I don’t remember where I got this one from, but it came back to me today when someone at work was talking about how their father likes to “play” with settings (VCR, TV, Air Conditioning, etc) and cables, then deny all knowledge.

There’s these three people: One IT Helpdesk staff member, One Software Developer, and one User.

They’re each put in a separate room, each room has a table, chair, and a window. On the table is a glass ball.

24 hours later, when checked - the IT Helpdesk person is sitting there, waiting for someone to ask for help. Similarly, the Software Developer is waiting to be given a task.   The User, however is sitting in the corner - there’s no glass ball, and the window is broken. “What happened?”, they’re asked. “I don’t know, it just happened”

I got a question the other day: “Can we set up blogs for each of our staff, that only certain people in our area can read?”.

Well, I immediately thought of Wordpress MU, and possibly some sort of Active Directory (via LDAP) authentication or similar.

It turns out there’s an LDAP Authentication plugin already created. So, we’d need some sort of additional plugin to specify only certain AD groups should be permitted to read the blog.

Excellent, now we just need a server to host it on… Oh, damn, I knew there was a catch!

Others are already doing this (or something similar), and seem to be reasonably happy, despite a few problems (such as the 11-tables-per-user thing).

See: Top Gear, The Chaser.

Next? “We go into a muslim area in Iraq and say how much we love roast pork!”