Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Author: Robby Pedrica

  • 2010 Date Programming snafus

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Y2K was an interesting time with the prophets of doom out in full force. And yes while there were some issues, it wasn’t quite the end of the world as we knew it. 2010 however came up on us very quietly from a date problem p.o.v. but there have been some fairly major issues worldwide…

  • On-line storage – safe or not?

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Cloud computing has become a major buzzword this year and entails the provisioning of application and storage services within a distributed system operating on the Internet. Think Google Apps ( Wave, Docs, GMail, etc. ), T-Mobile SideKick, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( EC2 )/Web Services, Salesforce, Bittorrent and many others. These can be put into…

  • Windows and on-line banking

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The 2 concepts above should never be spoken ( let alone used ) together considering the poor security track record of all Windows operating systems but somehow people still ‘trust’ the venerable OS to do their daily banking, paying of accounts and transferring of monies. So the question is why? I can only think of…

  • Adobe security issues – again

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    Robby Pedrica
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    A new 0-day vulnerability has been found in Adobe Reader and Acrobat – this time relating to how the 2 products handle Javascript. The only ‘fix’ at the moment is to turn Javascript off in these products. Or don’t open email you get from unexpected sources. Let’s see how long Adobe take to fix this…

  • Open Source in 2009

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    Robby Pedrica
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    2009 has been a very big year for FOSS with a number of high-profile occurrences and products being released this year. Let’s  take a short look at some of these: the release of Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 as well as Red Hat’s KVM-orientated RHEL 5.4 the submission of code twice by Microsoft into the open source…

  • Australia and the net filter

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The Australian government have gone public with their China-style Internet filter which includes the following measures: mandatory ISP-level filtering of Refused-Classification-rated content a grants program to encourage introduction of optional filtering by ISPs, to block additional content requested by households an expansion of an existing cyber-security program run by the government to improve education and…

  • Autism Western Cape and Kilimanjaro

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Completely unrelated to computers however more importantly, Gerhard from AWC and a team of volunteers are attempting to summit Kilimanjaro, all on their 1st attempt. Not only is this a very worthwhile cause but a friend of mine, Neil Stewart, is on the team and I wish him all the luck on the world –…

  • The OOXML gravy train continues

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It seems that the Microsoft-dominated SC34/WG4 committee responsible for maintaining the ISO/IEC 29500 standard ( Microsoft’s submitted document format standard ) is now making changes outside the scope of the  mandated rules, in a possible attempt at bringing the standard more in line with MS Office 2007. There is a clear delineation in the rules…

  • Intel’s SSD updates and firmware issues

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It seems that Intel just can’t get it right when it comes to SSD firmware updates. First they introduced a subsector remap algorithm on the G1 which increased performance but this was shown to cause fragmentation and performance loss over time. This was fixed with a firmware update but a new G2 appeared with more…

  • Virtualisation part 2: Storage

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The first part of the series focussed on the OS layer of virtualisation. This second part will focus on storage in relation to server virtualisation. Storage on its own, is a minefield of standards, specifications, technologies, protocols and incompatibilities. Add to this the concept of virtualisation and you’re looking at an area that’s difficult to…

  • Backups? We don’t need no stinking backups!

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Here are 2 stories ( just in this week ) of tragic data loss or nearly … My wife’s aunt phoned last night and indicated her daughter’s MacBook had been stolen while at a client. Simple: call the insurance, claim for a new laptop and restore your data. Not so fast. No backups … Considering…

  • Local insurance company loses client data

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    Robby Pedrica
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    So it’s not just the Americans who are poor at client data security – the South Africans have got into the act as well. Local insurance firm Zurich SA said it had lost a tape containing client information. Apparently the backup tape was lost during a routing tape transfer to a data storage centre in…

  • Data loss for Sidekick users Part 3

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Internetnews.com mentioned on the 16th October that the bulk of the data had been recovered: “Microsoft today reports it recovered the majority of lost customer data for Sidekick owners amid a flurry of lawsuits filed yesterday over the recent server failure caused a service outage and data loss.” This is not quite the truth: no…

  • SCO’s Darl McBride terminated

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Finally it seems that they’ve had enough of poor old Darl at SCO. Took them long enough but they’ve filed some paperwork with the SEC in the USA indicating as much.

  • Microsoft hijacks Firefox Part 2

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    Robby Pedrica
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    So there was a call for Mozilla to blacklist the MS plugins. And that is exactly what they have done! The Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation were added, for reasons of their vulnerability to remote code execution. All versions for all applications have been blocked. Apparently the Framework Assistant has now been…