that if you use what’s essentially a test program against a single not-particularly-stable server it doesn’t work very well. Big surprise.

Does anyone really use ntpclient like that on a critical production server? I’d have thought configuring ntpd with a few ntp servers wasn’t exactly hard – there’s even a pretty noddy Redhat howto for it. And yet the title of the article (and especially the introduction) suggest that they’ve uncovered a fundamental problem with ntp.

I’m left wondering if timekeeper is a Dr Dobbs product, to be honest.

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I don’t tend to post links, but this one just made me lol more than most.

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So betfair have a £5 free bet game (probably only works if you already have an account, although I’m not sure of that) which at first glance looks like a scratchcard – you have to click on the three hearts from nine which have a £ behind them. Except that if (after clicking start) you do nothing for a few seconds it quietly shows you which ones to click.

I guess it’s intentional but I don’t care: these free bet offers are great – I won £120 on the National this year risk-free and haven’t used my account since except for their free bet offers, and yet they keep on sending them to me 🙂

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I like this. It’s my idea of heaven in a theme – uncluttered, plain and simple.

Tags: meta.

Tags: humour.

Whinge on the way soon. I also need to decide on some more whingey colours.

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