January 26, 2009 by roland.

The announcements of the past two weeks don’t really surprise anyone who gets their fingers into the code of software projects. We’ve all seen companies re-state their earnings due in a large part to failed IT projects which were off-shored in whole or in part. We’ve watched as thousands of our co-workers were laid off by a management team horribly afflicted by “Grade 8 Bolt Syndrome.”

Everybody tries to make their numbers look like the “industry leader” because they all want to be considered the “industry leader.” We watched this be exposed in the wake of the Enron debacle. Hundreds, if not thousands, of companies raced to slide in under the amnesty granted by the SEC and re-state their earnings by un-cooking (in theory) their books. We are watching it happen again as everybody involved in the mortgage debacle scramble to get in line for government bail out money just so they can hire enough auditors to un-cook their books.

Now we have a shiny new bubble bursting, and we haven’t even gotten a good start putting people in prison for the last corruption bubble.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/090125/as_india_satyam_price_waterhouse.html

This is just the first shoe to drop. Sit back and watch now as every major off-shoring company scrambles to un-cook their books before the intense legal scrutiny comes crashing down on them. Too many companies were chasing Satyam with their numbers. Sit back and smell the barbaque sauce, because this cookout was just uncovered. There’s going to be a lot of freshly grilled books to look at.

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January 21, 2009 by roland.

Even if you get Windows and the computers it runs on for free, there is now no limit to the cost of owning it.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090121/ts_afp/usitinternetsoftwarecrimedownadup_20090121063422

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January 21, 2009 by roland.

A payment processor responsible for handling about 100 million credit card transactions every month disclosed today that thieves had used malicious software in its network in 2008 to steal an unknown number of credit card numbers.

The company’s information site on the incident, http://2008breach.com/, attempts to downplay the loss of data by asserting that no Social Security numbers, unencrypted PINs or other types of data were stolen. But according to some good reporting from Brian Krebs at the Washington Post, Heartland’s CEO says a piece of spyware stole payment card data as it passed through the company network, including the data from the magnetic stripe that can be used to create counterfeit cards.

Heartland says it didn’t discover the breach until Visa and Mastercard came knocking about suspicious activity involving card numbers processed by Heartland. Disheartening, to say the least.

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January 17, 2009 by roland.

It isn’t really a surprise to anyone who knows anything about technology. It is only a shock to those missguided souls who listen to that marketing firm known as The Gartner Group. Recently the Shanghai Stock Exchange announce it will be replacing its current HP UX trading engine with a next generation platform developed completely on OpenVMS.

Why? Unix can’t cut it and Windows couldn’t even find the knife.

This choice was made in a country where MS has claimed they lost billions due to piracy. I’m thinking more along the lines that billions of people took one look at the pathetic offerings from MS and turned up their collective noses.

China has had a long history of low quality and low quality control. Chinese steel has always had quality problems and now the gloves are coming off. A brand new twin roll steel mill being built just outside of Hong Kong is going on-line inside of 18 months. OpenVMS will run it. The Shanghai Stock Exchange has had almost as many problems with UX as the London Stock Exchange has had with their Aurther Andersen delivered MS Windows debacle.

Financial institutions in China are also beginning the migration away from feeble platforms like UX and Windows to fault tolerant distributed OpenVMS clusters. China has finally learned the lesson clueless MBA’s in this country forgot.

“When it absolutely has to work, it goes on OpenVMS.”

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January 11, 2009 by roland.

On Saturday I finally got to fly back from New York. Nothing makes one miss home like being in New York. Yes, it was a trip from hell involving a bout with the flu, an accident in a cab, and a host of other bad things. All pretty typical.

The flight home allowed for a brief moment of joy though. I arrived at the airport 3 hours early and spent my time napping at the gate. Barely one hour before departure time a blonde girl showed up chatting loudly and incessantly on her iPhone. She must have made 9 or more phone calls filling in people on the details of her shopping trip.

If you’ve never flown out of JFK, boarding a plane is an odd experience. Delta has this weird multi-plane breezeway system at the gate. One gate can load up to four planes at a time. They also have a very unforgiving overhead display. If an agent scans a ticket for a flight which isn’t currently displayed, it will automatically update the display to show that flight boarding.

Another individual who was also flying back to Chicago but far less patient jumped into line when they started boarding the plane flying to some place in Maine. This caused the overhead display to say they were boarding the flight to Chicago. Unlike many others, I actually listened to the PA system when the person said they were boarding the plane for Maine only at this time. I stood back in the pool of other people who listened. The one person handling the boarding became swamped with people trying to get on the Chicago flight, then finally got most of the Maine flyers on the plane.

Incessant cell phone chatter had moved in beside me, she fished out her ticket, and walked right up to the boarding gate. I expected her to be turned away, but she was scanned and walked down the ramp. About 10 minutes later a man came back up complaining that flight was not going to Chicago. The attendant explained that he had to listen to the PA system.

20 minutes passed, and I didn’t see the blonde girl.

We started boarding the flight to Chicago and I didn’t see her on the plane.

I wonder how she liked Maine.

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