Posts by Graham Newton

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

I left VM recently as the customer service was diabolical and the service was more unreliable than anything I had had previously. it took a bit of time but I was firm as I had signed up to CityFibre gigabit service. I received an email thanking me for returning the router, which is still sat on my desk! Which sort of sums up the whole experience.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: This is not even as close to as bad as acronyms are

I always understood it as innovative thinking. Much like thinking out of the box. My main objection is that it is used by people that can barely think in the box.

Academics have 'no confidence' in Edinburgh University's response to its Oracle disaster

Re: Echoes of Cambridge University's CAPSA fiasco

And also in 1999 the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) which also involved Oracle and ended up being on the front page of Computer weekly and the subject of an inquiry by the public accounts committee (PAC).

University orders investigation into Oracle finance disaster

This is almost identical to a incident at a large government laboratory I worked at. The admittedly aging accounts system was replaced by a shiny new Oracle system by switching off the old one and switching on the new one. Exactly the same issues -- suppliers were not paid who would then not sell us anything else until we paid up. The laboratory appeared on the front page of Computer Weekly and the management did get the privilege of appearing before the public accounts select committee. The minutes of which detail the full scale of what happened, which included a £100 million "anomaly".

Artemis I isn't just a test run – there's science to be done

Alexa -- Play Set your controls to the heart of the Sun.

Nexperia talks up its investment in UK wafer fab, says no plans to close

Re: "We're not planning to shut any operations"

So why take it over in the first place?

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Monsoon children

The local Monsoon shop has a poster in the window proclaiming "Monsoon children in stock"!

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: Similar problem with a moped

I had an Honda NSR125 which I had to sell last year after 20 years. One morning it wouldn't start, it was still under warranty so I got the AA out. Who also couldn't start it. I was only when the bike had been partially dismantled that the AA man noticed that I had accidentally pressed the emergency kill switch.

Robotaxis freed to charge across 60km² of Beijing

Bangkok TukTuk

In my experience one should remember that all bends should be attempted according to the teachings of the master -- Ayrton Senna @ Eau Rouge

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: What's The Password?

I had a colleague who was a great electronics engineer but liked to be guided through things like software installation programs which was fair enough in those days.

However I did wonder when we would get to:

"Your software has been successfully installed. Press OK to continue."

"What do I do now?"

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

It could have been worse!

I had a plumber to connect a gas hob. I had to give him wire wool and a heat conducting mat. He then wen to test the gas pressure and announced that we had a gas leak as there was no pressure. He called the gas emergency service who turned up and found no leak. They did find something blocking the hose on the plumber's gas pressure meter though.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Re: Haynes Manuals

My favourite is "The manifold is held on by three bolts, one which is inaccessible."

SpaceX Starship struts its stack to show it has the right stuff

Same here, great for making Ozone holes.

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

We had a new telegraph pole installed near us. My broadband was fine afterwards. Everyone else had problems which they blamed on the new telegraph pole despite most of them being WiFi related. Last week all the Sky customers blamed connection issues on the new telegraph pole ignoring the big article in the local paper saying Sky were having broadband connection issues throughout the county.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Re: Amateur move

The small appliance bins I've seen are in supermarket car parks with the other recycling banks. I did just manage to get a VHS video recorder in one.

Japanese eggheads strap AI-powered backpacks to seagulls

A relative who is an atmospheric scientist has used homing pigeons and drones to sample the atmosphere in various parts of the UK and the World. He said they did try gulls but having caught them and strapped the gear on them they were very reluctant to be caught again when trying to to get the gear back. A cross seagull is not to be taken lightly apparently!

The world's nonsense keeping you awake in middle of the night? Good news. Go outside and see this two-tail comet

Re: So many comet flops

I saw it from a playing field near my town centre. Once you knew where to look it was fairly obvious with the naked eye. I did find it at first by scanning with my binoculars checking each star for a bit a fuzziness when the tail appeared spread right across my field of view. A real WOAH moment.

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

Re: DEC Fortran

My final year project at Uni was a mathematical model of the human eye at low light intensity. Like the article it relied on loop within loops. The university computer was a DEC 10 and the program was written in Fortran.

I spent a lot of time ensuring that the program would run to completion without intervention. Unlike my fellow student who would babysit their programs overnight.

However my program consumed 12 hours of run time and was terminated. I got a "see me" email.

I was worried, this was my final year project.

They didn't bollock me but suggested that I sent my program to Manchester University . Not knowing about modems I thought I had to send my program by post but was put straight on this.

After a compile failure a CDC (Control Data)machine executed my program in less than a second.

This taught me that you had to program to the machine, not try to make it do things it wasn't built to do.

So for example I have:

Used the Transputers ability to do 2D memory manipulation and paralleled processing and CPU core linking to to do image processing for world class astronomical telescopes.

Produced a minimal memory and CPU cycle timesliceing OS to run experiments on the Cassini Huygens lander.

Programmed SHARC DSPs to operate on multiple audio streams concurrently using the SIMD mode.

Normal programming makes me weep, it's sledgehammer all the way, no artistry, no finesse.

I sit and wonder WTF when it takes several seconds for a word document to load.

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

Re: Oh No Surely Not...

My Wife is a track and tracer and is employed by the NHS and is certainly not doing it at at minimum wage. There are also no targets.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Being on the receiving end

When I worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory we used to send heavy equipment to our observatory on the Canary Islands by freighter. We were very surprised when we were informed that a Harrier jump jet had landed on it.

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

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Re: Friday

Is there is also a Sociology and Theoretical Hairdressing course ?

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

I had a ROM emulator that used a parallel port dongle. Anyway the dongle went missing so using the old DOS debug tool I found the test that detected the dongle and NO-OPed it out in the exe,

15 years on, Euroboffins finally work out what it took to send the Huygens Titan probe into such a spin

Re: seems sloppy

They did test it:

http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet85/jakel85.htm

Re: New Reg unit?

I wrote the firmware for that. As we planned for solid/liquid or a bit of both I suppose that statement is sort of correct.

Today's budget for application improvements is brought to you by the letters "Y", "K" and the number "2"

More pointless form filling

I had the pointless form filling which had to be done for everything software related. One of the boxes was "Impact on organisation" i.e. would our organisation be splashed all over the papers if we cocked it up?

One of my "items" was a computer system on the Cassini Huygens spacecraft. Which would have been a BIG DEAL if it went wrong. Fortunately we just did seconds since mission T0, no dates involved.

As it turned out they need not have worried about Y2K as a disaster of a replacement accounting system made the front page of Computer Weekly and the NAO list of worst public IT failures.

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

That may be so but I find if I leave the house name off stuff gets delivered to the mansion house round the corner that has been converted to flats.

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

I got that here in the UK. My house is called The White House, 'cos it's white. However further proof of address was required from my bank because on the bill it said The Whitehouse which was different. The other three lines including the house number were identical.

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

I've seen it in Oxford. A foreign student was told his package was "artonvan". When he left rather looking rather confused the post office guy said to everyone waiting "I told him as clear as I could".

I had a similar problem with wing mirrors.

Both wing mirrors were stolen off my ancient Vauxhall Cavalier. I ordered some from a scrap yard and they didn't turn up. I enquired as to where they were and was told they had got lost in the couriers system and they would be delivered next week.

Then the car was stolen, the next day I got two wing mirrors.

Visual Studio Code 1.35: Remote Development, TypeScript and (sigh) another new icon

Re: Some, of course, prefer to stick with the likes of Vim,

I was wondering what bouncing brackets are. Anyway you can go to the matching bracket using Ctrl-Shift \. The issue here seems to be the invention of a new term to describe something that already has a meaningful description.

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Astrology SHOULD be able to predict where the planet is from people not behaving/feeling as currently predicted. If it was a real science.

Granddaddy of the DIY repair generation John Haynes has loosened his last nut

Not always helpful

My all time favourite was for a Fiat 128 3P :- "The manifold is held on by three bolts one of which is inaccessible"

China on its way to becoming the first nation to land on the far side of the Moon

Re: eliptical orbit satellite...

I initially thought it would be a single satellite in lunar orbit. Receiving and recording when in contact with the lander and then re-transmitting when in contact with Earth, like Cassini Huygens.

However you are correct and there is quite a lot of interesting information in this link.

https://gbtimes.com/change-4-update-queqiao-relay-satellite-in-halo-orbit-longjiang-2-returns-amazing-images-from-moon

FYI NASA just lobbed its Parker probe around the Sun in closest flyby yet: A nerve-racking 15M miles from the surface

Re: 5.3 degrees of sun

I would have approached it differently. From Earth the Moon is the same angular size as the Sun.

The Earth is approximately 90 million miles from the Sun so at the current 15 million miles the probe is 6 time closer so the Sun would appear 6 times bigger. At closest approach at 3.9 million miles, say 4 to make the maths easy then it is 22.5 times closer. So maybe you have a factor of two missing somewhere.

In memoriam: See you in Valhalla, Skype Classic. Version 8 can never replace you

It works on Linux and it's better than Skype for Business

Well I find it works on Linux really well now. I don't even have to call "Skype" and listen the annoying upbeat message "if you can hear your message then your mic is working" (if you can't you are a hopeless loser). As for Skype for Business well that's pitiful. Like most things in office 365 the so called integration is abysmal. And I've discovered recently that Skype for Business does appear to have echo cancelling.

Tired sysadmin plugged cable into wrong port, unleashed a 'virus'

Re: Network related

When I worked in an office with smokers, if the weather was fine, I would join them and have a virtual fag. I would then find out from them what was really going on.

Galileo, here we go again. My my, the Brits are gonna miss EU

And India has working launch sites unlike the UK.

NASA's Curiosity puts cat among the climate pigeons: Lack of CO2 sinks water theory

So if CO2 is as clear as glass at IR wavelengths at above -50 degree C how do you explain Venus which has a 96% CO2 atmosphere and is a lot hotter than it should be?

Computerised stock management? Nah, let’s use walkie-talkies

The reply is

"Well they are long enough to reach the floor!"

Microsoft phone support contractors told to hang up after 15 minutes

Being paid to march

I was working for a company where the office was being shut down and there wasn't much work. So we found stuff to entertain ourselves. One of our colleagues had been a member of the Soviet armed forces and taught us all to march Red Army style.

Mercury to transit Sun: Viewer discretion advised

Telescope solar filters

DO NOT use the solar eyepieces that come with some cheap import telescopes. These are very dangerous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5xb3b-vRd4

As mentioned before use Baader Solar Film at the entrance to the main aperture so filtering the light before it enters the telescope optics.

Miguel de Icaza on his journey from open source to Microsoft: 'It's a different company'

Politics?

As primarily a Linux developer a Windows developer commented on C# and some useful RPC functionality. So I had a look and it seemed to sort of work.

There were obviously massive gaps in the functionality between .NET and Mono so I monitored the progress of Mono on Linux.

It soon became clear that with the creation of Xamarin then Mono on Linux wasn't really going anywhere. I am of the opinion that de Icanza is a politician. He'll tell you what you want to hear but if something better comes along he'll go for it. I don't blame him for furthering his career but it's not because he is a great coder or really committed to open source.

I don't believe the open source team were always talking to the .NET guys because why would Mono have so many deficiencies. de Icanza may have been talking to MS but I don't think it filtered down to open source but de Icanza used this to get to where he is now. Just like a politician.

I have found the views expressed here to be quite enlightening. I thought it was just me!

Which keys should I press to enable the CockUp feature?

Re: Rotated screens and "pranks"

You didn't need access to the terminal. You could send the user a messages with the control characters embedded in the text to get the terminal to do all sorts of things when they opened the message.

Happy days indeed

BTC dev: 'Strangling' the blockchain will kill Bitcoin

Re: Bit bollocks more like

OK step 1

Open (or log into) wallet.

Right, don't have one of those.

Try

https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

Mmmm -- most of them say they are vulnerable. That doesn't sound good.

Right try Bitcoin Wallet as it is not vulnerable.

Description:

"Have your Bitcoins always with you, in your pocket! You pay by quickly scanning a QR-code. As a merchant, you receive payments reliably and instantly. Bitcoin Wallet is the first mobile Bitcoin app, and arguably also the most secure!"

Not convinced.

Riddle of cash-for-malware offer in new Raspberry Pi computers

Re: exe file, on a Pi?

Yes it runs Windows. Full stop. The ARM version. You can load as many exes as you like, nothing will happen unless they have been compiled for ARM. Which they probably haven't.

I did try it and it was very painful. I have learnt the error of my ways and gone back to raspian, cos it just works.

They’re FAT. They’re ROUND. They’re worth almost a POUND. Smart waaatch, smart waaatch

In the 70's I had a FIVE function digital watch. OK my class mate had a SIX function digital watch but you really should know what year it is.

Windows 10 collects colossal 0.375 per cent market share in July

Having tried and failed (at least 10 times and including using a USB stick) to upgrade my Toshiba tablet thing I feel the mobile Windows 10 penetration may continue to be "disappointing".