Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

SLS goes vertical at Stennis while NASA practises SRB stacking

Exciting stuff

I have very fond memories of the Apollo era. Fingers crossed for the upcoming tests

Ancient Ore Crusher or KillBot 2000? NASA gets ready to pick a name for its Mars 2020 Rover

Marvin

has my vote, but then it might develop a pain in all the diodes down its left side

I'd better be going

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

"Productize"?

Sorry, that must be some strange manglement speak or marketing-droid phrase that has hitherto escaped me.

Anyone using it in my presence should be warned I might not take kindly to such an act.

Alan Turing’s OBE medal, PhD cert, other missing items found in super-fan’s Colorado home by agents, says US govt

True, ms. Schwinghammer/Elliot/Turing/Insert-Name-Here makes as much sense as an Enigma machine with a loose wheel or two.

Windows 7 back in black as holdouts report wallpaper-stripping shenanigans

Will they replace the start-up sound as well?

"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed"

seems appropriate now.

I'll be going. The one with the HHGTTG radio play cassette tapes in the pocket please

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Re: How did that work ?

Under MS-DOS, I typically used Norton Utilities' binary editor, and have at times managed to alter strings in executables and libraries in DOS, when access to the code was missing, or recompiling the whole shebang to correct a simple typo in the user interface took longer than performing the edits in code and executable or library. Under Windows, Wordpad could indeed be used.

No beard here, and I certainly recall that bus. It is almost as if the Reg is insinuating that beards are some sort of storage device for obscure tech facts.

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

Lovely little weekend starter

Great episode, once more

Google reveals new schedule for 'phasing out support for Chrome Apps across all operating systems'

Codenamed Fugu?

As in the fish that is expensive, and if not handled VERY carefully by a skilled, specially trained chef, poisons the customer?

Not the code name I would choose for something supposed to make life easier for devs rolling out apps intended for the masses.

What can we rid the world of, thinks Google... Poverty? Disease? Yeah, yeah, but first: Third-party cookies – and classic user-agent strings

Google cares for my privacy?

Aw, bless!! How touching!

</sarcasm>

Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

Re: Time to grab the book ...

Nebraska was the brand name now faded away on the label. Think large cow-leather cowboy style hat. The rim of my Aussie thin roo-leather Barmah flaps around too much in the current wind

Time to grab the book ...

and read the large friendly letters on the cover

Best advice ever

I'd better be going. The one with the HHGTTG cassettes in the pocket, please. Doffs hat (large, leather Nebraska, it is rainy and windy today) to the late, great Douglas Adams

NASA is Boeing to get to the bottom of that Starliner snafu... plus SpaceX preps to blow up a Falcon 9

Is it me or is this seriously creepy?

Rich guy looking for a single female to join him for a date in a cramped spaceship with no possibility of escape, for a flight that will last days. What could possibly be wrong with that?

There's something fishy going down in the computer lab

I think it is brill, just brill!

I'll get me coat

Tea tipplers are more likely to live longer, healthier lives than you triple venti pumpkin-syrup soy-milk latte-swilling fiends

Re: missing details

Lapsang Souchong is great. I frequently have it in the afternoon, and then some colleagues think their computer might be overheating when I enter their offices, with my steaming mug of smokey Lapsang Souchong.

Keemun black teas have the advantage that they never turn bitter if you forget to take the infuser out of your mug.

BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret

Just the morale boost I needed

The "private plummet license" is a phrase I might like to use more often

Tragedy: CES squeeze forces frequent flier hotshots into economy hell

Re: One wonders how many ...

Good manners help a lot in making everybody's life nicer. I almost always wear a hat, and doffing it politely when entering the plane always puts a smile on the faces of the cabin personnel welcoming you on board, and ditto on the way out. Didn't get any formal upgrades that way but have on occasion been given more leg room on the seat next to the emergency exit (I am told this may also be due to the fact that I have a fairly athletic build, so they assume I have the strength to operate the door)

Being nice to whoever is helping you costs nothing, and makes life much more bearable

5G signals won't make men infertile, sighs UK ad watchdog as it bans bonkers scary poster

All electromagnetic radiation harmful?

Would that include the (roughly 8-10 micron wavelength) IR our body radiates? Oh, well, each photon has a far higher energy than those of 5G signals, so they are BOUND to be more damaging. So we should all avoid each other's proximity for fear of being exposed to body heat radiation. How would that affect procreation, I wonder. </sarcasm>

I spy, with my little satellite AI, something beginning with 'North American image-analysis code embargo'

Hasn't that horse bolted?

As a researcher working on image processing (including remote sensing) I must really wonder what they think this will achieve. The tools I develop for remote sensing aren't fundamentally different from those I work on in astronomical or medical applications, or document processing. After all, AI methods are supposed to be generic. In CNNs the real slog is getting enough high-quality ground-truth data. Thus, an export ban on a trained neural network for an application might just work (not likely), but a ban on the generic code itself is hardly going to help, especially if you can buy it for e.g. document processing. And of course, there isn't an absolute shitload of code for these tasks available elsewhere, for free (<cough> GitHub <cough>).

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Woodworm never affected the cuneiform encoded clay-tablet storage of our old kit

I'll be going

EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott

This sounds about as effective a threat ...

as the national philosophers' strike proposed by Vroomfondel and Majikthise

I'd better be going. Doffs hat (black fedora today) to the late, great Douglas Adams. The one with the HHGTTG radio play cassette tapes in the pocket please.

BOFH: The case of the Boss's hidden USB inkjet printer

Great Episode!

True Xmas spirit, BOFH style!

BOFH: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and the ransomware struck

Nice one!

I'll drink to that! Fitting start to the festive season.

This isn't Boeing very well... Faulty timer knackers Starliner cargo capsule on its way to International Space Station

Re: Hubris

Call a spaceship "Titanic"? And have it undergo a total existence failure?

Cheque out my mad metal frisbee skillz... oops. Lights out!

Re: Cheques still relevant... at leastt for someone

I trust the "the right voltage spike" should be applied with a BOFH-certified cattle prod

Capita unfurls new consulting arm. Hmm, what shall we call it?

And the reason we put them in the B-Ark is:

they're bunch of bloody useless loonies!

Please embark just beside the telephone sanitizers

Doffs hat (black fedora today) the late, great Douglas Adams

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Re: N-word

Or "Ni!"

I'll get me coat

Someone get Greenpeace on the line. Boffins clock carbon 'pollution' cloud 30,000 light-years wide choking galaxies

Not to mention the super-intelligent shades of the colour blue

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Re: The user replied: "The same electrician who changed that plug rewired my house last week!"

I once built a really solid dimmer system for the pub I used to frequent, and before installing it, I wanted to make damned sure the wiring in the pub was up to standards. What I found in the basement was, let's say, interesting. Green and yellow wire = live, brown = neutral, blue = earth? No problem! Any other permutation? Equally likely.

Probably the same electrician

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

Re: Dido Harding...

Scum floats, as we say here

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: AKA Libertarians

What? Systems Engineer and no mention of a cattle prod? Clearly not BOFH-certified

Apple sues iPhone CPU design ace after he quits to run data-center chip upstart Nuvia

Re: Another language

It might be in legalese, sure as hell not in any variant of English I know

We've heard of spam filters but this is ridiculous: Pig-monkey chimeras developed in a Chinese laboratory

Next up: laser-shark chimeras

Oh dear, maybe I should be going

Behuld – zee-a internet ouff tuilet tissuoe at Meecrusufft Sveden. Bork bork bork!

Next their bog rolls will be equipped with defocused temporal perception ...

and will know when they will be needed before the users do. Nice idea on the face of it, but they will become prone to sulking in basements.

I'd better be going. Doffs hat (black fedora today) to the late, great Douglas Adams

If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive software development, check out this Google-backed API

Interesting

Had been using ad-blockers for a while now, might well install Pi-Hole or AdNauseam. I must say the idea of "reverse spamming" advertisers using AdNauseam is appealing, but Pi-Hole might be more generally useful in preserving bandwidth.

BOFH: I'd like introduce you to a groovy little web log I call 'That's Boss'

Re: Ooohhh ! We're back to sneakily dreadful.

Defenestration? I thought that was more technically called a data normalisation warning

Actually, "commenturding" has a ring to it

Motorola's mid-range One Hyper packs 64MP cam, huge screen and – ooo – 'Quad Pixel' tech

Precisely! Furthermore, what is the well depth of pixels that small. The tiny pixel size must have an impact on dynamic range.

My DSLR has a pretty good 24 Mpixel sensor, on lots more silicon real estate, and with much bigger lenses attached. There is a reason I get much better images with that kit than I get with my phone (despite Leica optics). Under bright sunlight the phone gets good results, but in low light the bigger optics and sensor rule. The phone is of course more compact, but what is the point of recording 64 Mpixels when you are most likely only going to view them on at best a 4K display, and probably just your phone.

123-Reg is at it again: Registrar charges chap for domains he didn’t order – and didn't want

Did these people actually READ their own statement?

"the customer was not charged and it appears to be an isolated incident."

is largely equivalent to, "we didn't do it and anyway, we only did it once". Basic logic has gone AWOL

Re: New name?

I think the devil has more style than this kind of incompetent bungling

EU gets a bit STRESSED out about 5G: With great economic benefits come great security risks

Re: Stop Shouting

"Whut??!!"

"THEY SAID 'DON'T SHOUT WHEN YOU ARE STRESSED', HAMISH"

"Who are they calling a pest?"

I'd better be going. The one with "The Last Hero" in the pocket

50 years on: Apollo 12 failed at selfies but succeeded at dismantling a probe

Great piece

I'm going all misty-eyed with all these memories flooding back. I didn't miss the colour footage promised with Apollo 12, as all we had was a B&W TV anyway. I did watch the later missions with the Lunar Rover on our neighbours' colour TV and was stunned by the footage. My eldest son is a complete petrol head, and looks with disdain at electric cars (not noisy enough to his liking, I suppose), but I told him the coolest car EVER was electric. He asked me which car I meant, and I said "the Lunar Rover", and showed him some footage. He (grudgingly) had to agree. Kids these days

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

If the lock was REALLY smart ...

it would recognise the large axe about to be applied to its memory circuits in an act of reprogramming it will never forget if it doesn't open that door in three seconds.

A lump hammer might work as well

Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

Brings back many memories

I avidly followed every launch and landing I could. Amazing days made possible by amazing people. I don't think balls of steel would be sufficient. Titanium might be better (tougher and lighter than steel)

Facebook iOS app silently turns on your phone camera. Ah, relax – it's just a bug, lol!?

Re: Which is it

One could almost call this app a bug-eyed monster

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'll get me coat

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

Re: Star Trek

At that price a 30 year old single malt whisky would be a minimum requirement

Astroboffins baffled as Curiosity rover takes larger gasps of oxygen in Martian summers

The Zen Masters of Mars ...

have learnt to breathe very, very slowly. I bet their heartbeat is at most once per Sol. Let's face it, there's not much to do on Mars anyway, so why rush anything

I'll get me coat

Astroboffins capture video of Mercury passing across the Sun's surface

Alas, our outreach event was clouded out

We still kept going, showing people live streams from Slooh, and playing my (very quick and dirty, and somewhat irregularly sampled) time lapse of the 2016 transit in a loop (on youtube right here). They also liked seeing the telescopes, and taking a tour of the observatory. I did manage to take some shots of the transit of Venus in 2004 on film. After scanning the results, I even managed a little time lapse shown here. The 2012 transit was clouded out.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

I had a narrow escape once

I was working on my BSc thesis project at an Italian observatory in Switzerland, testing a new cryogenic IR spectrograph. First order every night was refill the liquid nitrogen and helium reservoirs in the dewar container of the instrument, before heading off to the observing control room. After that we needed to enter the coordinates of the object to observe (right ascension and declination, or RA and DEC) for short. Most of the objects were northern hemisphere objects, and were perfectly safe to observe, but one object was below the equator, and there were limits to which we were allowed to point the telescope downwards towards the horizon, in part due to the mechanics of the instrument, but also due to the fact that we might actually pour all the liquid nitrogen and helium out of the instrument, which wouldn't be a particularly good idea either. The engineer who built the instrument had worked out that this object, at DEC = -6 degrees plus a bit was just about at the limit of the specs of the instrument, but it should be safe.

I duly entered the coordinates, and the system replied with the coordinates entered, with the sensible question "Is this OK?" Until that fateful southern hemisphere object, I had always checked; found the data to be correct, and entered "Y", to which the system responded with a cheery "Then I go!", and pointed the scope at the desired object. This time I noticed I had accidentally entered DEC= -16 degrees plus a bit. Therefore I entered "N", and was horrified to get the response "Then I go!". I turned to one of the Italians on duty to ask how the hell I could stop this, and why the hell the program had ignored my "N". He replid that the system would accept essentially all input as "Yes", except Ctrl-D. The only option to stop it after the "Then I go!" was to enter new coordinates and press "Y" (or any key that chose your fancy). We rushed upstairs to the telescope, but found that the extra 10 degree rotation hadn't damaged anything, but I felt rather shaken that I might have trashed a several million guilder (at the time) instrument, let alone several years work, all because of, let us say, substandard UI design.