Sometimes team meetings can be a complete pain, especially when you have a lot of work to do and that daily catch-up meeting just gets in the way. One thing I have noticed in these meetings is that the quiet members of the team often have the most useful things to say, apprentices mainly. To give everyone a chance, one of the projects I was on made everyone give a useful fact, someone might talk about Oracle constraints or give a useful command they have used. It does not even have to be about work, just get staff talking. Takes seconds and a good confidence builder. Did you know the Honda Civic is named after "Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion" or Japan produced the world's biggest battleships - life does not have to be all IT. Put quick facts in your daily meetings, you never know it might be that one thing that gets you through a show stopper or wins you some money on "The Chase".
Useless humans
Couple of stories trawling around "The Register" that caught my eye. The first one was about the guy who pushed the power button on a server and then immediately realised it was the wrong one. He had to stand for an hour while his colleagues ran around trying to organise a controlled power down before he could release his finger. Never managed to power down the wrong server but stood next to a Unix person who pulled the wrong network cable and with the speed of a wild west gunslinger plugged it back in in the vain hope nobody would notice.
The second story was about someone trying to get a system up and using "password1" as the password and amazingly it worked or proves humans are useless at security. I once had to use a tape library and to open it up you had to enter a 8-digit passcode. After trying lots and lots of dates and telephone numbers etc. no joy, only to discover that 7-2-7-7-9-6-7-3 worked. Why that number, well it is "password" on a telephone keypad. Once again, humans are useless.
Now I am not a fan of long passwords they are a pain to remember and get written down, they are also open to brute force attacks. We have all had that moment you lock yourself out after a couple of attempts and need to get someone to unlock your account. Yes I am a useless human. Come on server people do something with passwords, remember I am only human. I don’t want crazy combinations of uppercase and lowercase, letters swapped out for numbers and special characters tagged on the end - there must be a better way. Thoughts ?
https://xkcd.com/936/
The second story was about someone trying to get a system up and using "password1" as the password and amazingly it worked or proves humans are useless at security. I once had to use a tape library and to open it up you had to enter a 8-digit passcode. After trying lots and lots of dates and telephone numbers etc. no joy, only to discover that 7-2-7-7-9-6-7-3 worked. Why that number, well it is "password" on a telephone keypad. Once again, humans are useless.
Now I am not a fan of long passwords they are a pain to remember and get written down, they are also open to brute force attacks. We have all had that moment you lock yourself out after a couple of attempts and need to get someone to unlock your account. Yes I am a useless human. Come on server people do something with passwords, remember I am only human. I don’t want crazy combinations of uppercase and lowercase, letters swapped out for numbers and special characters tagged on the end - there must be a better way. Thoughts ?
https://xkcd.com/936/
Ninite
Came across this website via the BBC Click programme a few years back and completely forgot about it until I had to install Putty on another machine recently. Loads of other useful stuff too, an excellent site to use.
Will add it the useful links,
https://ninite.com/
Will add it the useful links,
https://ninite.com/
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