Posts by CatBoy

Mysterious outbreak with high fatality rate in the DRC could imperil tech supply chains

Behoove

behoove - winner of word of the week. Well done !.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Sounds very familiar...

Hmm.. this sounds decidedly like a group of myself and fellow student friends who abused the computers which I think were housed at another London location (UCL ?) from the green terminals in SELTEC. We got a good slap around the head for being generally slightly naughty students and abusing the poor operators ... I remember the general cry of "F%$^I)% Off" that could be heard after a small bleep of the terminal and yet another insult came across the RS-232 link to brighten up your coding woes.

Oh what fun good old fashioned text could be. :-)

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

I did a lot of swearing when I was trying to write regex last week..

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Re: Dropping the phone while gardening

I've mowed a little baby flip phone - probably from 2003 or 4 . NEC ? or something like that - It was in the shirt pocket and I was mowing the grass straight after work. Bent over to empty the grass collection bucket. Phone fell out n in the longer grass next to the mower. On the next run down the garden ... BANG.. shards of phone everywhere.

NEC 0 : Hayter Petrol 1

I also managed to leave another flipper in a shirt pocket, and wash it.. That one survived surprisingly - although took a week or so for the microphone to dry out.

Since then (luckily) I've not broken any of the fondle slab phones I've owned.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: New Cow Theory?

I've gone past the point of being grey - I'd do a great Santa Claus impersonation.

My youngest son however has only just turned 20 and is doing a Comp Science degree - his problem with the world of open source is a distinct lack of support when he runs into an issue due to "I've never done this before, I can't ask a friend as they've not done it before and I can't google my way out of it".

When asking on various open source forums, some people can be unbelievably snotty with their answers - RTFM or "that's not a real question - come back when you can you write a question". I appreciate a lot of us (me included) are on the spectrum and that everything must match your exacting standards - but try to remember these are young and potentially insecure young people who without help and support will certainly not become as good as you.. and potentially give up -so loosing a generation that could make open source even better.

Try to remember when we all started and made the most appalling cockups in our IT endeavours - but if you were lucky - such as me with the senior programmer Wendy (lovely lady ) who was kind and patiently explained how to do things or improve my own code and helped to make sure I didn't make the same awful mistake again.. For me that was over 40 years ago and I only need to remember back to my junior of junior trainee programmer (who should of not been allowed to use the kettle without supervision - let alone be able to play unrestricted with an IBM 4341 mainframe)

We need to be mentors not tyrants if we want the youth of today to get into helping for free...

Britain's Ministry of Defence accused of wasting £174M on 'external advice'

Re: Bowman radio technology

Well done... truly punny, snorted my tea.

for those who don't listen to radio - The Archers was / is the worlds first radio soap opera - been running forever ... since the early 1950's.

Footage of Nigel Farage blowing up Rishi Sunak's Minecraft mansion 'not real'

Re: GB News

woahh. VoA - haven't listened to that since the 80's when I got into shortwave radio... blast from the past...

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Yeah, sure. Nothing changed. Pinky promise.

I've just spent 2+ hours with a person who said - it's your installer - not our Anti-virus.

"Oh my AV it's new and shiny - best in the World... and was installed after the old version of your crappy app was in the infrastructure...but did I mention I personally had tea with Bill Gates and he and I wrote all the scripts ?.. I'm also best in the World - invincible and immortal to be precise"

Hmmm says I ... The installer gets blown away - leaving nothing of its existence in task manager... and it's really nothing to do with the AV killing everything that isn't labelled "made with love by Microsoft" ?. ?.

Quelle surprise !.. it's a "them" issue rather than "my issue" once our esteemed customer said... "oh there is a thing about a PuP which wasn't there last night " (There must be magic occurring on the logs)

"mumble mumble" says the dearly beloved administrator (sub-deity)

(could that of been an apology for getting quite shitty with me ?. phone warrior surely can't back down... "mumble mumble ,Obviously GPO not propagated... blah blah (add technical BS jargon for full effect) - we'll speak next week"

It's time for a not-so-subtle victory dance and a cup of coffee.

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

Re: There could be some 'quick wins'

An old IBM data centre I used to work at had about 4 feet deep of old cable under the floor - not one ever touched it - just cut the ends off and dropped it through the floor tiles... Much easier to run a new cable than to unpick it from the industrial-sized spaghetti farm under the floor. .

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

Lucozade - the killer of all known keyboards.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

CUB Monitor

Oh, how I drooled over the swanky pictures of the CUB monitor in the monthly PC rag-mag... colour !!

Too exciting for a young teen... and way too expensive to ever get my grubby paws on one.

Great fun in the old days with ROM copying* for some word processing app ... can't remember its name. Learned loads from doing that kind of thing.

* scientific research only of course.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

Byte magazine

I'd forgotten all about that till I saw your post... loved it .. was a fortune to buy for a young teen back in the day from the big W.H.Smiths in the next town over... special bus journey once a month.

I suppose I've dumped them all due to house moves etc as they aren't in the loft anymore.

Must see if they are online anywhere... be nice to see some adverts for things like Tandy (who,what ?. say the youth of today) adverts.. Used to drool at those pages..

Excellent job all at NASA. Certain my crappy coding won't be around in 50 years .

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Re: School IT Directors Thoughts

What about these people in Swindon

https://www.museumofcomputing.org.uk/

They might be interested...

The bletchley park museum were super enthusiastic when I gave them some LSMD filters for their big old drive cabinets that lived in the attic...

Sadly I'd thrown the data pacs away - as I thought... "no ones ever going to use these anymore"... how wrong I was !.

Engineers pave the way for building lunar roads with Moon dust

Moon Roadway

Yay... space lasers. There is a <insert deity of choice>

India's Chandrayaan-3 Moon mission hibernates to see out a long lunar night

Re: Going out through the in door

transceivers

There you go, that should cover both options nicely :-)

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Never was I so scared as when I had to go to Birds-Eye Frozen Foods - East London. An almost all-female workforce in the factory who used more Fs, Cs,,Bs and Z's (the full alphabet of obscenities) ... more than the entire crew of HMS Ark Royal would use in an entire year... all in 15 minutes.

and of course, the most fun the ladies had was to make the poor 18-year-old techy almost run out the door due to embarrassment from all the suggestive comments whilst he was trying to fix the printer...

ahh the 80s.. I hope this doesn't still happen... I'm scared for life (probably ;-> )