Reported a broken site with Firefox recently?
WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES from time to time. And we have to live with the burning pain of embarrassment every time someone is kind enough to remind us of our cock-ups.
But making a major howler at work and then posting the gory details on his blog is a move Mozilla engineer Mark Smith may live to regret.
Now the world and its wife knows the full sorry tale of how the hapless but humble tech managed to lose three months worth of data from a server set up to store reports of broken web sites accessed by the company's Firefox browser using software called Reporter.
"The database Reporter uses was getting a lot of traffic on the Firefox 3 'Download Day' and I moved Reporter from the master of that cluster to one of the slaves. I decided to take the hit on that one slave to prevent the master from going underwater," he wrote.
The possibility of losing a day or two's worth of data seemed to be worth the compromise, but that's when it all went Pete Tong.
When the all the hoo-ha of the multi record-breaking launch day had died down, Mark forgot to put things back the way they should have been and the temporary server ended up being formatted and bunged back in a cupboard.
In Mark's words... "Bye bye data!"
We can't help feeling a wee bit sorry for Mark but it seems that his colleagues and boss have forgiven his little wobble... so all's well that ends well.
Mark Smith... we salute you. ยต
L'Inq
Mark's Blog
Geek.com
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Maybe confession is good for the soul; maybe part of his penitence was to 'fess up to the world. A bit like your dad making you apologize, or otherwise make restitution, for doing something "bad" no matter how embarrassed you were.

Those of us who happen to live in this type glass house know better than to throw stones.

Hang in there dude, it ain't like you killed anybody or for that matter did something that can't be undone.
I don't make mistakes. Ever.
...so why should he be punished if he "solved" a problem with Firefox by getting rid of the evidence ;)

I use Firefox but the most important site for my work (an company internal one) uses some javascript which is incompatible with Firefox - or the other way around.
When I was a tech, about 10 years ago, a businessman brought his PC into the shop I worked at. We were going to move all of his data onto a new bigger hard drive.

I booted the PC up with both hard drives in it and, by habbit, entered "Format C: /q /u" and walked away.

To bad the new drive was D:, and all the old data I was supposed to move was on C:. I spent 2 days after that going through a painful "unformat" process. Ultimately, I got 95% of the data back. Still, I didn't get paid for 2 days while I fixed this PC. 
Installed a new 16KVA UPS here. Our electrician put in a new panel downstream, to break up the load into multiple circuits.

My server tech moved the PDU powering one power supply on each server to the new UPS. Then, he pulled the PDU that fed the other power supply.

No one checked to make sure the circuits had been turned on for the UPS first.

Whole datacenter (three racks) blacked out.
Formatting does not necessarily destroy the data.

If they actually gave a flying flog, they'd turn the HD over to a disk recovery specialist...
Must be a slow news day...
1) Superglue that sets in a second does exactly what it says on the tin.... to your fingers

2) Never spray pcb finish in the direction of your face. It might kinda glue your eyelids shut

3) Allways check of the bags on your bike arren't full of water before you trow your notebook from work in 
there. (I hated telling my boss that the next day :( )

4) To make a long story short, custom new version of a pcb which took me a day to build..... i go partying (weed/alcohol) and come back to work the next day..... and...

exidently (not standard) i put the 220v lines on the 12v rail which your normally hook the battery up too.

lets just say that PIC microprocessors can melt, quite good accually. :)

In total i killed 2 notebooks, all source code en designs on them, the company datebase....and managed to make the entire system not work for day because I "made improvements tothe server"

This is all pre-2000 but my workplace was filled with smoke often.

If it wasn't for the fact i invented good stuff on a regular basis....... i woudn't have worked there that long :p