Posts by Vincent Ballard 543 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2008
I'm pretty sure my company is supposed to have an ISO 9000 process, because our product is CE-marked. However, I've never seen any process documentation. If an auditor actually visits, it might be rather interesting. I'm not the named engineer, which is probably good for me, but if I had been named I would have pushed rather hard to have at least some process.
You were both part-right. Monty was right that Schengen and freedom of movement are different things, but Schengen is relevant to EU citizens too: it's not just a unified visa. In particular, I'm thinking of Benelux where one road near a border (can't remember offhand which) is jam-packed with petrol stations because the tax is cheaper in one country and lots of people border-hop to buy petrol. That would be a lot less practical without Schengen.
Schengen is about border controls, not freedom of movement. Any EU citizen can move to any EU country and stay (technically, provided they find work within 3 months or are studying or retired). That is what "freedom of movement" refers to. What Schengen does is allow travel between countries without having to stop and show your passport.
I need apps because I want to do things with files which are stored on the SD card. Putting all my photos, music etc. in the cloud without a local copy would be idiocy; keeping it all in a browser's LocalStorage cache would prevent me copying to/from my desktop computer or switching browser.
And to back up your point, not in avionics, but today I've run into a problem because I updated our TLS certificates last week and one client has an Android tablet which is older than the CA's root cert and does not appear to easily support adding trusted roots.
When I moved overseas from the UK, I tried to get copies of my medical records, because obviously my host country's systems aren't integrated with the NHS. My GP was able to give me a copy of a file with letters from/to my previous GPs, but they didn't have the detailed results of the day I spent in hospital having various tests after a previous GP had detected a worrying symptom. So I wrote to the hospital which carried out the tests, and they informed me that when I moved out of their Trust area they deleted all my records. I now know (following a different GP referring me to a specialist in a different hospital about a different symptom about a decade later) what was behind the original worrying symptom, but it would be nice to have the early record for longitudinal analysis.
PS I now try to get printouts of all test results and file them myself.
Not true: some countries separate spying on in-country diplomats and spying in other countries into two separate agencies. E.g. in the UK it's the job of the Security Service (formerly MI5) to do domestic espionage and counter-espionage, and they would be very upset if the Secret Intelligence Service (formerly MI6) were to try spying at home.
Are you sure? There is research effort currently towards post-quantum systems which are efficient enough to actually use, but I think you may be mistakenly thinking that elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman is post-quantum. That's not the case: it's still vulnerable to Shor's hidden subgroup attack. Certainly if I run `openssl ciphers -v` it doesn't list anything other than Diffie-Hellman variants and pre-shared keys.
> Have you ever found a fix despite not being an expert in the troubled tech you were asked to tend?
I've maintained code in languages I don't know, and in one case I didn't even know what the language was, but generally it's possible to reverse engineer the syntax by looking at the rest of the program. It only becomes a major problem when you need to know the type system.
I'm at the opposite extreme. Back when I was a cub scout, we had a trip to the library in the nearest town and the librarians wanted to demonstrate their computer system, so they asked whether any of us had a library card. I did, so they tried to find my account by searching on my first and last name. Then they asked whether I had a middle name. They managed to find me on the fourth page of results of people living in the same county who shared my first, middle and surname. I can hide by being a tree in a very large forest.
You comment about Kim is on point, but Putin didn't self-build. He was a mid-flier in the Leningrad KGB (whose career was helped by the purge following the exfiltration of a defector, Oleg Gordievsky, by the SIS) whose superiors gave him permission to change tracks to politics. He's managed to consolidate power quite effectively, but previous generations set up his empire for him and helped him on his way.
I hadn't noticed that, and you're right that it seems weird, but there are scenarios where it's not as weird as it seems. Maybe she's a mature student doing a second undergrad degree because she's the rare marketer who actually wants to understand the product they're selling. Actually, correct the end of my first sentence to "weird in a different way".
(On the question of undergrad theses in general: at my university it was called a dissertation and it didn't have to be novel research, but the end-of-course project was a substantial paper, on the order of 10000 words.)
I don't think that's quite right, because the patient won't necessarily know what side effects the real stuff has (and anyway, side effects vary from person to person). But I am reminded of something I read decades ago about making placebos taste really unpleasant because the patient will think that something that nasty must be effective.
Some quick Googling brings up pages which suggest that ginger hair has the lowest density of strands per unit area and that darker hair has thicker strands, so ginger beards probably weigh less than other colours after correction for beard length.
In-bus displays seem to be particularly prone to problems. My latest photo in this collection is a blue screen of "your computer needs recovery" from Schippol taken 10 days ago, although since it was taken with the camera of a cheap phone it's not worth sending in.
Sometimes I have to ask a non-technical client to run a debug command on the command line and redirect the output to a file. I fully understand that they might not grok that greater-than output.log writes to output.log. I was, however, surprised yesterday when I had to explain this to our first-line support guy.
They're afraid that if they delay more than 24 hours, the browsers will implement official policy and remove their root certificates from the browsers' trusted list, causing all of their certificates (and not merely the 0.4% at issue) to become worthless for interactions involving anything other than wget/curl/equivalent.
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