Why do journalists insist on doing this:

World’s largest aircraft crash lands its second flight

Take a look at the video and tell me if that is what you would consider a crash landing:

You are in heaven as you just signed up for your 1 month free porn subscription, and want to stream and save as much smut your internet link can handle, because you are a lonely looser nerd that needs to stock up on material for the long winter ahead. You run as fast as your legs can carry you to your favourite shop in the whole wide world - Best Buy. But alas - so many options to choose from when trying to buy that huge external hard disk drive.

So you google some products you see and find this:

LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive

If you have some old hard disks lying around and are considering selling them, it is important that you wipe them before passing them along - otherwise your data can very easily fall in to the wrong hands. There are a billion ways to wipe a disk - this article is not a tutorial. It is a reminder of something you might not be aware of. It definitely applies to using the unix command "dd" to perform a disk wipe, possibly to other tools as well.

A naive approach might be to issue this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskX bs=4m 

I have just received some unsolicited communications from a company trying to sell their software - nothing unusual there. However the two videos that were linked were kind of hilarious. The first one made me want to commit suicide. The second one wanted me to regret that decision. See for yourself:

Marketing Video 1 - Yawn

Marketing Video 2 - Wtf?*

Spot the not in the recent screen grab from a TV broadcast in South Africa for the recent elections:

If you are a bit slow, here is how that graph should have looked like (to be a fair, accurate mathematical representation of the data). Why? Because the y-axis of a chart must be constant for all data items on the x-axis so that they can be compared - which is the whole point of a graph. Otherwise it is not a graph but a story. Like the one you tell your kids just before an atomic bomb is being detonated - "Everything will be OK, I promise".