Posts by HXO

Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled

"Our IT experts worked tirelessly to resolve the issue – successfully,” reads a company statement.

Only a noob

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2017/01/16/nice-try/

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

Re: Although Trump's lot have taken 'thick as poop' to new levels...

> with PGP encryption.

And DVD encryption. 40 bits? Which I am quite happy about.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: DOS era?

> /folders/, not directories

Over in .NET land it is directory, fex System.IO.DirectoryInfo. But me using folder in naming.

Also, I could use a stable rsync...

www.osnews.com/story/145198/rsync-opens-the-slopgates-regressions-and-bugs-ensue/

Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

"without all the necessary skills?"

Yes. Pretty much all my jobs, not only IT. That is being an universal technician. The 'trick' is to spot when you are lacking knowledge or skills, then stop and acquire before continuing. My first chief, feared by many people, would say: "This is a learning situation, take your time.". Getting some customers and managers to accept, can be harder than the learning part.

Zombie user account let hackers control the city’s water

Separation.

> extensive privileges

With SAP, I sometimes had to ask: Why can I (a normal user) see *this*?

What I have been used to as an IT person:

Ordinary account like everyone to log into your PC and fex mail.

Ordinary account not connected to me, for logging into users PCs, and not risking 'my' things like shares and DBs, if the PC is infected.

Server admin account(s).

Domain admin account.

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Re: App with write permission.

I have had that problem more recently; the application opened files with RW flags in the function call when only R was needed. At least the vendor fixed it in an update.

Re: Crash of a different sort

We had leased printers, and one in a warehouse kept failing, requering frequent vendor visits. That never helped, and one day the printer failed completely and a replacement was finally granted. Then the vendor tech noticed the safety shoe sole prints on the side of the printer...

Former POE, english is not our first language, and I might have told this before.

Global rule: You cannot drink alcohol or have BAC > nothing AT work.

OK, no problem.

Me (joking) to Boss : So when working AT home, I can have a beer?

No! - You are still AT work.

Then it should say DURING work, and you know xkcd.com/323 is real: devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240416-01/?p=109672 ?

...

Next week Boss calls at night with: A got a call about this broken system, can you take a remote look with me?

Yeah, no. I have had a few beers, and cannot be AT work.

Much shouting of words that would give HR a collective heart attack.

Debian 14 cracks down on unreproducible packages

OT: VirusTotal

My own .NET Framework applications usually get 0-2 false (i assume :) ) positives on VirusTotal. But sometimes half the vendors flags an application. When I then go and rebuild with AFAICT the only change being the embedded build timestamp, and retest on VT, it is back to 0-2 positives.

More ranting: The behavior page. 2/3 of complaints are things the framework does or the compiler did and I assume does for all applications, or not relevant (I think) like 'Scripting'. Yes it reads the commandline, no need to warn about that. Or 'Registers a vectored exception handler (VEH), possibly to hijack execution flow'. Not entirely sure, but I think that is me catching unhandled exceptions for logging before exit. Looks scary to the customer.

Vi clone written in BASIC proves old habits :wq hard

Re: Fantastic

I just happened to get my Spectrum out of a moving box today. It got a new KB membrane <10 years ago, so should be good. And a HDMI to USB box. And a Scart to HDMI box. And ... WTF is the composite (nipped off the RF module for comp out many years ago) to Scart cable? This is going to take a little longer...

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

I totally agree that A/V rarely is better than text and images.

But I encounter lots of people, even in technical fields, that will rather sit through a 15min video than turn their brain on and read for 3min.

Another thing, a question: If you do make intructions/help material and and want to publish it, where do you do it? I used to use my personal site, but traffic disappeared decades ago, then there are ifixit for some things and another one I forget? Somewhere unlike stackoverflow where everything turns in to an argument... Somewhere for all categories of info.

I am afraid YT has won this one.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Had something like this once with a client

Why are 'smart people' like that? We had some lab storage equipment, that used to have parameters logged manually every few hours. I automated it and logged every few minutes (more sensible considering the mass). Then I got complaints, that auditors complained the number of out-of-bounds readings had gone way up. Duh!

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

At least on the Dell laptops I was exposed to, the !#¤!"%!!! switch could be disabled in (98% sure) the BIOS, which became our standard setup 2 days after the first PC got in user hands.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

"radical left"

Pffft. WTH would T&Co designate RAF (the german groups) as?

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: idiots

I read that in the voice of Mr Burns (Simpsons).

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Re: "Then Helen of Troy arrived, naked, oiled-up, and carrying the Dummies Guide to Coding"

> falling asleep in front of the TV has some interesting results

Oh man. Many years ago I fell asleep with the Beavis and Butthead movie on repeat. Not something to repeat.

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

My eyes! I remember using a word processor on the Spectrum with 4*8 characters for 64 per line. Tip: I switched from my 14inch color TV to an older 12inch B&W for a clearer view.

I never saw one IRL, but was shocked learning the first Apple Macintosh had a 9inch monitor.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

If webmail is the SaaS example, the earlier one would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com#Launch_of_Hotmail in 1996.

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Re: Use case?

That is not even a solution looking for a problem, that is a problem looking for a friend.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Re: Not good enough

Yeah, but does that mean AI is active? I have no AI account (anywhere or attached to FF), and have *zero* indication that AI is active. The best I can tell, those (and other) switches are just defaults for when a user activates AI on the main switch. Again I do not think this is wrong for ordinary users. (Apart for the underlying LLM part.)

Re: Not good enough

I do not understand the shouting about FFs addition of AI. When FF asked if I wanted an AI thing integrated, I clicked No, and have not heard from it again. (FF 147.0.2 now, mostly Windows.) Compared to other SW, that is OK.

And all SW will present new features: Ordinary users do not go looking for unknown features on their phones, computers, cars... Technical users may have read about the upcomming features or gone exploring for it. Ordinary users will only know if shown.

Still, the LLM AI experiment on the whole needs to end.

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Re: Linux obviously in favour

That kind of signage is banned here, except if on the land where your business is operating. And there are still restrictions. Except some counsils give themselves exceptions. I very much hate animation that will distract. Anywhere.

Speed 2. Had to look it up. Worst movie ever. Saw the first 15mins, and the next day I think someone sent it overboard.

Uncle Sam dangles nuclear campuses for states while watering down safety rules

Why bother?

AFAIK only Finland have what seems like a final solution for the waste:

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/viden/klima/450-meter-nede-i-klippegrunden-mener-de-de-har-loest-atomkraftens-stoerste-problem

And where are the fuel coming from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Production_2021.png

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are in shooting range of Russia.

Niger have kicked out France and are friendly with Russia.

Australia, I think, have discussed closing uranium production?

Namibia?

Canada? For home market and now China?

Crossrail? More like Borkrail...

IME IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL was quite common in the XP era with poorly written drivers. I guess WHQL largely removed that problem, and since about W7 it has been a sign of physically failing HW. So monitor the evtlogs in your fleet.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

IT people as well.

Having an engineering background where tool use are the norm, so comming to IT I assumed all technical people could use at least handtools like screwdrivers, wrenches, sockets, multimeters... I learned I was wrong, and that some IT peoples hardware skills came from maybe changing the ribbon in a type writer. Personal toolbag for me from then on.

I have joked that 'tool intelligence' is missing from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

Hacker taps Raspberry Pi to turn Wi-Fi signals into wall art

Re: cool

Not heard of that, but years ago I played with the idea of spotting police vehicles by their radio noise signature, but guess their modern radios/cell network are 'invisible'.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

DT talks a lot.

Neither GL nor DK governments have mentioned talks with DT, only NATO.

GL has environmental laws. See fex

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/groenland/mineselskab-i-milliardstrid-med-groenland-hyrer-amerikanske-konsulenter

(Firefox local translatation works.)

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

"Now don't be such a no-guy. We put the user interface on one page and the data on another. And we keep it on the network drive, so four departments can share."

No, not joking. Inmates running the asylum.

Former POE had a well developed ERP implementation were all this planning was done largely automated.

But in some departments there were people (including managers), that would extract data to paper or spreadsheet and fiddle it manually.

Why? Lack of understanding, knowledge, training, smarts... And then buy other SW solutions or build incomprehensible things in Excel, claiming how efficient they now are without the ERP.

Oh, congratulations. Three days production runs have to be scrapped, because one of the raw material batches had tested bad, and the ERP would have blocked it, but your data from last week did not have that info.

My point is, new (not always young) people at all levels really like to put their own prints on the work, AI just being the new Excel.

Global economy shrugs off US tariff shock, tech spending does heavy lifting

Re: Trick

I am in the EU, and for years, when buying from fex AliE or (until ~1 year ago) Amazon.com, VAT and duties are included in the price and collected by the seller, and payment and paperwork is handled by the shipper.

So no, the seller/exporter does not pay VAT and duties, it handles it for the buyer/importer to keep shipping expedient.

Anthropic quietly fixed flaws in its Git MCP server that allowed for remote code execution

"as more AI agents move into production, security has to keep pace."

I guess somebody will say: Add more AI.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Blockchain.

Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack

"cloud lookups to speed things along"

What? To set up a BT connection?

Flipping one bit leaves AMD CPUs open to VM vuln

Re: Only with SMT: Most important info at the end of the article...

As I read the article, the guests have an expectation of areas with data (keys) that are secret from the host. But the host can ruin that expectation by changing this bit. So telling the host admin to disable SMT is as effective as telling them to not change the bit, no?

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

"chairwoman at GAIA-X"

Thank you, there was something very blurry in the back of my head.

But take Airbus to mean any largish company, that outsources its operation and knowledge. I do not think it is midterm econmical or longterm viable. It can be/look economical in the short term.

"abide by European law"

For now. I think things will change fast.

"it would fight the US government in court"

Ha. "National Security!" means there will not be any court.

And if you are Airbus sized, why are you even considering public cloud for anything but your public website?

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Things I have learned to do:

SW/OS change on server or labPC: Shutdown. Remove power. Leave to cool for as long as possible, at least a tea break. Power on. Check that HW and old SW/OS is still fine. Then do your changes and finish with an OS restart.

Programming: Before making even a trivial change, see that the application builds as is, so you can tell if someone elses change broke the build.

Has a client or colleague blamed you for a problem you didn’t cause?

Oh yes. There are ignorant people in all industries. And that is one of the big reasons to stay with a manager (or group), that is intelligent and has technical understanding. In BigCorp even official root cause analysis was finding the first and easiest 'victim' for demerit and firing. Some frustrating fights over the obvious, and *never* a 'sorry', when the real cause was eventually accepted.

Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot

HowTo for HyperV (Win10)

Create Generation 2 VM (UEFI support).

Add second 8GB HD Boot Disk.

Set boot order with Boot Disk first.

Disable Secure Boot.

Do not start VM.

Mount and FAT-format Boot Disk in Disk Management.

Copy zip content to Boot Disk.

Unmount Boot Disk.

Boot VM.

Install guest OS.

Change boot order.

British Palantir rival, whose founder touted UK tech sovereignty, sells to Accenture

Eh. They are all the same, I could not tell Accenture and TCS apart. Or any of the many other rentals BigCorp thought were better options, than investing in their own people. I am not against rentals for specific tasks, but they are a bad choice for long term stability and knowledge retention.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

In 1999 I had a woman friend and was in an industry that could cold start by handcrank, so keeping software up was not a concern.

I few years later in IT I saw some lab SW, that would fall over with timestamps in new data.

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Ah, yes tax the huge exports from NO to US of herring and petroleum. That will make NO change its mind.

Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds

https://www.savagechickens.com/2025/07/rebel-kid.html

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

The only sites that I see complain about "suspicious bot activity from your IP" are IPv4-only sites.

Get with the times site operators. That includes you, theregister.com .

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

"Have you any idea how much heat servers produce?"

Yes, easy to look at the power measurement on the UPS output. All of it has to be removed.

"You have to have air conditioning"

No, just cooling.

AC also means also adjusting humidity, and increasing temperature. The cooling units may look like AC units, and be called AC by laypersons, but are not.

"datacenter that is by definition well ventilated"

No? All server rooms I have been in have had air cooling (not air conditioning) but no forced exchange of air to the outside.

And levels of lockdown differed wildly between countries, AFAIR we never had to prove reason for travel, but as many WFH, it made for nice quiet roads for MC trips. Often for work.

Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack

And both Firefox and Thunderbird have released updates in the last 24 hours.

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

I like Comic.

There, thumbs down away, but:

https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/the-reason-comic-sans-is-a-public-good.html

And use

https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/

and

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Comic+Neue?preview.text=Whereas%20recognition%20of%20the%20inherent%20dignity&query=comic

in fex CSS for readability.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

"with absolutely zero sense of humour clearly didn't want a single non-business email being sent whatsoever"

Or just a short joke in a status mail to my boss CCed to the rest of the project group, that spent 10 hours on a weekend, and had to roll back, because stupid big corp reason we could not control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfzlXcFbQ9I

(Not that exact link; Firefly "that went well".)

Most responded with [smiley] or [thump up]. Except the PM sent a nastygram to my boss. Who had already sent me [smiley] (*).

(*) "The post contains some characters we can’t support". Like unicode?