Posts by Stu J 156 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2009
When my kids' schools send letter attachments in .docx format, it makes me stabby.
My mail client - both my on computer and phone - will preview PDFs so I can decide very quickly whether it's one for the bin or not, or if it's actually worth printing off and sticking to the fridge as a physical reminder/prompt.
Other formats I have to jump through hoops to get it to do that, inevitably either installing Microsoft bloatware or some 3rd party bloatware that I don't frigging want.
If the major economies basically decided that any attempt to trade cryptocurrency or to convert them into tangible assets was done with the intent of tax evasion and/or money laundering, the value would crash, people would stop "mining" and wasting valuable electricity and killing the planet in this particularly obscene manner.
The inconsistency of the tooling around it is an absolute joke, and the amount of time it takes for anything to happen is commensurate with a company who push out monthly updates to desktops and servers that can regularly take upwards of 30 minutes to apply.
Want to tweak a rule on an App Gateway? A good 5-10 minute wait after issuing a command. What the fuck is it actually doing under the hood? Are they printing off an instruction for an ommpa-loompa to collect, and run the length of a building to a specific bit of hardware to manually update it? Because that's what it feels like.
I wish it was illegal on an anti-trust/monopoly basis to cross-sell and subsidise cloud services based on existing licensing/service agreements, because that's how many of the companies I've worked with have ended up on Azure, and it's very rarely fit for purpose. Fortunately I've yet to come across anyone stupid enough to fall for the Oracle Cloud bait-and-switch, but it's only a matter of time.
Azure doesn't really deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as AWS and GCP, so much of it is shite barely-better-than-vapourware that barely delivers anything useful, and even when it does it takes 5x longer to accomplish the same tasks as when using AWS/GCP, for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.
Oh, and if you want to apply some sensible security, then forget using the cheap SKUs, you need the more expensive Premium or Enterprise SKUs. What a load of horseshit, using secure features shouldn't be more difficult and more expensive, thus encouraging people to do a shit job - it should be the default!
Screw Azure, and screw Microsoft. I used to be a multiple-certified M$ Fanboi earlier in my career, but now if I ever have to use any of their products or services, it makes me want to cry into my coffee.
The company I worked for commissioned hundreds of displays in a US airport about 10 years ago. Unfortunately someone forgot to update the commissioning instructions to confirm that the "AC Power Failure" behaviour was correctly set in the BIOS to "Power On", and a bug in the BIOS meant that it forgot the previous power state.
When the airport power failed for no more than 15 mins, a small group of panicked 1st line guys had to scurry round the airport with step ladders and scissor lifts to poke the Power button on every single display controller... And then go round them all at night with a USB keyboard and change the BIOS settings to ensure they always powered back on after a power failure!
Reminds me of a former colleague in 1st line support that would occasionally remotely run pssuspend on outlook.exe on the CEO's laptop, be first to answer the phone when it rang, then would magically fix the issue. The CEO loved how responsive and attentive he was, and always managed to fix the issue within a few minutes,
One regular gripe AWS has been dealing with for years has been the fact that there's no foolproof way to stop sandbox/dev accounts from accidentally running up massive bills. I wonder/hope if this is the first step towards accounts where you don't have to attach a credit card, and when your balance hits zero, your services switch off and your costs stop rising...
Would mean they could potentially do away with the Free Tier, reduce the pricing of the lowest tier of each service to compensate, and credit new accounts with $200, or something like that.
Fingers crossed...
Didn't read the EULA.
Didn't do his sums.
If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
Assuming even at bulk hard disk prices with no resilience, you're talking at least $10 per TB, or minimum $360 for the amount he was storing. Mirror it and it's $720. And then there's data transfer costs too. Far less than the total amount he paid. He thought it was a "win-lose" situation, it was actually a "lose-lose" situation.
It's AWS-hosted - and even at Glacier prices, 36TB would be $1770 per year. No wonder they fucked him off, the only surprise is they didn't do it much MUCH sooner...!
Also, if they'd let him export his 36TB backup, then the AWS Data Egress charges would have been over $3,000. I'm not surprised they just threw it in the bin if they were legally covered to do so...
Once called out a boiler repair service to fix my boiler which wasn't coming on at all. The guy flipped open the front panel, and flicked the timer control switch from "off" to "manual", the boiler fired up immediately, and he thanked me for the easiest job he'd had all day, and knocked off an hour or two earlier than he'd expected to.
My wife and kids all denied having touched the switch. I knew I hadn't, and had assumed because it was in a cupboard behind the front panel that nobody else would have touched it. Never figured to actually check...
The best thing you can do - if you have the time - is play along with them.
"Oh there's a problem with my Internet? Someone's hacked it? How terrible!"
And when they start giving you instructions, pretend that you're following them, but with the skill and pace of a blind octogenarian. Tell them you've just turned your PC on and it's installing Windows Updates. Keep them waiting a good 10-15 minutes while updating them on the fictional percentage from time to time.
When they get to the point where they ask you to download TeamViewer or something similar, tell them it's taking a long time to download. Eventually pretend you've done it. But it wants you to reboot as part of the installation process. Reboot. More Windows Update fun on reboot. When they eventually ask for the TeamViewer code, make up some bollocks number. Then start questioning yourself "is that a 1 or an I". Eventually they'll probably give up.
Basically if you can keep them on the line for half an hour, that's half an hour they can't be scamming some poor bastard who doesn't know any better. It makes their business model a bit less profitable.
It was best practice back when I did my MCPD in .NET 2.0 (here be dragons) to *explicitly* specify both the culture for certain methods (often just Invariant, or using e.g. ToUpperInvariant), and the comparison method, because if someone buggered about with the Culture settings in Windows, your application could end up behaving differently.
Not a lot of sympathy if people have been too lazy to do it or get a linter to do it for them to be honest... They're the same people that don't pay attention to the collation settings on databases then wonder why queries don't behave as expected on some deployments...
Nope, not trolling. I used PHP in a past life for a couple of years. It's very easy to do simple things very badly, and quite difficult to do complicated things well, compared to other languages and frameworks.
PHP's a toy language really. As a hiring manager I certainly wouldn't hold having worked with PHP against anyone, but anyone that thought it was a good technology choice for a new project wouldn't be coming back for a second interview. I can't honestly think of a use case for it any more where there isn't an obvious better choice.
I got the test result late on Friday night, negative as expected.
What feels like the biggest con, is that allegedly they're treating the home test they send out as 2 tests, because you're swabbing both your tonsils and one of your nostrils. But it's the same swab for both locations (tonsils first, then nostril), sent to the lab in a single tube.
If it is true, it's a scam of the highest order, purely designed to make the test capacity look higher than it is. It may also explain why they refuse to detail the number of people tested - when they could clearly get that data, as you have to enter your NI number to order the test......
I ordered a test on Monday (as part of a study, I've not got symptoms, just hay fever).
It was delivered on Tuesday.
I did it on Tuesday night and a courier collected it on Wednesday morning.
Still not had a result.
If I was ill, contact tracing wouldn't have started by now, and people I'd potentially infected would still be wandering round oblivious.
Whereas the Ceredigion tracing process was based on people being symptomatic, not testing positive. Which is why they've only had 46 cases in the entire county.
The testing clearly still isn't fit for purpose, and by extension neither is the tracing. Piss up and brewery spring to mind.
In fact, it's beer-o-clock...
It's not always a valid approach though.
Running multiple instances of a monolith (and by this I'm talking about some of the enterprise-sized monoliths I've come across that required upwards to 32GB/RAM per instance just to get them online...) can be very expensive, and unless your monolith has been explicitly designed to scale horizontally, you invariably run into problems with session management to the extent that it's often impossible to scale dynamically, so you end up over-provisioning to cope with peak load.
I'm a big fan of the strangler pattern - stick a proxy load-balancer in front of all API calls to your monolith, and once you've identified particular areas that you want to be able to scale dynamically and rapidly, break those out as microservices and redirect the calls from the load-balancer to those services, then remove that functionality from the monolith. There's no real reason why the optimal solution shouldn't be a combination of monolith and microservices.
https://drones.nats.aero/page/app
The bits that are pink and are Class D Airspace aren't prohibited, you've just got to be aware. For example, the Class D airspace above me is part of the Manchester CTR, and although aircraft traverse it going in to both Liverpool and Manchester, they shouldn't ever be below 1,400ft (if they are, we got bigger problems given how far out from both airports I am), and my drone should never be above 400ft, so there shouldn't ever be a risk of conflict.
Specifically, the CAA states: "There are no separate regulations in place regarding the flight of small unmanned aircraft in controlled airspace below 400 ft (Class A,B,C,D,E)", so even though I'm technically in Class D airspace SFC-3500, as far as drones go it's 400-3500, which is a moot point.
TL;DR - There's plenty of places you can fly your drones.
Pretty sure fines aren't tax-deductible...
Edit:
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/business-income-manual/bim42515
"Regulatory bodies
Where a trader incurs a liability to a regulatory body on revenue account that is broadly intended to cover the regulator’s costs of performing its duties in relation to the trading activities, such costs will normally be allowable even where the trader has committed a breach of regulations. However, should a regulatory body impose a penalty for breach of regulations, or should a penalty or fine become payable as a result of a prosecution for a trader’s breach of regulations, this will not be an allowable expense (see McKnight v Sheppard [1999] 71TC419)."
I've just started commuting by train again after a hiatus of about 7 years, and was pleasantly surprised that I get 4G almost all the way to work - good enough to maintain a usable SSH session, and to actually "work" on the train.
The journey takes about an hour, and is mostly rural, and 7 years ago there was bugger all coverage for most of it - and what there was was 2G at best in the small towns and villages, and very little in-between. Now it seems the only not-spot is as we come into the suburbs on the edge of the city...
1. Take hard disk out of PC
2. Hang on another PC
3. Copy cmd.exe over the top of utilman.exe (may need to fart about with permissions)
4. Put hard disk back in original PC and boot
5. Click on accessibility icon when Windows Logon screen appears
6. Marvel at the command prompt that appears running in the context of SYSTEM
7. Use command line tools to create a new user, as member of administrators group
8. Full logged-in admin access to operating system at your fingertips
Yes, Bitlocker generally thwarts this approach; but it's a fairly quick way to earn £50 for unlocking people's home PCs when they've managed to forget their password.
As a summer job when at Uni, I worked in desktop support at a government scientific research establishment. One day I got a ticket to go and deal with the brand new CEO, who was some incredibly eminent Professor in his field. He couldn't get Outlook to update his email. After a quick ping determined no network connectivity, I followed the purple network cable out of the back of his PC, under his desk, where it was tangled with a green network cable, which was plugged into the wall socket. Plug the purple cable into the wall, and hey presto everything worked... He sheepishly admitted he'd rearranged his own office furniture and recabled things himself...
As per some other comments, most EVs can cope with a two-way commute plus some nipping about in the evening without a recharge...
And similarly, per comments about letting the market decide - that's where smart meters come in. My car's configured not to charge between 4pm and 11:59pm, simply because my per-unit rate jumps from 11p to 24p at 4pm, back down to 11p at 7pm, and down to 5p between midnight and 6am. The only way I'm ever going to charge between 4pm and midnight is if I'm desperate... So market forces can, do, and will help spread the "load" (literally and figuratively)
Even better - go for the VigorBX 2000n...
> in-built VDSL modem
> 4G dongle backup option (if you want/need it)
> VOIP PBX capability (it even supports your existing analogue line and phone, but the sound quality's a bit crappy - VOIP calls using a VOIP provider is perfect though)
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