* Posts by Tim99

2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Half a million stolen French medical records, drowned in feeble excuses

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Alistair, you have my sympathies

Prostate problems - Mine was also >600mL, full for much of the time, and waking up for 4-5 trips every night. Green-light laser treatment has apparently fixed it, but the nice surgeon told me to expect further treatment "sometime in your 80s" - So something to look forward too...

Planespotters’ weekends turn traumatic as engine pieces fall from the sky in the Netherlands and the US

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: RE: engine failure

Unfortunately they went broke: Wikipedia link...

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: The problem is

Some of us remember users who thought the internet was a big blue 'e'. Things haven’t improved much...

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

It's probably too hard

Now that systemd is nearly an OS, just upload a modified networkd to GitHub, no one will ever find it. The snag: Spooks being able to find someone who understands unmodified systemd...

Machine-learning model creates creepiest Doctor Who images yet – by scanning the brain of a super fan

Tim99 Silver badge
Mushroom

Blowing things up and then giving a prize?

What the heck is FinOps? It's controlling cloud spend – and new report says it ain't easy

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

"not the backing store any professional should use for a reliable web service" Horses for courses. My idea of a professional is someone who can work within the constraints that exist.

Your mind is made-up, but you can indeed replicate SQLite with commercial and FOSS packages: Dqlite - https://dqlite.io (If you don't mind using Canonical); rqlite - https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite ; SymmetricDS (but more for replicating to bigger databases) ; aergolite - https://github.com/aergoio/aergolite (I have no idea if it's any good) ; LiteSync - http://litesync.io/en/sqlite-synchronization.html (seems to be pricey).

You can advise that something is not suitable for purpose, and if that is not accepted walk away. I was offered a full time government job to create a Lab Information System. The boss, and a panel, asked for a solution to run across 5 laboratories in different parts of the country - My response, based on writing almost identical systems from scratch, and also installing commercial systems was: Either write their own, and staff it appropriately to look after changes and maintenance themselves; or, buy a commercial system and adapt their operation to match it, and not to install their own custom stuff. Experience had shown that once you move away from a "standard" commercial system with your own modifications, future updates would strand you - They wanted to use their in-house skills which were dBase/Clipper for a front-end (It was the early 90s and dBase was approaching obsolescence) and somehow cobble it onto a new commercial Oracle system - I politely told them "No". They offered me a full-time job at deputy director level (Formal interview panels - Apparently they had heard of them), I said no. They asked why - I told them that in my professional opinion their stuff would be orphaned by the commercial supplier. They asked for other alternatives. I thought that as they (like almost all labs) were using spreadsheets extensively, they could continue to use them for local manipulation and display, provided that all of the results were secured and available through a database; and that they should invest in a decent report writer (Not Crystal!) for printed output. They still wanted dBase and Oracle, and seemed to not understand why I wouldn't take a nice government job (I'd been a Scientific Civil Servant before my last salaried job). They went ahead with someone else who was a general programmer. It was a disaster, and after struggling for a few years, his successor installed an off-the-peg commercial system.

I see from your posts that you use Python. I use and like it too, but for heavy lifting on a server I would use it with C (My age is showing, maybe you would like C++). SQLite was originally written to do some quite serious stuff in Tcl and C, including talking to "real" databases. That's why I liked it with PostgreSQL for some of our commercial stuff (As you know great for prototyping, but we realised that it worked well for a lot of stuff by itself). My customer base is probably different - We specialized in $2-20 million p.a. companies, as well as local authorities and smaller government departments. A big database for them increased by "only" 10,000 - 10,000,000 rows p.a., but the data was "important to them, and needed to be right" - Much of the database didn't need to be live, so historical storage in read-only archived tables was preferable (UNION SELECT or UNION virtual table with the live stuff).

-----

OK, some rambling old-fart lessons learned in 50 years of doing this sort of stuff:-

Work for yourself, you'll never be rich or secure as an employee or contractor. If it all goes wrong it's your own fault.

Keep up (highly) specialist skills outside IT, otherwise your work gets outsourced cheaply to someone with generic skills. I'm a Chartered Chemist - Someone told me about 40 years ago that it's relatively easy for a chemist to get IT skills, but not for an IT person to do chemistry - I cheated, I needed to do this stuff in the 1970/80s for chemistry, but a lot of paying work was outside that.

Soft skills are nearly as important as technical nowse. If you can't get on with people you are wasting your and their time.

Microsoft has persuaded most that "only just" good enough is good enough. Computing stuff not working seems to be tolerated by many: Yesterday I was "helping" a younger neighbour to order coffee. The Nespresso web site and App were down for at least an hour, she thought that this was normal. I prefer stuff that works (within the punter's constraints).

Avoid commercial (database) packages whenever possible: Oracle - What do you call an Oracle Customer? A Hostage... Microsoft - That's a lot of SQL Server instances/databases you have there - Congratulations, we have just dramatically changed our licencing (Sorry, it's much more expensive)...

Cheers.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

Tom, perhaps you didn’t notice the [I’ll get my coat] icon...

But, my reply could be along the lines of "what’s the DR plan for when the server with the "YourServerDatabase of Choice" gets a double disk failure”.

A possible use for SQLite is at my original link: "Systems designers report success using SQLite as a data store on server applications running in the datacenter, or in other words, using SQLite as the underlying storage engine for an application-specific database server... ... For example, the server might have a separate SQLite database for each user, so that the server can handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous connections, but each SQLite database is only used by one connection.”

On a personal note: I have had some success in setting up temporary structures for the user in a Transaction based on {BEGIN TRANSACTION, CREATE [TEMP] TABLE/VIEW stuff for the user, populate the necessary temp stuff with data subsets, manipulate and check, then update the server tables, DROP whatever, and then do a COMMIT or ROLLBACK}... Another approach is to use ATTACH and DETACH of a separate temporary SQLite file for each user. If you don’t need to write back to the database you can use an in-memory ATTACH, but this does not support transactions.

SQLite was ACID compliant with journaling from about 17(?) years ago. In a crash or power failure the transaction will roll back the next time the file opens - It is possible to corrupt an SQLite database by having another OS process overwriting sectors in the file; by not using appropriate transactions; using a file descriptor after it has been closed; and using an OS file backup without snapshots (The Online Backup API allows incremental backups to other locations, allowing database users to continue uninterrupted while a backup of an online database is made).

OK, I'm retired - My background includes writing stuff with/for the first version of DEC's Rdb; Oracle from V4 (*NIX and Netware); Informix; Postgres; Sybase and then MS SQL Server (from V 4.2), including writing a couple of shrink-wraps which are still in use on 2017 & 2019, some web CGI; and a number of specialised scientific and business systems.

I have indeed found SQLite to be a useful test/prototyping tool, but it is more powerful than many (most?) think. I would almost certainly use it instead of relying on multiple key–value "databases". I hope that I have established that it is more capable than its use for "toys and running tests". Now, if you had said that about MySQL, I might have agreed with you :-)

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

"It seems to use React on Linux". Sorry, it should have read "SQLite's own site seems to use React on Linux".

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

...~100k requests per month, but sometimes quite bursty (nothing, nothing, nothing, 2k requests in 5 minutes).

So, you could have used SQLite* on two small servers and saved money? It seems to use React on Linux. Seriously, SQLite is quite adequate for a lot of the LAMP sites out there:-

*"... any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic. The SQLite website... uses SQLite itself, of course...it handles about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below 0.1 most of the time."

That was in 2015, I'm pretty certain that the site gets a few more hits since then :-)

Facebook and Google’s Australian pay-for-news nightmare finds a European admirer

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

Murdoch doesn't need to convince them, he just suggests that bad things might happen...

Google OS, phone home: Leaked Android 12 screenshots suggest new design, privacy features

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

... Android 12 screenshots suggest... privacy features

Snark.

...Oh!, you meant for third-party apps! Obviously, it can't apply to Alphabet...

Someone tried to poison a Florida city by hijacking its water treatment plant via TeamViewer, says sheriff

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: The wrong software for the job

Before Windows, a number of these systems used DOS and QuickBASIC because it was much, much, cheaper than the dedicated units or minicomputers that preceded them. The good news was that QuickBASIC was quite good at opening a serial line, sending or receiving data, closing the line and crunching the received data. The really good news was that they weren’t connected to the internet...

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

No log into the repository as the Boss, make subtle changes in a number of files, each of which will bork the system and then set the date stamps back to the last "working" configuration...

UK Test and Trace chief Dido Harding tries to convince MPs that £14m for canned mobile app was money well spent

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Those consultants

So, you thought you hadn't suffered enough?

There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: If you hated Skype...

I think that is only available in the big boys and girls version. The Personal version, which he was using, doesn't seem to have it. A bit of looking around indicates that we couldn't find it in the Personal version for macOS, Windows 10, or iOS.

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

If you hated Skype...

Skype had an option where you could test that the microphone, speaker and camera were "working". I haven't been able to find a way of doing that in Teams (Troubleshooting a user on the phone who couldn't get Teams "to work")...

Satya Nadella spoke with Australian PM about opportunities created by pay-for-news-plan. Zuck called the Treasurer for a chat, too

Tim99 Silver badge

Search

Normally, I use DuckDuckGo, sometimes with the g! bang if i especially want to see a Google Search. Recently, to see "what I'm missing" I used Google directly - I thought their prominently linked article with thier POV was forced, artificial, hypocritical, and unconvincing - Mel Silva, Managing Director for Google Australia - "When you put a price on linking to certain information, you break the way that search engines work, and you no longer have a free and open web". Pretty much all of the comments posted there were negative...

Completed Netflix? Indulge your inner nerd with a virtual talk from a computer museum

Tim99 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: You know you're old when......

A friend of ours went to the Museum of Childhood (Sudbury). Her gymslip, complete with her name tag sewn inside was on display. She was quite indignant until she realized it was >60 years old...

Troubling news for JSON tinkerers? Windows Terminal unveils The Settings

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: I sense a sea change at MS. And I'm not sure it is all swells from here on....

Sea change - Before getting something rich & strange you are drowned and submerged 30'...

Transcribe-my-thoughts app would prevent everyone knowing what I actually said during meetings

Tim99 Silver badge
Angel

Re: Bloody minutes of a bloody meeting

About 50 years ago I was a Civil Servant. My father (a Senior Local Government Officer) asked me who I thought was the most important person in a meeting - I said that it was the Chair(man). No, he told me it's the Secretary - If it was not minuted it didn't happen; and agendum for the next meeting are posted by the Secretary. He *always* made sure that he was the Secretary - If he couldn't attend the meeting it was cancelled...

An old saw: Why are they called minutes, when they take hours to discuss?

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad's over a decade old and we're still not sure what it's for

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Portability is key

"ruggedized version" : Otterbox - Expensive, but gets the job done for most.

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Seniors

I'm retired, but teach seniors as a volunteer (after fighting this stuff professionally for 50 years). Many of the 65+ missed out on computing, can be very wary of it, but realize that they probably "have to use it". The alternative was that their son/daughter did it all for them. In our experience the iPad works for many. We found that Android takes perhaps twice as long to teach and can require a lot of "hand holding" (Samsung - I'm looking particularly at you here). Phones, even big ones, are just too small. Almost nobody wants Windows (or Chrome, Linux etc) unless one of their children has supplied it. "Hand-me-downs" PCs and Android tablets are almost useless (they were handed down for a good reason). An iPadAir at AU$899 (£579) is affordable by many, the new iPad at AU$499 (£329) may be a bargain (particularly over 5 years).

The assistive technology is very useful for people with poor motor skills (Once the punter has wrested with Siri, many seniors also have limited typing skills). "Life savers" include: ordering (groceries), on-line banking, CentreLink, FaceTime, Photos (particularly when children/grandchildren are locked down inter-State), games, crosswords, etc.

I normally show them DuckDuckGo to get rid of most of Google's sales crap. For people who are plagued by web adverts, I demonstrate FireFox Focus - The free content blocker can be used by Safari.

On a personal level, I now use an iPad Pro more than any other computing device. Would I use it for large spreadsheets? (No) - Adding a bluetooth keyboard is useful for writing reports, and the ability to use a mouse and an HDMI adaptor is a good teaching and demonstration tool. Downsides include not being able to use plain text (I copy/paste from "QuickText"); having to load a PDF into Books to search for content; and too many websites assume that I'm using an iPhone...

Apple emits emergency iOS security updates while warning holes may have been exploited in wild by hackers

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Once.....

I thought that most of them were trojans? On top of that, Apple software was more than a bit pricey, so a lot of infections were from "borrowed" floppys.

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Caught by Met coppers?

Google's Git commits point to project on pared-back Android for virtualized environments

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

They said:

"Google plans to take an axe to an Android Generic System Image (GSI), carving out redundancies while preserving components that could prove useful."

They meant: Preserved components are "anything that will track or monetarize you, and your contacts".

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: How long is a man-year?

Transcription error: 11 files a man/day instead of one file in 11 man/days.

Or: 1 file written in 1 man/day, then 4 two hour meetings with 10 people.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Large vs Small

Before I retired I ran a small specialized software company. Amongst other things, we had written a product used by a number of local authorities. One site in particular was "special" as it was the first one. I had done "them a favour" by saving data from an American based system that had been badly corrupted. The original supplier did not want to fix it, as we suspected that each of their sites had a different "bespoke" system and the original author had retired. MS Access 2 had just come out and we cobbled them together a simple database containing the original data. Several of the "staff" were volunteers and the manager wanted a "friendly" front end and some management reports. The whole thing cost them a couple of thousand dollarpounds. We started to get phone calls from other users of the American system asking us to sell them a copy. Over the space of a few months we had sold about twenty. We were then asked by a national government body to expand the system so that it could be used widely. After suitable workshopping and user feed-back we had ~200 sales, and the option of a SQL Server back end...

Then the problem with the "special" local authority... They had removed much of their IT (3 people) and replaced it with a single in-house support person and a large national contractor. After a few months, some genius noticed that the department where our software was installed was about a mile away from the main building and connected by a 128k ISDN. Our stuff ran well with a local printer and a dedicated SQL Server. The staff used (almost exclusively) Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint managed by a small server with a shared printer. The staff managed nightly back up tapes themselves. This arrangement meant that the new contractor had to send someone to the local site on occasion.

Now the bit of real genius thinking - The contractor decided to manage the local office from the main building by joining the local site to the main PDC, connected by the ISDN. The local staff discovered that sending a MS Word print job would now take minutes to complete. The local office manager asked if there was anything that could be done to fix that. I suggested putting the main printer on the receptionist's PC and making it a local share. Apparently, from time to time the contractor removed the share so that it could be "managed better". The office manager would then put it back.

A couple of weeks later I had an accident and badly broke an ankle and was "no load bearing and no travelling" for 16 weeks. After about 14 weeks I got frantic phone calls from the local office and their senior manager - Everything was broken. I got someone to drive me and my wheelchair to a meeting that was set for the following day. When I arrived I was sent to the conference room where the contractor had five staff down one site of a long table, the senior manager was at one end, the office manager was at the other, and I was on the other side of the table from the contractors. After a number of years of working in the public service I could recognize a "put up job", so I politely said good morning and let them talk. After a brief intro from the senior management I was then subjected to about 5 minutes of unpleasant ranting from the senior contractor, with additional barbed comments from his staff. I waited until they had stopped and asked how long this had been going on, and what was actually "broken" to cause the meeting. "Nothing has worked for the last month" I was told, "You keep going in there and fiddling with stuff and breaking it. The gist was that we were a small company and don't know what we were doing, and that they were a large national company and were considered to be an industry leader. "OK", I said, "We were asked to supply our software by the main government body, and now have about 200 sites - This site seems to be the only one with a problem. I have been doing this stuff for about 20 years, the staff that you send appear to be juniors. You can see that I am in a wheelchair - This is my first day out for more than 3 months, so what has changed on site?". "Nothing", I was told "Your stuff broke it!". I asked "Could I make a guess that you have included the SQL Server in the main domain and moved it to the main building? If you have, every bit of traffic now needs to go up and down the ISDN. If you want to work that way, did you consider using "Terminal Services"? It went very quiet on the other side of the table...

It was agreed that I would "help" the large contractor sort things out. After they left, the local and senior managers asked me to stay and called in the remaining local IT person and then asked what was really going on. The story was that the contractors were coming in every few days, their manager had said that he was not impressed by our software. They thought that they should rewrite it (and presumably take over this small market, of which we were now the main supplier?). The senior local authority manager knew me; and after everybody else had left, told me he thought that I could help sort out what was actually going on. I suggested that maybe their big contractor had tendered for a low-cost basic on-site support contract, and that "additional hours worked" were charged at a (much) higher rate?

It seemed to sort itself out. The SQL Server went back to the local site, the LAN was sorted, the in-house person was asked to "supervise" local back-ups; I received a nice invite to the Mayor's cocktail party; another local support person was employed; the new contract was with a different supplier for a fixed up-front cost, and site presence *only* after a call out with a <24 hour response (for about a half of the real cost of the previous arrangements). The new owners of "our" company still have the site as a customer along with about 600 others, but the bad news is the contractor is still in business, and some still consider them to be "an industry leader".

Dropbox basically decimates workforce, COO logs off: Cloud biz promises to be 'more efficient and nimble'

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Literally undecimate

Shirley, it's "nonumate" as it applies to 1 in 9 (~11%)?

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Blame the management

[Posting anonymously because,

You didn't...

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Careful. Slow down and THINK.

Islay is good. I like Oban and Glenlivet (Smiths); and thinking about it, pretty much all of the Scottish and Irish single malts; without ice, snow or water (Famous Grouse blended malt is OK too).

I know that many Scots drinkers add ~50% water, as is their right; but after drinking with a couple of polis men in 1980s Glasgow who had their Grouse mixed 1:1 with concentrated orange squash, I now reserve my judgement...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Careful. Slow down and THINK.

I'm a bit worried by the head on yours...

It's just a pair of arrows. What could be more innocent than that?

Tim99 Silver badge

Regomised as "Naim."

Perhaps the unRegomised name was Julian (Naim - Wikipedia).

I had a NAP250 for >20 years, until I had to sell it because of illness, damn I still miss it.

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Brlliant

I expect May (Theresa) will be renamed too...

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Which country are we at war with?

Thought-crime: The ration was increased from thirty grammes to twenty. Big Brother and the Thought Police are always watching, for your own good.

Just let this sink in: Capita wins 12-year £1bn contract to provide training services to the Royal Navy and Marines

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: couldn't comment

"You might very well think that"...

Tim Cook 'killed' TV project about the one website Apple hates more than The Register

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

"If they used Windows, they were suspect"

A not entirely unreasonable initial approach? Trust, but verify?

Facebook crushed rivals to maintain an illegal monopoly, the entire United States yells in Zuckerberg’s face

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

OK, we were warned...

Quote: Software Freedom Law Center - Eben Moglen, Feb 10, 2010.

Enter Mr. Zuckerberg [24:00]: “The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed Friday night, that is, ‘Everybody needs to to get laid,’ and turned into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free web-hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time’. And it works...

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

"Lord knows that if we're to have such a hideous thing such as systemd, there really does need to be a big corporate backer who'll undertake to keep lots of resources focused on it"

A snarky post I wrote here a couple of years ago about systemd.

Life after proprietary wares: German support biz flees IBM Db2 databases for something more Postgres-shaped

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Sybase / SQLServer

OK, I was there and still have the scars from the first versions. Microsoft certainly did not buy Sybase. It was a joint venture between Ashton Tate (dBase) Sybase and Microsoft. If you were nearly as cynical as I am/was you might well have thought from the start that it would not end well for the other two companies. MS tended to have an "unfortunate" history with competitors/partners, but MS usually did OK :-)

MS will tell you that they bought a software developer distributer licence from Sybase, which *was* basically true. The early versions of SQL Server (4x-6x) were written in C, and somewhat limited, but worked well enough except for things like cascading deletes/updates which were normally written as triggers. As I recall the database plan could be structured to show that cascades were there, but the DDL structures didn't actually work. MS rewrote it in C++ for V7, and that was the first of the MS only products.

Sybase continued to develop the product independently and it was still a fast viable system. Sybase bought PowerBuilder which was used by some large corporates but seemed to drift until 2010 when SAP "merged" with them (SAP "bought" them, and killed the name in 2014).

Ashton-Tate had their own problems - The story is that some of the original product was based on code written for JPL (federally funded and not copyrightable). This caused problems when A-T tried to limit the spread of clones and dBASE compilers (like Clipper). dBASE IV was slow and buggy, and on our Novell networks could not be loaded without removing the network functionality (They both tried to load into the same expanded/extended memory) These well publicized problems effectively crippled it in the market. Borland bought A-T, but favoured their own Paradox product. MS bought the dBASE work-alike FoxBASE/FoxPro and started to dominate that market. Eventually Borland sold out the product range to Novell...

I suppose that I was "lucky" in avoiding many of the dBASE problems as I had decided to write almost all of my/our small networked PC database systems (at a very large public utility) with MicroRim's R:BASE which had menus, an ad-hoc command generator, forms and reports; and could be programmed in ANSI SQL - Some of these grew to hold a few hundred thousand rows and had ~20 concurrent users on one network, and ~6 on each of another 4 sites - We merged the data by shipping floppy disks around. Originally MS sold R:BASE under licence. MicroRim started to have their own problems (They spent a lot of time/money porting to a DEC based server product, just when DEC was struggling) and then MS bought in some R:BASE developers to help write MS Access, which obviously changed the market again.

These days I'm retired and the only database I use (for my own stuff) is SQLite...

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

As an exercise

Last year I created a tool to do some specialized statistical analysis with Excel. As it was pro bono and designed to be distributed to several organizations with a wide range of IT abilities, I decided that it would only use cell formulae and not VBA or Javascript. The process was surprisingly tedious. After about ten days (I'm retired) I started again and cobbled a new version together with Apple's Numbers. Numbers is not as powerful, but I had a working debugged prototype in less than a day. Getting a few people to use it on iPads over several weeks showed a minor bug and a couple of requests for changes. When the users were happy, it took less than a day to export it to Excel - The formulae were all good, just a bit of tweaking of a couple of Highlighting Rules was required (Opening the Excel file with Numbers, made a couple of changes - Re-exporting back to Excel was then OK) .

Spending a bit more time with Numbers showed that the biggest problems were that it allowed a user to create multiple tables in one sheet (which have to be exported to separate Excel sheets), and it does not have the ability to lock individual cells (a kludge is to put locked transparent shapes over the cells). Most of my ad-hoc spreadsheet stuff is now done on an iPad Pro with Numbers - Oh dear! I look like a fanboi...

US Air Force deploys robot security dogs to guard base

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Electronic sausages ?

W - MoD? If so, I can think of several Ws. This one was very old when was there in 1970s, called ER.. then renamed PE... after merging with a W.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Electronic sausages ?

We had a cat that used to sit on our garden wall. The neighbourhood dogs would cross over to the other side of the road when they went past. A Labrador that was walked on a lead would stop at the verge and look up to it’s owner until he gave it the go ahead to cross. Admittedly the cat was very large, very black and very vicious - Your moggie might catch a mouse or sparrow - He would bring home (dead) rabbits and pheasants.

A very long time ago, I worked at a large site that had armed dog handlers. The legend was that when the union asked why these officers were issued with the old Webley .455 pistol, they were told that "It might be necessary to shoot the dog, when it was off the leash". Staff did not attempt to stroke the dogs...

Why did Apple hamstring camera repairs on standard iPhone 12 but leave Pro Max module swappable? asks engineering group

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: If i wanted a

A long time ago, for work, I was taught basic photography by an (ex) professional news photographer.

Ex: "Tim99, what is the best camera for work?" Me: "I’m not sure - A K1000?" Ex: "No - It’s the one you have with you!".

Ex had several other gems of wisdom: "What’s an expensive camera good for?" - "Gentlemen’s jewellery!" (He meant showing off, by hanging it around your neck). "Why should you always leave your camera in auto-mode?" - "Because by the time that you have faffed about with range and exposure, whatever it was you were going to photograph has finished!".

Ex was also a fan of Polaroid Land 5x4 cameras, because you knew, on site, that you actually had a photo that you could use - Instead of going back to the lab and developing a rubbish negative.

And that’s why, ladies and gentlemen, you should have a decent-ish camera phone to hand...

Apple Arm Macs ship, don't expect all open-source apps to work without emulation – here's what you need to know

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Just to troll you

"IIRC all of them let you run e.g. some Unix variant..."

macOS is a Certified UNIX, LInux ain't: opengroup.org. OK it's more complicated than that.

US government clears debt collectors to go after Americans through their social media accounts

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

So

It looks like Donald might soon be using Twitter for the last time then?

Pass us a tissue: Capita CFO calls it quits, talks of 'privilege' to work at 'centre' of biz that 'touches the lives of millions'

Tim99 Silver badge

'touches the lives of millions'

Like being smacked in the mouth with a house-brick?

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Not a shock

You use Google? Well there's your problem...

Apple drops macOS Big Sur on the world – and it arrives with a thud, sound of breaking glass, sirens in the distance...

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Anecdote

Mine failed. An hour later I tried again and it downloaded a small update file, then it downloaded the 12GB+ upgrade. So far, fingers crossed, it’s "Working OK".

Ho-ho-heave ho! IBM warns Global Business Services staffers of that most festive of things: A 45-day redundancy programme

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

"due to the maximum number of persons on the call being reached"

If only IBM had something that could get Webex/Zoom to run on a mainframe...