* Posts by Tim99

2001 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: If the only tool you have is a hammer....

Some if us remember that Lotus 1-2-3 was named because it had 3 functions: spreadsheet, database, and presentation (graphs and text display).

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Tim99 Silver badge

Er P7

The version we used also referenced urine - In this case micturition might be an appropriate response.

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: work around or move on

…people ought to learn to use the computer "properly" with a command line. And we were right…

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Two sided

Now that I’m in my dotage, I find that Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64 (and Midnight Commander) is all the Linux "desktop" that I need.

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Vi vs Emacs

I’m too old for this. If I have to do a "big edit" nano is OK. For non-sudo stuff, Midnight Commander F4 mcedit…

Apple pushes first-ever 'rapid' patch – and rapidly screws up

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

In Oz my iMac had a message on the screen this morning suggesting that I restart it now (or later). Seems OK. Then did 2 iPad Pro's and 2 iPhones. All went well, except Mrs Tim99's iPhone which had a flat battery - Recharged to ~5%, then had to manually request patch, but needed an additional restart to avoid "Update Later" as the only choice, now OK...

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Short, shameful confession

I was working for the government in the mid-late 70s - Some were for adding records to dedicated databases and some were FORTRAN.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Short, shameful confession

Punched cards, we used to dream about being allowed punched cards… We were issued with OCR cards with the same format, that you used a 4B+ pencil to black out the marked oblongs. When the program didn’t work, you rubbed out the mistakes and tried again. Eventually, you might be allowed to make the cards permanent by punching out the graphited bits. If the program was thought useful, sometimes it was transferred to paper tape.

Perhaps meeting with Pope Francis did help iPhone sales

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Sadly; the way the markets are constructed; whilst the equipment could last, the company wouldn't...

Microsoft makes Windows Server 2022 licenses a little less cynical

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Microsoft, Linux, and SCO: Halloween Documents - Wikipedia.

Central UK govt awards £12M+ contract to leave Google Workspace for Microsoft 365

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Checking the tarot cards for likely outcomes

Anyone think I'm incorrect? Yes, you have at least 2 too many grads…

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: In Code We Trust

SystemRescueCD: system-rescue.org?

America ain't exactly outlawing gas cars but it's steering hard into EVs

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Not fit for purpose

As I posted above, cars (obviously) came first - The market for cars, and subsequent legislation, created petroleum fuel service stations. In 1901, 40 percent of US automobiles were powered by steam, 38 percent by electricity, and 22 percent by gasoline (total of all types probably less than 35,000). Most vehicles travelled short distances and were predominately urban. By 1905 there would have been >60,000 cars in the US but it took until about 1911-1912 for petroleum power to become a majority.

I note that BP in Australia have started rolling out 2 bay 75kW chargers in the Eastern States. So far they only have <20, but plan 600. They see it as an opportunity to sell/provide food and shopping: carexpert.com.au - Ampol have plans for 120 stations.

Shopping centres are another obvious location. I live on the outer edge of a metropolitan area in Western Australia, our local shopping centre has J-1772 and Tesla chargers; with another 26 within a 60 km diameter. Going 80 km further out, a low population area of 24,000 km^2 with a population density of 7people/km^2 has over 60 stations with the furthest distance between them of 70 km.

Admittedly we have lots of sun and wind (currently 65% of our electricity generation) with coal (19%) to be phased out completely by 2029 - Fortunately we have a lot of natural gas to make up any shortfall. It may be significant that most of the electricity generation and distribution is owned by the State Government, whereas in the rest of Australia it is mostly privately owned.

Tim99 Silver badge

Change can happen quickly...

...If there is a structural or a monetary imperative. A good example may be that of how quickly horses were replaced by internal combustion vehicles. They example that is often shown is photographs of New York's 5th Avenue taken in 1901 to 1913: Where is the car? vs Where is the horse?

Petroleum fuel stations only came into existence from about 1907 - Before then fuel was sold from 5 gallon containers by blacksmiths, hardware stores and pharmacies (places where kerosine was sold for lamps etc.). Fuel was typically poured directly into the vehicle using a funnel, a hazardous procedure as petrol has a much lower flash point than kerosine (<-25C vs ~38C) - Local authorities started mandating that gasoline should be dispensed safely from purpose-built facilities, hence the modern "Service Station" with underground storage tanks evolving from about 1913.

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: The modern museum

PURGE was your friend. To keep the two most recent copies: PURGE/KEEP=2

Take a 14-mile trip on an autonomous Scottish bus starting next month

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: buses will operate with a "Captain" in the passenger cabin "to take tickets"

Was it really that long ago? Dire Straits - Wild West End (1978): YouTube.

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: MR

I understand your frustration. I am in the twilight of my coding years and go back to various derivatives of Dartmouth BASIC. I have made the decision that I am getting too damn old to cope with all of the rapid changes in Swift for a couple of small pro-bono apps I'm putting together, so I looked at a couple of alternatives. I've been playing with XOJO for about 7 months now, and must admit that I like it - Obviously I don't have the problems that you have, but I did a fair bit of stuff in VB and noted the 'Dim' to 'Var' change (As I recall. 'Dim' was a Microsoft choice that originally was for arrays, but they lumped variables in there too). I too have found searching for stuff irritating, unless I remembered to put a date range in to filter out the old stuff. So far, the verbosity that you noted hasn't been a problem as the autocomplete seems to work well.

I'm sorry to say that older people may not be XOJO's current market <smiley> - In my case I have probably <5 years left, so anything I write for outside use is small and not mission critical. Your comment "I have a sneaking suspicion that this API 2 stuff is all about getting people to renew their licenses" may have an element of truth, but that is a business putting food on the table. At least, unlike most of the subscription market, your stuff will continue to work unless there is a major change in the underlying OS. I remember the howls of protest with changes in different Microsoft VBs - It was my experience that moving a project to a completely different platform just does not happen, unless it was mission critical (and that would normally take a very long time).

As an experiment I looked at a QuickBASIC program I had written in 1988 to take data from an instrument, rearrange and reformat it, and then put it into a CSV file that would be automatically loaded into a database: It took me about half an hour to work out what it was doing, about and hour to rewrite in XOJO, a bit longer to debug; and at the end it ran under macOS and Linux too (with a couple of small fixable file system problems).

I paid for the XOJO macOS licence and prototyped a couple of things. Originally I was going to run them as native apps, but in the end went with web versions to make deployment and support easier. Generally I have been very pleased: A simple web database app deployed on a LAN gave a "satisfactory" performance with a SQLite backend on a Raspberry Pi4: Its multiuser test CRUD performance plateaued at >200 creates and deletes/sec with about 800 triggered updates, and 600 retrieves; and still allowed a couple of users to do manual CRUDs with returns at about 2 seconds for the user. I liked the ability to run this without setting up a separate web server, making deployment and maintenance a lot easier. In this case the app will only be used within a single building, so security is easier. Disclaimer: I have just paid for the upgrade for web deployment...

Google Cloud pitches 'Gen Apps' – low-code AI-based tools, not post-millennial kids

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

And…

How long will it be before Google pulls the plug on these, leaving users in the lurch?

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

"In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.”

And summers were sunnier, and it snowed at Christmas, and girls were prettier, and I could climb stairs without getting out of breath, and I could eat garlic…

And detective films relied on someone discovering who the murderer was, then spending an hour trying to tell the police, instead of picking up a mobile phone…

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Aaaaargh!

Before retiring, much of my business was with SME and bits of government. Mostly databased. I usually came up with two front ends - One for the workers on the coalface and one for the manglement. The "workers" was designed for quick data entry and retrieval, the other produced lots of nice reports.

A Director at one place was really pleased when I gave him a "Export to Excel" button with suitable data filters. After a while he got bored and said that he needed more detail - He was ecstatic when I set up a SQL Server OLAP database that pulled the real data out of the production system. The company accountant said that he almost stopped bothering her, as he now spent most of his time playing with the data - I'm not sure that he actually made too many changes based on what he saw...

First-known interstellar Solar System visitor 'Oumuamua a comet in disguise – research

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: That's just what we want you to think Earthlings

"but there is very little fossil evidence of intelligence longer ago than a hundred thousand years". A significant level of intelligence is required to fashion stone tools to perform particular tasks (rather than just picking up a rock or stick to to bash something). Oldowan tools are at least 2.5 million years old, and include Hammerstones that show battering on their surfaces and stone flakes that were struck from stone cores. Well formed handaxes go back at least 1.7 million years. Oldowan (Mode 1) tools have been found from between those dates in East Africa, Asia and Europe. Little evidence of other tools involving sticks or animal products exists because they would have to be fossilised, a very rare event.

A hundred thousand years ago the human population may have been less than 200,000. It seems that at about 70-100 thousand years ago it dropped dramatically in many parts of the world (climate, volcanoes, etc.?). A period when advanced artefacts have been found (including "art"). That might be what you were thinking of?

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Shakespearian question?

Or Aristophanes?

Tim99 Silver badge

With apologies to William Shakespeare, and BOFHs everywhere

To Cloud or not to Cloud, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of off-premise ransom,

Or to keep on-site against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing, save the business…

Alarming: Tesla lawsuit claims collision monitoring system is faulty

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: VW too

YMMV: I have a Golf 7.5. The only time that mine did that was when a child ran out from behind a parked van in a car park. I was doing about 15 km/hr, the car stopped about 1 metre away from the child - I'm not certain that I, unaided, would have been able to but the vehicle would probably have been doing <5km/hr.

On the other hand, I live in a jurisdiction where undertaking is legal. If I use driver assistance on a dual carriageway the car regularly decelerates to match the speed of a vehicle in the outside lane - This is particularly noticeable when they have moved into a turning lane and have slowed down ready to turn off/stop. The only way to stop this (other than turn it off completely) it to press on the accelerator for a second.

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Joshing or not - I couldn't tell

I'm retired, but not (quite) as old as ken. Maybe it isn't quite a joke - I use an iMac and iPad for most day-to-day stuff, and have 3 RPs: An original Pi; a 2GB Pi4; and a Pi Zero 2W which are for background use and fun. I refer to the newer ones as my "server farm".

If you don't mind the lack of ports, the pi Zero is "astonishing". I originally used it as a Pi-hole but now it's for casual development work - A rough calculation indicates that its VAX MIPS/VUP performance is nominally ~5,000 times that of a 11/750 that I used in the 1980s. A multiuser web/database test with Bullseye 64 bit Light and a SQLite database on a microSD card gave ~14 inserts+70 updates/second.

I still run Windows XP and 10 in Parallels on the iMac to run stuff that I wrote before I retired, but if I replace the Mac they won't be installed.

Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Call me old fashioned, but

Maybe, as noted as above, it might be colour grouped? In the 1980s I had a light blue Volvo. Mrs Tim99 and stopped at a Little Chef on the A17 - It was drizzling. When we got back, I unlocked the door, and sat in the blue driver's seat. Then I noticed that "someone" had removed the automatic gearbox and replaced it with a manual. My car was two further along the car park behind a panel van. We quietly got out of the car, locked it again, and drove off in our car...

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: T

Oh, do tell - "test"?

Or: tact, tait, tart, tatt, taut, tawt, teat, telt, tent, text, tift, tilt, tint, tipt, toft, toit, tolt, toot, tort, tost, tout, towt, trat, tret, trot, tuft, twat, twit?

The Great Graph Database Debate: Relational can't do everything

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: I don't understand the motion

Good thought; but including all the inserts, updates and selects, it was three tables.

Disclaimer: I'm old and the memory may be going, but I go back to building stuff with DEC Rdb and Oracle V4...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: I don't understand the motion

When a full SQL Server instance takes 10 hours to insert 1 million of the same records that velocitydb takes 12s on the same system for then there is a big bloody problem with using SQL for any kind of large-scale input/output.

I'm not sure what was wrong with your SQL Server data/database, but experience tells me that "it is not typical".

As an aside I've just completed a feasibility study for a small pro-bono project using the lightweight SQLite database on a desktop with a web front end. A loop generated test data and inserted it into an indexed table. I got 2.3 million record in an hour, each record was updated 6 times and a trigger inserted a record from each update into another indexed relationship table, giving a total of 16 million records an hour. Each row was retrieved three times, its values inserted into strings and then cleared. So a simple test app using one core of an old i3 iMac manipulated and inserted a million records in <4 minutes. I've just confirmed this by inserting 50,000 records from each of two clients (i.e. 700,000 records in total) in 2.7 minutes.The database size was 0.64GB. Unlike my simple desktop system, a SQL Server will normally use multiple cores and probably has a fast hardware RAID 10 setup...

Obviously my results are not a million records in 12 seconds, but are perhaps indicative?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Use-case

I haven't tried it... Appropriate Uses For SQLite (sqlite.org) - Replacement for ad hoc disk files

Many programs use fopen(), fread(), and fwrite() to create and manage files of data in home-grown formats. SQLite works particularly well as a replacement for these ad hoc data files. Contrary to intuition, SQLite can be faster than the filesystem for reading and writing content to disk.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Use-case

For (1) - If you really need a small relational database SQLite is your friend. Whilst it is "a single user database", a web server with multiple clients is "a single user". With WAL (write ahead logging) I’ve just prototyped something with multiple related tables (using that) running a multiuser test at ~120 added rows per second on a 2GB Raspberry pi 4. Eventually it got to >5 million rows. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the sqlite3 command line shell could successfully back it up into another SQLite data file whist it was running at close to that rate…

Microsoft makes Outlook Mac native email app a freebie

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

No thank you.

I switched to a Mac after I retired because of the scar tissue I had accumulated from MS systems like Exchange or Outlook.

"MAPI" vs "IMAP" is typical of MS - Like "Microsoft Office XML" vs "OpenOffice.org XML". They sound "similar" so they are "the same" (snort).

Now don't get me started on Active Directory vs LDAP (mumble, mutter)... "Nurse, my medication please" >>=====>

The Great Graph Debate: Revolutionary concept in databases or niche curiosity?

Tim99 Silver badge
Angel

Re: well-architected relational databases

I started with DEC Rdb and Oracle 4. Obviously, by the time I got to SQL Server 6, my systems were nearly perfect :-)

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Graph is a view, often stored as relations

A long time ago I wrote relational systems for managing "Heritage". Traditionally this was for storing information for physical "object" items for museums, galleries, and archives - These included artefacts, artworks, photographs, documents, etc. Our problem for connecting these with other things to create "stories" was solved by using "subjects" - People, places, events and topics. Each object could be connected to a number other objects (like a camera, and a photographs that it took) using an object/object relationship table. Each subject could be connected to another subject (like a person lived in a particular place); and all subjects and objects could be connected - Like a camera that was owned by a particular person; who took a photograph of an event; like the opening of a new town hall (a place); covering a topic like "Local Government". All done easily in a traditional database with a few simple relationship tables…

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: RE: most safety rules are written

A very, very, long time go a Civil Service safety officer (he also did "real work") gave me some advice. " Leave something that is easy to find, because I'm going to keep going until I find something to write up" .

It turned out to be: Me leaving an ether bottle out on the end of the bench - Meaning he didn't have to keep looking until he found that the 60 year old solvent store, that it should have been in, was "inadequate" and should be replaced by one further away from the building.

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: oxbridge

Don't forget "Greats" (Boris Johnson, Literae Humaniores). The last STEM PM was Margaret Thatcher (Chemistry, Oxford), maybe not all of us would want that? Disclaimer: I'm a Chartered Chemist...

MacStadium brings macOS instances orchestrated by Kubernetes to AWS

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Hilariously expensive

Is there a minimum charge? Otherwise, a few hours of testing would be cheap…

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

I’m not sure that inmates of the modern versions of Gulags have internet access…

Puri.sm puts out LapDock for its Librem 5 smartphone

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Travelling

Should I have mentioned that a headless Raspberry pi with the iPad is useful? Well, it is…

Tim99 Silver badge

Travelling

I don't travel much these days; but when I did an iPhone with a small bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and an HDMI cable to connect to a hotel TV was often enough. These days an iPad does to job.

Clumsy ships, one Chinese, sever submarine cables that connect Taiwanese islands

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: State Actors

Tommy Flowers: Wikipedia.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: A lot of El Reg Readers really are very old

Well what do you expect for the (alleged) $25,000 Bill paid Seattle Computer Products for a non-exclusive licence (later an additional US$50,000?). I believe that MS bought the last licence from Tim Paterson later...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: A lot of El Reg Readers really are very old

When we bought IBM PS/2 PCs, the serial numbers were on the front. It saved a lot of crawling around. We had a Volume Workstation Agreement (for us, up to a 30% discount), so I'm not sure if that applied to all PS/2s.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: @AC - Technology & Economics

Women were wyfmen or wommen. Wyf originally meant adult female. A housewyf was a woman who ran a house (often as the "wife" of the owner). It also became a common word for female servant. Much of that changed after the Norman invasion, when generally women had fewer intrinsic rights to property. As an aside, "world" is likely to have been gendered. It comes from the root weorold/werold; and meant the "affairs of men" - Possibly that things outside the household were the business of men (gendered), whilst those of the wyfman were within the household.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: The problem is desktop components on servers

I'm old and possibly senile. and like many older contributors, mostly used *NIX on expensive servers, minis and specialised systems. Before NT "Microsoft had the highest-volume AT&T Unix license": Bill Gates- Microsoft's Xenix (Wikipedia). We shipped a number of systems using it, mainly because it was reliable and ran well on cheap generic boxes.

The Proliferation of Poettering is one reason that I suspect that the premise it's a fact: Linux is a Unix now. In fact, arguably, today Linux is Unix... ...To get the ready-to-use version, though, you have to buy a support contract is not necessarily desirable. Any Unix that had the obfuscation of systemd would have died "back then" as not conforming to the basic "Unix philosophy". My earned cynicism suggested to me that systemd was a cunning plan that was not in users' best interests. I wrote a "Troll" El Reg comment nearly 5 years ago: How can we make money? I still believe that it was closer to a truth than Liam might be comfortable with...

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Relocated

I'm old, and went to a UK school with "illusions" of grandeur. I was taught Oxford English. That "-ize" was usually correct, and the blanket use of "-ise" was for the uneducated. My teachers were mostly of the "Americans were late to the War, and over-paid, over-dressed, and over here" generation...

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Only 8 years old...

I have several watches. One is gold and >55 years old, which I won in a competition; another is an 80+ years old Longines Professional which my father bought in WWII; but the one I wear the most is an Apple Watch 8. It saves me having to walk around with a phone. I have to pay the Apple Tax to have a phone to set it up, but my cheap phone and the watch together seem less expensive than the high-end Apple or Android phones that I see people carrying. I admit to being of the generation that walked miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways, and know that the author has a point to make, but the article could perhaps have said "which can start from around $300 for the basic GPS and cellular model.

A younger friend has an autistic child who has an Apple Watch, the school that they attend does not allow mobile phones - Both the parents and child have said that it has made a significant difference to their feeling of security. The parents said that they would have considered home schooling without it. Fortunately, I will have shuffled off before there is a conversation about fitting children with iMplants...

Oh, 07734! Internet Archive debuts vintage calculator emulator

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Get off my lawn!

Whereas an Otis King can be <$50. I paid the equivalent of ~$120 when I bought it…

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Get off my lawn!

I had/have an Otis King cylindrical slide rule. I do feel old…

Software devs targeted as British tax authority makes fraud allegations

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

So,

We’ll be seeing similar action against merchant bankers, financial consultants, and political think-tanks then?