Computer techie wipes out info on $38 Billion fund

All developers manage at one time or another during their career to accidentally delete important data, and it is at those moments when you find out if there is a backup strategy in place :) I feel for the tech dude at the Alaska Department of Revenue doing routine reformatting of hard disks:

While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account — one of Alaska residents' biggest perks — and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well...

And the only backup was the paperwork itself — stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.

Japanese version of Sarbanes-Oxley : J-SOX

Japanese companies and their international subsidiaries have started prepping for next year’s implementation of a corporate governance framework - called J-SOX - that’s comparable to the requirements imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S.

I wonder what impact this regulatory framework will have on the already struggling Japanses economy?

I can see lots of IT work coming from this very soon :)

Expanding The Blogger Hierarchy

Blogger/blogspot, where my blog is hosted, recently did an upgrade. One of the new features is the ability to display archived posts in a hierarchical tree. Unfortunately this archive tree displays links to just the last few posts and I want it to display more. If you look at the raw HTML you will find that in fact links the last 40 or so posts have been preloaded but are hidden by default. I wrote this little bit of javascript, which you put just before the end body tag of your template, to display those hidden post links.

<!-- A small script that expands all collapsed items in the blog archive -->
<script type='text/javascript'>
function getElementsByClassName(oElm, strTagName, oClassNames) {
   var arrElements = (strTagName == &#39;*&#39; &amp;&amp; oElm.all)? oElm.all : oElm.getElementsByTagName(strTagName);
   var arrReturnElements = new Array();
   var arrRegExpClassNames = new Array();
   if (typeof oClassNames == &#39;object&#39;) {
       for(var i=0; i < oClassNames.length; i++){
           arrRegExpClassNames.push(new RegExp(&#39;(^|\\s)&#39; + oClassNames[i].replace(/\-/g, &#39;\\-&#39;) + &#39;(\\s|$)&#39;));
       }
   }
   else{
       arrRegExpClassNames.push(new RegExp(&#39;(^|\\s)&#39; + oClassNames.replace(/\-/g, &#39;\\-&#39;) + &#39;(\\s|$)&#39;));
   }
   var oElement;
   var bMatchesAll;
   for(var j=0; j &lt; arrElements.length; j++){
       oElement = arrElements[j];
       bMatchesAll = true;
       for(var k = 0; k &lt; arrRegExpClassNames.length; k++){
           if (!arrRegExpClassNames[k].test(oElement.className)) {
               bMatchesAll = false;
               break;                     
           }
       }
       if (bMatchesAll) {
           arrReturnElements.push(oElement);
       }
   }
   return (arrReturnElements)
}

var listItems = getElementsByClassName(document, &#39;li&#39;, &#39;archivedate collapsed&#39;);
for (var i = 0; i &lt; listItems.length; i++) {
   listItems[i].className = &#39;archivedate expanded&#39;;
}
</script>

NOTE: The above javascript is in a valid XML format since blogger now XML validates any changes you make to your blogger template.

Are You Satisifed With Your Wall Street Bonus?

Thanks to half-agile daddy Marc for this article on satisfaction for the 2006 bonus season. What would be even more interesting if people taking the survey also volunteered how much their bonus was as a percentage of their annual salary.

UNIX Rapper

Check out this dude who raps about his favourite UNIX commands.

"kill -9 and your process is mine..."

Terrorism in Second Life

Looks like US presidential candidate John Edwards is not even safe in cyber space with the attack on his HQ in Second Life using Bill Cosby posters (huh?) and Nintendo's Mario.

Such an attack could be a danger for companies that have established a presence in Second Life like ABN Amro and Sun.

I See Geek Everywhere

Even on my vacation I see geek phrases everywhere.

Shame I don't have a picture of that licence plate that starts with "TCP"...