I have a couple of clients that seem to not understand the definition of the word "revert". Here is a typical sentence how they would use it:

Please would you create a new user account, please revert once done.

Seriously? As a scientist / engineer I am very confused by the need to expend energy for a net result of nothing. If I create a new account, but then revert it once done, I have not done anything, have I?

I must confess - although I had a fairly extensive education in higher mathematics, I am by no means a mathematician. I do love maths with a passion though, so when I played some Putt-putt with my kid the other day, it was just logical that I would use it as a means to teach her some algebra and basic trigonometry.

Recently I found that Dell servers with UEFI BIOS configured cannot perform a full backup with Windows Backup due to two issues. One is that the OS partition is FAT32, and the second is that one of the system partitions do not have enough free space. I forgot the details but these two links helped me recreate the partitions and get Windows Server 2012 R2 installed in to the larger partitions to enable backups.

Configure UEFI/GPT-Based Hard Drive Partitions

Converting Windows BIOS installation to UEFI

Remember the 60's,70's and 80's? I was too young in the 70's to really have been able to first hand experience life as it was back then, but I am pretty confident that I am accurate in stating that it was an extremely exciting time. It was the time of freedom, hippies and self expression. It was the time of a post war arms race where the most powerful nations on earth flexed their muscles. It was the time that computers came out of the dark ages and became accessible to the average Joe. People were excited. Energised. Hopeful. We landed a man on the moon. We created the personal computer. Science broke new ground every single day. Medicine allowed people to live beyond 50. Even science fiction predicted that in 2001 we would be travelling amongst the stars. Antibiotics, gene theraphy etc. boosted our life spans considerably.

However the 90's, '00's and 10's proved otherwise. During the 90's and 00's Moore's law held strong, but in the 10's it slowed down. For the past 10 years we have been hovering around 1-3GHz for CPU speed. Increases in performance are harder and take longer. 18 Months are no longer mandating doubling of performance. The amazing Concorde plane was grounded in 2003 when people decided they were not economically viable and unsafe. That means our air travel is as advanced as it was in the 60's. No progress. With NASA shutting down its space shuttle program, space exploration has been set back to the dark ages. Funding is now redirected to global warming, healthcare, sustainability etc. It is believed that by 2050 global warming will reach a point of no return causing major damage to many coastal regions and change our general climate, wreaking havoc with agriculture. Bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics due to doctors overprescribing the drug. What we once could treat easily is becoming harder every day. The Hubble Telescope ran out of funding - most likely one of the greatest scientific astrological tools we have ever built, and the James Webb telescope is also running into serious budget concerns. If cancelled, it will dramatically reduce our ability to research space and the origins of our universe.

Our freedom is threatened by the emergence of terrorism. War was a breeze - there was some conflict, nations sent their troops and while they fought their battles, science got a tremendous boost as this was funded by military needs to reign supreme. Today terrorism is the new enemy, since 9/11 our freedoms have been reduced to ashes. There was a time when it was considered inappropriate behaviour to pat down a 10 year old girl at an airport screening station. Today millimetre wave scanners violate our privacy, and do not even think about trying to board a plane with a cellular phone that has a flat battery. You will be denied entry to the plane.

I recently tried to boot up an old PHP based project, but it failed with the error:

Call to a member function query() on a non-object ... in pdo_driver.php

Looking at phpinfo() output, I saw that --enable-pdo was present but so too --without-pdo-mysql. Since this project depended on PDO / MySQL, it was clear this was the culprit.