Posts by Alan J. Wylie

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Lenna

I do like that the image that goes with this article on the Latest News page subtly references the "Lenna" image that started it all.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: Ring, ring ...

They are stardust, but they are not golden.

Re: VAX field service engineers

It's not just electricity - just getting a ring caught on something and it's quite painful

My mother was in the WAAF during the war, some of the time she was servicing airplanes. Lots of stories to tell - the technicians were "encouraged" to go up in the plane on the first flight after servicing. Winding up the undercarriage on an Avro Anson. Pilots showing off with aerobatics and trying to impress the attractive young woman sitting next to them. But what sticks in the mind most is the scar from a ring that got caught on the fuselage as she got out.

VAX field service engineers

I can still remember, in the early 80's DEC VAX field service engineers removing their wedding ring before working anywhere near the computer's backplane. Apparently the current available from the power supply could heat the ring to red heat in only a short contact.

And I can still remember FIELD / SERVICE and SYSTEST / UETP too. The good old days of insecurity.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

I once had an email blocked by one university because it referenced The University of Sussex (or was it Essex?)

Law firm 'didn't think' data theft was a breach, says ICO. Now it's nursing a £60K fine

Re: "Commitment" is not enough

Better than the old BS5750.

Some of us are old enough to remember Def Stan 05-21

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Smoking hairy golfballs

They're left with racks of molten silicon

As Jim Gray said: "smoking hairy golfballs"

paper

Interview

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

Arthur? Who's Arthur?

Thanks for that. The interview would have been early 2001. I hadn't done any work on ARM for more than ten years at that time. P.S. I got the job.

Please note the "I'll get my coat" icon before giving me a thumbs down.

32-bit registers, 26-bit memory addresses. The upper six bits of the program counter held the CPU flags

I remember an interview where answering one of the questions required realising that since all instructions were word aligned, the lower two bits could be (ab)used for storing state.

"from hand-crafted Arm assembly language to high-level language (eg, portable ANSI C)."

Why not be up-to-date and use Rust?

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Feynman

Plus several hundred for the Feynman title reference.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

And in one story, Bob's intern is called Peter-Fred Young

What position do you get appointed to if your CV mentions "CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN"?

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

Re: WTF is "leepfrog.com"

I thought the max size of an SPF record was 255 characters / 512 bytes?

Sort of. Note that there are multiple double quote delimited strings in their record.

RFC 7208 section 3.3

"TXT records containing multiple strings are useful in constructing records that would exceed the 255-octet maximum length of a character-string within a single TXT record."

WTF is "leepfrog.com"

OPM have one of the most ridiculous SPF records I've ever seen.

opm.gov. 300 IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:205.131.184.50/32 ip4:205.131.184.51/32 ip4:205.131.177.50/32 ip4:205.131.177.151/32 ip4:205.131.184.52/32 ip4:205.131.177.152/32 ip4:205.131.184.125/32 " "ip4:205.131.184.126/32 ip4:205.131.177.125/32 ip4:205.131.177.126/32 ip4:73.23.28.0/24 ip4:208.76.128.0/21 ip4:66.159.72.186/32 ip4:216.230.115.73/32 ip4:216.52.6.89/32 " "ip4:216.230.115.69/24 ip4:66.169.72.166/24 ip4:216.230.114.66/24 ip4:216.230.101.69/24 ip4:66.169.72.176/32 ip4:173.201.193.170/24 ip4:107.20.210.250/32 ip4:52.1.14.157/32 " "ip4:52.6.44.126/32 ip4:52.207.153.36/32 ip4:65.196.93.7/32 ip4:96.43.152.64/28 ip4:96.43.152.80/32 " "ip4:149.19.38.227/32 " "ip4:149.19.37.167 ip4:149.19.38.138 ip4:149.19.37.159 ip4:149.19.37.32 ip4:149.19.37.73 ip4:149.19.37.55 " "ip4:163.120.86.44 ip4:163.120.86.62 ip4:149.19.37.109 ip4:149.19.37.33 ip4:149.19.37.49 ip4:149.19.37.86 ip4:163.120.86.56 ip4:163.120.84.26 ip4:149.19.38.45 " "ip4:163.120.84.80 ip4:149.19.38.69 ip4:149.19.38.87 ip4:149.19.38.105 ip4:163.120.84.62 ip4:163.120.84.37 ip4:149.19.38.63 ip4:163.120.84.20 " "ip4:52.61.131.175/32 ip4:52.61.131.176/28 ip4:52.61.135.175/32 ip4:52.61.135.176/28 ip4:34.206.132.87/32 ip4:18.233.74.128/32 include:spf.protection.outlook.com" " a:usalearning.net mx:usalearning.net include:e2ma.net exists:%{i}._spf.mta.salesforce.com include:leepfrog.com -all"

Naïve Reg hack thinks he can beat Christmas food comas once and for all

Re: Castlerigg stone circle and computing history

Not North, the book you refer to wasn't published until 1996, twenty years after my schooldays, by which time I'd moved on to other interests, but your post triggered a memory of Alexander Thom. Another part of the "research" we did at school was investigating the precision with which students could pace out a "Megalithic yard".

I do have a copy of Euan MacKie's "The Megalith Builders".

Trekking poles

Trekking poles are invaluable for crossing streams in spate, even if they spend the rest of the time strapped to your rucksack.

Also, +1 for Paramo, but even a Paramo "waterproof" jacket and Berghaus overtrousers won't stop you getting soaked to the skin in the worst weather (been there, done that).

Layer up, with a synthetic wicking layer against the skin.

Taking it to the extreme, don't bother with a waterproof top, instead wear a Paramo/Buffalo/Montane smock.

Jackets come in two lengths. The shorter ones may be more fashionable and better when belaying a climber, but they can leave an exposed gap around your midriff above your overtrousers. Paramo do both lengths, I have one of each. I found my short padded Paramo top in a charity shop in Kendal with £5 on the ticket. I gave them a lot more than that for it.

Castlerigg stone circle and computing history

Back in the 70's, when my brother, sister and I were at school in Keswick, we did a project on Castlerigg Stone Circle and "leylines".

The local education authority provided the school with an HP 9830A calculator/ BASIC computer.

The physics master lent us an ex-Canadian Army gunsight - a compact theodolite. We surveyed all the stones, I did the 3D trig to calculate where on the slope of Blencathra the sun would rise on midsummer morning and stayed up overnight to catch it. Helpful teachers and students with driving licenses drove us to other stone circles. My brother wrote a program for the HP 9830A to calculate the "leylines" between them, then created random points and ran the program again to see whether we got a similar result.

We entered the project into two competitions, one run by Computer Weekly and the BBC's "Young Scientists of the Year".

We came second in the CW competition and were donated an ICT (the forerunner of ICL) 1902 computer, and reached the finals of YSotY.

More details at my brother's website.

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

Lyon equipment make just the thing (image)

web site

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: what does ~* do?

Quoting the original article: Emacs backup files

emacs appends ~ to the filename when creating backup files.

$ cd .emacs.d

$ ls *~

bbdb~ gnus.el~ viper~ vm.el~

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Nikola

For my personal, self hosted web site I used to use Blosxom, but it's getting old in the tooth. I recently moved to Nikola, available as a package in Gentoo. It's a Python program that takes as input plain text files with some HTML markup and turns them into more featured HTML. Fortunately importing my old site was pretty easy using the RSS support in Blosxom.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

BBC News today: Smartphones: "I feel guilty for not buying my daughter one for school"

Girl without smartphone unable to join in lesson

A mum has said her 11-year-old daughter returned home from school in tears because she did not have a smartphone to use in class.

Celeste Lewis said she felt guilty after her daughter Ava's school, Whitchurch High in Cardiff, encouraged pupils to use their phones in lessons to do things like look up locations on Google Earth.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Taking a company's source code and preparing it for release to the wild is not a simple process. I've been there, done that for OpenSTA

back in 2001.

IIRC, it involved checking the copyright of everything, removing author's names (some no longer worked for Cyrano, we didn't want people being bothered by support requests) and not least, removing any jokes or bad language from the comments.

Re: LOL

It seems to have been like this for a while. discussion at GitHub Community

The github-actions bot has responded.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: Cookies too?

Cookie-AutoDelete may be what you are looking for

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

No Annoying Music

There's also a version with no annoying background music

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

This on twitter at 19:00 UTC. CUPS is one of Openprinting's projects.

<cite>

Simone Margaritelli @evilsocket

Mark this. 1 hour to go.

https://openprinting.github.io/codeofconduct/

</cite>

Re: Its confirmed to be cups-browsed

If it is cups-browsed, then I've got nothing to worry about. It's [N]ot installed. And no server I've ever managed has had it (or cups) installed either. "all GNU/Linux systems (plus others)"? Hardly.

[I] net-print/cups (2.4.7-r2@06/02/24): The Common Unix Printing System

[N] net-print/cups-bjnp (2.0.3-r1): CUPS backend for canon printers using proprietary USB over IP BJNP protocol

[N] net-print/cups-browsed (2.0.0): helper daemon to browse for remote CUPS queues and IPP network printers

[I] net-print/cups-filters (2.0.0-r1@04/06/24): Cups filters

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs

Good article explaning the issue from Matthew Garrett

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70348.html

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Critical systems do not fail because a person makes a mistake, but because insufficient controls fail to prevent the mistake. Dr. Johannes Ullrich

Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

I can remember sitting in a pub with a load of Ferranti employees and contractors one lunchtime in 1993, listening to the news on a radio, waiting for the announcement of bankruptcy. We'd already put all our personal and corporate belongings in our cars.

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Fission is easier, but that doesnt make it better. Burning Coal is even easier and cheaper

Have a read of this article by Otto Frisch On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations

The recent discovery of coal (black, fossilized plant remains) in a number of places offers an interesting alternative to the production of power from fission. Some of the places where coal has been found show indeed signs of previous exploitation by prehistoric men, who, however, probably used it for jewels and to blacken their faces at religious ceremonies.

The power potentials depend on the fact that coal can be readily oxidized, with the production of a high temperature and energy of about 0.0000001 megawatt days per gram. That is, of course, very little, but large amounts of coal (perhaps millions of tons) appear to be available.

The chief advantage is that the critical amount is very much smaller for coal than for any fissile material. Fission plants become, as is well known, uneconomical below 50 megawatts, and a coal-driven plant may be competitive for small communities (such as small islands) with small power requirements.

...

Re: Optional

How Many Years Away is Fusion Energy? A Review

Historically, it has been a running quip that ‘fusion is always 30 years away. ... Thus arises the following question: is the age-long sarcasm of “fusion is always 30 years away” still valid in 2023? This paper answers this question through a literature review of researchers' expectations about when fusion energy will be “ready” for over the past 40 years.

BOFH: Why's the network so slow?

Mornington Crescent?

I'm surprised that while visiting all those stations, the PFY never arrived at Mornington Crescent.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

ObXKCD

Devotion to Duty

Molten lunar regolith heats up space colonization dreams

So whose face are we going to carve into the surface of the moon?

NIST turns to IT consultants to clear National Vulnerability Database backlog

Opensource Security blog post: "Why are vulnerabilities out of control in 2024?"

"Why are vulnerabilities out of control in 2024?"

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Re: Tail wags dog

Cleckhuddersfax

Only 5 or 6km from Torpenhow is Aspatria, which has its own problem. The locals pronounce it "Spyat-ree", posh folk "As-spay-tria", but the recoded message on Northern Rail trains says "As-spat-ria".

Re: Does anywhere in Wales have accented letters?

You beat me to it.

From The UK Gov Index of Place Names in Great Britain, download the index, unzip it, grep out all the usual characters, and you are just left with ! and ô

Westward Ho! and Ynys Môn

Let's not mention Torpenhow Hill

Re: stand 'ard

ObXKCD

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

This road sign always used to amuse me: Bronte Parsonagë. These days they've lost the diaeresis on Brontë.

Lightweight Dillo browser springs back to life, still doesn't care about JavaScript

Re: Posting from dillo

Yes - I really was able to log in and post

Posting from dillo

$ cd /work/src.git/dillo/

$ ls -lh src/dillo

-rwxr-xr-x 1 alan users 6.0M May 6 11:53 src/dillo

$ src/dillo https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/05/07/dillo_browser_v3_1/