Recently I received a fairly typical “please do my research for me” email from a graduate student at a US university. It related to an open source software project I’ve done some work on and asked a couple of questions: 1. I was wondering if [project] has gone under any major restructuring/redesign initiative in its [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Fail category.
Mapzen: First Thoughts
CloudMade have tonight launched their Mapzen flash based editor for OpenStreetMap. It’s officially described as a beta, but as they’ve made it publicly available and it is working against the live API and editing real data I assume that is more of a “Google beta” than anything else. The basic editing of roads and such [...]
Secure Usernames
We’ve all dealt with web site which have rules (ostensibly to increase security) about having a certain mix of character types in your password. Today however I encountered an entirely new security concept: Yes, that’s right, this site has invented a whole new idea – the secure username that has to contain both letters and [...]
OpenOffice is Way Too Clever
OpenOffice really is way too clever for it’s own good… It’s latest massive fail in the “I know what you want better than you do” department is to decide that just because I already have an instance of OpenOffice running on my desktop what I really want when I type “oocalc foo.ods” is for it [...]
BT really are clinically insane
Yesterday, as mentioned in my previous post, I (eventually) sent BT a message via their web site asking them to stop making marketing calls to me. Today, rather than just replying by email to say they would stop, they decided to phone me up. Not once. Not twice. No, they phoned me THREE times. Twice [...]
Contacting British Telecom…
So I get an annoying telesales call from some (for once reasonably comprehensible) guy in India on behalf of our dearly beloved national telco trying, somewhat bizarrely, to offer me a Visa card. After explaining that I prefer to obtain financial services from financial institutions and to stick to purchasing telephone service from a telco [...]
Out of the BlockBuster frying pan…
So for about the last eighteen months I’ve been using BlockBuster’s DVD by post service and, aside from them never paying my QuidCo cashback, things have generally been working fine. Lately however they have started to annoy me – things at the top of my list for months on end with no sign of them [...]
MONOPOLY City Streets EPIC FAIL
It seems Hasbro had a brilliant idea – launch a free online version of Monopoly™. So they got Tribal DDB to build it for them and engaged on a media blitz promoting MONOPOLY City Streets everywhere they could. Then they went live… I suspect they fairly quickly wished they had done things in a slightly [...]
Bletchley Park Password Fail
In order to register for the ACCU Autumn Conference (Security; Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) which is being held at Bletchley Park on 7th November I needed to create an account on the Bletchley Park web site. Given the association of Bletchley Park with the history of both computers and security issues, and the subject of [...]
Tyan AST2050 Mac Address Fail
Apparently all Tyan AST2050 remote management cards have the same ethernet address (00:10:20:3d:40:5f). Certainly the ones supplied in OpenStreetMap’s two new servers, yevaud and errol, had the same address. Which means trying to talk to both from the same machine led to constant fights in the ARP table over which IP address should be mapped [...]