Posts by Kubla Cant 2827 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
I used to work in an office with a vending machine that made perfectly acceptable coffee using freshly ground beans and fresh milk. Once, following a trivial milestone, a colleague said "Let's have a real cup of coffee. To my surprise, he then boiled a kettle and made two foul cups of instant coffee. In his brain, "real coffee" was some kind of performative thing defined by the action of boiling a kettle and pouring into a cracked mug.
Commercial-scale software engineering always benefits from re-use and encapsulation. Doing everything with static HTML is OK for a small number of pages. But a big site with extensive commonality and a complex UI is going to be slow to develop and hard to maintain if it's just a collection of massive HTML scripts.
Syntax errors are the least of the problems when creating HTML pages. Getting the look and behaviour to meet requirements, at all scales, takes a lot of effort (for me, at least). And then you have to change it....
Distributed as part of the free software bundle with the Osborne 1. Alleged to be better than VisiCalc - I wouldn't know, as I've never used a spreadsheet for anything demanding*.
Also a spreadsheet that ran on DEC RT-11 (or possibly TSX). I can't remember its name, but the way it thrashed the disk is unforgettable.
* Many years ago, a customer asked me to build an application in Lotus 123. I couldn't get anywhere with it, probably because of lack of skills. I advised them to let me code it in DBL, a version of DEC DIBOL for the PC, as that was the language I knew best. In retrospect, this may not have been good advice.
To my astonishment, it seems that the DBL language survived until at least December 2014, when "Version 10.3 added support for creating programs that can run on Android and iOS devices".
I can only refer you to Joe Tidy, the BBC "Cyber correspondent". He says They have "god-like" access to all the inner workings of an IT system for obvious reasons..
Mind you, I don't think Joe is really a techie. His next paragraph tells us that "End Point Protection" programmes have to be able to monitor the inner workings of computers. Back in the last century it was not unknown for reactionary UK crusties to try to insist on spelling "program" that way, but I don't think I've seen it for at least 40 years.
The cost of this incident is surely going to run into $trillions. The airport shutdowns alone will see to that. But you can bet that the CrowdStrike licence will have the usual disclaimer for consequent loss or damage in the small print.
In any case, the chances of CrowdStrike having the resources to cover the cost of having crashed the world are infinitesimal. So the world will soon have obstructive security software that's supported by a company that has vapourised.
More popcorn, please.
A few years ago I was involved in a project to present a large and complex database as a GraphQL model. The idea is that downstream users of the data don't have to know the details of the relational model, they just present a JSON template of the data they need, and the software generates SQL. Essentially a duplication of the effort that had once been put into SQL interpreters.
an eldritch spark that fused his consciousness with the computer's newly sentient circuitry
DEC made wonderful computers, but this sounds like a grim fate. Best case the computer might be an Alpha or a VAX, but the environment sounds more like a PDP/11. Imagine spending the rest of your life running RSTS/E, unable to understand anything but the word "PIP".
I too used to think "burglarize" was illiterate. But it seems that it's the correct* verb for what a burglar does. The alternative "burgle" is a back-formation based on the misapprehension that the "-ar" suffix is just an eccentric spelling of the agentive "-er" or "-or", but "burglar" dates from the 1540s, while "burgle" doesn't appear until 1869, and it seems to be a joke.
* There may be some dispute over "-ize" versus "-ise".
Horizon is a Point Of Sale system
It certainly seems to be a POS system, but I don't think that stands for "Point Of Sale".
The problem with using accounting methods to correct errors is that it depends on the recording system being reliable. If, as seems likely, Horizon just makes stuff up, it won't work.
SPM: sells a 50p stamp
Horizon: debits an account by £50
Back-office: creates a correcting journal for £49.50
Horizon: debits the account for £4950
Apparently this code is in Visual Basic 6 which seems where the max int is 65,535
(Reluctantly dredging up past knowledge of VB6)
In the absence of any type declaration VB6 will use a Variant. What the underlying type will be probably depends on the phase of the moon, but it's likely to be a float of some kind. Of course floating point arithmetic is not really suitable for accounting systems anyway.
Since it's a Variant function, you can pass it anything you like - string, date, boolean, object... and it will faithfully return something or other. Unless it errors, in which case the lack of error handling will probably make itself felt.
The judge's summing up in the class action against the PO makes it fairly clear he thought the technical witnesses from Fujitsu and the PO were either evasive or lying.
It also appears likely that the PO lawyers failed in their legal duty to reveal to the other side facts that would harm their case. This is important: a trial is supposed to be a mechanism for establishing truth, not a win-at-any-cost competition.
The unfortunate thing is that the poor old taxpayer will end up footing the bill, as the PO makes no profit and can't be allowed to cease trading. And if the lying bastards get sent to prison we'll be paying thousands to keep them there. But it'll be worth it.
"Did anyone benefit financially from the errors in Horizon or the unauthorized activities of Fujitsu employees accessing terminals remotely?"
It seems the "reimbursements" paid by the SPMs were held in suspense accounts for a year or two, then rolled up into PO trading profit (aka loss).
For reasons I can't recall, I upgraded to Windows 11 a few months ago. It's buggy junk. Several times a day copy/paste stops working, and the only solution is to restart Windows Explorer.
I've been using Windows for 30 years, since 3.1. I've used GUIs on Linux, Mac, and even VMS. The clipboard always just works, and you come to rely on it. How on earth can Windows reach version 11 with instability a fundamental service like this?
The useless Microsoft forums suggest that I look for an application is the cause of the clipboard problems, but give no idea how to identify such an application. It seems unlikely, as the applications I run are far from exotic. In any case, what kind of Mickey Mouse architecture would allow such interference?
The Post Office fiasco has all the hallmarks of an incompetent attempt to take a monolithic legacy system and tart it up to meet requirements for massively distributed transactions. Confirmed when I read that Horizon is basically an old ICL system. Lipstick on a pig.
It says a lot about Fujitsu that they claimed there were no error logs*. Whoever heard of such a thing? And they apparently allowed support staff unrestricted access to live financial data without logging that. Has anyone here ever worked on a serious system where that was allowed?
Quite apart from the morality of using a live system for testing, this doesn't prove anything.
The implication is that the circumstances that cause the dragon code to execute are hard to understand, and probably very rare. So it won't fail on the first release, while you're watching it, but it may fail several releases down the line, when your change is no longer evident.
Healthcare isn't exactly a local concern. Most countries in the world have a healthcare system of some kind. The NHS is only unique in its funding model and in its monolithic structure. The requirements should be much the same everywhere, and the data sharing problems should be, if anything, greater in less closely-integrated systems.
Most of the other requirements of healthcare seem to be filled globally. The NHS doesn't design and manufacture its own equipment, and its staff is notoriously drawn from all over the world. So why doesn't it use IT systems that are in use elsewhere?
It's not that many years since the last attempt to address all the NHS IT requirements in one gigantic project. The only output from that seems to have been a gigantic bill.
Upvoted.
But in most cases the best solution is to refactor the 80 lines of stuff to one or more well-named methods. The only exception I can think of is where it's 80 lines of essentially repetitive code, so there's little advantage in moving it to an 80-line method.
The way that human brains are wired, there is focus on a subject, and negation is not instinctively processed
An interesting related phenomenon:
In streets where pedestrians cross, the words "LOOK RIGHT" are often written on the roadway next to a central reservation or pedestrian refuge, because that is the direction the traffic is coming from when you're in the middle of the road. To avoid confusion, or perhaps just to balance things out, "LOOK LEFT" is written in the roadway at the start of the crossing (i.e. next to the pavement).
When you're getting ready to cross a busy road, you don't naturally look just in front of your feet. Your gaze naturally fixes on your destination, the island or reservation in the middle of the road. So you don't see "LOOK LEFT", but you do see "┴HפIɹ ʞOO˥".
There is no well-established convention that inverted text means the opposite of what it says, and most people can easily read two short words upside down without even registering that it's inverted. So they look the wrong way.
It's obvious various roles could never be done remotely, or are difficult at best.
Less obvious than you might suppose. Here's a story about a GP who lives 250 miles away from her surgery and works from home.
it uses a semi-automated system to link calendars with national holidays to its content creation process
Seems to imply that Kristallnacht (or, as in the message, the even more explicit "Reichspogromnacht") is a national holiday in Germany. Do they have holidays to commemorate all their appalling actions?
we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawn
In pursuance of a long-standing* but mostly inexplicable feud between Trinity College and next-door Balliol College in Oxford, a group of Balliol undergraduates turfed the Trinity Junior Common Room with grass from the quad outside**.
* It was long-standing in 1967. I've no idea if it still exists. Today's pranks probably come with trigger warnings.
** I never saw the result myself, and I expect it was elaborated in the telling, with a few sods of grass turning into a wall-to-wall greensward complete with daffodils.
Yes.
At the start of lockdown I was faced with an urgent requirement for a work laptop running Windows. I bought a reconditioned Lenovo from Amazon for about £120. Arrived next day, big, ugly and scruffy, complete with SSD, USB WiFi dongle, numerous USB and video ports, and Windows 10 Pro. Still giving excellent service.
"Please print out this form, fill it in, and send back a scan."
Even worse, "Please print out this 20-page contract, sign the last page, scan all 20 pages back in, and email it to us".
So I try to add a scanned signature to the original PDF. Not allowed.
Maybe I can just print the final page, scan it and replace it in the original document. Not possible.
Libre Office can edit PDFs, but the result never looks quite like the original document.
The only solution seems to be to print the thing to 20 single-page image files, edit the final one to add a signature, then assemble them all into a new PDF. But life's not long enough, so print'n'scan it is.
Why the gratuitous disrespect for the River Ouse*? It's just across the road from my house, and I can confirm that although not fast-flowing, it's quicker than a slug.
*I appreciate that there are several rivers called Ouse, but the other Ouses are generally subject to a geographical qualification. Ours is the Great Ouse, and therefore the defining instance.
… or like everyone else their ability to investigate (and prosecute as required) has been hampered. by Government funding cuts
Not true.
When the original IR35 was introduced in 2000 there was a certain amount of panic among contractors. Then it was pointed out that HMRC (Inland Revenue as it then was) has hardly ever won an employment status case, including the odd one where they tried to prove somebody was not an employee.
No question that £sd was an inconvenient system and nearly impossible to automate.
But there's no doubt that having to spend a lot of time at primary school practising arithmetic in £sd and Imperial units was very good training. Perhaps it was time that could have been better spent on other aspects of maths (though to my limited knowledge the subjects included at O Level, as it then was, were more advanced than those in today's GCSE maths).
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