Yet another collection of random links and rantings of a greying unix geek with a photography bent. Pass the Guinness and Grecian Formula.
So, what school of laziness did you not attend to come up with this wonderful method of using a database?
This is almost, but not quite, as bad as storing it as blobs.
Hmm, what else… oh yeah, it doesn’t appear that they close the xml tag. Double plus goodness.
I feel like I’m wanting to move in the opposite direction of ‘the cloud’.
I actually have some interest in landing an opportunity to work with the Z mainframe stuff (which I think can run AIX and Linux inside of LPAR or something). It’s not very likely to happen, but still.
I don’t know exactly why I want to do this.
Perhaps leveraging existing os and platform stability vs designing/implementing for constant chaos-monkey action is part of it.
The older I get, the less risk for ‘exciting times’ I seem to want to take on. The less I care about actual geeky bits and the more I want to just leverage my income for enabling my photography hobby, taking time to do other things, etc.
Must be my mid life crisis creeping up on me again. Must also be why I’m working in financial services industry right now. Hmm. 
Head hunters continue to scrape the bottom of their barrels, by contacting me for AIX positions that keep coming up (or are re-listed). They know, or should know, I haven’t touched AIX in any serious way since the 90s, AIX 4.3 or thereabouts.
They should also know that I’m not looking. Nice to feel wanted I suppose.
That being said, I do kinda miss the jack-boots that came with AIX. This tinker toy Linux stuff is fun at times but not very enterprisey.
I guess if talent with that tech is so scarce I could consider finding more out about it, and give them extortion level rates…. to see what they would do.
Just like the COBOL Y2K remediation guys did in 1998-1999.
Wait, does that make me the same as the COBOL dinosaurs? o_O
People think I joke when I say my job is to protect the computers from the users…
Well, guess what I’m doing right now? Cleaning up after some poor piece of code made 54+ million attempts to login to the ftp server. The ftp server fell over with a full disk due to 34GB of logs.
I might need to turn on the feature that blocks ftp/sftp logins after n failed attempts.
I was worried about accidentally locking out a customer if they had a bit of a bad time with a password etc. Now I know I need not worry, and just turn that feature on with a limit of say 1000 bad attempts before the offending ip is blocked.