Posts by Vincent Ballard

Financial authorities fine UK bank nearly $60m for platform migration disaster

Re: subject for investigation

Baader-Meinhof? What do German terrorists have to do with it?

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

Re: Less qualified?

You're not actually disagreeing with me, because you say there was "computer science". The poster I replied to claimed to have started in computing before there was "computer science", which means no later than 1953 (and I suspect that the term wasn't invented for Cambridge's Dip. Comp. Sci. but is actually older).

Re: Less qualified?

That means you must have started in the late 1940s or at the very latest the early 1950s, which puts you in your late 80s, so your experience isn't going to be the same as those in the 50-65 range that the article is talking about.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: NULL is just the pointer analog to NaN

It's changing the type system. Instead of relying on documentation to know whether a value can be null or not, the type will be explicit about whether it can be null or not, and if it can be null then you'll have to handle the null vs non-null cases or get a compile-time error.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Experts are always Experts of legacy systems

I don't know how Twitter's backend is architected, but it's conceivable that non-parameterised queries and queries with predictable parameters (such as the one specifically referred to, whose only parameter is the user ID) could be fetches of pre-generated documents.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: Hidden backlog

In functional democracies, the government is a tool of society.

Re: Law degree

I missed Badenoch's second degree, but Prentis and Jenrick are not in my list because they're ministers who attend cabinet rather than cabinet ministers. (Although admittedly the main reason that I made the cutoff there was because my coffee break is finite).

Law degree

Look at who in the current cabinet *does* have a law degree (Raab, Braverman, Dowden) and ask yourself whether it's really useful. Braverman is particularly interesting: quite aside from the extremely recent scandals about security violations and her ministry keeping asylum seekers in illegal conditions, she was Attorney General in September 2020 when the UK government said it was going to break international law "in a limited way".

BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?

Re: No fenestration?

Didn't Chekhov have something to say about powdered glass? Or maybe that's been saved for the sequel.

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

Re: Trusty and devious mule

They both have their uses. In particular, the ability to use PuTTY without installing was great when I was travelling for several months and had to ssh back to my home machine from random web cafés to check my mail.

(Obviously there was some risk involved, but I assessed that the risk of web café operators being savvy enough to not only log the keyboard but also sniff the keyfile on my USB stick or launch a hacked PuTTY when I tried to run the one on my USB stick was low enough to be acceptable).

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Re: The linked story to that wannabe rocket company

He claimed to believe that. Whether he did, or whether it was a convenient fiction to cover up the fact that he knew there was land because he'd been told about it by Basque fishermen is still debated AFAIK.

Ex-spymaster and fellow Brexiteers' emails leaked by suspected Russian op

Re: Russian government's favourite playbook

I agree that your first post made a good point, and that your doping example was pertinent, but I think you're missing Anonymous Coward's point. You said (direct quote) "the Russians have done a lot of hacking email archives around controversial subjects in order to either cause general trouble or distract from their own wrongdoings." AC's point, as I understand it, is (rephrased):

We live in an era when the PM can hold a press conference about new laws, and break them himself within a couple of hours of the press conference; when photographic evidence leaks, he blatantly lies about it and gets away with lying about it. How can a leak of some e-mails in which about political campaigners allegedly coordinate lying to the public be controversial against such a background?

Re: Is there a reason not to publish…

Given the context, it seems slightly irresponsible to publish the URL without also reminding people to assume that it's more malware-laden than the average website, and to take appropriate precautions.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Just a quick question.

I added a build step to spell-check the texts in our l10n files and produce a report on any words which weren't recognised. That's how I learnt that my Italian colleague consistently bodged the accent on più (more).

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: So what should a a 21st century UI look like?

LibreOffice is the name of the project, not the application. Its DTP application is called Writer.

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Occasionally an app is worth buying

I have an Android app of the Oxford Spanish-English dictionary which cost 15 GBP back about 12 (?) years ago when I got my first Android phone and which I have used far more than my hardback copy of the same dictionary (acquired 14 years ago for a similar price). I also paid for Locus Map after using the free version for several years, because I wanted to support the developers.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Re: ID ten T Errors

The confusion comes because you can enter O mode from software (shutdown -h now), but to then enter I mode again you have to remove and insert said USB cable.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Lost dog pictures

If there's a next time, mounting the drive isn't the best idea. Better to dd it and work solely on the copy. If the copy mounts, great; but the most reliable method of extracting photos is to scan it for JPEG headers, because usually the file will be on contiguous blocks.

Pigeon fanciers in a flap over Brexit quarantine flock-up, seek exemption from EU laws

Re: Brexit.

Their problem is precisely that they're not immigrants, at least from a legal perspective. They're very long-term tourists.

Re: Seriously?

Third wave? We've had four already in Spain and we're starting on a fifth.

(NB various media and politicians miscount them but a five-year-old could identify the waves in the official statistics: https://cnecovid.isciii.es/covid19/#ccaa )

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Things are never quite that simple

On the other hand, they need Parliament to pass a budget each year or they'll be disbanded.

Yahoo! Answers! will! be! wiped! from! the! internet! next! month!

Re: Funny

When I moved to Spain, I considered getting a moped but I wasn't sure whether I'd need to do some equivalent of CBT. I searched the web for something like (in Spanish) "What do I need to ride a moped in Spain?", and the best answer by far was on Yahoo! Answers: "Your mother's blessing".

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

Re: Gatwick -> Edinburgh ?

I was once offered mileage for my shoes by an interviewer, having turned down a taxi home. (It was only about 10 minutes' walk and a nice day).

Re: Not quite a straightforward bribe

When my Dad was a teacher in East Africa, one of his additional duties was to visit the bank in the nearby city and collect the wages for the entire school. He used to carry the money in his shoe, not to avoid bribes but to avoid pickpockets. All was well until the time he got on the bus back and discovered that he had no money in his pockets, so he had to pull off his shoe there and then.

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

Re: I'm pondering how bad "government control" would really be

Why would Scots care about a wall in Northumberland?

BOFH: 7 jars of Marmite, a laptop and a good time

Self-contradiction alert

An inhibition is precisely the thing which stops you from doing something you wouldn't do otherwise.

Whistleblowers: Inflexible prison software says inmates due for release should be kept locked up behind bars

Re: Which came first?

I was once offered a half-time job producing a series of similar bespoke programs. I expressed my surprise, explained the principle of code/data separation, talked through the real requirements, and spent three months producing a single configurable program which put my client's previous vendors out of six months' billing per annum for (if they were half-way competent and had done essentially the same thing behind the client's back) about three days' work.

No egrets: Ardent twitchers fined for breaking lockdown after bloke spots northern mockingbird in his garden

Re: Is the point of a personal interest that you persue[sic] it?

I think that the cynic is you is wrong. Twitchers may well tend to introversion, and may try to keep talking to a minimum to avoid scaring more paranoid birds, but we tend to cluster around the places with good lines of sight to the interesting ones, and most of us will try to explain where to look if someone can't spot it.

Re: Puns

As the Americans say, tern about is no fowl.

A quick snipe

No egrets? We quail before the stilted pun, although no doubt the bustard who came it with it was crowing about it. One swift question for the benefit of all the culture vultures larking about here: was the pun on "hobby" intended, or just a bonus?

EncroChat hack case: RAM, bam... what? Data in transit is data at rest, rules UK Court of Appeal

Re: End to end encryption

I think that reasoning is a bit too glib. The guarantee given by end-to-end encryption is that the data which passes through routers and servers (so roughly layer 2 or 3 in the OSI model) is encrypted by keys which are not available to the people who run the routers and servers, but encryption itself belongs in a higher layer. However, that higher layer is arguably layer 6 rather than layer 7. Which layer should count as the cutoff between rest and transit?

Re: I can never use data again

Homomorphic encryption lets you process data while keeping it encrypted. But that still leaves the issues of data input and (non-aggregated) output.

Severe bug in Libgcrypt – used by GPG and others – is a whole heap of trouble, prompts patch scramble

Would you ban the use of pure nitroglycerine in mining just because dynamite does the job effectively and is far safer? Hell, yes! Sometimes appropriate use of tools means recognising that the old tool is so dangerous that the only sensible thing to do is to use newer, safer tools.

You advocate manually extending the struct and adding manual checks every time it's used, but you haven't made an argument for why that's better than switching to a language which does that for you automatically, eliminating the entire class of errors.

We regret to inform you the professor teaching your online course is already dead

Re: And get a better education...

There are a couple of things which make it more complicated than that.

First rate university courses consist of more than lectures: there's also interaction with lecturers or teaching assistants.

And lecture courses don't stand alone: they're integrated into a dependency system which allows the lecturer to make valid assumptions about what the students ought to already know. So a given lecture course at one university might spend the last third or half building towards some important result which will be a prerequisite for an advanced course the next year, but at another university which doesn't offer the same advanced course the corresponding intermediate course might be structured very differently.

There is value in heterogeneity and in allowing students to choose a course which suits their interests and capacities.

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

It seems that Google is going to revoke the API keys, which would mean that the traffic would start to be blocked server-side.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Re: Respect the experience

One of the physics teachers in my secondary school had a demo where he shocked a volunteer using a capacitor charged from a battery. I naïvely volunteered and gave a tremendous shriek; he confessed to me a few years later that he checked afterwards and discovered that he'd miscalculated the capacitance and given me a bigger shock than intended. He followed up with the first XV rugby player who had volunteered in an earlier class and discovered that, although he was too tough to show pain, he had a numb arm for a few hours. So I can well believe that someone with a dodgy heart could be killed by the surprise.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

I remember back in about 2000, the first time I tried to top up my pay-as-you-go phone. I duly purchased a 10 quid top-up card from the supermarket, scratched off the opaque coating over the secret code, and tried to follow the instructions. But the instructions wanted me to enter the secret code followed by the hash key, and I couldn't find the output of a one-time function applied to the secret code anywhere on the card... It took a call to the operator's support line and much mutual confusion to figure that one out.

Re: Doubtless with the assistance of a baseball bat peppered with rusty nails.

The previous king of Spain killed his elder brother in a similar accident. Or "accident" for those who disbelieve the official story.

Inflated figures and customers who were never there. Just another data migration then

Re: I bet inflated numbers happen everywhere

No-one has been punished for the failure to reach the self-imposed targets for daily CoVID-19 tests because if Johnson fires Hancock now then he'll have to find a different scapegoat when things don't improve.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Wheeled office chairs

And the Battenburgs became Mountbattens.

Samsung shaves 0.1μm off pixels to make new ISOCELL sensor lineup 15% slimmer

Re: Pixel binning

Or you could just combine it in hardware by having larger pixels for a cheaper, better sensor. It's like the megahertz race in personal computers when anything off the shelf had a CPU which supported a really high clock speed and so little RAM that it spent all of its time swapping.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: 11Oct16

The whole "ambi" is the part which means "both", so surely it's just guous?

I won't be ignored: Google to banish caller roulette with Verified Calls

Re: I'm trying to think how many unsolicited calls I've actually wanted

Maybe your hospital withholds its number. The hospital which phoned me a few weeks ago to give me an appointment didn't, which was why I picked up.

Re: The only winner is Google

Does that help? The company calling you won't know what kind of phone you have, so it won't affect their decision to notify Google.

Re: I'm trying to think how many unsolicited calls I've actually wanted

I can't think of many, but there was an incident a few years ago where I had a couple of calls from a 20-or-so digit number which was obviously some spammy call centre; a few months later I discovered that it was in fact a court trying to notify me of something important. And hospital waiting lists are another one: you can go months between being put on the list and getting the phone call to tell you your number's come up, and I don't want to take every potentially spam call in that interval.

I note that Spain is one of the countries where they're launching, and I think that's partly due to cultural differences. In Spain no-one leaves a message. The culture here is that if someone phones you and you don't answer, the ball is now in your court and you should phone back to find out what it was about.

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Re: If you want irony ...

When politics and language get mixed up, things can get very interesting.

Many people know that in the north-east of Spain there's a region, Catalonia, with a substantial* independence movement and its own language, Catalan. Fewer people know that Catalan actually has three main dialect groups: east Catalan (spoken in Barcelona, and hence the "prestige" dialect), Balearic (spoken in the islands of the same name), and west Catalan, spoken in a large area of rural Catalonia and most of the southerly neighbour of Catalonia, the Valencian Community.

Now, as far as Valencian politicians are concerned, Valencian is a separate language to Catalan. As far as Valencian linguists are concerned, Valencian is another name for Catalan. When the Valencian government established its own Academy, the academicians wrote a dictionary which defined Valencian as Catalan and were nearly sacked for it.

To throw an additional spanner in the works, Valencian academics (in general, not just linguists) were used to taking their lead from the older Barcelona-based Academy. Valencian as taught in schools and, especially, universities is much closer to what you'd hear on the streets in Barcelona (more influenced by French) than in Valencia (more influenced by Spanish). So there is also a non-party-political pressure group which tries to get official Valencian to reflect street Valencian rather than the east Catalan dialect: i.e. to promote the real situation that Valencian is an identifiable dialect of Catalan.

* As of the past 10 or so years.

Re: Local 'languages'

There are always corner cases. By that standard, en-GB and en-US would be different languages, but the mutual intelligibility is so high that I don't think anyone seriously disputes that they're dialects of the same language, however many counterfactual jokes we may make.

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Cinema tie-in

My strongest association with KFC is the time I saw Chicken Run at the cinema and the back of the ticket had a voucher for money off the Colonel's menu. It seemed somewhat inappropriate.

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

Re: They're navigating like an Egypcian

You missed an opportunity there to hop out, run across the bridge, and jump back in.

Snortical warfare: Wild boar launches amphibious assault against German beachgoers

I thought they were hunted? I'm sure I've read of at least two outbreaks of listeriosis in Spain in the last year caused by people not getting a vet to do a blood test on a wild boar before they ate it.