You’ve probably heard the expression “five nine reliability,” which is shorthand for saying that a product, Web site, service, application, or whatever is fully functional 99.999% of the time, the equivalent of less than six minutes of downtime per year. Most Web sites don’t need to achieve that level of reliability. However, when you’re in… Read More: National Grid gets 66.666% confused with 99.999% »
Apparently it’s “big companies that can’t keep their Web sites up in the middle of the day” week. Yesterday, Citizens Bank online banking was down for over two hours. Today, National Grid’s main US Web site and online account management site are both down:
I’ve added Not Invented Here to my comics aggregator. Enjoy!
At 9:45am on a weekday:
For those of you who use my comics aggregator, please note that the charming folks at GoComics.com mucked with their site again, possibly to make aggregators like mine more difficult to implement (they want your eyeballs and your clicks on their ads!), and I’ve just fixed the aggregator to compensate for their changes, so their… Read More: GoComics fixed in comics aggregator »
The Citizens Bank Web site recently added a new feature: bill payees can be put into groups. When you first visit the “Add/Manage Groups” page, it looks like this: The first stupid UI decision should be obvious after a moment’s thought. Once you’ve set up your groups, you will rarely if ever create new ones,… Read More: Terrible UI Design of the Day »
Yesterday, my wife forwarded to me an email message she had received from our children’s school to ask me a question about it. I should have received the same message, but I hadn’t. A little research in the mail server logs revealed that she has received seven messages from the school in the past three… Read More: When “Constant Contact” Isn’t »
Mail clients nowadays offer you the option of saving a copy of outgoing messages in a Sent folder, and in fact most modern mail clients do this by default (that sure wasn’t the case when I first started using email, 23 years ago!). Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work so well. Here’s another option to for… Read More: Copying “Sent Items” on the mail server »
You would think that when your email client saves a copy of an outgoing message in your “Sent Items” folder, that message would be an accurate copy of the message that was sent, right? Well, in the case of Microsoft Outlook and IMAP, you’d be wrong. For some entirely inexplicable reason, Outlook assigns one message… Read More: Microsoft Outlook and IMAP: When a Message ID isn’t a… »
I use Vonage telephone service and Fedora Linux. My Fedora box is the router for my network. Vonage recommends letting its box sit between the Internet and my computer, so that its traffic always gets priority. However, there’s no way I’m going to give Vonage control of Internet connection, so I have it plugged into… Read More: HOWTO: Prioritize Vonage (and other) traffic in Fedora (and other)… »