This article is directed towards Information Services at the University of Nottingham, as a partial follow-up to their ongoing dialogue with representatives of the student body.
Despite having been reassured that the age of IS service provision failing the student body during exam time is now far behind us, today has been awful.
For at least several hours earlier (at LEAST between 16.00 and 20.00 and continuing), webpages are inaccessible from ISCRAs, WebCT is down and the main University of Nottingham webpage unavailable.
Loss of service to some extent can be expected on any network, although 99% uptime guarantee would be the minimum acceptable to any company requiring a Quality Of Service agreement.
However ANY loss of service during exam periods is 100% NOT OKAY and Information Services needs to realise this.
You are NOT immune from responsibility just because you happen to (currently) be the sole provider of network support on campus. Press coverage of such failures of responsibility would not reflect favourably at all on this University.
Many, many promises were made to the student body last term about upcoming increases in reliability. It sounded good so that IS could be seen to be improving their service and thus taking responsibility for their position… but so far many of these have not been visibly met.
For example, some student course notes are located on WebCT because the University's PVCs and Department Heads continue to place huge emphasis on the transition of the University to a more internet-friendly academic institution: but now, with potentially no fewer than four hours left in the day until an examination day, hundreds of students have been left ALL afternoon without access to their course.
Today's service failures are an absolute travesty, reflecting the continued mismanagement of a very fragile system.
I hope this is taken incredibly seriously, alongside previous discussions tabled between IS and the student body. At the very least, we deserve a realistic explanation for the failures that occurred today.
Everyone's heard the old UFO favourites. Roswell, Fatima 1917, Illinois 2001, etc etc. However, maybe it's just the news material I read most often, but I'd not heard of a decent new sighting in quite a while.. until now.
A bunch of workers at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport are describing a grey saucer which hovered over Gate C17, span (or maybe not) then shot up through the clouds leaving a hole behind in its wake.
The FAA are trying to pass off the 7th November sighting as a "weather phenomenon" but it's hard to imagine that a weather phenomenon would have pilots and ground officials stop what they're doing to figure out what they were seeing. One United Airlines official ran out from his office to see what all the fuss was about.
So although there was apparently no record in the duty log and United Airlines deny everything, there was most certainly something odd going on that night, be it the weather or something more mysterious.
The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.
The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time.
"It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky," said one United employee.
Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds.
It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.
However, the Air Traffic Control personnel up in the tower saw nothing on radar. O'Hare Controller and union official Craig Burzych had little recourse but to joke about the rumours.
"To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable."
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how much of this story I actually believe. But anyway, the Telegraph is reporting that "Britons flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington."
By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account.
The extent of the demands were disclosed in "undertakings" given by the US Department of Homeland Security to the European Union and published by the Department for Transport after a Freedom of Information request.
About four million Britons travel to America each year and the released document shows that the US has demanded access to far more data than previously realised.
I'm not surprised by the American desire to get as much information on people as possible — legal or not. But access to people's actual email inboxes is something entirely different, and I'm not convinced that the author of the article got the details right on this one.
Perhaps a log of message headers resides somewhere for government perusal, but an actual wiretap on a specific email account? Seems like a bit of a stretch for even the EU to allow that: and even if they did, is the US really going to snoop on everyone's email? Was there a huge NSA agent recruitment drive lately that we didn't hear about?
I wrote a few months back about web engineers worldwide fighting to stop the advance of the false notion that using getElementById() shortcuts is a good idea. Apparently some scripters have only just discovered the IE trick and are now encouraging everyone else to dump the proper DOM methods and write malformed code.
http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/12/no-more-getelementbyid.html
Real browsers such as FF will accept it if you have JavaScript settings set a certain way, but traditionally this 'shortcut' has been the primary cause for scripts failing on other browsers when written for IE, because it was IE which propogated the idea that it's valid Javascript.
It's also a bad idea to rely on implicitly available DOM elements from this position in the variable space, for the same reason that you shouldn't use Magic Variables in PHP… albeit slightly less of a risk in Javascript.
Argh.
