Speaking to a friend this morning revealed an interesting story. This friend needed to test Voicemail functionality. This is fine, and is part of his job. There was only one problem. He needed to get a managers approval for this since someone thought that they could save money by not having voicemail on phones. Voicemail is essentially a free service. It is even more so when you are a phone carrier!

There are some projects that should be illegal. For some reason building a plane is one that many people think should be. Well, maybe. But I know of one that really really should be. That is >building an engine. This one is a V8, and looks great. It takes about a year to make, but I would guess that depends on how much time you spend on it. The price is about right, except for the time needed to work on it. You need to visit the link. If you do you will see that it is made of paper. It is an origami engine!

I have not found the story yet online, but the print version of the SMH has a story about moving the QANTAS Data Centre from George St in Sydney to Baulkham Hills to the IBM Data Centre. Since this was a switchover I suspect that they were outsourcing the servers at the same time. Like any big organisation, QANTAS has a number of mainframes, and something like 300 servers. It is about what I would expect. There will probably be a link in the SMH soon.

There is a funny document on How to write un-maintainable code. This is a strange look at how not to write Java. It goes into too much deapth, but I thought I would include the link for completeness.