BBC Online Editors
Feb0
Or more specifically, the lack of them. I was perusing the news today when I saw this on the BBC website.
The action followed a meeting of about mechanical contractors in one of the plant’s car parks early on Monday.
A meeting of about… mechanical contractors? One slip-up is acceptable, but over the last month or so I’ve noticed more and more grammatical and punctuation errors including my personal favourite of the misplaced comma.
Does the BBC not employ proof-readers any more, or are they just relying on their readers to report problems?
Graphic Design Failure
Dec2
Oops...
However, somebody in the graphic design department has fallen into the classic trap of knowing exactly what they used for the icon, and not stepping back and taking an objective look at the finished product. It’s not a stretch of the imagination, if you squint a bit, to turn this particular icon into a closeup of a wine glass.
Thanks to Alex who let me know of this particular failure.
Missing MoD Hard Drive – Epic Fail
Oct0
And so, a government department seems to have misplaced personal details again. This no longer comes as a surprise to me, since most branches of government have shown themselves to have no basic grasp of basic security policies or data management.
For very obvious personal and national security reasons the MoD must ensure that it handles the records of our Armed Forces personnel with the highest care.
Says the Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox. He has a very, very good point. We must ask things like why this data was kept on a removable hard drive and not, for example, on an encrypted database array with strict access controls. I don’t pretend to be a computer security expert or a professional database administrator but even I can see that keeping details in this method, probably in an Excel spreadsheet of some description, is both poor security and poor data management.
A MobileMe Mistake
Jul0
The MobileMe online login screen.
I thought it would all be good. The .Mac service wasn’t amazing, and certainly wasn’t worth the money for the yearly subscription unless you had more than one Mac and needed to keep them in sync. iDisk was slow, Sync routinely broke iTunes contacts syncing with my iPhone and so on. Then Apple announced MobileMe at WWDC, which looked absolutely amazing. Instant push updates between my Mac and iPhone – even my Windows installation – of calendars, contacts and any mail sent to my @mac.com (now @me.com) email address.
Trouble is, it doesn’t work and has been an amazing cock-up on Apple’s part, a company normally renowned for their flawless execuation of product launches.
It came alongside the iPhone 3G launch, which was predictably insane with demand far outstripping supply and the inevitable server issues as O2 and iTunes tried to handle thousands of people all activating at once. The iPhone 2.0 software update was good despite a small delay in pushing it to iTunes, but the iPhone and the new iTunes expects the MobileMe infrastructure to be in place.
It isn’t. It’s been up and down and unreliable for around 48 hours now, and I still don’t have the update which enables my Mac to talk to MobileMe, rendering it useless. Apparently there was a 1.1 patch hovering around briefly, but this has been pulled, despite some people still not getting 1.0 (Me included).
Guess it’s back to waiting.
Library Security Sucks
May1
No, I am not going to tell you how to do this.
I have recently discovered that the library security at Lincoln can be easily defeated using nothing more than a simple, freely available online tool. This allows you to enter the library simply by knowing a valid Student ID number (All undergraduate student email addresses begin with these), and check books back in which aren’t actually there.
This is not good.