News that ever-agreeable software giant Oracle will support JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel applications beyond its proposed 2013 deadline may have been welcomed by users, but it leaves Sneak a trifle concerned about the damage it could do to the sanity of chief cheerleader Larry Ellison.

Oracle's commitment to indefinitely support separate applications is bound to prompt shareholders to ask what happened to the original plan to cut costs by focusing development on one suite. Which, given the identity of Oracle's major shareholder, raises the worrying prospect of Ellison having to ask himself what the hell he was thinking.

Still, given that laughing-boy Larry happily put money into Salesforce.com and then almost immediately announced his intention to have Oracle crush the upstart, perhaps financially unwise schisms are a familiar part of the Ellison psyche.

And given Ellison's history of raking in cash, Sneak wouldn't bet against either half of his brain.

April 28, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak was gutted to learn that Sun’s colourful, quotable, toothy, dogged, doggy-loving and ice-hockey obsessed chief executive Scott McNealy has stepped aside in favour of pony-tailed “ideas man” Jonathan Schwartz.

Sneak has always admired McNealy for saying the kind of things other CEOs only think. Famously, he told bed-wetting privacy advocates: “You have no privacy. Get over it.” And did he try to weasel out of it after the furore erupted? No, he repeated the point: “Someone already has your medical records. Someone has my dental records. Someone has my financial records. Someone knows just about everything about me... Visa knows what you bought. You have no privacy. Get over it. That's what I said.”

What has Schwartz said of equivalent, spat-inducing notoriety? “Let me be really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period.”

Yeah, whatever Jon.

Of course in his ongoing role as Sun’s chairman, Sneak fully expects that McNealy will hold his tongue and let Schwartz have free rein for, ooh, ages. Has anyone got a stopwatch?

April 25, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Research engineer Jonathan Dunne has a neat proposal to end disputes over football’s famously contentious offside rule: monitor all movements on the pitch with RFID tags.

According to a report in The Times last week, “tags sewn into players’ kits and inside match balls can pass position data for players and the ball via receivers placed alongside the pitch to a central server, which then determines whether an infringement has taken place and alerts the referee’s assistant.”

The big advantage over video analysis, according to Dunne, is that help can be offered to the on-pitch officials in real time, without interrupting the flow of the game. The system could also, perhaps, aid in deciding whether the ball has crossed the line in a crowded goal-mouth fracas.

Sneak foresees just one problem: to implement the system, some lucky programmer will have to sit down and explain to the central server, in unambiguous lines of code, exactly how the offside rule works. Perhaps there is a flaw in Dunne’s logic after all...

April 24, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fans of geeky names like GNU (which famously and recursively stands for GNUs Not Unix) and WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator) will probably also like the name of a new approach for online authentication, dubbed CAKE. The acronym stands for Key-Addressed Crypto Encapsulation. As CAKE’s instigator helpfully explains, “Yes, yes, it's KACE, but I decided the acronym needed to be encrypted with a letter-swapping cipher”.
Thanks to the miracle of the interweb, naming aficionados can even track the emergence of this silly name from the primordial ooze.

April 20, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak had thought that Easter eggs were hidden bits of frivolous functionality, but apparently they are a form of seasonal confectionary as well. Perhaps Sneak needs to get out more. Anyway, the promoters of the upcoming InfoSec security show recently demonstrated how easy it is to gather the personal info of commuters passing through London's Victoria Station. Vague offers of chocolate Easter eggs were sufficient to prise name, address, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and pet’s name from 80 percent of lamb-like passers by. The questions were, of course, designed to elicit feelings of childlike innocence: “Have you ever fed Easter eggs to your pets?” [Yes: 89%] “And what is your pet’s name” [Fido, etc] “And what is Fido’s current credit limit?” etc, etc.
After each interview, the victim was told the real reason for the probing. “I work in finance,” said one hapless pin-stripe type. "I cannot believe I gave all that information away.” Oddly enough, Sneak has absolutely no trouble believing it.

April 19, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

IT Week’s own Les Hatton recently contributed to the Risks list, which dissects computerised mayhem, on the case of an unfortunate Malaysian man who was sent a phone bill for 806 trillion ringgits - and given 10 days to cough up. Interestingly the Malaysian ringgit is not a suitcase currency - there are only six ringgits to the pound, meaning the bill amounted to £132 trillion.

“[The phone company] must have gone to 64-bit arithmetic,” Hatton observes, “[which] would allow them to issue a bill up to 72 quadrillion ringgits [about £11 million billion].” So the Malaysian man should count himself lucky.

“At least it’s obviously stupid,” Hatton adds. “It could have equally well been an erroneous number which was vaguely reasonable but expensive. And because the computer says it, it must, as we all know, be right.”

April 18, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

What a difference a letter makes. Customers looking to buy a business process management system from specialist vendor Metastorm need to be very, very careful when sending off the purchase order, or they might inadvertently end up buying something even more specialised: a high-tech, ultra-rapid-firing 40mm cannon from similarly-named Aussie firm MetalStorm.

Of course such a slip might just work. After all, the old-fashioned way to improve business processes it to put a rocket up the backsides of underperforming staff. Or, in this case, a rocket-propelled grenade.

April 12, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gulliver’s Travels famously took Lemuel Gulliver to Lilliput, but also to a variety of other strange destinations. On the flying island of Laputa, for example, he found that important people required “Flappers” to alert them to everyday things: “[A Flapper is] employed diligently to attend his Master in his Walks, and upon Occasion to give him a soft Flap on his Eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in Cogitation, that he is in manifest Danger of falling down every Precipice, and bouncing his Head against every Post.” Similarly, a Flapper is needed to gently prod at the mouth and ears of conversing gentry, to keep the conversation flowing.

Of course it was the flappers, not the aristocracy, who held all the real power in Laputa, by filtering what could and could not be said or heard.

So Sneak assumes that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is not big on reading the classics: “I always see a write-up from my assistant of any email from companies that aren't on my permission list, or individuals I don't know,” Gates told Fortune magazine this month. “That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.”

Flap, flap, flap.

April 10, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is indebted to US magazine Popular Science for drawing attention to the following medical alert: if you’re going to swallow magnets, don’t swallow more than one. As might not be obvious to all, the magnets will try to stick together, even when passing through different loops of intestine. The resulting unnatural bowel movements can lead to constriction, necrosis and, if left untreated, a rather painful death.
Reading through the source material for the magazine’s story also highlights another danger. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning equipment paints pictures of the inside of your body using intense magnetic fields, which are strong enough to whisk a steel fire extinguisher across a room with lethal force. So if you’ve swallowed even a single magnet, don’t let the doctors put you inside an MRI scanner. If you do, you will be rapidly reunited with the magnet in a somewhat bloody, Alien-esque manner.

April 6, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (3)

Martyn Winters contacted Sneak to marvel at the latest missive from the British Computer Society, in its campaign for higher standards of professionalism among IT departments. Hmm. Is that a plank that Sneak can see in the BCS’s eye?

April 4, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is it just Sneak or is SOCA – the UK’s newly launched Serious Organised Crime Agency – taking its “soccer” acronym a little too literally? Its logo – a roaring lion, rampant above a globe, with a stylised crown atop the whole thing – is exactly the kind of emblem normally found stamped on merchandise from a Premiership football club. Not the most auspicious comparison for an agency charged with protecting society from threats a lot more dangerous than eleven men and a bag of air. Sneak hopes this is not a portent of things to come, and that Soca will not score too many own-goals.

April 3, 2006 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1991 Apple Computer came to an agreement with Apple Corps – record label of Beatles fame – over their shared name. To avoid confusion, the Mac-maker agreed to limit the use of its brand in the music business. Now, the subsequent rise in popularity of iPods and iTunes has plonked Steve Jobs’ Apple into the heart of the same business as Paul McCartney’s Apple, and an Apple vs Apple lawsuit is the result.

Looking at the case, Sneak doubts that McCartney and his partners will let it be. They’re intent on telling Apple Computer: Get back to where you once belonged, or they’ll be misery in store. Lawyers on both sides will no doubt be putting in a few hard days’ nights, working eight days a week as they tread the long and winding road to a verdict. And both parties are likely to need a lot of help from their friends during the case. Hopefully both Apples can work it out, because life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, but then again, tomorrow never knows. Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.

OK, that was terrible. Sneak is going for a little lie-down now. The end.

April 3, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (3)