Posts by Wensleydale Cheese 1381 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2011
"If you have an interview that needs a £20 train ticket that you cannot afford, then you need to ask yourself, can I afford the commute to this job?"
But once you have a contract in hand you can get an overdraft for the rail fares. Or an advance on your pay to get as far as your first pay cheque.
"Even if they're not required, it's very good practice to sit down at the end of each day and make notes about how your time was consumed."
At one point I had a diary especially for logging my time at work, and filled it out on the train on the way home each day.
It became an extremely useful record of time spent at client sites.
"The truth is that most organisations today are IT organisations"
I'll argue with the "most" there.
For many organisations, IT is simply a tool, much like a PABX switchboard or telex used to be.
In other words, their use of IT does not differentiate them from their competitors in any significant way.
" Just like the mice spike in Europe this year (I have never seen so many, neither in UK nor Eastern Europe)."
Here in Central Europe I noticed a distinct increase in mice last summer.
And incidentally, disturbed an owl in the middle of the barn at about 8am just last week. I've never seen that before.
"Apparently it was a management money saving policy to keep all the photocopiers empty because it they had paper in them people would use them more."
Back in the 1980s I had to spend some time at HQ shortly after the company had been taken over by a very large corporation.
The new owners had instigated a drive to get everything documented. As a result, every single photocopier in the building was running low on toner and the printer ribbons were at the end of their useful life,
Fortunately my girlfriend offered me the use of the printers at her place of work to do some decent looking reports for a large customer.
"don't tumble dry individual socks"
I have definitely done that, but it was a case of packing enough socks to last 3 weeks working away from home.
"only using the vacuum cleaner between the hours of 2 and 4am"
Having had a neighbour who actually did that, don't be surprised if court orders start landing on your doormat :-(
"In the US ASDA is known as Walmart.... well, actually it's the other way round... Walmart in the UK is called ASDA."
Walmart bought ASDA in 1999, rescuing them from near-bankruptcy.
And scrolling back up to ASDA's Early History, we find that the name came from a contraction of Asquith and Dairies:
In 1965, when the Asquith brothers approached Associated Dairies to run the butchery departments within their small store chain, a merger was proposed. So they joined together with Noel Stockdale, Arthur Stockdale's son, to form a new company, Asquith + Dairies = Asda (capitalised from 1985).
"Setting DEBUG=true in a config file and asking the user to retrace their steps can be enough to tell you exactly what is going on."
Many years ago I discovered a similar debug mechanism lurking in the code I was given to fix as my first task in a new job.
Whoosh! I managed to identify some bad data on file in less than an hour on a system I'd never seen before.
This can be a seriously productive means of identifying problems.
"Mac OS X never existed officially."
Untrue.
Have a look at the text on the Snow Leopard Mac Box Set
The Mac prefix was dropped a few major versions ago (Lion or Mountain Lion?).
"5. Accounts Payable then prints the checks, checks under $10,000 are printed with signature."
Well, maybe for high value items (e.g. 10K+), but everything else is done by bank transfer.
There's no reason why similar checks and balances to the ones you describe can't be incorporated into that of course.
USS Yorktown: Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
It had to be towed into port.
"I can remember my dad's registration on car he used to have until about 1960"
I can remember that and those of the next two.
Beware someone digitising old family photos and putting them online. Details of more recent vehicles may be lurking in insurance or similar databases.
"not only will you have to pay £5.99 to get that packet of three ... but all that lovely data you are giving them about you and your (cough, cough) habits be they good or bad."
1. Fall out with partner
2. Stop ordering your packs of three
3. Get inundated with ads for dating agencies
"I wonder if we could sue Microsoft for slander for insinuating that we've installed knock-off copies of Windows when they're perfectly legit."
I wondered about that.
Instead I decided that an OS which randomly disabled itself AND insulted me at the same time wasn't fit for purpose.
It was the straw that broke the camel's back and I started looking at Linux in earnest.
"After that it depends on how much updating your distro needs and how fast your connection is. But it's all usable whilst it does this."
As I type a kernel update is installing itself on a couple of my openSuse VMs.
I can happily carry on with stuff I'm doing in them, and when the update is done, it will let me postpone the reboot for as long as I wish.
In other words, even a fundamental update such as one to the kernel doesn't get in the way of work in progress.
"ahhh, i see. SHOULD NOT as per rfc 2119 i presume? well, it wouldn't be the first rfc implemented by microsoft in a, let's say "creative" manner."
Creatively copied and pasted from Your wget is broken and should DIE, dev tells Microsoft:
"users might already have written scripts using the functionality provided; Microsoft's position is therefore that fixing this needs to go through a community request for comment (RFC) process."
"They get no money by updating drivers, only by selling new devices. They get no money by updating drivers, only by selling new devices."
Printers are sold cheaply in order to establish a future income from printer ink sales.
That income stream will dry up if the devices stop working.
"It looks to me you never found the CVS importer in Excel which lets you set separators, string delimiters, column types, etc. etc. "
But IIRC* doesn't give you a means to save those carefully input settings, so you get to do them all over again the next time.
It was there in the Extras folder on the Office 97 CD, which meant it wasn't installed by default.
It was not present on any corporate installation of Office that I have come across.
* it's been a long time since I had to use Excel
"Except, of course, any software which starts out attempting to be too clever by half ends up not being clever enough."
I've recently run into series of supplier invoice numbers which start with 118, and the "intelligent" pattern recognition system in OS X tries to interpret them as phone numbers.
In my country, 118 is the number for the Fire Brigade.
Oops.
"For those lucky enough not to be familiar with those AZERTY aberrations, it is impossible to type accented capitals, or a capital cedilla, amongst other things,
On OS X with a Swiss keyboard, accented capitals are a pièce de gâteau (Miles Kington fans will see what I've done there :-) )
The three accented character keys to the right of P and L on the keyboard are ü, ö, ä when the keyboard layout is set to Swiss-German, and è,é, à, when set to Swiss-French. Apply Shift in normal use to get the "other" set of accented characters.
Add Caps Lock to get the capitals of those: Ü, É, À and È, É, À.
Ç is alt-4, though on this PC keyboard I'm using at the moment I'm at a loss to find out where a lowercase version of that is.
OTOH, the programming symbols [, ], {, } |, \, ~ etc are achieved by using Alt, and that soon becomes a real pain in the neck. I've resolved to give in and get a US keyboard for development work.
"And to Phoenix for having the balls to reverse engineer IBM's BIOS..."
"But what if the web page IS a file share and the file share is ALSO a web page? They're NOT mutually exclusive, you know?"
Exactly.
A lot of products supply documentation as a bunch of html files, and it's extremely convenient to drop them to disk and browse from there, no web server required, and works totally offline.
"One of the things about GUIs was that they liberated us from white (or green or orange) text on black backgrounds. We could finally have easy-on-the-eye black on white."
FWIW the VT100 could do reverse video to produce black on white, though my vague memory of that was that I didn't want to work in that mode for any length of time. It was very good for leaving messages on the console for whoever turned up first thing next day though, they couldn't miss that.
"Now designers seem intent on forcing white (or grey) on black on us"
But it's not just the designers. There are loads of geeks out there who prefer dark themes.
In particular, many seem to think a dark theme is "natural" for coding. To me it looks like a backward step to DOS days. :-(
Is it a Heavy Metal or Goth thing? Enquiring minds wish to know :-)
"Anyway sometimes I'm surprise how decades of limited word processor capabilities led to regarding proper typography as a 'mistake', "
One could blame the typewriter for giving us a century or so of restricted capability before that.
Separate characters for opening and closing quotes might have percolated through to computers - "Hello World" could have been “Hello World” all along :-)
"Use an editor then, not a WP?"
Ahem. I mentioned code snippets in technical documents.
Yes, copy and paste will work, but I've just upgraded LibreOffice to V5 and it seems to have lost the auto-correct settings I had in V4. I'm probably hitting the same problem that Trevor mentioned.
Trevor wrote:
I was perfectly happy using Office 2010 that had been beaten about the ears enough to look and feel identical to Office 2003. It was quick, the context menus gave me access to all the commands I wanted, and I managed to get rid of both the spacing after the paragraphs and all those dumb "smart quotes."
It's not just the "smart quotes" but the ellipses, em-dashes et al.
I'm not a frigging novelist, I write code.
I really really really don't want that smart quote nonsense creeping into code snippets when I'm writing a technical document.
"I keep the platter on my desk to constantly remind me of the importance of backing up correctly...."
"The forced updates (and reboots if updates need them) are very annoying. You open the laptop to carry on what you were doing previous day to find out it has helpfully rebooted on you."
Incessant reboots are incredibly disruptive. Enough exposure to almost any other OS will tell you that it doesn't have to be this way.
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