If i remember correctly, the Starcraft 2 launch was just as bad, despite extensive beta tests. I’d love to say that if you want to require your games to be always online, you’d better find a way to let everybody play on launch day without 12 hours of downtime, but really, I just feel bad for all the engineers who have to live at work right now.
It’s been half a year now since Google said we would be able to migrate our Google Plus profiles to Google Apps in “a few weeks”. I just deleted my old profile and started over. Really, I don’t understand how there is still such a disparity between regular Google accounts and Google Apps.
EU Court Rules APIs, Programming Languages Not Copyrightable
As far technical misinterpretations go, this is about as bad as it gets. I’m struggling to come up with a technical analogy, but the first thing that comes to mind it would be like trying to copyright language. APIs are how programs communicate with each other, just like people communicate with each other based on shared vocabulary, syntax and grammar. Sure, Oracle came up with API signatures and there’s some marginal value in having a well-designed API over a shitty one, but the real value lies in the implementation.
It’s like saying that a HEMI engine violates the the patents of a VTEC because both are controlled with square pedals.
TeraCopy is a fucking revelation. Copying files in Windows has always been a pain in the ass, although Windows 7 is a fast improvement. TeraCopy adds some sorely needed features. It can optimize the order in which files are copied to reduce seek times, and it can verify copied files on the fly. It also integrates into the shell. But the real headline feature is that it finally gives you some control. You can pause the copy process at any time. You can easily see where the holdups are, which files are causing problems, and most important of all, it doesn’t cancel the whole transfer for every little bump in the road.
Now if only MacOS could catch up.
Still waiting for the updated Gmail look, but they really shit the bed with Reader. I miss the clear demarcation lines. Or really any sort of contrast.
I don’t know what’s worse. That they don’t know, or that they can’t be bothered to google him.
How possible? I don’t know. Things over at PSN are obviously about as bad as they get. There are data breaches all the time. But I can’t remember the last time a company brought in the security consultants and those consultants actually managed to convince the people in charge that they needed to shut down their business and stop taking in money for going on a week now. Usually it’s all very hush-hush while you keep out the hackers with one hand and frantically patch all the security holes you can find with the other.
All that’s beside the point, though, because the fact that it’s a possibility at all is just said. There is no reason, none whatsoever, to store credit card numbers. Once you verified that the information is valid, you can discard it. If you want to keep cards on file so you can re-charge them without your customers having to re-enter information all the time, you don’t need the actual number and expiration date. All you need is a reference ID for when you verified the card information the first time it was entered.
Security shitshow failparade over at discover.com and chase.com . Chase’s problem is pretty serious so I emailed them to see if they’ll fix it before disclosing it (I like my security research ethical… today). Discover’s problem is pretty much out there: Auto complete is not disabled on the form fields for social security numbers, which seem to be on every form they have 
All their customer service or contact us links give 500 errors, so I doubt that will ever be fixed.
I had to reverse a PHP upgrade today which I did just yesterday because of what I can only assume is some sort of regression error. I’ve been using the PEAR HTTP_Request library for webservice calls. Today I’ve noticed that in about 5% of requests, the request body would be incomplete for no good reason. A quick comparison with 5.2.10 showed no such problem, so I had to reverse to that version to investigate. HTTP_Request uses Net_Socket, which in turn uses the fsockopen function. I build a test case and confirmed that it was indeed a problem in that function. I checked the nightly build of PHP 5.2 and the problem is not in there, so I recon no bug report should be necessary.
UPDATE: I checked the PHP repository and the offending commit was r288034 by Sriram Natarajan. What really pisses me off about this is that not only did he check it in despite breaking a test (ext/standard/tests/streams/stream_get_contents_002.phpt). But the change made it all the way into the next bugfix release despite breaking a test. The bug was fixed 5 days ago by Dmitry Stogov in r288604.
