It's actually quite an achievement that considering the current situation, it managed to portray a future that was actually worse without a full-on apocalypse.
]]>At my last job I spent a lot of time and effort trying to train clients and coworkers not to interrupt me. I got our biggest client set up to use JIRA to raise issues rather than sending emails or phoning unless an issue was urgent, and I nagged people to use Slack (for the uninitiated, it's an instant messaging application for teams) rather than interrupting me or sending an email. I also spent a lot of time writing Ansible tasks to automate new server setup. At least as a developer I do have some scope to automate stuff away so I don't have to deal with it manually, which is a huge improvement on my previous career path.
]]>Nonetheless, the result of this referendum does seem like a textbook example of tyranny of the majority, and in a nation where a head of state, whether elected or not, has veto power over legislation, then that's exactly the sort of occasion when you'd expect that head of state to seriously consider using their veto.
]]>However, I think there's a product that needs to die even more, and that's Excel. I used to be a customer service grunt for a big UK insurer, and I saw Excel used in the most unspeakable ways. I'm now a web developer and I shudder at what people were using it for.
A lot of mission-critical data that really belonged in a relational database was stored in Excel spreadsheets, and frequently got overwritten if two or more people accessed it simultaneously (of course, you could limit access to a single person at a time, but then that person invariably left it open when they went to lunch so nobody could get their work done). The only way of rolling back any changes that went wrong was by contacting the IT department to get a previous version of the file. A staggering amount of vital tasks were done with VBA macros that were an unbelievable pain to use and required a great deal of manual work by the user before they were run.
All of this was stuff that would be far better handled using MySQL and Perl or Python (even bash, sed and awk will handle most of what you'd need), but these weren't permitted for security reasons.
]]>Something I've wanted to know since I read The Apocalypse Codex - was the tongue-eating parasite based on Cymothoa exigua? The images of them in fish's mouths are pretty unsettling, and I can easily imagine seeing that somewhere and thinking "Yes, that'll make a good parasite for this story"
]]>It does sound pretty unlikely that we'd get kicked off if we did get rid of our nuclear deterrent to me. Also, if we only get the seat through having access to the top tier of nasty toys rather than political or economic influence, surely that's a sign we probably shouldn't have it in the first place?
]]>I do have a somewhat under-utilised VPS I could use for this, so hosting something isn't going to entail any additional expense. I quite like the look of Tiny Tiny RSS, but it's written in PHP, which puts me off. I have used Newsbeuter (memorably described by Zed Shaw as "the Mutt of feed readers") with Google Reader in the past, and I could fairly happily switch to using this on my VPS over SSH.
]]>At the most basic, I imagine you could use Asterisk to implement a very simple CAPTCHA-style test ("Press 5 to demonstrate you're human"), and either disconnect failed attempts or redirect them elsewhere in order to waste their time. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to require a password from callers to put them through as well, and I understand there are ways to subscribe to a shared blacklist as well.
Surely it wouldn't be out of the question for some manufacturer to begin selling small inexpensive home PBX systems?
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