Sneak is a big fan of content management. I mean, where would we all be without it? Content would literally just be flying all over the office, coming out of our drawers, getting stuck under our slip-ons, etc, if there were not proper systems and technologies in place to manage it. So it was with great joy and extreme happiness (alright, alright, I know they're basically the same thing) that Sneak recently received an email inviting him to participate in the new Facebook page set up by the content management team at EMC.

According to the email from EMC's PR agency, "The page will discuss industry trends such as Web 2.0 and new legislation, and the implications these have on technology innovations in enterprise content management, security, etc." Oh ... my ... god! Sneak is literally giddy with excitement. A pity though that it doesn't look like the page will feature pictures of the content management team at EMC in various states of annihilation after a hard night on the pale ales. Which is basically what Facebook is for, after all.

July 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems the frequency of - 'Vendor 'X' IT hardware installed at CERN's large hadron collider' press releases has cooled somewhat over the months since Sneak last reported - rather like the superconducting circuits being used to deliver the magnetic fields needed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to dig out that rare beastie, the Higgs Boson or 'God Particle' as it has become known.

Anybody reading about LHC will usually be only a sentence away from a superlative - as in - "The LHC is the world's largest cryogenic facility". Any mention of cryogenics nowadays means superconducting circuitry, which means using a lot of liquid helium to cool said circuitry. At LHC, 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to maintain the 1.9K temperature required for superconductors, to - well, superconduct, and provide those important magnetic fields for the LHC to collide exotic particles together in CERN's search for glory.

That temperature of 1.9K, on the centigrade scale, is -271 degrees C, quite nippy - in fact another two degrees gets you to the ultimate in nippiness - absolute zero. You can see how cool the experiments at LHC are - online - here ...

One of the problems with liquid helium is that the damned stuff keeps evaporating, and the levels have to be topped up now and again. In fact there are scenarios where the helium evaporates on a lot quicker timescale than normal. This happens when the superconducting wires loose those superconducting properties and effectively become resistors, rapidly heating up, causing the helium to expand explosively, in what's known as a 'catastrophic quench.'

Sneak originally envisaged staff at the LHC suffocating helplessly after a 'quench', whilst shouting, "Help!", in Mickey Mouse-like high pitched voices. However, LHC has quench detection and protection schemes, besides which magnets like these are manually 'quenched' just to check the cryogenic gas venting systems work properly. Of course if the venting fails ..... well, even then it looks highly unlikely that mass Mickey Mouse impersonations would be taking place, although there have been suggestions that a big enough quench in large superconducting magnets like these, could cause the air to liquefy and 'rain out'. Nice - well, I suppose it's less dangerous than a mini-black hole turning up anyway.

July 24, 2008 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another warning for online retailers this week: young couple Jocelyn Kirsch and Edward Anderson admitted to nabbing the identities of friends and neighbours in Philadelphia. The couple spent over £100,000 on luxury holidays and other expensive goods, according to reports.

But despite the millions of pounds spent by the e-commerce giants on fraud prevention tools, the downfall of this e-Bonnie and Clyde duo appears to have come in the offline world, when a cheque Kirsch submitted to pay for her hair extensions bounced. So two lessons here: fraud prevention tools are not infallible, and if you're a fraudster, don't pay by cheque.

July 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

BT, which was today cleared of both scaring children, and calling them potentially offensive names, has added a new layer of gittishness to its charmless Kris Marshall starring adverts.

The ads continue the story of Adam and Jane, the apparently loving couple that spend their time discovering new features in their BT internet services and discussing them with total strangers. This seems like a fairly good basis for an unfulfilling relationship, but it has always appeared to work for them.

Now, however, things are not so rosy for the pair.

Adam, it appears, has left the family home and is chasing his dream career. Not all is going well for him, however, as he has also spurned one other family member, the BT connection.

During a particular pointless IM discussion about whether the pair should still be together Adam's wireless connection falls down, meaning that his partner is left wondering what's going on, and whether she ought to take garden shears to his wardrobe, or his private parts.

Sneak is unimpressed by the whole idea. Especially as he uses a BT Homehub at his own home and finds it as unreliable as his own time-keeping.

July 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Global IT giants like to come across all green and clever, with their power-efficient wotsists and their holistic thingumijigs, and their super-cooling, energy star-compliant whatchamacallits. Chip manufacturers are some of the most gung-ho when it comes to dropping enviro-speak into their product pitches, but if you ask the residents of Chandler, Arizona, they may have a slightly different opinion.

According to reports in the The Arizona Republic, a combination of high temperatures, wind and "organic materials" from birds and other wildlife have come together to create a noxious gassy stench which now permuates the homes of the hapless residents. The culprit? City-owned evaporation ponds built 14 years ago to purified wastewater pumped from Intel's reverse osmosis system nearby. Intel? Bah .... you stink!

July 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

London's transport network has long been a joke - archaic rolling stock, rotting tracks, timetables that might as well not exist, and all this at a price that makes your wallet weep.
Well, Transport for London has upped the ante now. It appears that on Saturday morning, a fault in the Oyster card system lead to thousands of passengers' top-up swipe cards being wiped. TFL then had to resort to emergency plan A; opening all ticket barriers and allowing free bus travel until the fault was fixed.

So not only is TFL rubbish, it's even losing itself money through IT incompetence. Maybe worth trialing any Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology well before you buy.

July 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has never been in on the birth of new acronym - but he can now add this to his CV after a natter to analyst firm IDC's Chris Ingle.

Discussing datacentres and backup strategies in general, Ingle related the story of a firm whose backup strategy was what he said was a 'cave' underneath its building connected by a network link to another 'cave' nearby.

It was fairly easy for Sneak to knock out an acronym for this - Compute And Virtualisation Environment - easy, peasy - job done! Consulting an online acronym checker showed that CAVE had been acronym-ised many times before, and although there were many close ones, none fitted Sneak's version exactly. OK, maybe some words are the same and Sneak can almost feel the sneers of derision emanating from IT managers world-wide, but with application virtualisation on the climb, royalties from patenting the acronym should keep Sneak in Irn Bru for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of ancient ancestors, it seems that virtualisation rollouts may soon require more personnel skilled in the art of capacity planning - that well-known craft, critical in getting mainframes to run efficiently. It seems that experts in capacity planning could well be important in firms' virtualisation of production business critical applications. Would these people be called CAVEmen wondered Sneak - warming to his task of trying to create a fairly tenuous link to his headline...

July 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is often accused of being a little bit anti-American. It's not that he is anti Americans per se, it's just that not many of them seem to get his rather dry wit and frequent forays into the land of sarcasm and irony. Unfortunately, this is a strange, mysterious place about which most of our cousins from across the pond seem to know very little. So thanks, Daily Mail, for providing Sneak with the perfect opportunity to explain the meaning of irony.

It seems that Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, has had one of its laptops, containing thousands of journalists' financial details, stolen. You may remember these same Daily Mail journalists launching attack after incensed attack against "criminally careless" government departments such as the "bungling Ministry of Mayhem" as the HMRC was dubbed. Um, maybe they should have been more careful about their own data security.

July 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has read with undisguised contempt some new research by Avail Intelligence, suggesting that the role of the journalist as an arbiter of taste and quality, an oracle for the masses, is slowly unraveling. Yes, thanks to that damn Web 2.0 phenomenon, it seems that consumers are more inclined to get their pre-purchasing advice from social networks like Facebook, or iTunes recommendations.

Alright, to be honest the research just applies to music, so it doesn't bother Sneak that much, after all, most music critics are over-privileged pretentious buffoons who seek to name-drop and reference as many bands as possible in a single article to show how clever and sagely they are. But Sneak is slightly worried that this trend might continue into other spheres. Could the IT hack's days be numbered too? Noooooo!

July 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes politicians do things of which they should be very, very ashamed. Perhaps starting a war on spurious legal and moral grounds in which hundreds of thousand are likely to die. Or maybe lying under oath. But possibly the most reprehensible thing a politician can do, and don't they do it so often, is to try and get "down with the kids". Really, the history of world politics has been littered with cringeworthy incidents and press calls gone wrong, possibly culminating in Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" shindig at Number 10 in which rockers, comedians and others staggered around the PM's residence wondering what the hell they were doing there, will Teflon Tone turned up his smile for the cameras.

And now this. The pic shows EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding, at the Cannes film festival this year. OK, so she's also there with EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barosso. But who the hell is that dude in the shades? You're not fooling us Viv, we know you've no idea who he is. Um, actually, Sneak isn't sure either ... is he perhaps a member of a popular music band?

July 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak always worries that the technology dreamt up by those clever boffins he used to bully at school is somehow being misused. Where are the applications of IT wonderment that can truly make our lives better, he wonders, on a little too frequent a basis. Well, thank the lord for Asahi, the Japanese beverage and beer company, which has finally found a use for robotics.

Mr Asahi, or Asahi-san if you want to be really accurate, is the firm's answer to all of our bar queuing prayers. And the good news is he's coming to town. Yes folks, the world's first robotic barman can serve a pint in under two minutes, and will be available for our enjoyment at Selfridges.

July 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)