Category: Pet Peeves

Stupidity at Evanzo

Post author By otmar
Post date April 10, 2009

Dear Evanzo,

the contact emails in the whois records for the domains you manage are there for a purpose: If there are troubles with these domains, the responsible people can be contacted in order to get the problems fixed.

And there is a good reason these whois data is not just a blob of Ascii, but structured data: Scripts can parse the records and e.g. automatically send email to the right address.

Getting back autoreplies stating basically “please use this web-form” is not going to cut it. We will not special-case our scripts to fill out web-forms just to accommodate your setup.

You, and your customers will simply not get our Mails regarding defaced Websites hosted by your service.

Your decision, your loss.

Pet Peeves

Nokia 6120 Classic and A1 Broadband

Post author By otmar
Post date March 13, 2009

When I got my company cell-phone two years ago, I opted for a Nokia 6120. The reasoning was simple: Nokia was supposed to have a decent user-interface, the phone could act as a 3G modem for my laptop and run various simple applications like Avantgo.

Well, …

Pet Peeves System Administration

The razor business model within IT

Post author By otmar
Post date March 4, 2009

The razor business is said to have premiered the following business model: Sell the razor really cheap, but charge a lot for the blades.

Seeing the same in IT isn’t unusual, the prime examples are Inkjet printers where the printer is ridiculously cheap, but a new ink cartridge costs almost the same as the printer.

Cisco memory is another example.

I just noticed the same with HP’s new entry-level 1U server, the HP 120G5. We bought one for evaluation purposes for slightly above 500 â‚¬. Seems like a decent hardware: 1GB RAM, a Xeon processor and a single SATA harddisk. No frills, no chrome spoilers, just a straight forward server.

But: no on-board remote management. That would be extra. You need to buy the HP DL120 G5 Lights-Out 100c kit. We just plugged one of these into a DL 180, where we really need it. It’s a very tiny card. Just a PCI-E slot, a RJ45 jack and a single chip:

LO 100c

The price: ~ 200 â‚¬.

Sheesh.

Pet Peeves

Buying shoes for kids

Post author By otmar
Post date February 28, 2009

The feet of kids are delicate things and as a caring parent you’re supposed to make sure that the spawn’s footwear fits his ever-growing feet. Ok, spring is coming and thus the time is near where we can stop using his #24 winter boots and give him “normal” shoes again. So off to the store we are and what do we find?

At the end of February, the shop is already geared towards summer shoes. i.e.: open shoes and sandals. Great. That’s about 2 to 3 months in the future.

That stocking policy might make sense for shoes for adults, but for kids? The size of their feet is highly variable. You buy when you need the shoes as you want to size them correctly.

So dear shoe industry: what’s fine in the woman’s section of the store does not make sense in the kids section. There, “just in time” shopping is much more appropriate. Please stock accordingly.

Pet Peeves

Kafka would be proud

Post author By otmar
Post date February 22, 2009

I used to work for KPNQwest, which was a pan-European company. They tried to offer seamless service across Europe (which failed miserably) and tried things like regional service centers.

Dealing with Interxion gives me Deja-Vues. They, too, try to offer the same service in all of their Datacenters across Europe. And they, too, have their centralized customer care. Here the fun starts:

Life Pet Peeves

Buying a new TV set

Post author By otmar
Post date January 2, 2009

I had hoped to replace my old CRT in a few years when the pace of innovation on the LCD side had settled down, the standards have really established themselves, more HD content feeds are available, and the prices are lower than now. But no, the CRT called it quits a few weeks ago (no more vertical beam deflection) and we are forced to buy now.

Well, shucks.

I won’t repeat what’s been discussed to death in the various videophile sites and price-comparison fora. Just one simple question:

Why don’t hand the shops out simple 1:1 scale paper pictures of the various TV sizes? It is really hard to picture how the set you see in the showroom will look like in your living room and thus decide which size you want to buy.

Thus I spent yesterday evening getting the measurements of 32, 37 and 42 inch TVs and cutting cardboard as mockups. Holding these against the wall almost instantly told us what size we really need/want.

So dear Philips, Sony, Toshiba & co: what about it?

Pet Peeves

Numerology and Haider’s death

Post author By otmar
Post date November 16, 2008

I spent this weekend in Carinthia and got treated to the local press. The KTZ had on their front-page a story about a numerologist who had calculated that Haider was in great danger during October and November. She had tried to warn him, but they didn’t manage a meeting before his date with a concrete fence post.

As usual, the story did not ask the only really relevant question: How many other calamities had she predicted in her career that did not came to pass?

Pet Peeves

Fun with conditional probabilities

Post author By otmar
Post date April 20, 2008

Yes, mathematics is sometimes hard to understand. Probability theory is a prime candidate where “common sense” might mislead you. And once you venture into conditional probabilities (“given A is true, what’s the probability of B being true as well?”) things get tricky.

A good example is the following statement: “The orbit of our earth so incredibly fine tuned to the requirements of intelligent life, that this is a strong indication that a higher being was involved.”

This may sound reasonable at first glance, but it’s completely wrong. Let me rephrase the statement to make this clear:

“What is the probability that the environment here on earth is suitable for the development of life, given the fact that this question is asked by a person whose species evolved here on this planet?”

The answer is 1 (100% probable).

Or in other words, if the environment here on earth were hostile to us, we wouldn’t be here to ask this question. And indeed, there are billions of planets, where nobody is asking this question.

So no, these considerations do not provide an argument regarding the existence of god.

(Btw, the same reasoning applies to arguments concerning the fundamental constants of this universe. In that case, you just need to assume an infinite number of universes with varying parameters, as a number of physicists postulate.)