Category: General

The Commonwealth Bank lost 10 years of banking records

As reported on BuzzFeed, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia lost backup tapes holding ten years (2004-2014) of banking records for up to 12 million customers. If you’re a customer of the Commonwealth Bank, and haven’t already been turned off by the stories coming out of the Royal Commission, then you should take this as the last straw and change banks. Make sure you tell them why.

Continue reading “The Commonwealth Bank lost 10 years of banking records”

Blog-A-Day May

It has been literally years since I’ve blogged on anything resembling a regular basis. This hit me recently when I renewed my WordPress subscription, and then again today when I renewed my DNS domain. I’m just not blogging enough – even for myself, and I’m the primary audience. So – I’m going to post every day in May. A #BlogADayMay.

As usual, I’m blogging for myself. If other people find my rambling ruminations regarding reality interesting, or even of benefit, that’s great, but it’s a bonus, not the goal. The topics for this month will be wide and varied. Posts will range from short to long, because I don’t have an internal editor, and will write until I run out of things to say or time to say it in. Once May is over, I may continue, or I may go back to my irregular posting.

You have been warned.

Should repository managers ever ‘unpublish’?

As a result of the recent kerfuffle about left-pad being unpublished from the NPM repository, and the subsequent “internet breakage”, I had a twitter discussion with Charles Miller about the right for unpublish to even be an option.

First, let me make something clear: having provided an unpublish option, npmjs.com was ethically, if not legally1, obliged to respect Azer Kuçulo’s decision to unpublish. The fact that this caused downstream problems doesn’t change that. But what this post is about is:

Should the unpublish option have been available?

And yes, I think it should be.

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ExtJS 5 and Gradle – Playing Together

Augmenting ExtJS with Gradle

ExtJS is pretty nice, overall, and it comes with a powerful build tool – Sencha Cmd.

Running builds with it can be tedious, because it doesn’t have any up-to-date checks – it constantly rebuilds stuff it doesn’t need. Oh, the time wasting!

As it turns out, Sencha Cmd is an Ant-based build tool. Which means we can create Gradle builds that augment it – given us support for such things as up-to-date checks.

Like this:

ant.importBuild 'build.xml'
def packages_dir = file('../packages')
clean {
doLast { delete 'bootstrap.js', 'bootstrap.css', 'bootstrap.json' }
}
refresh {
inputs.dir 'app'
inputs.file 'app.json'
packages_dir.listFiles().each() { package_dir -> inputs.dir new File(package_dir, 'src') }
outputs.file file('bootstrap.js')
outputs.file file('bootstrap.json')
}
js {
inputs.dir 'app'
packages_dir.listFiles().each() { package_dir -> inputs.dir new File(package_dir, 'src') }
outputs.file file("../build/${this.property('build.environment')}/${projectName}/app.js")
}
resources {
inputs.dir 'resources'
packages_dir.listFiles().each() { package_dir -> inputs.dir new File(package_dir, 'resources') }
outputs.file file("../build/${this.property('build.environment')}/${projectName}/resources")
}
sass {
inputs.dir 'sass'
packages_dir.listFiles().each() { package_dir -> inputs.dir new File(package_dir, 'sass') }
outputs.file file("../build/${this.property('build.environment')}/${projectName}/resources/${projectName}-all.css")
outputs.file file('bootstrap.css')
}
page {
// what are the inputs to page, I wonder?
// the outputs are the microloader.js and the index.html...
}
view raw build.gradle hosted with ❤ by GitHub
# the default Build Environment. Production is the default for Sencha Cmd.
# Use -Dbuild.environment on the command line to change, otherwise it doesn't get passed to the ant build properly
build.environment=production
# The project name. Should match what is in the app.json file
projectName=MyApp
view raw gradle.properties hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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Mavericks Upgrade Experience – Apps keep freezing

So I, like a zillion other Apple fanbois, updated to Mavericks yesterday. Yay for free upgrades.

Overall, I’m impressed. It feels faster, I love the proper support for multiple monitors, iBooks on the desktop is a win, and the iCloud keychain works as advertised, with syncing to my phone.

But there’s one big negative – I’ve had multiple episodes of “applications randomly freezing”. When this occurs, the application _that I’m currently using_ just stops. It doesn’t crash, it just pauses. For a few seconds, or a few minutes, then it resumes. I can go use other apps, and they’ll work – or they might pause as well. It’s only been a day, but I’ve had 4 of these episodes so far – once last night shortly after upgrading, which I kind of shrugged off, and then 3 this afternoon, in about a 2 hour period. (Worked fine all morning though).

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the new memory compression feature – but I had it occur just after a reboot this afternoon, with no other apps open. Then this evening it’s working fine again.

The other likely explanation is a clash with 3rd-party apps – I don’t run that many, but you never know.

In any case, I’m going to be doing a clean install to an external disk to see if it reproduces there – if it doesn’t happen there, then it will be a clean install for the laptop as well this weekend.

If you’ve had issues like that, feel free to leave a comment.

Update: Well, it just happened again. The only observation I can make is that it was while doing a build for the project I’m looking at – it’s quite possible that it was trying to compact memory or move stuff to swap. I wonder if the swap partition is corrupted?

Update the second: As it turns out, my hard disk had started reporting SMART errors the day before I download Mavericks. Bad timing. The freezes were being caused by I/O errors – sure enough, when reading from the swap file (not partition).

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