Posts by DJV

Hauliers report problems with post-Brexit customs system but HMRC insists it is 'online and working as planned'

a UK government IT platform

.....^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ -- well that's the problem, right there!

At 9 for every 100 workers, robots are rife in Singapore – so we decided to visit them

Re: Share and Enjoy

Yes, but which one will be first against the wall when the revolution comes?

You wood not believe what a Japanese logging company and university want to use to build a small satellite

Re: experts - please correct me here

Yes*

(* or maybe No under some circumstances where Yes isn't appropriate)

Maybe...

...instead of having it burn up during reentry, they could include a small container of hibernating woodworm* that will be released at the appropriate time and eat the entire thing up.

* and, possibly, metalworm** for the non-wooden parts.

** ah, wait, I think I can see a slight flaw in my idea...

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

8. Go to 5.

Which one? You have two fives in there - wait, you're not trying to lie to us are you about how many fives you have? Shock horror!

A time when cabling was not so much 'structured' than 'survival of the fittest'

Re: Stuck a finger...

Back when I was an apprentice TV engineer whenever we had a lot of work on we'd call in a retired engineer to help out. The guy was in his late 60s and, having worked in the trade for donkeys years, he seemed to be completely immune to electric shocks. I once saw him check to see if a ceiling light bulb socket was live by deliberately sticking his fingers in it. "Yep," he said, a few seconds later - so we replaced the bulb.

Screwdrivers in wrong places.

Not IT related but I've got a couple here:

1) Back when I was a teenager my second job was an apprentice TV engineer. Poking around in the high voltage areas of a TV with a screwdriver and not a lot of teenage wisdom would occasionally result in accidentally earthing part of said screwdriver's shaft to the chassis while the tip was in contact with something very much NOT at earth potential. The resulting spark would often temporarily spot weld the screwdriver to the chassis! Good job this was back in the valve days as those things were far more resilient to weird voltages being thrown around than the transistorised replacements that had started coming along around the same time.

2) A few years ago I had a guy out to do the regular yearly service on my gas combi boiler. He'd cleaned everything up and partly re-assembled it and was testing how well the water was heating up before putting the main case back on. At the same time he was looking around for a screwdriver that he'd misplaced. Then he noticed a "slight" irregularity through the small window that gave a view into the burner - he'd found his screwdriver! A hasty disassembly and the screwdriver, whose plastic handle was by now slightly melted, was recovered! The following year he was still proudly using the same screwdriver...

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

I once cleaned HALF of a screen - just to demonstrate to the idiots what the problem was!

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

"All office chairs are gaming chairs"

And that's why I am sticking with my secondhand office chair which is probably pushing at least 30 years old by now.

The unadjustable but detachable arms were removed very early on as they were giving me shoulder ache. The seat was recovered back around 2005 after the offspring of a deceased next door neighbour skipped her old furniture in the house clearout - my good old Stanley knife (1960s vintage and previously owned by my father) liberated the as-good-as-new back velvet material from the otherwise well-worn-out sofa which is why the seat is red and the back support is the original brown. The air cylinder packed up a couple of years ago so a bit of unused plastic waste pipe now keeps the seat at the appropriate height.

I've tried other chairs but this one is still the most comfortable - I think I will alter my will to make sure it gets cremated with me when I shuffle off my mortal coil!

Four years: That's how long Azure's App Service had a source code leak bug

"Note that description does not mention security"

Well, it's Microsoft* where security has always been an afterthought (if it's ever "thought" in the first place).

* Actually, you can probably substitute almost any computer software company here. It seems to me that security is something that's always patched in later but is NEVER part of the mix of original ingredients.

On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…

2031

Before realising it was a date, my first thought on seeing that number was, "Blimey, he's talking about the first disk drive I ever owned."

UK National Crime Agency finds 225 million previously unexposed passwords

"Depends whether you trust them or not"

Ha ha ha! Trust Google? NEVER!

And my trust in Apple is not that far behind...

The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC

Re: Blue Christmas

I've been running dual monitors on both my PCs for years until a couple of weeks ago when one of my cats managed to jump on top of one monitor and kick it over so that its face hit the mouse. On first inspection there didn't even appear to be a scratch on the monitor's screen surface. Then I turned it on and discovered that, beneath the surface, the LED part of the screen had shattered!

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: Lower than a flea's bellybutton

Maybe one of its ancestors was well into Jules Verne but, given their relatively small size, 60m down is only as far as they've got so far. Give 'em time!

Well, it's certainly taxon my brain at this time of night!

Wasn't this on Top of the Pops?

Sorry, my mistake - that was Legs & Co.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

I'm not so old that I can't scroll downwards without assistance

Some people can't!

I was once in an office where another member of staff (let's call him Colin, for that was his name and this isn't a Who Me?) was trying to explain to a customer on the phone how to scroll down a long drop-down menu list in order to view the items that were off the bottom of it. Colin was the utmost in polite helpfulness, which didn't disguise the fact that the person on the other end of the phone line was someone who obviously had problems with computers (and possibly thinking and breathing at the same time). I was in stitches laughing by the time (many minutes later) Colin had finally got the customer to realise what those bars were for on the right of the screen or drop-down menu and how to move them - maybe he'd previously thought they were just random decoration or something. What Colin said AFTER the customer had finally got a clue and was off the phone was far less polite!

Pop!_OS 21.10: Radical distro shows potential but does not play nicely with others

"Pop doesn't install GRUB; it uses systemd-boot"

Well, that's definitely a good reason to avoid it then!

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

Re: *despite* needing a reboot several times a day

Oh yes - I remember it well - I was doing IT Support between 1993 and 1998 - fun times (he says, tongue firmly placed in cheek!).

As Windows at that time was just a graphical shell on top of DOS sometimes a crash meant that you just had to type WIN again at the DOS prompt and not need to do a full reboot.

Windows 95/98 wasn't much better but, because they'd made an attempt to hide DOS, crashes would usually require a reboot. There was also the fun fact that, should Windows 95/98 manage to stay up and running without crashing*, then it would automatically fall over after 49.7 days due to a counter exceeding its limit and resetting to zero**!

* i.e. turned on and not made to do anything AT ALL!

** possibly this was fixed in 98se - there are patches for earlier versions.

More details at http://web.archive.org/web/20111224012719/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641

"So is there a version of Windows from an a) source?"

Oink, flap!

Apple wins Epic court ruling: Devs will pay up for now as legal case churns on

"allowed in-app purchases outside your app"

I think the Register forums need an extra link on posts in addition to the one that says "Report abuse". The extra one should read "Report utter stupidity".

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

Yeah, but my number is better than your number cos I added 1 to it! (And probably made the font size bigger, so there!)

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

It's

Re: Uranus Products

That's their old name, they changed it to avoid the embarrassment.

They're now known as Urectum Products.*

* with apologies to Professor Farnsworth

Why your external monitor looks awful on Arm-based Macs, the open source fix – and the guy who wrote it

"spokespeople were not available for comment"

You surprise me!

(Not)

When you think of a unit of length, do you think of Antony Gormley's rusty anatomy?

Re: dinosaurs are formed from Greek and Latin stems

Ray Harryhausen formed his from latex, apparently.

Nextcloud boss: You gotta fight … for your right … to 'plug into Windows and offer the exact same service'

I have been bitten by OneDrive failures and, for that matter, issues with NextCloud as well, and I refuse to use GoogleDrive because... well... Google. I am now using pCloud. So far, no problems.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

I licked liked what you did there.

Think that spreadsheet in your company's accounts dept is old? 70 years ago, LEO ran the first business app

Re: Shame

It takes skill and a lump or two of sugar.

Re: Trailblazers

I recommend the book "A Computer Called LEO" by Georgina Ferry for a fascinating insight into the history of LEO.

It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?

Re: "when the security of the old ones is actually better"

Ah, you mean they are so old that they have absolutely no inkling about the internet whatsoever.

Yep, that's pretty good security!

Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that

Re: "Server error 500"

Maybe it should be along the lines of:

Error code for techies: Server error 500

Translation for normal humans*: Hey, it's not my fault! Me (the bit you're holding in your hand) is working fine. I'm trying to talk to another bit a long way away out on teh interwebs. Teh interwebs seem to be working fine as I am managing to shout all the way to other bit. But the other bit isn't talking back in a way that I can understand. Until it does there's not a lot I can do at my end. I suspect coffee is called for at your end. If you're not at home should I try to find the nearest coffee shop (within walking distance**)? While you enjoy your coffee I will keep trying to talk to the other bit and I will ding at you when things are all happy again.

Error messages like this will certainly not add to the app bloat much, well maybe a little (ok, a lot then).

(* yes, I know what that is implying! :)

(** added if the thing the user is trying to get working is a Tesla***)

(*** other electric vehicles as amazing**** as Teslas are available)

(**** stop laughing)

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

Nope, not a clue... I ran your response through Google Translate and it blew up.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint laid low. Not by malware, but by another buggy Windows patch

"Days since we last shot ourselves in the foot"

A sad-faced Microsoft engineer has had to reset the "Days since we last shot ourselves in the foot" counter.

Do they party every time it threatens to reach double digits?

Kremlin names the internet giants it will kidnap the Russian staff of if they don't play ball in future

Re: I rather... live at the YMCA

At least the music's better!

ESA's Solar Orbiter will swing past Earth this week – sure hope nobody created a big cloud of space junk up there

Re: Size really does matter in this case

Maybe they should consider a flyby of Donald Trump's ego then...

Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research

What's the betting that...

...in most cases the software used will be Excel (probably an old unsupported version) that's running lots of macros that were programmed by someone who no longer works for the institution, and no one there has any clue how it works, so they will leave it to do its "magic" until the day it dies*.

* which will be 2 weeks before it needs to be used for something super-critical whose deadline can't be moved.

Should be easy to win the rights to .tv when you're name-checked in the contract's tech reqs – right, Afilias?

Re: The Population of Tuvalu is about 12,000

You are Bombastic Bob and I claim my £5!

Rust dust-up as entire moderation team resigns. Why? They won't really say

Re: Sounds like the team

And a liberal spraying of WD-40!

We asked you how your biz introduces new IT systems – and here are the results

Re: THis can be dangerous.

Absolutely!

One place I worked at had (for a while) a policy of IT bods shadowing non-IT bods for a short period to see how the non-IT areas worked. Often the benefit was two-way - IT bods understanding how other areas worked and what issues they contended with + being able to suggest improvements (that's PROPER useful improvements as opposed to top-level-management imposed ones) where appropriate.

Later on that policy seemed to slip when changes at the top occurred and I buggered off about a year later after seeing the general downward march into stupidity resulting from said top management changes.

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

Concatenated fields

Similar story except, in my case, the client "didn't want to bother" me by asking for a new fields in a customer database table, added secondary data (I think it was eBay and/or Amazon IDs and sometimes both) to the phone number field. 3 years down the line they needed to have this data separated and it took far longer (and therefore cost them more) to unpick the mess, decode which bits were phone number(s) and which were IDs and shove them into separate fields.

I expect there was a lot of "if you'd told me up front you wanted to do THAT with the data then I wouldn't have programmed it THIS way in the first place."

There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs

We fixed an issue...

"we fixed an issue that kept putting the words 'we fixed an issue' at the beginning of all our bug fix reports."

"we fixed an issue that meant the fix that was supposed to prevent putting the words 'we fixed an issue' at the beginning of all our bug fix reports really worked this time."

"we fixed an issue that meant the fix that was supposed to really work this time to fix the problem of putting the words 'we fixed an issue' at the beginning of all our bug fix reports did actually work this time even though it didn't last time."

"we fixed an issue ... oh fuck it, it's pub o'clock - just install Linux instead!"

Earth's wobbly companion is probably the result of a lunar impact, reckon space boffins

Re: Looks like a nice place to put an observation deck

And then he tries to get them stoned... (gets coat).

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: An MP today would lose their seat for that

“We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?”

“Why?”

“It saves time.”

Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent

It's a pity we don't do this...

Investment app Robinhood: Extortionist tricked our support desk and made off with customer information

Re: RobinHood, RobinHood...

Your lupins or your life!

New year, new OS: OneDrive support axed for old versions of Windows from 1 Jan 2022

Re: OneDrive is perfectly usable under Linux

Doesn't surprise me. However, in my experience it was often broken under Windows which is why I always turn it off.

Reg scribe spends 80 hours in actual metaverse … and plans to keep visiting

Re: Zwiftbook

A good reason to cycle straight into the volcano*.

* Real or virtual...

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: How to deal with calls

Someone at a place I once worked thought that she was "programming" when she was using a wordprocessor to write letters. The laughs coming from the direction of the programmers soon relieved her of that delusion!

Re: How to deal with calls

Reminds me of a software error in one of my programs back in the 1980s. I can't remember exactly what the fault was now but the person sending me the report sheet had written "funny on screen" - yeah, that made it absolutely clear as to what the problem was!