Jeff Licquia: This Is Not An Oops.
Carver County, Minnesota, is in big trouble. (via buzz.mn)
Eric Mattson was not surprised that the small vacant lot he bought last year near the shores of Lake Waconia was increasing in value. What shocked him was the $189 million market value the Carver County assessor’s office came up with for the 55- by 80-foot lot, making it the most valuable property in Waconia and possibly the county.Of the resulting $2.5 million tax windfall, about $900,000 had already been spent by the time Mattson got the bill and came in to complain. They’re now looking at spending cuts and new taxes to pay for the shortfall.
“This is not an ‘oops.’ This is a major error that affects an awful lot of people,” said Mark Lundgren, director of the Carver County division that oversees the assessor’s office.So how could someone make such an egregious error?
Lundgren said the trouble began in August when a clerk went into Mattson’s file to change the designation of the property, at 233 Lake St. E., from homestead to non-homestead to reflect its change in status after its sale.
The clerk filled in the $18,900 proposed valuation, but then mistakenly hit the key to exit the program. The computer added four zeros to fill out the nine numerical spaces required by the software, thus indicating the value was $189,000,000.So many thing come to mind, most of which are probably too snarky. But a few observations come to mind:
- Don’t just pin this on the clerk. The major mistake was with the programmers, whose software did such an unexpected thing, and on the auditors, who missed a $2.5 million mistake. (Oddly, given that audit failure was an issue, the only solution worth mentioning in the article was “more auditing”.)
- Programmers, cherish your input. Do not auto-munge it without at least user review! And, I’d argue, don’t auto-munge it at all if the result is at all valuable. Validate it, sure, but don’t change it; force the user to fix his or her own mistakes. After all, if your program was so smart as to know what the user “meant”, why does it need manual data entry at all?
- Use modern tools! What kind of data store today requires zero-padding? MySQL is a free download, and very popular; for all its perceived faults, it can at least store numbers of variable sizes correctly.
Ok, so two people replied to 
My domains DNS is still hosted with the company I registered it at. I'm
planning to move it to a different company early next year. So when a friend
asked me for secondary nameserver exchange, I already set up the new DNS.So my current setup is like this:Primary and secondary nameserver are at my old provider, serving their copy
of the DNS zone (which obviously lists their nameservers as NS)The A and MX records point to my server, which will sometime also be the new
master NS. This host has an own copy of the zone file, which agrees on the
'regular' entries, but lists my server as well as the friends two servers as
NS. This is the only link from the domain to the friends servers.
Let me emphasize this: neither my server nor my friends servers are currently
listed in the .tld database. Their NS entries still point to the old providers
server. I'm planning to change that in January.Now my friend told me, that he had about 10 email delivery attempts to my
domain in his logs, obviously coming from some spammers.WTF? In order to link my domain to his server, you'd need to
Sunday afternoon I came back from the QA meeting in M rida (Spain).
I host some of the pictures on my machine: 
Monday in the evening I got a phonecall from the company where I had a personal interview last tuesday. They can adopt my apprenticeship. Yay… There are several reasons why I want to leave my current workplace (Stadt Grenchen): I have almost nothing to do, I learn nothing anymore, some people in my team were an interpersonal catastrophe, noone knows what the work “responsibility” means. I don’t want to go into the detail, but at least they reached that I got several nervous breakdowns, ending at the doctor wednesday afternoon. As I told, my nerves are down, I can’t sleep during the night here, motivation for life was down in the cave. This week I don’t need to work at all (medical certificate) and the next 2 weeks only 50%, so enough time to relax and get healthy again.
Also thanks to my girlfriend 
Everyone knows that Webmin is nasty - it does things in wrong way on a pure and nice Debian (and Ubuntu) systems and for some reason is not included in Debian (post-sarge) or Ubuntu. That does not inspire confidence in a root-running web based software to say the least.
Today I went for the second time[1] to 
One thing that's been interesting me lately is 
Like most things, the scale of decisions that have to be made by a person
or organisation fall across a wide spectrum. At one end, you've got the
fine-detail work: lines of code, individual config settings, IP addresses,
that sort of thing. This is crucial work, because it's this detail that
ultimately produces saleable results. Travelling all the way to the other
end, there's the "big picture" decisions: the "visionary" stuff. What
market segment will we target? What will we do (in large-scale terms)
to get there?
I am convinced that individuals naturally gravitate towards one end of this
spectrum or the other, depending on their psychology. While people usually
can work at all scales, they have a "most comfortable" point where they
work the most naturally. The further away from this point they are pushed,
the less comfortable and effective they are.
No level of thinking is better or worse than the other; they're just
different. While "large scale thinker" and "small scale thinker"
could be taken as being insulting, I certainly don't mean it that way.
I should point out that "Strategy" isn't (just) about setting goals. A
strategist isn't someone who comes out with grand pronouncements like "By
the end of next year this company should be providing telecommunications
services to 20% of the Fortune 500" without knowing how to get there.
That's not a strategist, that's a poor-quality management consultant.
People whose only skill is making vague pronouncements should just be taken
out and shot. They're not doing anything useful for anyone.
A strategist is someone who is good at planning the goal of "20%
of the Fortune 500". They're thinking about the big picture issues,
without getting bogged down in the minutiae. A tactician, given the job of
planning something at the macro scale, will chase some good idea down an
intricately detailed rabbit hole, and miss the other dozen or so large
issues that need to be considered. The strategist's planning needs to stop
at a certain level and let other people take on the detail work.
Conversely, a good tactician can focus on the individual details
without getting distracted by the big picture. A strategist put into a
tactical role will miss all the important minutiae because they're working
out how their little part fits into the big picture, instead of working out
how to make their little part work, in and of itself.
It's important, for individual happiness, to try and work out what level
you're most comfortable thinking at, and then trying to find a job that
puts you there. It's almost as important to make sure that the people who
are working at the more and less detail levels around you are equally
comfortable.
Take, for example, the micromanager. We've all either been there ourselves
or have heard multiple stories on the subject. I think the micromanager is
nothing more than a person who wants to work at a smaller scale than they're
being forced to by their organisational rank. Since they can't do
the detail work any more, their only outlet is working vicariously through
their subordinates. Voila! Instant micromanagement.
An even more painful case of micromanagement would be when the subordinate
wants to think at a larger scale than the superior. In that case, the
subordinate will naturally be thinking large scale, and will miss the
details. To the small scale thinking superior, that is incompetence, and
will naturally be dealt with by more micromanagement. In reality, both
parties are incompetent at their jobs, and they should really swap roles,
so that everyone is in their element.
It would be nice if companies stopped thinking hierarchically in this way
-- that a more "senior" person has to think at larger levels. Just because
you've been somewhere longer (or have been working in an industry longer, or
got higher marks, or whatever), it doesn't mean that you're more of a
strategist. This is probably the Peter Principle restated: people get
promoted to a level where they just can't comfortably think at the necessary
scale any more. If instead people were put into a planning hierarchy based
on their natural scale of thinking, we'd all be a lot better off. There'd
be a lot less power games, though, which makes me think it's not going to
happen any time soon.
A business, at whatever size it might be, needs an appropriate mix of
strategists and tacticians. A really small business (1-10 people) can get
away without needing large scale thinkers, in the same way that a really
small boat can get away without needing a rudder or pilot. If a really
small boat gets itself into trouble, everyone on board can grab an oar or
bucket and help get the boat out it's predicament -- it's small and nimble
enough to be able to do that.
As the company expands, though, it's important to make sure you've got some
strategists around. If you don't have anyone to keep an eye out for
problems and plan around them, your small-to-medium sized boat is likely to
have a hole punched in it by a submerged rock. Even if somebody on board
happens to notice the rock before you actually hit it, once you get to a
certain size you can't physically stop or turn the boat in time.
If you don't understand the growth issues in the company, you might not
even realise that you're no longer the nimble and low-inertia dinghy until
you're up to your knees in sea water.
Although an obvious solution to this problem might be to say that all
businesses should be small and nimble ones, it's as impractical as saying
that all boats should be dinghies. A fleet of dinghies isn't going to be
able to support the worldwide sea freight market, and a fleet of small
companies doesn't have the necessary resources on hand to take on the big
projects that are so often needed. Also, a dinghy is at risk of being
swamped by one freak wave, while a larger ship can weather significant
storms without going under.
Regardless of the size of the business, there always needs to be a good
supply of tacticians. A boat (of whatever size) full of people who are all
looking out for rocks isn't going to go anywhere, because nobody's making
the thing move. Similarly, a company full of strategists isn't
going to be doing any of the day-to-day work that actually earns money, and
no money means no company.
The single most important thing, though, is be self-aware enough to know
what sort of person you are, and try to find something that lets you work at
the level you're most comfortable at. Otherwise you're just setting
yourself up for unhappiness.
Yesterday, i decided to activate the so-called RAID 0 support on my P4P800 mainboard, to increase the performance of my 2 Seagate SATA disk -- bought for this purpose. The first unfortunate event was to discover that there is 3 levels of hardware RAID: controller, accelerator and fake. Of course fake RAID is not the better category and it is the one provided by my mainboard. Once, i have understood that i must use the package dmraid to activate my RAID, i fall into a syslog flood of messages concerning "attempt to access beyond end of device".
The problem is simple, the partition table are stored on the first disk of the RAID. Linux believes that he can reach the end of the device defined in the partition table of the first disk. But since, the partition table is for the whole RAID, it cannot access the last partition.
In fact, the solution is quite simple and described here 
I think my title is some tagline from some tv show I am not following, but anyway. Today my laptop stopped working. *GRR*. The usual: The power plug in the laptop stops working because it has been molested over the last 4 years.
I haven’t planned in investing in a new laptop currently, so the alternative was fixing it. After splitting it into every little part I finally found the plug. And yes. The soldering was broken, the plug itself was broken. Needs replacement.
I never bragged about my soldering skills before, but \o/ - I managed to get it removed - the only spare one I had came with 8 cm wire
I now have this wire hanging out my laptop, but it is working again. Even better than before. The last weeks, I constantly needed to wiggle the powerplug. No need for that anymore.
Finishing off with a big piece of warm glue to keep everything at its place.
It is not beatiful, but it works:
Patents are the best way to improve development, and software inventors have just the natural right to their algorithms and designs. Research and Development in industry wouldn’t just work without patent protection, and technology improvements would just stop, right?
Well, I’m not so sure of that.
Key 
Dear Warner Brothers,
As a poor hosed college student, I have spent many a month where I have not bought any movies. Finally, I got some money for my birthday and decided to buy the film March of the Penguins. However, I did not read the very fine print, and when I got home I found that it crashes mplayer, and totem will only play the previews; it is completely unable to play the feature title. I don’t want to copy this goddamn