Posts by jake

My website has raised its anchor and set sail into the internet oceans without me

Re: I hate Interviews

Re: Motorcycle:

The last 9-5 I interviewed for (in 1989), I was wearing my racing leathers. When the interviewer queried my choice of "uniform", I pointed out that he had asked me to drive up from Palo Alto to South San Francisco by 10AM ... and had called at 9AM. I knew I could make it on the bike, but there was no way I was driving the Bayshore without armor ... I got the job.

The 9-5 prior to that, I wore the same outfit, for similar reasons. When queried, I responded along the lines of "are you hiring an engineer or a fashion plate?" ... They made me an offer. I counter offered, they hired me at my price point.

There is a name for that, you know.

They are called "cobweb sites".

And you thought that $999 Mac stand was dear: Steve Wozniak's Apple II doodles fetch $630,272 at auction

Re: The paper

"required paper for homework in the 70s,"

I've had one in the top left corner drawer of my desk since the '60s, usually attached to a clipboard for note taking on the go.

"To my knowledge, no one else makes this exact kind of paper."

Office Depot carries a reasonable facsimile.

"I doubt my scribblings would bring as much."

But I'll bet you and I (or others) could spend a couple hours over a beer, laughing with each other at our childhood musings :-)

Presumably the Book of Kells is just another bible. You have no need to see it because some dude called Gideon left one in the drawer of your hotel room.

"It's even less necessary when the item is a bunch of papers that had engineering documentation on them."

Ever traveled specifically to see the original work of Leonardo da Vinci? Many people have.

Re: Amazing

I've been using a typewriter and keyboard since the 1960s. I've long since given up on the thought of anybody being able to read my handwriting.

A couple questions

1) How do they know that Apple 1 board is legit? It is perfectly possible to build a replica that will fool a so-called "expert" using off the shelf components. No, you can't tell from serial numbers ... thanks to bad record keeping, and a general lack of giving a shit about that kind of documentation back then, nobody knows for certain what the numbers were. Couple that with the original design, which The Woz gave out at a Homebrew Computing meeting in '76 (making it open source(!!) ... I still have my copy, I can't be alone in this). Next, throw in a little unscrupulous silk screening of copyright notice, and Bob's yer Auntie.

Not that I would recommend doing such a thing, of course. But you've got to wonder every time one of these things turns up ... especially one in working condition.

2) I wonder what some fool would pay for my above mentioned copy? It is complete with a note from The Woz, offering to lend a hand if I need it, and his phone number. More to the point, I wonder what he'd do today if I contacted him and asked for help building an Apple 1 ... and once finished & working, what THAT would be worth.

A pub denied: One man's tale of festive frolics postponed by the curse of the On Call phone

Re: Boxing Day

We're all foreigners somewhere. Fortunately, the Sun is always past the yardarm in that very same somewhere, so cheers!

Re: Boxing Day

Punch at parties? How quaint.

It's a habit we picked up from the Brits back in the late 1600s, but as far as I know, with the exception of kid's parties, that custom went away with the repeal of prohibition. No need to disguise booze anymore.

Note for the prudes in the audience: The kiddie version usually contains no booze.

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

Re: "Not so good at spelling"

"If a cocked rifle is 'fired' with no round in the chamber then the firing pin makes contact with nothing but thin air."

You have obviously haven't closely eyeballed very many firearms, nor thought about it with any degree of concentration.

Think about it ... if the firing pin makes contact with nothing but air, how far away from the firearm does the shooter have to walk to retrieve it following every shot?

With that said, some firearms are more susceptible to damage caused by dry firing than others. Historical and most rim-fire weapons should never be dry-fired, but many more modern designs have fewer issues. When in doubt, don't dry fire unless you really have a need to do so. There is a reason that most of the world's high-end hand-made rifles and shotguns are shipped from the manufacturer with a tool (or tools) called a Snap Cap.

For the record, I have never heard an expert suggest keeping a fired round in the chamber for any reason whatsoever.

Re: " because one always keeps a spent cartridge in the chamber."

You've honestly never seen the word documentary used in the sardonic sense?

I suddenly feel very, very old and jaded.

$900bn coronavirus stimulus bill includes $600 for most Americans, $50 in monthly internet subsidies, $1.9bn to help rid the US of Huawei kit

It's worse than that .... a good deal of the money destined for Covid-thisNthat is rolled over from the last go-around. Only a small percentage of the total destined for Covid relief is going to be a new batch of money injected into the system.

Re: Outraged of Suffolk

Muphry was an orthographist.

_{If you have to explain the ... ah, forget it.}

Re: Outraged of Suffolk

An ellipses is three dots, not two.

The Kings English (1906) states unequivocally that double quotes should be used in a first level of quotation.

Convention and experience indicates that so-called smart quotes are only used by twats (and the odd Mac user) in text-only fora.

This poor punctuation thing is spreading like a disease.

Re: Re : "Not sure how the last bit relates to COVID-19 but there ya go"

"Donald might be thinking computer viruses here"

Objection! Assumes ability not in evidence.

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Dead mouse

We live in the civilized world. Ask your Vet about anti-parasite meds for cats. They are cheap, widely available, and they work. Even the local ferals around here each get an anti-flea/worm/tick treat often enough to not become infested.

The only "skin infection" I've ever seen a cat give to a human (other than poison oak) is ringworm, which is fungal (not an actual worm), and hardly life threatening. In that one case, the owner wouldn't have contracted it if she had listened to the Vet's advice and had the cat treated a couple years sooner. (Ringworm is rather difficult to pass from a furred critter to a human.)

Other skin conditions are so rare in most places as to be pretty much ignorable ... However, as always, if you see anything odd about your mog's coat, get it to the Vet post-haste.

Re: Heat detector

I was under the distinct impression that Freddie wasn't particularly into pussies.

Re: Heat detector

I'm fairly certain that the cat that hangs with the Freak Bro's is owned by nobody ...

Re: Dead mouse

Yes, in extreme cases a healthy cat can occasionally go 10 days or two weeks without food. However, it comes at a cost. Even healthy cats who don't eat for 24 to 36 hours should be considered at risk, and in need of emergency vet care. I won't go into the details of why (look up feline hypoglycemia and hepatic lipidosis if you want to know). If your cat skips meals for a day for no apparent reason, get it into the vet, pronto!

Cats can go without water for about the same amount of time as you can, about three days. However, again it can come with a cost, specifically kidney damage or failure. As with food, if your cat refuses water for a day or so, it's vet time.

Note that I am not a vet! This is not a diagnosis! Don't take the word of some random dude in an obscure techie forum on the Internet as gospel when it comes to the medical care of your critter(s)! Instead, ask your vet for verification. Your mog will thank you.

A clean desk is the sign of a diseased mind. —Old SillyConValley proverb

Re: No cats but...

Those machines were lovingly assembled entirely by hand, back when assemblers had clues, wire-wrap pins had teeth, and solder was solder.They quite literally don't make 'em like that anymore.

For example, I helped a friend restore an original 1965 PDP8 a couple years ago. Even though she had sat in his garage for over thirty years, there was no real damage other than a little bit of physical wear and tear. We had to replace a couple broken switches (cosmetic damage only), a couple components on various cards (caps, mostly), probably no more than 60 feet of cut/b0rken wire-wrap, make some new wire harness, and the drive mechanisms for both of the tape drives were hosed (I had spares, thankfully). The physical damage, and broken and missing wire, was probably from kids playing with it. We spent around 50 hours total. Today, she runs like she did when new.

Re: No cats but...

"Curiously enough the machine didn't have much of a history of board/backplane contact problems."

Not curious at all. The connectors were made out of nearly pure gold. They didn't have electrical connectivity problems ... but in labs, where we were constantly removing and inserting cards as we worked on them, they often had quite severe wear problems.

Re: Benefit

"Are cats immune to this?"

Cats, like Humans, are apex predators. Over time, as they learn the countryside, they win. Sometimes with disastrous results for the locals. Note that this is not the fault of the cat, this is the fault of the humans who introduced them.

Re: No cats but...

Throw in old-school Print Shops, especially shops where they will (die)cut paper to order. Paper dust gets into everything, but PCs are concentrators by their very nature.

Re: Not Just IT...

The "proper" term might be clowder, but I call 'em a drapery, per my married-into-the-family Great Aunt, who claims she got the term from her Grandmother. Auntie is 105 years young, so this version probably goes back over 150 years, about the same as Clowder.

Re: purring dog

Most greyhounds and whippets have a very distinct purr when they are content. It's usually quiet, and almost always short, roughly about as long as it takes you to say "I'm quite content", but it is a purr nonetheless.

About once per quarter ...

... I clean out the computers in the barns, whether they need it or not. It's amazing how much dust and hair can accumulate in a desktop PC without affecting it noticeably. The one in the main barn office gets especially bad when we are clipping horses ...

Bitter apple spray usually stops pets chewing inappropriately. Just make sure whatever you are spraying is unplugged, and has a chance to dry before plugging it back in.

Re: Keep the hoover handy

The indoor cats here are mostly Skogkatts & Maine Coons. They have full access to the outdoors, but are usually found napping indoors, draped elegantly over whatever they can shed on the most ... or trying to con somebody out of food.

I agree with the above post.

Re: Pugs, golden retrievers and IT equipment do not mix

Ah, yes. Robotic vacuums ... Here's an apropos repost.

Mine were called FRED, short for Fucking Ridiculous Electronic Device. We got four of them for Xmas one year (SWMBO's relatives are in cahoots, it would seem), so we turned one loose on each floor to see what would happen. The cats ignored them, but the dawgs took an instant dislike to them. They all met their demise in under three days.

The first to go was FRED four (the one supposedly patrolling my attic office space). It was found beeping most piteously in a mud puddle under a rhododendron at the far end of the dawg's run. It never rolled again. FRED three disappeared. We never did find it[0]. FRED two kept mysteriously falling down the uncarpeted back-stairs, until the magic smoke came out. FRED one somehow wound up in the laundry sink while a load of wash was running. None of us actually observed roboticide as it was occurring, so we don't know who the perp(s) is/are ... but my money is on the very elderly Standard Poodle, who had a rather guilty, yet satisfied look about him for a week or so afterwards.

Needless to say, we didn't repeat the experiment.

[0] Update: FRED three was found in the crawl-space under the feed barn about a year later. I have no idea how it got there, the only entrance large enough for it to physically fit is the locked trap door in the floor, and I have the only key.

Re: Dead mouse

Most people are quite surprised at how small a hole a mouse can fit through.

Buggy chkdsk in Windows update that caused boot failures and damaged file systems has been fixed

Re: Connected?

This is the wrong place to ask such a question ... and in order to get an answer in the correct place(s), you will need to learn to ask technical questions properly. Learn how here.

Re: Seriously? Wtf were Microsoft doing fiddling with chkdsk anyway?

"I mean seriously, what has changed in NTFS in the last decade?"

As hardware changes, so must the code that directly deals with it.

"Astonishing incompetence."

Yes, but not for the reason above.

Re: re: If you run a windows "server" it will always be a pain.

Except after many repairs, the Ship of Theseus would still be perfectly functional.

Re: it would appear that a change was made in another function called by CHKDSK

"If CHKDSK has not been altered and it presumably does not call any DLL's"

From TFA:

"The chkdsk utility itself is not listed in the files that are patched by these updates, suggesting that the problem is with other system files called by chkdsk."

Worrying about .DLL files is a mental red herring. chkdsk might call any file for reasons only known to Redmondian logic ... And to make matters worse, .DLL files don't necessarily have to have a .DLL extension.

How many ...

...cumulative hours has your business wasted on Microsoft fuckups in the last decade?

And you are STILL trying to defend your use of the toy OS in a corporate environment?

Glutton for punishment? Or just plain stupid?

How to leak data via Wi-Fi when there's no Wi-Fi chip: Boffin turns memory bus into covert data transmitter

Re: Maybe Typewriters should make a comeback

"Electric typewriters were not computers, they just let you edit one or two lines of text before pressing a key and typing them on paper, that's it."

Editing has nothing to do with clandestinely getting information from a device. If you fail to see how the ribbon and/or platen can act as machine writable, human readable device storage (to say nothing of the office trashcan full of used typewriter paper), I have an IBM Selectric with 25Kbytes of read/write tape for memory.

"My mother had two of them and they were really freaking big."

So I assume that you think am IBM S/360 was unhackable, because they were even bigger than really freaking big? Besides, my Smith Corona "Coronamatic" Portable electric typewriter is hardly what I would call massive.

Re: Maybe Typewriters should make a comeback

"the things had no memory storage."

You obviously never took a look at a used ribbon, or the platen after someone absentmindedly started typing without a sheet of paper properly inserted.

In the days when early computer terminals shared desk space with typewriters it was quite common for someone to accidentally type their computer login/password pair into the typewriter instead of the computer keyboard, thus leaving them neatly on the platen, available for anyone with half a cue to read.

With that said, here's an example of the KGB bugging IBM Selectrics ... There were others.

Proper form is on the top right corner, with the speaker facing into the room. Top left corner if you're a southpaw.

I was at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1977ish when someone (Steve Dompier?) demonstrated that trick with an Altair 8800. It took him about 30 minutes of toggling switches to get it to play "Fool on the Hill" or "Bicycle Built for Two". Someone watching (Roger Melen? There were several CROMEMCO folks there that day, if I remember correctly ...) was overheard to say that it was the most useful thing he'd ever seen a personal computer do. Kind of sad commentary on what was going on with computers in Silly Con Valley back in the day ... Still, onwards & upwards!

Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again

Re: Stupid question

See: threat model.

Re: Privilege Sprawl

Gee, you think?

Re: What about SIEM / Threat-detection / Traffic-profiling tools?

"Have these tools been found to be snake-oil?"

Yes. Decades ago. Bandaid on a sword wound, at best.

Security starts with wetware, not expensive patches to inherently unsecure systems ... not even if they are pretty and have all kinds of glitter for sprucing up PowerPoint slides.

Dell Wyse Thin Client scores two perfect 10 security flaws

Re: FTP?

Nothing wrong with good old FTP, when used properly.

Thin clients still have a place in Corporate infrastructure. Rather sadly, that place is not usually properly defined by "We'll save tons of money!!!" ...

They were invented, built and sold by Marketing, not Engineering. There is no Marketing course for code review or system design, therefore they don't exist.

Re: “Dude! You’re hacking a Dell!”

It's hardly hacking when you are waved in and allowed to do whatever you like.

Stony-faced Google drags Android Things behind the cowshed. Two shots ring out

Re: The problem is.....

Parser Error Message: Unable to traverse source.

Re: Note for prospective farmers:

"Why the downvotes?"

Perceived lèse-majesté ... The downvoters are the same folks who constantly gripe about Americans, and how we do things, but if anyone has the damn gall to even HINT that anything happening in Europe (especially the UK) is the wrong way to go about it, they are all over it like flies on shit. Wear the downvotes in this situation like a badge of hono(u)r, you've struck a nerve that they would rather not have exposed.

Re: Note for prospective farmers:

Damn nit-picking pedants. There's one in every crowd.

Note, however, that I wasn't talking about shooting cows. I was talking about shooting "things" behind that shed (or not shooting things behind that shed, rather ...). And I used the term "cow" generically. But you are quite right. Steers are much tastier than cows.

Have a beer with that steak. Belted Galloway. Breakfast of champions.

As UK breaks away from Europe, Facebook tells Brits: You'll all be Californians soon

Re: Yes.. I do know the way to San Jose..and further afield.

Somewhat strangely, I'm quite the opposite ... From here in Sonoma, I take 12 to 5 (yes, through the Delta), then bolt down 5 to LA and San Diego. Return trip is the reverse. It's the fastest way to get to, and then get away from the hell-hole, if I'm not flying.

I'll take 101 about as far South as Solvang or Santa Barbara occasionally.

On the other hand, if I'm heading North, I like the drive up 101. Much more scenic over-all (once you get North of Santa Rosa). Relaxing. Allows the mind to breathe. Yes, it takes longer. But in my mind it's worth it.

The UFO sightings are probably an artifact of the State of Jefferson's biggest cash-crop.