This is like road rage, except your head explodes after trying to enter 10 different captchas with no success. Today's offender: cisco.com registration. Plus their password policy, which fails your registration successive times for not enough characters, not enough numbers, not enough punctuation marks, without actually telling you what the criteria are. Wonder how many registrants have their password set to C1sco!123 - ?My better alternatives:
Recaptcha: Because you're helping the public good, and, like, saving trees and stuff.
Asirra: Because kittens and puppies are CUTE!
tppCaptcha: Because ASCII Art rules! (Although I don't know if it would be that effective if everyone used it.
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The weather station is off the internet while I shop for a new wireless router. The Linksys gave up the ghost yesterday after 7 years of service. Not terribly impressive, considering it has no moving parts. I really think the software, which was always buggy, just bricked itself somehow.
UPDATE: Bought a new Linksys WRT54G2. $50 and works just like the old one, except that encryption actually works with the Powerbook G4 and the browser works with Firefox. We're a Cisco shop now, at home and at work.
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All the financial sites are making you select "security questions", most from a fixed list. I am sure it was bank VP's dream to schedule the conference in Hawaii at the customer's expense and the days of drunken revelry and committee meetings that resulted in the pinheaded questions the sites are making me answer:
"The first time you flew in an airplane, what was your destination?"
"What year did you graduate from elementary school?"
"What is your favorite fragrance?"
How am I supposed to remember all that crap? I can hear the notes being taped to the undersides of keyboards everywhere. Oh The Security!
Why not let me pick my OWN questions? USAA.com let me do that (those retired Brigadier Generals ought to know something about security) and even my lame HR site at work (which required me to set up such a complicated password that I have to write it down, and usually end up answering the secret questions and resetting it anyway.)
What's YOUR porn star name?
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;)
This article pops up with a high rank in Google: http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?opti ... p;Itemid=1 along with a useful list of open source CMS products. It's OK but it doesn't mention the #1 reason for CMS project failure: Failure to allocate resources to maintain the content.Example: In the early 90s I was (barely) involved in a municipal GIS project: Millions was spent on specialized GIS hardware (back when that stuff was REALLY expensive), software, and an initial database. But no one was hired to maintain the data. Within a couple of years the GIS was useless.
CMS's usually fail for the same reason. I can count the number of CMS's I've seen with years-out-of-date content on - well, four or five hands and counting. The moderation requirements and level of skill required to create content vary widely among CMSs. Plan accordingly.
FWIW We had great luck with Mediawiki. It requires no moderation, content can be created and edited by the most unskilled of users, the UI is familiar and exactly the same as Wikipedia, and the software defies all attempts to heavily customize it (that being a GOOD feature; the code is a giant hairball of PHP.) The only issue is lack of fine grained access control, but admins can lock pages, and you can throw up Basic HTTP Auth in front of it.
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I almost feel professionally negligent for not doing this earlier (probably because we have limited storage and Solaris 10 resources at work), but after giving ZFS a spin, I'm hooked.
For example, setting up a mirrored filesystem with two disks is as simple as:
- zpool create nfspool mirror c4t5d0 c5t5d0
- zfs create nfspool/nfs4
- zfs set mountpoint=/nfs4 nfspool/nfs4
You now have a filesystem:
nfspool 286949376 24 286949220 1% /nfspool
nfspool/nfs4 286949376 24 286949220 1% /nfs4
Other mountpoints share this pool of space:
zfs create nfspool/mnt
zfs set mountpoint=/mnt nfspool/mnt
nfspool 286949376 24 286949220 1% /nfspool
nfspool/nfs4 286949376 24 286949220 1% /nfs4
nfspool/mnt 286949376 24 286949220 1% /mnt
You can grow, shrink, take snaphots, thin provision, etc, etc, all for "free".
I'm late to the party, so others have created lots of blog entries before me, you can search for them. I'm hooked.
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