Posts by Harry the Bastard

Get out your Allen keys: Facebook's cooked up flat-pack bit barns

ikea product line code contest

RÄKBIT

I NEVER DONE BITCOIN, says bloke fingered by new Newsweek

because, like paris, people with $400 million are well known for living in suburbia with easy access to the press, kidnappers, nutters etc.

Rackspace seals new UK data center in frosty air-cooled TOMB

"At certain times of the year when it gets warmer we spray additional water onto the face of the heating system."

as heatwaves never coincide with droughts, what could possibly go wrong?

Gorilla Glass fights dirty, dirty germs with antimicrobial coating

corning claims "innovation", copying might be more accurate...

http://www.agc-glass.eu/AGC+Flat+Glass+Europe/English/Homepage/News/Press+room/Press-Detail-Page/page.aspx/979?pressitemid=1031

The importance of complexity

many years ago, for a project we were doing in a far flung place for her britannic majesty's government, one part required a lot of cabling

it was not easy to get cable from here to there, transport weight needed to be kept down

but we knew the cable routes, very many different paths and lengths, and we knew how much cable per reel

what was the minimum number of reels to do the job?

in a flash, i thought 'knapsack problem', a bit of cunning coding and hey presto, a cable laying schedule saying which run to do from which reel, the others at the site were most impressed by our efficiency

triples all round

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

word? mention it not

things peaked with troff, a macro package for the job, and eqn, grap, tbl etc., plus you could embed command line stuff to dynamically suck in data to populate tables etc., since then everything has been downhill

for arty stuff, indesign is the bees knees, although bloat has set in there too

Apple's new non-feline Mac operating system, OS X Mavericks, ready to go

run out of cats?

nonsense, there're...

tabby

brown tabby

marmalade

persian

tortoiseshell

moggy

bengal

burmese

manx

...that'll do for ten years, plenty more after that

'mavericks', ugh, bunch of californians with over inflated egos thinking the rest of the world will bask in their trite place names

i'm sticking with snow leopard, by far the best of all the os x releases, cute kittens too

Greece ends extra hols for civil servants forced to use hated computers

that small slice is schadenfreude, not happiness

surely a better resolution would've been to give the rest of us 6 days extra hols

this would've increased overall global happiness and slightly improved relative greek competitiveness, trebles all round

instead they've just deepened the hellenic zone of despondency thereby reducing overall global happiness

Radioaficionados españoles: Echadnos una mano

¿qué?

German guardsmen growing mono-boobs from drilling with Nazi-era rifles

this sounds wrong in so many ways

expect to be receiving the attention of david cameron's enforcers

Quantum boffins and bread-heads form new VC fund

the first fund where your investment is a superposition of states

you cannot know whether you made a profit or a loss until you look at your holding and the wave function collapses

although many of my investments seem to work out this way, collapsed, so perhaps it's nothing new after all

Boffins fire up old dish to send interstellar SMS

let me be the first to text that

i, for one, welcome our new gliesian overlords

Sacred islet Rockall repels Brit adventurer's first assault

Re: I miss the Rockall Times

me too, the domain is being sadly abused these days

so i dredged it up on the iwbm...

http://web.archive.org/web/20041010040157/http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/rockall-ho/assault-plan.html

happy memories

Did Kim Dotcom invent 2-factor authentication? Er, not exactly...

utter tosh, i developed a 2fa replacement for /bin/login for our unix boxes in the early '90s, and it wasn't a new concept even then

Reg boffins: Help us answer this Big Blue RAID data recovery poser

big disks him go titsup

spin around mix it up

him get up walkaround disk again

bof

Apple said to have let the name of the next OS X cat out of the bag

snow leopard was the last cuddly release

i'm not upgrading until tabby and/or they drop the ios-ification of os x

Snake-fondling blonde nude punts Polish coffins

let me be the first to say, that, i, for one, welcome our ophidian draped overlady

WAR HERO PIGEON carrying SECRET WWII CODE found in chimney

it's with some glee that i find the reporter's name to be an anagram of riparian bell end

MPs: Border Agency's own staff don't trust airport-scanner tech

iris is lovely

it'll be a sad day when the last ones are taken out of action

simple, fast, reliable, i wear contact lenses or glasses, no issues, iris just works

the appalling lack of signage is the only complaint i have with iris, but from the article it sounds like that's deliberate

the long lines of people at the egates, and high failure rate (i stood in the queue with non-iris gf, wathcing the misery of the egate users), are worrying, seems like a step back in reliability

UK Home Secretary approves TVShack's O'Dwyer extradition

i'm baffled by these cases

if the person was not physically present in usa territiory when the alleged offence was committed, then what fuck has it got to do with the usa? since when did johhny foreigner's laws apply to the uk?

if he committed a crime while in uk, under uk law, bang him up, otherwise, he's innocent

otherwise, i assume we're going to extradite all usa handgun owners and lock them up because they are committing a crime in uk law

Two UK airports scrap IRIS eye-scanners

only problems i had/have with iris are...

gates out of order/closed

non-existent/hidden signage to show where they are

people thinking iris was for e-passports and spending ages trying to get through before giving up

JEDI alliance: Jellyfish overlords won't rule Earth after all

well...

i, for one, welcome our new wobbly overlords

Potent proton pulse to BOMBARD EARTH Tuesday morn

it's reg dot co dot U FUCKING K that's why it's G FUCKING M FUCKING T

egads, the horror, the horror

UK student faces extradition to US after piracy case ruling

ok, fair's fair

let's extradite all americans carrying unlicenced firearms, it's a crime in uk law, they must pay for it

Solicitors from hell website unplugged by libel judge

well, the only time i've used a solicitor it turned out he was incompetent, he didn't do what he claimed, i'm still stuck with the result

i never heard of the sfh site before, but now that the solicitors have been kind enough to generate the publicity it seemed well worth bookmarking a wayback gander for future reference...

http://web.archive.org/web/20110423174326/http://solicitorsfromhell.co.uk/

Drug cops log Nigerian star's 24 bowel movements

best. post. ever.

Steve Jobs' last words: 'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.'

he was clearly stunned by the sight of the android fondleslab now used for self check-in at the pearly gates

C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead

at my desk with tears in my eyes

this is sad news indeed,

c (and unix) genuinely changed my life, my k&r, now battered and old, was the spark that led to two decades of the most fun i've ever had working, plus i got paid for it

i'll be raising a glass to his memory

US rocketeer thunders to 121,000ft

nice try

but no playmonaut, no prize

Facebook Deals dumped

surely that subhead should be

Back to Groupon, bitch

British-born NASA astronaut Piers Sellers becomes OBE

and yet nothing for the intrepid playmonaut

a baffling omission

Yahoo! buzzing over 'nonce Pope's' Christmas message

hence...

...papal noncio

PayPal banned WikiLeaks after US gov intervention

hmm

so we'll shortly be able to enjoy the shutting down of paypal, ebay, and gumtree, all as happily and knowingly support the payment for, or sale of, counterfeit and stolen goods

not to mention seeing bush the idiot and his cohorts banged up for maliciously blowing the cover of one of their own agents

oops, just realised i'm confusing rule of law with the spite of impotent and corrupt politicians

ja ftw

MYSTERY of vanished PARIS spaceplane, playmonaut

hurrah!

"Vulture 1 recovered intact. Completely intact. Playmonaut safe and sound."

can't wait for the pics

UK operation patents DVD lockdown

hmm

stolen credit card + stolen mobile (or payg sim) + disk copier = pwned

Judges grant McKinnon extradition review

@Anonymous John

"Not that one-sided. It seems damn near impossible to extradite anyone from the UK. Extraditees (is that a word?) seem to be able to fight it indefinitely."

Tell that to the Natwest three.

I don't see the USA coughing up the PIRA terrrorists that the UK wants to stand trial.

The facts are simple, check for yourself, under a treaty intended to ease extradition of terrorists, the UK readily extradites white collar crims, while the USA protects people wanted for terrorism.

One. Sided.

simple reason he should stay in UK

the UK-USA extradition treaty is a one-sided abomination that Blair and the rest of Bush's poodles rolled over and begged for

now the UK allows extradition to the USA on the flimsiest of grounds, do it in the other direction? dream on suckers!

Blair got that medal for caring more about the USA than the UK, as PM that's treason

flames for the second step in Blair's hanging drawing and quartering

HP targets compulsory redundancies at EDS UK

mh strikes again

can we have a Butcher Hurd icon please

Virgin Media in premium rate U-turn

about ft!

their service is so miserable i've been planning to switch

their tech. support is clueless - they don't even know when outages are due to planned maintenance

their free recorded service status message is a nightmare, even when calling on a vm cable phone line you have to enter your phone number, you get a status message that usually doesn't say anything informative, then you get yet another round of "type 1 to have more of your time wasted" before you finally get a second completely different status message that if the lazy sods responsible for the shite service have been bothered to update might possibly confirm that yet again vm's service has failed to deliver

as for the perky bitch reading the canned messages, she's the last ffffing thing i need to hear when my service is down yet again

vm and good customer service are mutually exclusive

BlackBerry takes Monday afternoon off

re: @Clemens Wachter

"Rule of three?? Anyway, you have an arbitary figure of 0.001% = 20 hrs. Ignoring the fact you used 0,001 and therfore 1 and also 99,999% where did you get a period of 20hrs?"

20hrs... "So they had 12hrs downtime in April 2007 and 8hrs yesterday. 20hrs in 11 months.", or was that too difficult to read?

in some countries , is used as the decimal point, or was that too difficult to guess?

you have difficulty with english, deductive reasoning and simple arithmetic, i know... you work for virgin media broadband technical support, aicmfp!

OFT mulls Egg probe

er

mike ashworth - the point isn't about any 'right' to a credit card, it is that egg is clearly either lying or incompetent, neither is desirable in a financial institution

steve - what is 'hilarious' is your ignorance of how the credit card industry operates - operators charge the retailer a fee on every transaction, operators also hang on to the money for a while before giving it to a retailer, and if you spend outside your home country they'll also gouge a bit more on loaded forex rates. if there were no interest charges and no extended credit they'd still be operating profitably