Posts by Paul Johnston

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

How to spot a lie

A couple of decades ago I had just started a job at Uni, running all the Unix stuff, workstations DNS server, NIS NFS, Mail,the whole shebang!

I was invited to go to the pub on Friday night early on and one night late on the tales of who did what to whom and who got caught started! As the newbie I just sat and listened.

First thing Monday morning I got a mail from the head of school, who wasn't one of the drinkers to the effect I shouldn't spread rumours and that doing so might end up bad for me at this time I was still under probation. Never one to sit and consider the options I went straight to his office and pointed out I wasn't the one saying anything as I had only been there a few weeks and all this stuff predated me so he should look to others as the issue.

Typical senior prof, ummed and ahed and said he wasn't picking on me and had actually sent it to all staff involved.

Nipping back to the office looking at the mail server I saw (without looking at anyone's mail I hasten to add) the modification stamp on my mailbox file was when the prof had sent the mail to me and no one else in the pub gang had been modified at the same time. (I always got in early Monday just to check before start of play).

Later spoke to people and they said no they hadn't received a mail about conduct off premises outside work hours about stuff which it was nothing to do with the boss!

Welcome to academia!

Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

Cult?

Nano is not cult.

Now vi v emacs let battle commence!

UK's Co-operative Group to centralise IT teams across various divisions, warns redundancies 'inevitable'

Looking for a CIO

Is Gerry Pennell available?

Drupal drops first big upgrade in five years and looks forward by looking backwards

Please no!

Thought I was finished with this nightmare.

When one open-source package riddled with vulns pulls in dozens of others, what's a dev to do?

What can you expect?

"The second step, however, isn't to triage across the org, but rather to start fixing issues. Teams who overspend energy triaging at the expense of fixing end up incurring greater risk.

When a very large proportion of the team are "managers" whose sole job it to push bits of paper around and try to look busy where is the incentive to actually fix something?

Here's a headline we never thought we'd write 20 years ago: Microsoft readies antivirus for Linux, Android

Whatever they do...

Cannot be worse than McAfee!

Microsoft emits a colourful Windows Terminal preview

Re: I'm getting old but..

Thanks, you know how recall gets as we become more "mature".

I'm getting old but..

There used to be something which allowed you to do that, it was some third party add-on if I remember.

Can any one put me out of my misery remind me what it was called?

Cheers

UK spending watchdog blasts £792m STEM school scheme over low student numbers, deficits, education quality

It's later than that

Not sure how typical Hull was but on leaving Junior School in 1975 there were three options excluding the fee paying "College". The comprehensives, the nautical school, (okay niche I know but it was Hull) and the technical school. I've tried to google it, sure it was called Reilly. Thought the whole point of having specialist academies was to allow this sort of focus. The school my daughter went to was supposed to be specialised in Business and the Performing Arts but was just a factory to get kids out with grades that kept OFSTED off their backs.

Says it all doesn't it?

http://www.wiganutc.org/important-announcement/

http://www.wiganutc.org/

Rather sad IMHO

Briny liquid may be more common on Mars than once thought, unlikely to support life as we know it

Life is more tenacious than you would expect

There are very few places on earth where life hasn't arrived.

Selection happens when there is pressure to survive so there is no reason why anything on earth would evolve to live in an environment which doesn't exist on earth.

Without looking into Scientific papers you can get an idea at

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/08/02/5-extreme-life-forms-that-live-on-the-edge/

We will give them 212° Fahrenheit (1000° Celsius) is an unfortunate typo

Icon in homage to D. radiodurans

As coronavirus catches tech CEOs with their pants down, IBM's Ginni Rometty warns of IT's new role post-pandemic

Here is my guess

>>I'm going to modernise applications that my IT [department] perhaps weren't modern enough to change fast enough for me'.

So they will ask all the IT senior managers who will say "Oh not our fault look at our ancient staff, they are not agile enough".

Redundancies hit at the lower technical levels as we don't need them, only people who can manage a "Digital Transformation" will remain.

It all goes pear shaped. Senior IT management move on to their next positions and organisations are left with partially working systems (if they are lucky) and no one who can sort it.

As I say just a guess.

Move fast and break stuff, Windows Terminal style: Final update before release will nix your carefully crafted settings

Re: How about a poll?

Better still vote for your choice of number then multiply them all together and see who wins.

I'll start voting for 0

Python 2 bows out after epic transition. And there was much applause because you've all moved to version 3, right? Uh, right?

Re: why python ?

Critical mass is one of the main reasons I would say.

As more people use it and the library support grows you have to move with the times for better or worse.

For example if you want to use pymol you need python, end of story really.

In case you need more proof the world's gone mad: Behold, Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels

Re Cycle Wheels

Sometimes I think cycling is the new Hi-Fi in the sense of "How Much?"

Linux fans thrown a bone in one Windows 10 build while Peppa Pig may fly if another is ready in time for this year

WSL1 versus WSL2

Anyone seriously had a look at WSL 2 recently.

I've been looking to see if it can replace having dual boot machines with Ubuntu 18_04 LTS and Win 10.

We have to run OpenFoam and it requires the sort of grunt Virtual Box is going to have issues with.

Also supporting Linux for people who have never heard of it but who need to use it for their PhDs is to say the least not fun.

So I have it installed and some simple benchmarks for simple file operations suggest WSL 2 is noticeably slower than WSL 1.

Facebook loses control of its own Twitter account in hacker attack – and more news

Rooooot

Yes good, but not as good as Sir Geoffrey

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

Package management systems

You're seriously saying that the Python system is worse than having to use CPAN?

Hey Insiders! DTrace can now run riot in Windows 10, if you really want it to

Fun time

Time to start shouting at hard disks!

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

Oh yes Joerg Schilling

I'd successfully blanked that from my mind, thanks for bringing it back!

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Sounds like a new chapter for

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780471624820/Clouds-Glass-Beer-Simple-Experiments-0471624829/plp

Internet Society's Vint 'father of the 'net' Cerf dodges dot-org sell-off during public Q&A

But don't you realise

Morals are good but there are beelions to be made here!

Watch tiny swimming magnetic robots suck up uranium in a droplet of radioactive wastewater

Biology beats Robotics

If you need loads get them to replicate!

https://phys.org/news/2015-06-scientists-bacterium-uranium-immobile.html

Tearoff of Nottingham: University to lose chunk of IT dept to outsourcing

And this means

"the University will want to retain in-house expertise to provide strategy, leadership, governance, domain knowledge and data safeguards for IT services"

Management will keep their jobs technical staff will be shown the door.

Remember, remember, it's now called November: Windows 10 19H2 update has a name

Can anyone please explain to me ...

"normal servicing cadence"

Pardon?

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Re: re: Once desktop processing power became sufficient to crack the encryption

and Hull of course!

US government sues ex-IT guy for breaking his NDA (Yes, we mean Edward Snowden)

Purely hypothetically

If you wanted to give money to someone living in Russia would Facebooks version of a cryptocurrency be the way to go?

We're great, boasts Huawei in founder's Little Red Book – but isn't that a video game screenshot?

Cracking plane

If you want to see one I recommend the museum in Kirkenes

https://nordnorge.com/EN-ost-finnmark/?News=642

Quick question, what the Hull? City khazi is a top UK tourist destination

Not a patch on ...

Surely The Old King Billy toilets were the best.

Have a look at

https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/history/urban-myths-truth-bizarre-hull-3140121

It's Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas this week. And yup, you know what that means. Hotel room searches for guns

Drugs okay

Assume if your a high roller a huge stash of drugs is okay then?

Lancaster Uni data breach hits at least 12,500 wannabe students

Banner?

Does anyone know if they use Banner?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/21/security_roundup_190719/

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

Fairly sure

No one at our places the the title "senior strategist handling information technology and marketing" would have the tech skills to do this!

Was this quake AI a little too artificial? Nature-published research accused of boosting accuracy by mixing training, testing data

Rather apt!

Reminds me of

To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.

R.A. Fisher

Programmers' Question Time: Tiptoe through the tuples

Re: RIP Joe Armstrong

Me too just seen this

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/08/joe-armstrong-obituary

Can I get a RHEL yeah? Version 8 arrives at last as IBM given go-ahead to wolf down Red Hat

But when is there a Centos version 8

That's when my fun starts.

QEMU 4 arrives with toys for Arm admirers, RISC-V revolutionaries, POWER patriots... you get the idea

./configure

>Those keen to bash out the odd wget, tar and make can get their hands on the update now. ®

What about ./configure that's where all the fun is!

RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009

It will never die!

Well not here.

Off the network I hasten to add running Electron Microscopes and other fun items!

The curious case of a WordPress plugin, a rival site spammed with traffic, a war of words, and legal threats

Aren't Wordpress Plugin great!

I used to look after loads of Wordpress sites and whilst the product was generally okay the whole infrastructure around it was a nightmare.

The number of times site owners found a new wonderful plugin/theme and installed it with hilarious consequences were legion!

Website programming? Pffft, so 2011. Python's main squeeze is now data science, apparently

Find this bit hard to believe

It says " it is number one in the statistical domain,"

I'm surprised R doesn't fulfill this role.

Techie basks in praise for restoring workforce email (by stopping his scripting sh!tshow)

Recursion is difficult

I once advised a Professor that rather than staying with his very old Sparc box running Solaris under x86 was a better idea.

He bought a new machine and was not very happy as he said it was far slower than his old machine.

I said I couldn't see why but he was the respected professor of computer science.

A couple of days later he admitted there was an infinite loop in his Prolog code and once this was sorted it really was very fast.

Word boffins back Rimini Street in Oracle row: 'Full' in 'full costs' is a 'delexicalised adjective'

The bit that interests me is using "corpus linguistics"

Corpus Linguists tend to work in statistics rather than absolute rules and judgements.

So although they would say x is a delexicalised adjective it would often be governed by something like "97% of the times in 2000 occurrences based on a corpus of size 5000000 tokens taken from the specific domain of texts of legal representations in the USA"

Corpus linguistics is based on actual usage rather than abstract rules.

Domain of the corpus is core to this idea, the classic case is the difference in the use of adjectives to describe legal and non-legal drugs.

GCSE computer science should be exam only, says Ofqual

GCSE Computer Science

Perhaps you might want to look at what is actually in GCSE OCR Computer Science

I've got in front of me "The Revision Guide" and "Exam Practice Workbook" for my daughter who is taking it this year and it's not just about coding.

Sections on Components, Networks, Issues, Algorithms, Programming, Design Testing and IDEs and finally Data Representation.

One questions asks about 4 conditions from the Creative Commons license. FFS!

If you think the problem is schools IT kit think about Edsger Dijkstra and his "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" (okay I know it may not have been his quote) but you get the idea.

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

Have another drink on me!

Finally someone pointing out the Emperors Clothes are not all they are made out to be.

Being at a University we see a lot of the Futurist stuff and not many people are willing to say "hang on!"

Imperial bringing in budget holograms to teach students

Re: Virtual lecturer and audience

Manchester is very proud of its podcasts of lectures, very popular especially the 0915 ones I guess,

This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet

Yes to Centos

I tried on my Centos Box and it was indeed overwritten

Replaced with my backup of /etc/shadow.

Let the fun commence :-)

Break out the jelly and ice cream! Microsoft's Small Basic turns 10

Funny this came up

Over the last couple of weeks I've been visiting schools in Tameside (by son is going to senior school next year). He is keen on computers so visited the ICT departments and most talked about Scratch and python.

All except one which said they use Small Basic. Didn't think much of it until I saw this so it is being used somewhere. Not saying it's good of bad but looking at the GCSE Computer Science syllabus the actual language they learn to program in is fairly irrelevant.

Example question Identify three benefits of using layers when working with network protocols :-)

Linguists, update your resumes because Baidu thinks it has cracked fast AI translation

Re: Missing a Bit

On page 6 of the paper I put a link to it talks about this.

If you have a series of matched translations and the Russian ones generally have fewer words than the English ones which contains "is" the model "realises" in the Russian copular is implied and so deasl with it.

The same goes for definite and indefinite articles.

Clever eh!

Insert AI for added interest

I fail to see this is any advance in Kevin Knight's paper from 1999

http://mt-archive.info/JHU-1999-AlOnaizan.pdf

With enough training data you get a better idea of what word follows another or group of others.

The fun comes with languages with relatively free word order i.e. where subject and objects carry case markers rather than by their position e.g. ones with lots of morphology.

Equifax IT staff had to rerun hackers' database queries to work out what was nicked – audit

The bit I found interesting

Reading the report one of the problems was the mailing lists of Sys Admins was out of date so when they e-mailed people to warn them of the vulnerability not everyone got it. I thought if you looked after something part of the job was to keep any eye out for announcements for said systems and if necessary pass that information upwards. I understand you cannot go patching stuff as and when you feel like it but at least try and keep them safe! Oh what do I know?

Google goes bilingual, Facebook fleshes out translation and TensorFlow is dope

Re: Urdu?

Short answer the way they are written, Hindi in an "Indian" script, Urdu in a "Perso-Arabic" script.

Long contentious argument Hindi is spoken by Indians, Urdu by Pakistanis so they must be totally different. Think Kurdish v Turkish where both sides have nuclear weapons hence icon.

Interestingly all the languages mentioned are classed as Indo-European so theoretically from similar roots.