* Posts by bpfh

1002 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2011

Google's .bro file format changed to .br after gender bother

bpfh
Mushroom

Re: To others...

Oh the woes of the politically correct days we live in....

In my time, the use of reserved words in my French workplace made everyone smile, such as "con" (generic insult & pejorative term for female private parts), "nul" (Idiot) or even "bits" (pejorative term for male private parts), and associated jokes involving all 3... but no-one went ape about this, it was just accepted....

The same thing about other file extensions that we have come across, in both English and French make everyone smile from time to time, but as time goes on, everyone has an opinion and the loudest are the wishy washy politically correct kind who moan "I'm offended" and believe that that gives them the morally high ground to impose those view on others.

Anyway, in this day and age, we are no longer limited to the 8+3 filenames, why not have just left it at .brotli, .brot or .bli ?

Political Correctness will be the end of me...

bpfh
Trollface

Re: .bro or .br?

.bro's before .sis's man...

A thousand mile Atom merci mission: Driving from Monaco to London in an open-topped motor

bpfh
Pint

Breathalyzers are no longer obligatory in France

Recommended but not obligatory, and no penality or fine of you don't have one.

The law was repealed by President Hollande as the fact of having one in the car and it blowing negative would cut no mustard with the law who would still control you anyway and do you if it came back positive.

The fact that this law was ramrodded through by the previous président, Sarkozy before the end of his term - who just so happen to have a mate who owned the biggest French breathalyzer company - had no bearing at all on this obligatory freedom to self test being pushed into law and flogging 40 million extra units at 3 euros a pop...

FOUR STUNNING NEW FEATURES Cook should put in the iPHONE 7

bpfh

Re: What flavour is your phone?

*Kool-Ads

Fix'd

More BlackBerry layoffs: 200 Venice devs binned amid Android shift

bpfh
Go

Shut up and take my money...

Android, but with a decent mail app and the worlds best mobile keyboard.... I need one, stat!

BOFH: Press 1. Press 2. Press whatever you damn well LIKE

bpfh
Stop

On our desk phones...

8 will get you reverse, not go forward into mission control...

I want to pitch this to my boss for our customer support hotline. We won't solve your problems, but you will have a fun time whilst we endevour to provide our best and upmost efforts to ignore you...

Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux

bpfh
Facepalm

Re: Any comment from Steve Balmer?

They won't have much option but to play by the rules. The Linux kernel license (i.e. the GPL) is pretty clear on the obligations that MS have to satisfy

Didn't this train wreck already happen between Sun & Microsoft with the MS Java fiasco of the late 90's or have I entered a reality distortion field?

World finally ready for USB-bootable OS/2

bpfh

Re: What problem will it solve ?

Ahhhh, the printer problems. I remember getting hold of the Lexmark software engineering manager to run tests on why our fleet of Lexmark Zsomthings (Z12 ?) were printing properly, but with the print head only making one side-to-side trip every 10-15 seconds (so 1 minute to print out one line of text). Ended up being told to comment out a line in the config.sys (the OS/2 config.sys being massively larger than it's MS-DOS counterparts), and deactivating some active communication setting on the parallel port fixed the issue. Took us about 3 weeks to find out what the hell was going on with the drivers, with a developer debugging on the phone with us.

Excellent support and knowledgeable people. Probably the only reason I got that far up the support chain was that I was working for IBM, on an IBM site and we had about 500 of the damned things...

A BOFH friendly cloud service? Shurely shome mistake...

bpfh

Re: the only BOFH cloud

Powered from someone else's bill, on someone else's hosting account, contains a cache of pr0n sites, using 80% of someone else's bandwidth, contains physical site security via abuse of the fire extinguishing system, and also a combination of 1000 volts DC feed from the backup batteries through the rack frame, no earth, damp floors and in the basement for some strange reason, high powered chest freezer "big enough to hold a man" and an industrial waste shredder, already has system upgrade capacity stolen acquired at no cost, but still requests a paypal payment to the cloud hoster to "install" it, payable to simon@bofh.ntk.ne....

Atlantis: The DSSD, data centre disk killer rising from the deep

bpfh
Coat

Re: DSSD?

Those are the ones. You thought fans and aircon were loud, how about 5 racks of cheap Chinese 3.5 FDD's rattling away! :)

Microsoft's 'successful' Nokia slurp kills off Lumia photo apps

bpfh
Mushroom

Re: An enhanced user experience!

> Ignore the Cloud with the silver lining, if you're not storing them in folders and keeping annotations in text files and backing them up you're doing it wrong.

This!

This is my current nightmare: Most reciepts and bills are coming in electronic formats, photos are only digital, and even the tax return forms are digital where I live...

So how to back it up? Only OneDrive Pro (not the general public version) and DropBox (I believe) supports file encryption on your resting data, so if you are storing on the cloud, you need to encrypt if you want to make it harder for someone to drop the dox on you. Local backups depend on the health of your hard drive or usb keys, and not getting them stolen or destroyed.

I believe Google makes 3 distinct backups of their server data in different locations so maybe a local computer "live" storage, with regular dumps to a cheap usb key for the stuff You Cannot Afford To Lose, rotating the key every year to avoid that failing, plus an encrypted sync to the cloud of the same data?

We have hieroglyphs carved into the side of the pyramids that have survived over 5000 years. I can't even access my high school report typed up in 1997 sitting on a floppy somwhere that has probably died anyway....

Photoshop for 40 quid: Affinity Photo pushes pixels further than most

bpfh
Alert

Re: £40 too expensive...

Ah, the floting windows that threw bits of the interface all over your multiple screen real estate has finally gone?

Is it worth dumping Paint.net yet?

Entity Framework goes 'code first' as Microsoft pulls visual design tool

bpfh
Headmaster

Re: And this is why

<rant>

I was brought up on C, PHP and VB6 + VBA, so I know both from the code up and from the GUI down methods, and for some time, the idea of using a GUI, even for basic, simple, no frills "get some user input in a user friendly interface, do somthing with it, and please get it delivered in 2 hours" environment, you will have a hard time beating a form based event driven approach, it works.... then the Linux kiddies spouting W3C compliance started taking over the shop, code is everything, it must be pure, we don't care if the end user can't understand, and oh, it will take us a day to write the interface, by hand, in XML, and we have not even started thinking about the logic yet...

With Adobe Flex, hand building a GUI with XUL and XAML was the new Apache managed future. a GUI interface design? Na, too easy, only noobs with Frontpage do that...

20 years ago, the buzzwords were RAD, drop in controls and WYSIWYG prototyping. Dev tools were popping up left right and centre. Access was thought of as a powerful database tool that an accountant could use to pull and query data - and they did, Windows apps became easy with Windev, VB and Delphi. AOLPress, Amaya, Frontpage and Dreamweaver gave people a chance of building their web pages, and started the interest in the net, and shaped what we have today...

Today though, it it's not coded by hand in (notepad|vi|notepad++|eclipse), you are doing it wrong, and I personally, as a reactionary old fart, think that we are slowly sinking back into the dark ages, efficiency be damned.

</rant>

Boffins promise file system that will NEVER lose data

bpfh
Angel

Personal experience...

I have not had a system crash corrupt "normal" data in years (there were a handful of occasions where we were using McAfee disk encryption on laptops and the encryption got lost.... but a full disk decrypt allowed us to run a checkdisk and not only was data recovered but the system booted perfec'.

What I have had though is bloody new/recent disks dying, from power outages, from a slight knock well inside their G shock tolerances (running or stopped) or just going into the corner and never coming out of it's eternal sulk...

I guess this FS does not address that problem ;) But of course, everyone has backups don't they. Don't they? Hello? Hello ? Echo ? Echo echo...

NHS site defaced with screed protesting Syrian conflict

bpfh
Mushroom

I'm not sure what is worse...

The fact that the government got another state site hacked, or the fact that the NHS has it's own version of TripAdvisor and probably paid through the nose for it - it's not as if people actually *want* to go to hospitals to have bits of them fixed or removed....

Back to the Future: the internet of things as imagined in 1985

bpfh
Thumb Up

> most of this could be done with a Raspberry Pi

Why do you think the boxes are so effing big?

Microsoft Edge web browser: A well-presented mea culpa

bpfh

Re: HTML5 performance

< table >, < tr > and < td >, because displaying tabulated data is an arse with &nbsp; , and < form > to go with the above mentionned < input >...

Google to French data cops: Dot-com RTBF? Baiser ma DERRIERE

bpfh
Headmaster

Would not be emotive enough...

A bored "suce mes boules" or an emphatic "va te faire enculer" would be the more adequate phrase...

bpfh
Headmaster

Re: Better translation

It would also be "Mon" and not "ma" IMHO.

Just ONE THOUSAND times BETTER than FLASH! Intel, Micron's amazing claim

bpfh
Stop

Re: A MAJOR breakthrough,

How much will they charge for this - compared to Flash for example?

TalkTalk deactivates hundreds of email accounts after legacy spam scare

bpfh
Mushroom

Tiscali?

I thought that they automatically sold your addresses to performance marketing companies to get you spammed within 24 hours of signing up with them.... at least that's what happened in France...

Bloodthirsty Microsoft prepares for imminent 'major' job cuts

bpfh
Devil

"Microsoft is pulling out of display ads and will hand operations to AOL and AppNexus"

AOL still exists?

Did a SUPER RARE Sony-Nintendo PlayStation prototype just pop up online? Possibly, maybe

bpfh

Where did you see an RJ45 port?

I can see the svideo, a handfull of RCA's and 2 specfic not so say propriatory output ports, nothing RJ like, unless you mean the small rectangular hole below RFU DC out. Seems way too thin to be an RJ45, plus no locking tab cutout. More like a blank for another optional connector.

Giganto French telco merger: Altice makes eyes at Bouygues

bpfh

Re: Need to get out more?

First of all the correction: "When Numericable brought SFR" (and not Numerical).

I have heard of Altice before, but not much. It's a dutch company, but headquartered in Luxembourg, and yes, it's the company that owns Numericable (orginially a cable TV operator, branched out into cable internet) that brought up SFR a short while back.

As for Free, yes, it's owned by Illiad, who owns a shedload of other services, including telephony, hosting, and a while back, minitel services. Mostly pr0n... Actually, Illiad made it's fortune out of the French equivalent of 0898 chatlines in the 80's... (and before that, a couple of sex shops and several shady deals)

Ubuntu daddy Mark Shuttleworth loses fight to cancel $20m bank fee

bpfh
Boffin

I don't know about that...

In France, the Banque de France used to allow inidviduals to hold an account with them. Even the Public Treasury (Ministry of Economy and Finance) allowed French nationals to hold checquing accounts with them until the mid 00's... Possibly the same in SA.

The watts in a box that kept West London's lights on

bpfh

Re: UPS/gensets

The RedBus datacentre went offline sometime during 2005-06 3 times in 12 hours, due to an offsite power outage, bad UPS battery management and an unplanned genny outage.

First of all, a sparky shorted out the main power box, and tripped the whole site. Oh dear. That was corrected and the UPS fired into action and restored service.

When the offsite outage lasted more than 30 minutes, the industrial gennys were cranked up, but they need 15 minutes to warm up before they can be attached to the internal power grid,

With 15 minutes left on UPS power, the diesel generators took over, keeping the lights on. After 30 minutes, with reasonable load, the 3rd genny was taken offline and put back as backup, problem being that the generators could power the site, but not recharge the UPS.

2 hours later, one of the generators failed, overloaded and tripped the second, and the UPS bank took over. The tripped genny & backup were restarted and allowed 15 minutes to sync. 2 minutes longer than the life in the UPS batteries.... Second outage.

I'm not sure how the 3rd one happened, but I think when the external power was reapplied, somthing else went wrong and tripped the whole site again.

End result, a lot of SDA's down, and a shedload of angry clients!

Moral: Even with a DR in a top tier datacentre, reduncancy is king!

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Bog-standard boxty

bpfh
WTF?

What's wrong with this one? It's more or less the same thing as Swiss Rösti: fried grated spuds.

RAF radar station crew begs public for cash to buy gaming LAN kit

bpfh

Re: Priorities

No, that only works for the zombie apocalypse...

bpfh
Go

Can't provide cash, can help provide kit...

Got spare cables and 40 port HP gigabit ethernet switches... What's their mailing address?

Wrestling with Microsoft's Nano Server preview

bpfh
Meh

Re: Add me to the confused list....

I got Apache, PHP and MySQL running on Windows 2K server, the whole kaboodle running with 35 meg of RAM in production (4x16 mb chips on the mobo) for a small CRUD data entry app for 2 people with a PHP script that pulled photo processing information from Kodak's servers in the US. Worked like a charm, and booted fast too, though I did have to deinstall more apps and more services than Microsoft would have liked. would have used NT 4 but that did not have native USB support and the PC's disk drive was naff.

From this, what has MS just invented that is so earth shattering?

Rare monkeys stolen from French zoo – now even rarer

bpfh
Joke

Re: Hopefully soon...

I knew that the Brazilians didn't give a monkey's...

Yow! It's the HOT NEW 'Collections' from Google! Oh wait ... it's a Google+ thing

bpfh
Joke

Re: As many have said on here before...

I've told you before, stop talking about my wife!

Phablet for the biz fleet with easy typing: Microsoft Lumia 640 XL

bpfh
Go

Re: Good idea

^This!

Why the downvote? I agree with this, after major pain in reinstalling a different firmware on a Samsung phone that took several hours to find the correct version with the correct baseband and set up, install, etc etc etc, or just the absolute PITA to get root access on some android tablets... especially as a complete OS install or live CD boot takes less than half an hour and works off the bat...

Your new car will dob you in to the cops if you crash, decrees EU

bpfh
WTF?

How many new cars don't have airbags in Europe?

I thought that airbags + ABS was now obligatory for EU car homologation....

Stuff your RFID card, just let me through the damn door!

bpfh
Paris Hilton

Re: ID

What French ID carte? There is no valid ID cards you can get from France unless you are either French or not from the EU (carte de séjour/de travail).

Driving licenses are actually not legally valid ID for some strange reason ...

DRM is NOT THE LAW, I AM THE LAW, says JUDGE DREDD

bpfh

Thinking exactly the same thing....

But sheeing shaun connery dashing around in the deshert with just a webley pistol and a leather braces & underwear ish prishlesh.

Apple Watch RIPPED APART, its GUTS EXPOSED to hungry Vultures

bpfh
WTF?

Why all the talk about upgrading?

You certainly won't upgrade a watch that requires a degree in swiss watchmaking just to dissassemble... Repair duff screens, and change the battery after a year when it's fsck'ed defo, but that's as far as I would be willing to go and waste my time (but I'm quite happy with my Seiko and Hamilton automatic watches that do their job, need no recharging, and are globally maintenance and upgrade free...)

Watch: Nasty JPEG pops corporate locks on Windows boxes

bpfh
WTF?

Re: Nasty JPG

So this is just a plain upload issue. if the server side script took the time to make sure that the file extension was really .jpg (or even renamed the file to <uniqueid>.jpg); then when Mallory goes and hits the new url with a browser, all they get is the text of their script spat out at them in the viewport. Webservers should not be executing random binary data, just reading it as standard input and sending to the standard output...

Doctor Who and the Dalek: 10-year-old tests BBC programming game

bpfh

Re: FORWARD 20; LEFT 90; BEEP

How about a BigTrak?

BOFH: Explain? All we need is this kay-sh with DDR3 Cortexiphan ...

bpfh
Meh

They started to lose the plot after closing the parallel universe...

After all the build up before, the fourth was mostly fast-forwardable filler with a team almost certain to be axed and no motivation in the writers, despite a lot of loose ends that could have been played and a surprise extra season coming in, and ended up watching the first episode and the final 10 minutes of the 5th, with the impression I had not missed anything in between.

Fancy six months of security nirvana for free? Read on...

bpfh
Stop

How much...

For the next 6 months?

National Grid's new designer pylon is 'too white and boring' – Pylon Appreciation Society

bpfh
Trollface

You must construct additional pylons

You must construct additional pylons

ISIS: You bomb us, we’ll interrupt your TV transmissions

bpfh
Pint

Re: yes, and?

I don't think ISIS would really want a bacon sarnie....

On that subject, one of the guys in our French office who used to work in London (and is Muslim) spent several weeks petitionniong our local kebab joint to upgrade their kebab meat to crispy fried bacon. Now that would be a thursday night kebab to hammer.

Beer. As tonight is beer night. Like most thursdays.

Google: Give us cash or we'll poke YouTube ads into your eyeballs

bpfh
Devil

How much and what...

A tenner a month for any and all videos, I'm game. Probably not if it's much more... But if it's only 150 odd "premium" channels, then honestly, I really CBA...

Iridium sat comms module comp goes completely TITSUP

bpfh

Some acronyms...

- Total Integrated Test Sortie: TITS

- Goal: Total Flight Operations : GTFO

- Airborne Integrated Research Boffins Awaiting General Service: AIRBAGS

- General Operational Airborn Test Required Of Plane Experiment: GOATROPE

- Last Obital Validation Experiment Airborne Diagnostic Check Kickoff : LOVEADUCK

- British Orbiter Final Flight InspectioN: BOFFIN

- Progress In New Technology Global Last Airborne Systems Study: PINTGLASS

- Working Aviation Research Measurements By Evaluating Experimental Requirements: WARMBEER

Bonking with Apple is no fun 'cos it's too hard to pay, say punters

bpfh

What's a girlfriend?

OK, I'll crawl back into my basement......

France will flog off 700MHz to boost mobe broadband while UK dithers. Thanks, Ofcom

bpfh
Go

Re: Outside

Loads of freely available wifi in streets, bars, shops or via operator hotspots.

The French Defence Ministry gave up it's (more or less unused since the 1970's) reserved 2 Ghz band in the early 00's. You are allowed 100 mW between 2.4 and 2.4835 Ghz

Currently 5Ghz bands depend on the exact frequency, but going from 100mW to 1 watt depending on the exact frequency band and if you are or not using power regulation.

What you cannot do is interlink those wifi connections into a backaul without either a permanent or experimental licence from the ARCEP as you go from being a hotspot to a dedicated carrier.

See: http://www.arcep.fr/index.php?id=9272

BOFH: Never mind that old brick, look at this ink-stained BEAUTY

bpfh
Happy

Re: Oh yeah, sweet memories

BOFH Classic. :) I still have the actual printed books :D

Still, today, not enought Bzzzzzert .... or clickety-clickety.... or rm -r

"Spare the rod and spoil the rm -r, that's what I always say"

bpfh

Re: says:

Ah, the Model M. I may still have 4 or 5 hanging around at my parent's place sitting in the attic for the last 17 years. The clack-clack-clack waking up people when coding at 3 AM in the morning. Priceless :D