The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

This looks incredibly neat - I'm hoping the full site closer to the release date will be even better. I'm also hoping that FUNi continues what they've been doing and gets us one of the R2 boxes, because those are just cute.

Watching Boss Man's dreams being crushed before his very eyes this morning was satisfying, in a bitter sort of way. There's a distinct possibility that my job is going to get billions of times better somewhere around the end of December. Yay! In the meantime, I'll leave you with this:

You have a network that stretches across the globe, with hundreds of thousands of user accounts. Somehow, you lose a copy of all those accounts with associated passwords. Brilliant! Now, clearly you need to have all your users change their passwords. However, you can't send temporary passwords by email for obvious reasons, and you can't call them with the temporary passwords for less obvious reasons. The temporary password step is necessary for the obvious reasons.

So, you have hundreds of thousands of user accounts, all needing a password change, and you need to be able to do this on a tight schedule and deliver a temporary password in person. How do you do it?

If you're NMCI, you do it like you do everything else - stupidly.

First, you take all your user accounts and alphabetize them...by first name. Then, you divide the accounts by the site they're associated with, and then into "segments" of x% of the total number of accounts. Each segment is assigned the same temporary password and a one-hour block in which they are required to enter the temporary password, then change their password again. If you miss your block? We don't even want to go into that part of the process.

Oh, and the temporary passwords are all variants on the same theme, so if you happen to stumble across one, the rest are trivial to figure out.

I'd love to be the proverbial fly during some of the meetings where these schemes are cooked up.