* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Facebook spooked after MPs seize documents for privacy breach probe

Stevie

Re: Sergeant at Arms

Speaker of the House (looks up from papers on desk with face like thunder): "Get me ... The Sarge!"

Great Scott! Is nothing sacred? US movie-goers vote Back To The Future as most-wanted reboot

Stevie

Re: There is plenty of original material

I always thought Samuel R Delany's Nova would make excellent fodder for the big screen.

Stevie

Suggestions for the putative BttF remake:

Start showing current Doctor Who regenerating into Marty McFly.

What?

Stevie

Re: what the people want

See: Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Stevie

Bah!

Given that I was forced to attend a screening of Fantastic Cheek: The Crimes of JK Rowling* at the weekend I'd say that all people wanting to complain about Hollywood also include the crap ideas being fed to it by their own countrymen.

* - A movie with no story and characters recycled from the never-ending HP saga.

Fact is that Hollywood will only make what they think will make money. Come up with a non-comic book, non-remake idea that people will actually go and watch for cashmoney, then you can take the high road and be king of the hill.

Eye-Witness Evidence is that new ideas on worthwhile subjects (eg First Man) are playing to almost empty theaters.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

Stevie

Re: Exam question.

Many years ago, in the last-but-three decade of the last century, a colleague told me of a Systems Analysis course he had attended at ICL.

Everyone sat around a big table. The presenter dumped a huge box of mixed bolts on the table and said "sort that out".

After an hour or so, when the bolts were sorted in order, he said "Well done". Then he picked up the single four-inch carriage bolt sitting on it's lonesome at one end of the collection. "But I only wanted this one".

The lesson being that the course was going to be all about discovering the right questions to ask when given a user request.

I believe the Systems Analyst job position has largely died out. A shame. Many of the issues we read of here at El Reg have to do with not asking the right questions.

Scope creep is a whole 'nother issue and has bee with us since Gak Eisenberg demonstrated his perfectly fit-for-purpose hammerstone to the tribal elder and was asked if he could add an antler handle to it and maybe use a more glittery rock.

Stevie

Bah!

I recently pulled an Old Man Idiocy when using TOAD (an excellent tool, but like all tools very dangerous in the hands of the unknowlegeable, forgetful or just plain lazy - last one applies in this case).

Asked to move an Oracle package from a test database schema into our production schema I proceeded to pull up the package in TOAD, did a create script to the clipboard, pasted it into the editor window in the target database session, edited the code to change the schema name and ran said code in the production database that night as requested.

Next day no-one could access the package code. It seems some witless dolt had removed all the permission grants and synonyms from the package.

Turns out I had neglected to double check the check-boxes on tab in the create script pop-up that controls the generated code closely enough, and had neglected to notice that the generated code contained the dreaded "drop object" syntax.

Not only that, I had neglected to recognize that that had happened when I did the code edit for schema name change. I mean, it was only hiding in plain sight on bloody line one.

Unfortunately, I rather like all the people I work with now, so I was forced to do the Bonehead Dance and wear the Pointy Hat of Not Being Smart instead of shifting blame to the intern or new hire as per industry standard practice.

D'oh!

Stevie

Vizualizing

Stand By Me.

Technical foul: Amazon suffers data snafu days before Black Friday, emails world+dog

Stevie
Pint

4 kend1

Norty man. Have an e-beer.

Stevie

Re: WTF?

So how come they didn't have a more businesslike template pre-prepared? It was only a matter of time before they were going to need it.

Microsoft confirms: We fixed Azure by turning it off and on again. PS: Office 362 is still borked

Stevie

Bah!

In NY weather was not severe on Monday.

Must be the other East Coast.

Big data at sea: How the Royal Navy charts the world's oceans

Stevie

Bah!

Find any ... geological anomalies, especially geological anomalies accompanied by "singing"?

What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs

Stevie

Bah!

Look, it's very simple:

The FBI is a domestic law enforcement organization with no legal powers outside the USA, so stop recommending people in Europe call them.

The people you need to talk to are the CIA.

Who already know because they put the Pi in your closet in the first place.

Allegedly.

Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?

Stevie

Re: The ghost of John Backus would like a quiet word

FORTRAN doesn't have significant whitespace.

It has significant character columns. Different thing. All "card based" languages are likely to have that since the first few characters usually were reserved for the card sort order ordinal (line number). FORTRAN also uses Hollerith characters if memory serves.

Stevie

Bah!

I'd bet real money that in the world as a whole there's more Cobol than YAML, counted any way you choose.

8o)

John McAfee is 'liable' for 2012 death of Belize neighbour, rules court

Stevie

Re: "than depicted here."

Understood and no, thanks. The less McAffee in my life, the better, I've found.

Keep up the good work.

Stevie

Bah!

According to a documentary I just saw there was a bit more pushing and shoving between neighbours* than depicted here.

The murder also allegedly involved multiple "unnecessary" stun-gun burns on the victim's back, leading to a supposition that he was tortured before being shot.

The film purported to have found the person wot done it after being paid $5000 from an account owned by the subject of the article.

I have no idea what the truth is, but I have to say that the youtube screengrab shows that McAffee is capable of producing the most stunning state-of-the-art virtual stately-home class libraries in which to host his blitherfests. Most convincing.

* - Neighbours who were hundreds of feet apart too. Imagine if they'd been in a terraced road near you.

Microsoft sysadmin hired for fake NetWare skills keeps job despite twitchy trigger finger

Stevie

Bah!

Many, many years ago I used an agent who was somewhat legendary for what would become known as a "wide boy" approach to the business. He was a total villain who would upsell a job and then downgrade the pay once the interview was won, but I learned to factor in the "shrinkage" and he always, *always* paid and paid on time - a major plus in them cowboy days. If I tell you the agency was situated across the road from the Paul Raymond Revue Bar in Soho in the early 80s you may be able to intuit the atmosphere or even recall a contract of your own with the un-named agency that went pear-shaped big time.

One of my agent's endearing qualities was to tell the prospective employer that I would be arriving in my-estimated-time-of-arrival minus 30 minutes. I drove long distances several days a week and had a very good idea of how long it took to get from A to B even in places I'd never visited before, but he never learned and it always landed my with an initial job of explaining that I was actually wherever-it-was in good time but we had both been had by Mr Never-Learns.

My next job was to ask for the CV they had in hand, before the interview started properly. I would then go through it and correct it for creative writing "slips of the pen".

Lovely times.

Facebook's CEO on his latest almighty Zuck-up: OK, we did try to smear critics, but I was too out-of-the-loop to know

Stevie

Bah!

Was totally buying Big Z's waffle until he announced he'd "read the article" [in the New York Times].

Zuckerberg reads newspapers? That is one bridge too big to swallow. Or something.

Trump in Spaaaaaaace: Washington DC battles over who gets to decide the rules of trillion-dollar new industry

Stevie

4 StargateSg7

TS:DR

(Too Shouty:Didn't Read)

Bloke fined £460 after his drone screwed up police chopper search for missing woman

Stevie

The actual reason for rubbernecking

Nah, it's prurient interest and nosey-parkerism plain and simple.

Getting rid of this idiotic traffic-jamming practice is one item on a very short list of reasons I can see for virtualizing the view from car windows. No accident/police stop/bloke changing a tire (for fuck's sake), no mile-long tailback on the opposite carriageway of the Long Island Expressway.

(If you are interested, in-fog vision enhancement and heads-up navigation (that blocked lane presents as a simple chicane with no work crew to cause rubbernecking) are the other items.)

It's incredible. You change a tire on the LIE and you have half a million people who need to get a good look because they've never seen such a miraculous sight before. Get rear-ended on the same stretch of road, no-one sees anything.

Sorry, but NASA says Mars signal wasn't Opportunity knocking

Stevie

Bah!

Oh for a human being with a dollar-store whisk broom ...

Court doc typo 'reveals' Julian Assange may have been charged in US

Stevie

Vapid etc (4 Greengrocer LucreLout)

cat's nickname for its owner

8o)

Stevie

Bah!

That cat has secrets! A campaign to persuade the Ecuadorans to take the cat to a shelter must be set in motion soonest.

Then, a special team of fur-work experts can spirit the cat to a secret location where it can be plied with tuna, shrimp, long pieces of string and all the catnip mice it can sniff in an effort to loosen its tongue.

We may yet have found the chink in the vile Assange's armor!

Bright spark dev irons out light interference

Stevie

Re: Split infinitive

Or simply stop for to read.

A new Raspberry Pi takes a bow with all of the speed but less of the RAM

Stevie

3 cameras, Galileo GPS, SATA

And runs off zero point energy.

Hands up who isn't p!*$ed off about Amazon's new HQ in New York and Virginia?

Stevie

Bah!

Long Island City.

Long Island (no city) means the whole fish.

Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?

Stevie
Pint

Re: Bah!

Dry ice requires very hot water to work, and is expensive. Almost every facet of the handling is prone to accidental burning (cold burning in one sense, scalding too).

Glycol foggers are basically vape pens on steroids and altghough there is talk of health hazards, nothing is in print definitively tying any known problem to them, which is how they still get used in clubs etc.. The chilled stuff stays on the floor anyway.

The only real hazard I can think of, and it is a real one, is that hardwood floors will become "dewed" and possibly slippery as a result. Oh, and you can get a burn off the fog projector if you buy a cheap one or run an expensive one too hard too long (intermittent use is the key).

I like the ultrasonic fireplace, and your trident is masterful. Have an e-beer.

'My entire company is without comms': Gamma's Horizon cloud PBX goes DOWN

Stevie

Re: Did the person responsible for the DR plan ever test it?

"Plan? There ain't no plan"

Pigstealer

Mad Max Beyond The Thunderdome

Did you by chance hack OPM back in 2015? Good news, your password probably still works!

Stevie

Bah!

Budget?

Scam or stunt? It's looking like the latter... Xiaomi so sorry for £1 smartphone 'promo'

Stevie

Bah!

So a bunch of tech twonks wrote sniping software to grab phones from those using the "fair" method (a mouse in the hand) and are pissed that the company was just as crummy as they were?

Hard to feel sorry. especially since I'm sure a fair number of them would be spouting "if it looks too good to be true, it is!" in these pages if they hadn't been caught up in the frenzy.

Open the pod bay doors: Voice of HAL 9000 Douglas Rain dies at 90

Stevie

Re: Unexpected Fame

I doubt Alec Guinness is smirking it up for that reason.

He had few happy words to say about Star Wars. I rather think Doctor Lazarus was modeled in part on AG's displeasure at how far he had sunk.

I reckon he achieves brilliance in The Ladykillers (a rare movie where the remake is as enjoyable for different reasons as the original) and Kind Hearts and Coronets. There are any number of "better" movies he has appeared in as grumpy angst-ridden Army Officers/NCOs, but he was a comedic genius and I like comedies that are clever.

Stevie

Re:I was a Consultant / Diagnostician for ICL

I used to be fond of our 1901T's singing "weedleweedleWOOOORP" over and over during a sort. The night shift ops would sit in the OpsMan's office drinking tea and smoking* with the phone off the hook and connected to the console phone while the evening batches were running. Never had a late finish with our own blokes.

One contract op used to like to knock off early so he would poke a metal rod through the louvers on one cabinet, cause a momentary voltage excursion and crash the machine. We caught him because he wasn't bright enough to vary the times or give it a miss every now and then. Idiot.

* - In those days men were real men and our lungs had more tar than the road 'neath your car.

Stevie

Bah!

Oh man, I was working late one night and had to perform an operation on a Sperry mainframe that first took away, then reinstated an in-core shared resource pool. The dialogue that the command to release the BDIs brought on was so HAL-like it was damn scary, alone as I was in a big office late at night.

It went along the lines of:

"Are you sure you want to do that?" - "yes"

"I will be unable to do x,y, and z if you continue. Please reconsider."

"Daisy" was running loud and strong in my head as I typed in the confirmation order, and it took me almost a minute of paranoid re-checking my notes before I nerved myself up to do so.

Between you, me and that dodgy-looking USB: A little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone

Stevie

Bah!

Dead simps, this one. Fire up the trusty Raspberry Pi, plug in and stand ready with the trusty lump hammer if teh warez gain the upper hand.

Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly

Stevie

Bah!

Bad news is the subspace quantum nuclear magnetic flux buggers up mechanical *and* digital watches, so while you might know exactly where you are, you won't ever be able to calculate your average speed over the orienteering course.

I had a pedometer once. I switched it on and walked twelve miles. I checked the output on the device while celebrating in the pub and it correctly showed I had two feet.

Scare Force: Pakistan military hit by Operation Shaheen malware

Stevie
Pint

Re: Belgium, man.

Naughty man. Have an e-beer.

OK Google, why was your web traffic hijacked and routed through China, Russia today?

Stevie

Re: I've got the answer!

And I've been saying for years that we should reboot the internet to flush out all the warez and 4chans. I get downvoted every time but now look what's happened!

Stevie

Bah!

World War Three will not be televised. Or browsed, apparently.

As I read the article, for some reason that Monty Python/Terry Gilliam "bit" with the German fish being eaten by the Japanese fish, which in turn was eaten by the British fish was running in Mr Brain.

I may have the order of fish wrong, because the nationalities don't matter in the analogy.

All our cat pix are belong to bad actors at the state level t'would seem. Then again, given the three-letter agency oversight it turns out *isn't* just a paranoid fantasy, that's been the case since, well, forever.

Junior dev decides to clear space for brewing boss, doesn't know what 'LDF' is, sooo...

Stevie

Why would database software be written ...

... such that deleting an ancillary file ( such as a log file of historic steps) cause it to fall over?

It is the way of things.

Can your rival fix it as fast? turns out to be ten-million-dollar question for plucky support guy

Stevie

Bah!

I imagine everyone who grew up in the interface between greenbar reports and print-to-disc has at some point spent all morning getting more and more annoyed at a fix that won't, only to find they've been editing the bloody output from the compiler. Found a boss doing that, gently pointed out the error (and pointed out that the reason I spotted it was been there, done that) and got snarled at.

But the best was when I returned from a stint in a youngish start-up to an enterprise I had years of working for/with/in and was given the task of administering the product I had been supporting while on the bleeding edge.

One day I get an incandescently angry phone call from someone who has never thought much of me over the years and who is trying to administer the same product on a different site where they flew in the face of Sperry's advice and eschewed the software-building tool in favor of "pick what's best".

This has meant that a certain vital shared memory resource with absolute addressing involved (BDIs for the cognoscenti) is a jumbled hodgepodge and that now *any* software install must be a very manually intensive thing indeed instead of a few parameters and a COMUS script. Think IRQs in the bad old days, and raise it a few binary orders of magnitude if you don't know Sperry stuff.

Anyway, the lady is screaming at me because she has been looking at "my configuration file" and is demanding to know why I set all the values the way I did. This means of course that she is trying to sneakily take over my project - which unbeknownst to her is jake with me.

"I didn't fill in any of those fields" I say, baffled. I've no idea what you are talking about. I accepted the defaults in every single case when running the set-up utility."

"Oh yes you did! I'm looking right at the file as I speak. Why did you even set all those field values?" she howled.

The penny dropped. I dialed down my own reaction to her snottiness in order to get exactly the right tone. I was aiming for George Sanders at his evil lizard best. It probably came out more like Snidely Whiplash, but that's life.

"Which file are you looking at?" I asked innocently.

She told me.

"Ah, I see the problem you are having now. I'm afraid that *isn't* the configuration file. What you are looking at is the report you get when you run such-and-such a utility, which fills in all the missing info with the defaults that will be assumed by the software. I can understand your confusion now. Why on earth didn't you simply call me and ask me which file you needed to look at? You must have wasted your whole morning."

She hung up with ill-grace once I had told her where she should be looking for her sneaky recce, she in the sure and certain knowledge that the story would be passed to people she *did* respect.

Because I can be a miserable c*nt too if the circumstances call for it.

Astroboffins spot one of the oldest, coolest stars in the universe lurking in the Milky Way

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Your understanding is incomplete. Metals are created by the fusion process in a star, as far down the periodic table as iron. You don't have to start with them in the mix.

Citation: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec18.html

When the star makes iron, that's the end of the line, because Iron takes more energy to turn into other elements than it throws out in the process. That's when the star starts wending its way toward a possible supernova event, but starts dying whether or not it will experience a giant space kablooey.

Stevie

Bah!

I thought stars cooked metals themselves, at least as far down Mr Medeleev's bedsheet as iron.

Clearly "metal poor" is not a helpful terminology, unless fusion isn't working in the new killer star.

Dell upping its margins again: Precision 5530 laptop will sting you for $13m. Yep, six zeroes

Stevie

Bah!

Okay, lesson learned: Attention entry-level Java programming new hires!

a) No more doing currency calculations in real data types.

2) Those huge negative numbers on the monthly sales report? They mean whoever added a second title line to the report needs to go back and look hard at their code too because the word "total" is being read as the total.

*) Perhaps cracking a manual instead of breaking from twitter just long enough for a search of Stackoverflow will save your jobs.

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Stevie

Re: "secure" boot is *EVIL* 4 Chronos

Intersting link there.

But once again no mention of price without a frustration-inducing hunt.

Russian computer failure on ISS is nothing to worry about – they're just going to turn it off and on again

Stevie

Re: lash one to your effin' body.

Paging Captain Cyborg!

Stevie

Bah!

Three Computers?

Then the ISS is really ... A BERSERKER???

AIEE!

Dutch cops hope to cuff 'hundreds' of suspects after snatching server, snooping on 250,000+ encrypted chat texts

Stevie

Re: That broke rule 1 of creating secure services

Well if the Dutch peelers were worried about drugs, I'd have to say the "crime" must have been a biggie, obvious to all.

And then there was talk of murders, which is usually a litmus test for crime.

Foxconn denies it will ship Chinese factory serf, er, workers into America for new plant

Stevie

Bah!

Attention all those indignant c-ards who indignantly put me in my place two weeks ago: Read the bit about the wetlands again, then tell me again how fabbing isn't filthy.

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

Stevie

Bah!

Anything by Culture Club, no?

Keep on Rennin (Marks and Spencer Davis Group)