Project Preliminary Fail

I bought some 12V LED filament bulbs for a preliminary delve into a project I'm thinking about building... Only...

That ain't no filament.

Virgin Media's: Terrible Security

So, in a prior post I made you aware of the situation with myself and Virgin for my services, well... Whilst talking to them they wanted me to give them the "First and Fifth" letter of my security password...

I apparently got this wrong....

"Give me the fourth and the eight"....

I apparently got this wrong....

"Just give me the password...."

No.

This is terrible security, and I said this to them, I asked if they can see my password "yes".  So their system stores my password, in plain text.

I said to the chap "This should be stored as the salted hash of the password, not the actual password, and you should not use it as part of my accessing the account over the phone".  This is the password to access your account, your VirginMedia e-mail, basically everything.

Now, I don't know if this guy was fishing for my whole password bit by bit, or whether he was genuinely looking at the whole thing and just asking for letters, of if he just had some mask of it being shown to him which he asked me the solution to...

But the underlying system clearly stores the plain password, and that's just such a massive security flaw.

Development : Visual Studio Giving False Reports of Missing Symbols

I have just run across an issue which has me slightly baffled... Sending the build down to my automated server and it started coming back as failed, panic ensued, so that I started to then do builds on my local Visual Studio instance... (which is VS2013). 

Now, this code is perfectly working, has been fine, released and tested for... Since about 2011.

This is how the error shows up...

Taking a closer look...

We can see there are suddenly a bunch of unresolved externals, specifically the definitions of a bunch of functions.

There is NOTHING wrong with this code, indeed, the work around to get a build to complete is to comment out any one of these functions....

Rebuild, and it now fails on that specifically missing function body.

Finally, re-enable the code and do a further rebuild... and everything completes perfectly...

Consulting the internet about this one, as everyone here has drawn a blank, and one person suggests that this is a miss-match between the Byte set setting of the project (Multi-byte) and any libraries being Unicode.  However, I have no third party libraries... The mystery only deepens.

A full fresh check out of the code, still fails, a full clean fails, a rebuild fails, rebooting the machine has failed.  None of the fixes has made a difference, and more problematic is that the failure happens sporadically.

Administrator : Shredded Drive Bays

Yes we've all had to dispose of redundant data, be that drives or disks, I've even had to shred paper cards in my time... However, I recently came across a bit of a problem, an old Dell Equilogic was being decommissioned.... I had dibs on the unit for redeployment to a small development team.

Out of the Enterprise and into the shop floor, trickle down economics right?!  Right?!  RIGHT?!??!?

Nope!

The staff decommissioning said to one of their minions, remove the drives from this unit and put them through the shredder....

So he did... Literally, he pulled the drives in their bays and sent them off for disposal...

Yes, the CADDY BAYS!...

He was meant to remove the drives and put the caddies back into the unit, then shred the drives.

Now we have to find new caddies, on a zero budget, for about £18 a caddy... And we need twelve of them... So in thirty seconds this has cost about £216 hardware replacement costs, lest my time and the time of the poor guy who I sent scouring the place for these already trashed units.

The moral of this story, teach your staff what a drive is, what a caddy is, how a screw driver works...

YouTube Search Results

Just watching Jingles latest offering, and I was very surprised by one of the Thumbnails in the "What to watch next" shown by YouTube at the end of the video...

Quite what the lady is up to, we can only leave to our imagination, but why is she there?... Well it's a classic miss-leading thumbnail (very annoying) and is a documentary about torture.

This isn't the first time a search I've invoked because of Jingles has lead to strange search results... Anyone remember the result of the search I did regarding searching for WarThunder Ground Forces before they were released?

Supermarket Search - Website Failz

So, I have some computer restoration and cleaning to do, this is of a set of four Atari ST's and an older Commodore 16... So I want to get some isopropyl alcohol really, but I'm skint the budget for this project is spent on the carcass Atari STe to re-case one I have which was painted green...

Anyway, a cheap alternative is to therefore look for cheap alcohol based skincare products in the beauty isle... Now I'm at work, and its lunch time, so I hit the internets and I wondered if Asda had anything suitable.... Here's the search

WHAT AN EPIC FAIL!

Yes, the search ability of this website is appalling, its not the only super market chain with this kind of problem, Sainsbury's is an online supermarket site I've used a lot and it's search is terrible...

Supermarkets, make this better, or hire me... I'll make it better.