Category Archives: Cross Posted from Club Troppo

A thought bubble about service-level agreements.

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Jacques Chester

It is very common in IT to see “Service Level Agreements” specifying a certain amount of uptime. This is usually considered in “nines”: when someone talks about five nines, they’re referring to 99.999% uptime.
Very few services actually attain it, or even come close. All it takes is one bad day and the “downtime budget” for [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Geeky Musings, IT and Internet | Leave a comment

Google and News Ltd are in the same business.

Posted on July 6, 2009 by Jacques Chester

A cat named Hartigan has apparently put himself amongst the blogging pigeons. A generous amount of fur and feathers has flown as a result.
For example, Hartigan has defended traditional media reporting and newsroom methods; bloggers say that News Ltd don’t “get it”, or are already giving in, or their content sucks, or some combination of [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Cross Posted from Club Troppo, IT and Internet, Journalism, Metablogging | Leave a comment

A good summary.

Posted on June 27, 2009 by Jacques Chester

By the author of the Pictures for Sad Children webcomic. Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Humour | Leave a comment

And now for something completely geeky

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Now that my exams are over, I’ve gotten back to working towards launching my little startup. During the second half of my semester I couldn’t find time or energy for it, but I did occasionally give it some thinking time, some of which has borne fruit.
Beware, Troppo readers; here be nerds.

My technical architecture has a [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Geeky Musings, IT and Internet, Startup | Leave a comment

Quiet milestone

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Australia being connected to the internet.
On the night of the 23rd June 1989 Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne and Torben Neilsen of the University of Hawaii completed the connection work that bought the Internet to Australia. It was a 56kbps satellite circuit, and the Australian end used [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, History, IT and Internet | Leave a comment

Do you own NAB shares? Flog ‘em now.

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Jacques Chester

NAB’s CEO has decided to work amongst his hoi-polloi in a corner cubicle.
Cubicles are one of worst false economies created by bean-counting. Managerial types seem to thrive on interruption. They love a crisis in which they can prove that they are as good as Captain Hornblower.
However it’s been known for a long time that cubicles [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Cross Posted from Club Troppo | Leave a comment

Our Nick gets the Nod 2.0

Posted on June 22, 2009 by Jacques Chester

With all of today’s sturm und drang in Canberra, it perhaps slipped by Troppo readers that our own Nicholas Gruen has been tapped to head up a government taskforce on Government 2.0.
As I understand it, the taskforce is essentially being run out of AGIMO. Long time readers of Troppo will know that I’ve become a [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Government 2.0, IT and Internet, Metablogging, Politics - national | Leave a comment

I broke Troppo

Posted on June 22, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Feel free to express your hatred, dread etc etc below.
Update: Just to add insult to injury, our server internet connection failed for about an hour. Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Site News | Leave a comment

An excuse to mention cryptography

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Jacques Chester

I needn’t tell Troppo readers that a few days of heady excitement are afoot in Canberra. Personally I doubt that the PM will go, but Swan might be in serious trouble.
A lot of argy-bargy has gone on about whether a “smoking gun” email, allegedly in the Coalition’s possession, is genuine. A lot of people have [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, IT and Internet, Politics - national | Leave a comment

Followup to my mortgage procedures survey

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Jacques Chester

As I promised a few weeks ago, I have a brief report outlining the results from the survey I conducted comparing two different mortgage calculation procedures. For the truly curious, here it is. Continue reading →

Posted in Blegs, Cross Posted from Club Troppo, IT and Internet | Leave a comment