Posts by J.G.Harston

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Photoshop can be used to make images of nekkid people, report yourself for punishment beating immediately.

Re: kernel has a stable ABI?

No, he means Zen, including the (bump) before and after the speech (bump). Orac would never give an answer as polite as that.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: WD40

I've just bled the air from my central heating boiler, and of course as I put the cover back on, one of the screws pingfukkit'd down the little hole in the counter top the pipes disappear into.

Of course, being A Man, I had plenty of jam jars to rummage through to find a suitable replacement. ;)

And that's when the foreman drags the miscreant to the yard gate and bodily throws him off the premises and bans them ever entering ever again. That sort of things is an instant one-strike-dead offense.

Re: Unbelievable stupidity

We had our AGM there around 2005, followed by a tour. Fascinating place, but an embuggerance to get to by bus.

Re: BS

Could be that this wasn't an "air duster", but an actual air *cleaner*. ie, used to microabrasively remove contaminants from the surface of metalwork and polish it. Which, being a metalwork shop, is quite likely. And, being so, *will* have contained water and oil. The air is merely there to throw the water and oil at the surface of the metalwork to "scrap" off muck and give it a high shiney shiney.

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

Wots a legos? Do I need it to operate my knees?

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Baudot/ASCII

I think the major improvement of ASCII over previous encoding methods including Baudot was sorting characters in their natural order instead of them being randomly scattered across the code space. This, incidently, is what made learning Morse so hard for me, there's no structure to the encoding.

Re: In the raw, use markup

I don't care if it's metric or freedom units, as long as I can cut it exactly in half and get the next size down.

Re: In the raw

A lawyer once pointed out to me that legal professionals expect many of their documents to conform to established layout conventions.

Look at modern USA patent documents or Congressional bills. They are still laid out to 1780s standards and typefaces. :D

For program-generated documents that I want to appear "the same", I generate RTF. It's worked well for me for over 20 years now. The only hiccup I've had is with WordPad not understanding columns (I don't think it implements columns at all), but the content itself is correctly laid out and readable.

How California built one of the world's biggest public-sector IT systems

Re: Huh !!!

Dear god, what does it mean that I can't even get a public sector job?

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Yeah, after watching the fireworks out of my bedroom window, I turned a computer on and the fuse went pop. My wife insisted it was a Y2K event. I couldn't persuade her that a 12mm fusible link had no idea what date it was.

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

"Wipe and install a new OS". "Apps you've paid for but don't own"

What about the apps I've paid for and *do* own? I've put off updating the OS on my main machine because I will lose all the programs I've gathered over the years and have no idea where I got them from, and will have to track down and re-install all over again, trying to remember and recreate all the directory structures, start menus and context menus, and crucially, remember *what* programs I've got. Why can't I update the OS and just leave the damn programs in place and already there for using with the new OS? And the "wipe and...." bit also terrifies me at the prospect of all *my* stuff vanishing. Or some of it vanishing, but me not noticing it until too late. After all, *I* don't remember what's on my computer, that's the damn computer's job. I've had too much experience of update/rollout jobs where users' data wasn't respected and users demanding the now-impossible restoration of irreplacably destroyed data.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Too True

I've done that sort of tweeking specifically to get a file just under a sector size. I have ended up with loads of files where the size is xxxFx. Not being able to get something down from xxx01 is a frustating loss of a whole disk sector.

Re: Not all optimisation in software engineering has been about resource efficiency

And that's so frustrating. There are people who just innately *ARE* programmers who can't get employed, while at the same time there are people who *didn't* want to be programmers who ended up being programmers as make-do work. HUGE waste of talent.

Re: Not all optimisation in software engineering has been about resource efficiency

Computer programmers of any ability have been in short supply since the career was first invented.

That's a lie, the reality is there a YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE oversupply of programmers, how else can you explain thousands upon thousands of applicants for every vacancy and employers not even getting off their arses to say **** you to applicants?

Re: Nope !!!

Yebbut, the resources for support is Somebody Else's Problem.

Re: "long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering"

Except, again, that's throw-together instead of engineering. Two bytes will give you a 65536-year date range. Bodging gives you a 100-year range, using 16 bits to store 8 bits of information. Even *ONE* byte gives you a 256-year range.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

That doesn't seem to be "not testing against the Y2K bug" but "not testing against an end condition". If it was Y2K'd-bugged it would have gone from "1 second to..." to "36524 days to...." It was actually *CORRECTLY* functioning, showing a negative amount of unelapsed time to a past event. The 1st January *IS* minus one days before 31st December the previous year.

Regominised as Cane because he wasn't Abel?

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

YAY!!!! Worked first time!

As I pointed out in the previous article, it's the first version that consolodates exceptions into the one signal() call, and has the indir() call. So, it's possible that my code that runs happily on v5 will actually run on it, as checking the syscall list there's nothing my code uses in v5 that is missing in v4. :)

That's my Christmas project sorted.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Where ON THE DISPLAY does it say "sorry, stop pressing those buttons, you can't do that until you've set the clock"?

"oh, I wanted to make sure the button worked so I pressed harder and now it doesn't"

Well, with user interfaces now having no feedback, either mechanical or visual, that a none-response from the equipment is an explicit instruction to the user that the user hasn't pressed the button properly and that the user should try again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. It's not the user, it's the fuckwit moron user interface designers.

Example: got a new microwave. Tried to do a test cook. Pressed the minute button. Nothing. Pressed again. Nothing. Pressed harder. Nothing. Pressed as hard as I fucking could, almost breaking my finger. Nothing. Clearly the fucking stupid machine is broken.

Went to open the door to take the food out, and brushed against the 'clock set' button. The fucking thing started working.

WHY THE FICK DOES THE FUCKIMNG CLOCK HAVE TO BE FUCKING SET BEFOPRE THE FUCKING THING WILL EVEN RESPOND????????

Re: Blame the computer

8.5" disks? They must have been really specialist.

Re: Teachers/Lecturers/Academics

That's something that really irritates me. It's "*THE* baby", not "baby".

Even worse, the ones who think they can fix a problem by power cycling......... by flicking the power switch as fast as possible, the *SOLE* intention can *ONLY* be to destroy the ******ing power supply.

Seriously, what on *EARTH* causes somebody to think that the method of doing *ANYTHING* is to inturrupt the power for as short a time as possible? I first saw it in the early 1980s, and have seen it ever since.

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

"the intenet" is neutral, it's a communications system. It's like saying people have no confidence in "copper wiring" instead of people making malicious phone calls. It's what *PEOPLE* /do/ with the communication systems they communicate with that has impacts. I got a nasty letter, I have no confidence in the postal system!!!!!

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

at least Windows now bundles all the questions to the end when copying files.

Ah yes. "Can't read file xxyyzzz.thing. Cancel?"

Errr.... which file xxyyzzz.thing? What directory is it in? What have you copied so far? Where's the "skip this one and continue"? The only option being: Cancel everything and start again, not knowing where the dodgy file is or what had been copied. grrr

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

Years ago I was programming EPROMs and a handful would fail partway through, but if you restarted it would get further and further until it completed. As long as the selection bar was still over 'WRITE' all it needed was RETURN pressing to do another write attempt. As I had other stuff to do, I built a little pile of lego bricks and bridged across to the RETURN key and placed an empty mug on it to hold the key down.

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Re: Dunno

In my work with election data processing, we were forced to move from a spreadsheet-y system where you could freely scroll through data, to a database-y system where you could only see one elector's data at a time. The productivity destruction from moving from a "phone directory" format where you could see an entire street ALL AT ONCE to a "index card" format where all you could see what one person at a time was immense.

Re: Excel is not bad

Phone numbers entered by braindead illiterate morons who don't format them. Wayyyyyyyy too many spreadsheets with columns of phone numbers looking like: 7.7936e10 1.1428e10 2.0872e10.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: reminds me of the telnet test

After weeks of frustration, I ended up typing up some instructions for connecting to a certain service with puTTY with NOW TURN YOUR FIREWALL OFF! Absolutely NOWHERE in the application's documentation was there anything to indicate that "Connection refused" actually meant "Connection *BLOCKED*".

Re: screen messages

Also, people who are incapable of actually repeating what they actually said to you.

* Insert the mumble in the mumble

# Sorry, could you repeat that?

* It wants me to ask ask about the ...

nooooo. My head has "Insert the mumble in the mumble" waiting for the mumbles to be replaced. They've given me SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

It's like when you're at a till and you're waiting for the operator to start saying numbers, and when they say something not numbers it doesn't get processed.

* hardyagainingdyawannn

# Sorry, how much?

* hardyagainingdyawannn

# Pardon?

Re: Go, Look, See

Weird, as forward slash is right there on the keyboard right where you're typing along with all the other punctuation they've just been typing, yet rather than use what's right in from of their eyes and right underneath their fingers, they go hunting around searching searching searching and use a backslash for some goddammed\moronic\incomrehensible reason. YOU HAD TO PHYSICALLY TAKE YOUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM WHAT YOU WERE DOING AND *LOOK* FOR THAT INSTEAD OF USING THE ONE THAT IS RIGHT THERE!

The device *IS* protected by a fuse in the device. The fuse in the plug is there to protect the CABLE. What do you think would happen if your device has a 40A fuse and the cable can only carry 5A?

Australia bans teens from social media, but nobody thinks it'll really work

Person is banned from fishing, they go fishing, person is arrested and punished.

Person is banned from driving, they go driving, person is arrested and punished.

Australian teens banned from using social media, Australian teen uses social media, AUSTRALIAN TEEN IS ARRESTED AND PUNISHED.

That's what "banned" means.

So, children that access social media will be arrested and sent to prison?

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Lost for words

Yes, I can't remember which of the UK GP clinical applications it was; but after installing I couldn't configure the printer settings, it had to be done by one of the users logged in with their keycard inserted.

Re: Lost for words

Microsoft's in-Windows CD writer software would decide that because a CDROM was a read-only media, that it should also set all the *file* attributes to read-only, destroying the metadata. When copy things back off the CDROM to their destinatin, to get things to work you'd often have to do a recursive attrib -r *.* on everything without knowing what really should really be read-only. I tried to distribute data and applications via ZIP files on CDROM, but go too many users who couldn't comprehend the concept of archives. So, I wrote a simple "installer" than unzipped the data to the correct destination, and then got fails from a couple of users who had something installed that made ZIP files look like directories to all filesystem calls, so it bombed out with "Cannot do file actions on a directory" sort of errors.

I was on a Windows 7 roll-out project 12 years ago, and about a third of the applications we migrated refused to work unless they had ALLUSERS access to the whole harddrive.

Seriously, users only having full access to their user data has been normal programming since before the '80s, why are commercial developers still shooting holes in their head 30 years later?

Swiss government says give M365, and all SaaS, a miss as it lacks end-to-end encryption

So one government bans the use of systems without end-to-end encryption, while the UK partners up with the EU to try and ban the use of systems *with* end-to-end encryption.

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

has a name that sounds like a law firm, not the one named after a river.

Ah! Boots, Boots, Boots & Boots.

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Re: Lottery

I can't even get FTTC because I live literally on the other side of the alley from the exchange, so rusty copper wire drowning in the cracked ducting under the alley is the best I can get. I'm forced to wait until they physically switch off the copper exchange and are forced to run a fibre to me.

Re: Landlords!

Yeah, I had a utility provider slice through the middle of the stone paving slab in front of the door and fill the gap with tarmac. Another one, when installing cable feed, after I very pointed pointed to the corner of the room and very pointedly told them: drill within an inch of the corner to get through the floor: a couple of days later I found they'd drilled about six inches from the wall and run the cable under the carpet. Six months later, after the tenant reported flickering lights, I found they'd DRILLED RIGHT THROUGH THE FUCKING POWER CABLES I'D SPECIFICLALLY TOLD THEM NOT TOP FUCKING FDRILL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUNCIKC FLOOR TO FUCKING AVOID.

#

Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code

Re: Retro games

An actual Master 128 is common and cheap enough.

Re: squishy "dead flesh" type keyboard

I found a empty Atom keybaord+case and wired that up Spectrum-wise and used it. I also built an ASCII keyboard interface and wrote drivers to plug a bog standard ASCII keyboard in as well. Ah, nostalgia.

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Re: System manages to already be broken before implementation starts

Yeah, I've been fighting through the system trying to help my ex get her OneLogin validated because all her acceptable ID is in a different name to her HMRC records, and for privacy purposes HMRC are not allowed to say what the mismatch is.

Income submissions for landlords is already mandatory. It's called Self Assessment, and I've been doing it for over 30 years. (god, I feel old....)

You can renew both driving license and passport online now. And you have to do it every ten years, and when I first renewed each they required a new photo to capture any visible changes.

However, when I last did both, each renewal said "oh, we already have your photo on $OTHERID, we will automatically use that". So my driving license used my passport photo 'cos it was less than ten years since it was renewed, and my passport now uses my driving license photo 'cos it is less than ten years since it was renewed, and now my driving license now uses that passport photo because it's less than ten years since it was renewed.... all omitting to notice the original photo is from 2008.