Rubénerd!

I'll be honest, I want an empty one of these to use as a bookshelf. Don't suppose I can just buy the rack, can I?

As I mentioned on Twitter, I'm so glad Oracle largely kept the designs of the Sun server hardware. They're to servers what Apple are to consumer tech, in my opinion.

Having just lambasted (sounds like an old school Shaggy song) cloud computing for data breaches and privacy concerns, I think it helps to remind myself/ourselves that "traditional" in-house server systems aren’t exactly bullet proof either. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

From a report on The Register:

Shell has been hit by a massive data breach – the contact database for 176,000 staff and contractors at the firm has been copied and forwarded to lobbyists and activists opposed to the company.

Richard Wiseman [...] said: “the Global Address List, containing contact information of everyone in Shell and some contractors, joint ventures and other third parties, has been downloaded without authorisation and distributed to some external parties. We do not know who did this. We are investigating and are raising this theft of information with the relevant data protection authorities.”

Just as we know that if you have a virus on your machine its already "too late", this was what I was thinking before I even finished reading the article:

[I]f hackers have got access to Shell’s systems then they might have more mischief planned.

The barely listenable web development episode!

Hashing out and talking through some ideas about the future of Rubenerd.com and how I want to move my five separate sites over to it. Might be listenable for a pleasant background distraction if you mess around with weblog engines, databases and whatnot, otherwise don't feel bad giving this one a miss. Looking at Dave Wares' Photo Gallery as an example of where I want to be.

To make it somewhat more interesting, I've included some retro audio easter eggs :-).

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 01:12:11 33.1MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.