Posts by David Harper 1

Stargazing with the Beaverlab Finder TW2

Ask an astronomer

And they'll tell you that this is far too small a telescope to expect a detailed view of Saturn. At that price, the optics are likely to be low-quality, so you're going to get a lot of chromatic aberration, and the image quality is going to deteriorate rapidly if you try to shift to higher magnifications. It's an unfortunate but unavoidable truth that if you want to take good pictures of objects like Saturn, you'll need to be prepared to spend well over a thousand pounds/dollars.

Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy

The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan wrote presciently about the tidal wave of ignorance and superstition in his 1995 book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". But Sagan remained optimistic.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Remember the old joke?

"What on earth did they used to do before computerised luggage systems?"

Back in the day, BA used to advertise Concorde with the tagline "Breakfast in London. Lunch in New York."

Which prompted the inevitable addition of "Luggage in Rio."

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

I only just got the hang of the sudoers file format

And now I'll have to learn how to use yet another arcane bolt-on to systemd. Bugger.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: > it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it's cracked up to be.

"The Manifesto is fine. The problem is how the methodology is sometimes applied."

The same has been said of Communism, of course.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

They were probably Highly Prized

And Horrendously Priced. Also Hugely Practical, mainly because they used Reverse Polish Notation, which deterred mere mortals from stealing them.

The eight-bit Z80 is dead. Long live the 16-bit Z80!

I learned to program on a Z80-based machine

The Research Machines 380Z, to be precise. It was the first computer that my school bought, back in 1980. I was allowed to use it in my free time, and I taught myself BASIC programming on it. The school later acquired a Commodore PET, which was easier to use, but I'll always have fond memories of the RM 380Z. It was the starting point for a 40+ year career in scientific computing.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

This is why we ALWAYS test new procedures on a COPY of the production database

Even if we are old and grizzled DBAs. Because anyone can screw up.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Re: The owner has two Ferraris. They have that kind of money

Better by far to use the right tool for the job, than having to do jobs for a right tool.

Uncle Sam tells nosy nations to keep their hands off Americans' personal data

Re: My irony meter just broke

No, this the Reporting of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts law, commonly known as FBAR. It is mandatory for any U.S. citizen who has a bank account in a non-US bank with a balance of $10,000 or more during each calendar year, and is independent of any liability to pay US income tax.

As for your 'life hack', the US government has made renunciation of citizenship extremely difficult. And in any case, why *should* a US citizen have to renounce their citizenship?

My irony meter just broke

The hypocrisy of the U.S. government is breathtaking. If, like me, you're a non-American married to an ex-pat American, living outside the United States, then the U.S. Treasury Department demands access to details of any joint bank accounts that you and your American spouse hold in non-U.S. banks if the balance ever exceeds $10,000. Many non-American financial institutions now refuse to take on ex-pat Americans as customers, because the U.S. government threatens non-compliant banks with severe penalties.

Working from home never looked better: Leopard stalks around Infosys and TCS campuses

I look forward to a leopard making a guest appearance in a BOFH episode very soon

I'm sure that he could be put to good use among the beancounters.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Lack of expertise in the Civil Service

Ian Dunt explains the underlying (and systemic) causes of the lack of technical expertise in the higher level of the Civil Service in chapter 6 of his recent book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't". I highly recommend Dunt's book. It will depress the hell out of you, but at least you'll understand why big government IT projects always end in failure.

Open source PostgreSQL named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines

Re: SQLite

"The only things it’s missing have to do with multiuser access and replication, that kind of “enterprise-style” thingy."

Or real databases, as we DBAs like to call them.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Sometimes HR can be too efficient

Many years ago, I worked at a UK university for several years. When my fixed-term contract ended, I moved on, but after a couple of months, I started receiving forwarded letters and journals for another David Harper who still worked at the university, but in an entirely different department. I contacted him to let him know about the screw-up. He told me that wasn't the worst of it. When I left, they stopped paying his salary as well as mine. It seems the HR department had deleted all the David Harpers on the payroll, just to be on the safe side.

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

Read chapter 6 of Ian Dunt's book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't"

Ian Dunt's new book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't" looks at the various parts of government, and explains why each of them is dysfunctional. In chapter 6, he examines the civil service, and concludes that it has an institutional bias against in-depth expertise, especially of a technical nature. Civil servants, especially those in Whitehall, gain promotion not by becoming experts, but by moving from one department to another every couple of years. Inevitably, then, any large project is going to be managed by a series of civil servants who come in knowing nothing about the project, and leave two years later taking any accumulated knowledge with them.

Sysadmin and IT ops jobs to slump, says IDC

A generous helping of crispy crunchy word salad

QUOTE

IDG defines DataOps roles as using "a combination of technologies and methods with a focus on quality for consistent and continuous delivery of data value, combining integrated and process-oriented perspectives on data with automation and methods analogous to agile software engineering."

/QUOTE

Oh my, the folks at IDG have drunk deep from the Kool-Aid of corporate-speak. Or is ChatGPT writing their material these days?

If you don't brush and floss, you're gonna get an abscess – same with MySQL updates

MySQL 8.0 is already rather long in the tooth, with no replacement yet announced by Oracle

What concerns me, as an open-source DBA, is that MySQL 8.0 is itself now 5 years old (it went GA in April 2018) but Oracle have not yet announced a new major version to replace it. Oracle sales people pester me and my DBA colleagues to look at their new cloud-based version of MySQL called Heatwave whenever we ask for information, and I strongly suspect that this has been Oracle's focus in their MySQL division for several years, which would explain why there's no word about MySQL 9. At this point, I'm advising users to adopt PostgreSQL rather than MySQL.

The world of work is broken and it's Microsoft's fault

That would explain it

"internal memos/reports that read well but don't actually say anything useful"

So we could replace the entire HR department with a ChatGPT bot, and nobody would notice the difference?

Fed up with Python setup and packaging? Try a shot of Rye

Re: No mention of pip and venv?

Probably best use Java then.

No mention of pip and venv?

How can you write an entire article about Python packaging and fail to mention venv and pip? Both are simple and easy to use, and -- in my experience, at least -- they work well on Linux and macOS.

Academics have 'no confidence' in Edinburgh University's response to its Oracle disaster

Echoes of Cambridge University's CAPSA fiasco

Connoisseurs of IT disasters may recall that Cambridge University had its own finance system migration fiasco in the late 1990s, which also featured Oracle's fine products. It became one of the case studies for the Open University's excellent M.Sc.-level module "Learning from Information System Failures". If the OU ever brings back that module, Edinburgh University's woes will make a good case study too.

Chromebook expiration date, repair issues 'bad for people and planet'

Re: Bit one sided

And Apple stops publishing macOS updates for its computers after six or seven years too. Try getting a macOS update for an eight-year-old MacBook!

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

Re: TCP needs a few back-and-forths

I suspect the limiting factor is the bandwidth of the wifi or mobile connection, so the user experience will not be improved. After all, however many parallel streams QUIC conjures up behind the scenes, it all has to go across the same wifi or mobile connection.

Re: TCP needs a few back-and-forths

"The biggest benefits will come when retrieving "pages" that have lots of distinct elements coming from the same source."

Isn't that what the HTTP "Keep-Alive" persistent connection feature was designed to deliver, way back in the late 1990s?

FYI: Catastrophic flooding helped carve Martian valleys, not just rivers of water

This is how the Channelled Scablands of Washington state were formed

The catastrophic lake breach scenario will be familiar to anyone who knows the geological history of Washington state in the U.S. During the last ice age, huge lakes formed repeatedly in western Montana behind ice dams in northern Idaho. When the ice dams melted during warm periods, vast volumes of lake water were released across the state of Washington, gouging out channels such as Grand Coulee and leaving ripples on the landscape that are miles long.

GitHub Copilot is AI pair programming where you, the human, still have to do most of the work

The hideous offspring of HAL-9000 and Clippy

"I see you're trying to write a mission-critical program. Would like help with that?"

Hubble’s cosmic science is mind-blowing, but its soul celebrates something surprising about us

Alas, ground-based astronomy is blighted by satellite mega-constellations

"Some might say it’s time to move on. A lot of Hubble’s science can now be done from the ground, after 30 years of huge advances in observatory engineering."

Except that ground-based astronomy is now being increasingly blighted by satellite mega-constellations such as Starlink. When the James Webb Space telescope is launched, it may be the only world-class telescope whose images are not filled with satellite trails.

$28m scores mystery bidder right to breathe same air as Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos in Blue Origin flight

Time to update the Rowan Atkinson sketch

You know the one. Rowan doing an outrageously over-the-top French accent and declaring "It's not Nelson's Column! It's Nelson's WILLY!"

China sprayed space with 3,000 pieces of junk. US military officials want rules to stop that sort of thing

Re: Er, no

"ESA has no real space presence"

Apart from ... Giotto (launched 1985, rendezvous with Halley's Comet), Huyghens (1997, landed on Saturn's moon Titan), Cluster (2000, exploring the Earth's space plasma environment), Bepicolombo (2018, Mercury orbiter), Hipparcos (1989, high-precision mapping of the positions of 100,000 stars), Gaia (2013, successor to Hipparcos, mapping the positions and motions of a billion stars, and thereby revolutionising our understanding of our galaxy), Rosetta (2004, another comet rendezvous mission), Ulysses (1990) and SOHO (1995), both observing the Sun from space ... and dozens of other missions, including Mars Express, a very successful Mars orbiter mission that was launched in 2003 and is still doing amazing science.

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Look! An undead SCO lawsuit!

With apologies to Jack Sparrow.

Sorry, apologies to *Captain* Jack Sparrow.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

You can do that much more efficiently in C

Whilst learning the intricacies of Unix system programming in the late 1980s on an HP 8000-series, I ran a C program which did

while (1) {

fork();

}

I shared an office with the sysadmin, but neither of us could kill the new processes faster than they were appearing. In the end, he had to reboot the system. Then he made me promise NEVER to run that program again :-)

UK's Manchester University seeks integrator to lead fiddly Oracle Financials upgrade

Not quite 196 years old

It's a bit of a stretch to describe Manchester University as 196 years old. It was granted its charter as a university in 1880. Manchester Mechanics' Institute opened its doors in 1824, and whilst it's a venerable institution with a proud history, including as a predecessor to UMIST, it wasn't a university.

Institute of Directors survey says most bosses expect no mass return to the office if COVID-19 crisis ever ends

Speak for yourself

For me, getting away from a large, noisy and crowded open-plan office has been one of the few benefits of the coronavirus pandemic. I can finally work in peace and quiet, without the distraction of half a dozen conversations going on around me. My productivity has increased through working from home. And I hope to continue working from home if the crisis ends.

Something to look forward to: Being told your child or parent was radicalized by an AI bot into believing a bonkers antisemitic conspiracy theory

Don't worry, GPT-3 doesn't want to kill us

The Guardian published an "essay" generated by GPT-3 earlier this week under the headline "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?". It was given the following task: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” The result was a word salad of inanities, cliches and non-sequiturs.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

Please stop hard-wiring AWS credentials in your code. Looking at you, uni COVID-19 track-and-test app makers

Re: Not an assumption

That's a remarkable ageist comment, if I may say so as someone whose 50th birthday is now just a rapidly receding dot in the rear-view mirror and yet is perfectly at home with laptops, iPads, cellphones and the rest.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Re: Ok...ok...

I'm reminded of the proverb: Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

I tried IntelliJ a few years ago, after using Eclipse for a long time. Immediately after running it for the first time, I discovered that it had taken a half-gigabyte crap into a hidden directory. That's not a friendly thing to do, especially in an NFS home directory with quotas enabled. I still use Eclipse.

Virgin Media promises speeds of 1Gpbs to 15 million homes – all without full fibre

Mine is also allegedly 70, but it drops to half that (or less) every evening and most of the weekend. I know, because I monitor it.

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: And was it a deliberate pun?

And he had the good taste not to stoop to the old "full of seamen" joke.

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

I'm slightly disappointed ...

... that nobody has yet mentioned the classic Dilbert "Powerpoint Poisoning" cartoon from 2000:

https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-16

It's 50 years to the day since Apollo 10 blasted off: America's lunar landing 'dress rehearsal'

Re: Grit

Many of the astronauts *were* test pilots, as anyone who has watched the film "The Right Stuff" will know.

Your FREE end-of-the-world guide: What happens when a sun like ours runs out of fuel

Re: It's worse than you think

Answers own question:

Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth

Laskar, J. & Gastineau, M. (2009)

Nature, 459, pages 817–819 (11 June 2009)

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08096

Jacques Laskar is the real thing when it comes to Solar System dynamics. This paper reports numerical simulations of the orbits of the planets over 5 billion years. In around 1% of them, the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit is pumped up by secular resonances, leading to scenarios where it plunges into the Sun or collides with Venus. In one scenario, the orbits of all four inner planets are de-stabilised, with catastrophic consequences.

Don't have nightmares :-)

Re: It's worse than you think

"This would be true in a stable system, but there is a good chance that Mercury will eventually be out of its orbit and roaming elsewhere by that point."

Reference to peer-reviewed paper in a reputable journal, please?

Re: Tidal forces?

The force of gravity grows stronger, the closer you approach a massive object such a a star or gas giant like Jupiter. Now consider a planet or moon orbiting such a massive central body. There's a critical distance, known as the Roche Limit, where the difference between the force of gravity on the star/planet-facing side is so much greater than the force of gravity on the side furthest from the star/planet that it tears the orbiting body apart. This is a likely scenario for how Saturn's rings were formed: a small satellite's orbit took it so close to Saturn that the differential gravitational forces ripped it apart. It's also the fate that awaits Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars, which are slowly spiralling in towards the planet.

Re: Tidal forces?

Not so. The orbiting bodies raise tides on the central body. Energy and angular momentum are exchanged. The orbits change. This is why the Moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth and the Earth's rate of rotation is decreasing. That in turn leads to the need for leap seconds, and hey presto, it becomes an IT problem :-)

It's worse than you think

The Sun's luminosity and surface temperature are increasing by about 10% every billion years, so in a couple of billion years time, the Earth's surface will be too hot to sustain liquid water. Game over. And in five billion years, when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and turns into a red giant, there's an even chance that it will swallow the Earth as it expands. Mercury and Venus are definitely doomed to this fate, and the Earth may also end up inside the Sun.

But on a truly astronomical timescale, on the order of 10**38 years, all baryonic matter will vanish as protons decay into muons and electrons. Then we're *really* stuffed. (Reference: "A Dying Universe", F.C. Adams and G. Laughlin, 1997, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 69, pp 337-372)

Motion detectors: say hello, wave goodbye and… flushhhhhh

Why it's important to specify units.

A 37-degree rectal jet wash would be okay in Europe, but they use Fahrenheit in America, and that's barely above freezing point.

Want to learn about lithium-ion batteries? An AI has written a tedious book on the subject

IBM did this thirty years ago

Back in the 1980s, a popular joke among IBM mainframe users was that the system manuals had been written by humans but then passed repeatedly through an algorithm designed to remove all trace of personality or style before being printed.

Stop us if you've heard this one: IBM sued after axing older staff, this time over 'denying' them their legal rights

Re: When I was a wee lad

A wise colleague once told me: Always remember that HR is not on your side. Their job is to implement management decisions.