Posts by Richard Mason

Fried-egg sarnies kick off Reg man's quid-a-day nosh challenge

Re: Soya & beans

Forgot one ingredient, 4 teaspoons of sugar.

Soya & beans

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned using soya mince. Holland & Barrett (and Tesco) do a 375g pack for £1.89 which when reconstituted becomes the equivalent of 1.5kg of mince. I use it all the time to make chilli, bolognese sauce, cottage pie, anything that has liquid and flavour and normally uses mince. The secret with soya mince is to add a little Marmite and a few drops of olive oil to the boiling water used to reconstitute it.

Dried beans are also a good buy, once they have been boiled and simmered, they double in weight. I buy the 500g packs from Tesco of red kidney beans, cannelli beans, pinto beans and black eyed beans, mix them together and store them in an airtight plastic tub. 2kg of mixed beans (1 pack of each) comes to £4.27.

375g of soya mince, 2kg mixed beans, 4 tins chopped tomatoes (Tesco Value, £0.31 each), 1 tube tomato puree (£0.35), 1kg onions (£0.90), 1/2 jar crushed chillis (£0.95/jar), 1/2 jar hot chilli powder (£0.95/jar), 1/2 bottle hot pepper sauce (£1.00/bottle), a couple of oxo cubes, 2 teaspoons Marmite, a little olive oil and some water gives me about 10kg of chilli for about £11.00. That's enough for about 30-40 people at a party or 20 large portions of chilli for my freezer, giving me 20 meals (rice or baked potato with the chilli would of course be extra).

Flame sign because my chilli should normally carry a chemical warning, I like it hot.

Applicants sought for one-way trip to Martian Big Brother house

Reality TV fail

How are they going to balance the intelligent, mentally stable people they'd need for a mission like this who don't normally make good reality TV subjects with the moronic, egotistical, mental trainwrecks who are normally chosen for reality TV programmes?

I'm sure if watching astronauts training made good reality TV either NASA or the Russians would have done it years ago to boost funds.

Reg hack uncovers perfect antidote to internet

Re: Barrier tape?

Not always a good idea having proper mains outlets in the bathrooms.

I used to be the IT Manager for a holiday resort on the Costa del Sol. I went out to the resort once and the accounts girls were complaining that for the previous few days when they tried to print to their deskjet printer it would physically switch itself off (which I didn't believe until I saw it for myself) and switching on the computers would put a terrible buzzing on the phones.

I suspected an earthing fault somewhere in their office, a not uncommon problem in Spain, so i called our head of maintenance. He brought up one of these plugs that has lights on it to show faults on the mains, when he plugged it in it lit up like a Christmas tree. He quickly ushered us all out of the office.

It turned out Unelco the local elecricity supplier had been doing some work on the block the offices were in, and had somehow managed to cross phase the supply. For 5 days we had had 415V coming out of the sockets in our offices, reception and 15 holiday apartments. In those 5 days the only device that had blown was one guest's hair dryer in one of the bathrooms.

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Re: Wheels & Tyres

Actually tyres in Europe are a realy strange one, you order a 205/55R16 or a 165/45R14 and the first number of the designator is the tyre width in millimetres, the second number is a percentage (the profile height as a percentage of the width), but the final figure is the rim size in inches. Despite the last number being in inches, this is known as the ISO Metric System for tyre designators.

I work in inches and 'thou' every day selling classic British car parts. Nuts and bolts are all in fractional UNF, UNC, BSF sizes, none of this M6, M8, M10 rubbish. About the only things we do in metric are bulk lengths of hoses, cables, seals, etc which we sell by the metre.

FAA to pilots: Expect 'unreliable or unavailable' GPS signals

California is a cone as well

The notice for the test in California also details an inverted cone as well ranging from 185NM radius at 4000ft to 345NM radius at 40000ft. The centre for the California test appears to be the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

Russia wins World Cup bid in parrot-sickening travesty

We are hosting the World Cup

In 2015 we are hosting the World Cup in England after New Zealand host it in 2011

.

You mean there is another World Cup other than the Rugby World Cup?

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

Re: Slightly higher waste in the appliance cables

I can't find a link now, but I read recently that the US could reduce its power generation requirements by something like 8-10% by switching their domestic voltage from 110/115 to 220/230 because of reduced losses in power transmission and step down. Less power is lost stepping down to 220V than to 110V, and 220V power also suffers less transmission loss than 110V.

NatWest sets lawyers on student site

Not just their staff that can't add up.

Our local branch has recently replaced 3 counters with 3 deposit/cashpoint machines that can't add up either.

A few months ago I took in 5 cheques to pay into our company account, they totaled something like £5648.23 (I forget the exact amount). I fed the cheques into the machine, and it attempted to read the values on them, it got 4 right and 1 wrong, so I had to manually enter the value for that cheque. It came up with a total of £5648.22 on the screen. That wasn't the figure I had so I thought it had read another cheque wrong by £0.01, and rejected the total at which point it ejected the cheques and the paying in slip.

I repeated the operation, this time paying careful attention to the values of each cheque and again it came up 1p short.

I went up to the help desk and spoke to one of the senior cashiers who was there, she checked my adding up and agreed with my figure. So I got her to come over to the machine and try it. She got exactly the same result as I had earlier.

I was told that even though the machine was showing the wrong figure, our account would be correctly credited as all the deposits were manually checked anyway. So, at that point we decided to print a receipt for the deposit, and the receipt actually had the correct figure on it.

My boss who normally does the bank deposits has a similar problem with the machine displaying and printing different figures twice since then.

So long then, Windows 2000

Yes

I have loads of games that list XP as the minimum spec running quite happily on my Win2k desktop.

I've finally succumbed this week to buying a Core i7 machine with 64-bit Win7 on it but only because the latest incarnation of Eve Online has started randomly rebooting my 2k desktop (P4 3.05Ghz, 2Gb DDR, 512Mb PCI ATI X1600) if I have 3 copies of the client open at the same time and I'm doing certain things in game (PI for those who play).

Don't know if I'll keep Win7 or downgrade to XP on the new machine, need to see how much I can get Win7 to look and feel like 2k

Brighton NIMBYs complain over BT broadband upgrades

Hope they don't upgrade mine

I had a look at the BT website from that link of yours.

My router currently says : Downstream link speed 6014kbps, Upstream link speed 448kbps.

According to the BT website:-

"Your exchange is ADSL enabled, and our initial test on your line indicates that your line should be able to have an ADSL broadband service that provides a fixed line speed up to 2Mbps.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL Max broadband line speed of 5.5Mbps.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL2+ broadband line speed of 7.5Mbps. When ADSL2+ Annex M is launched our test also indicates that your line could support an estimated ADSL 2+ Annex-M broadband upstream line speed of 750Kbps and downstream line speed of 5Mbps."

So when they upgrade my area, my downstream speed looks likely to drop but my upstream will go up.

UK.gov preps bonfire of the vanity websites

UK Trade Info is good for a laugh

We export a lot of items, so we have signed up for alerts to changes in EU Tariff Codes, so we get sent links to interesting documents like this one that came in a couple of weeks ago.

http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/downloadFile?contentID=HMCE_PROD1_030516

(Warning, PDF)

Opera alerts EU to hidden Windows browser-ballot

Just delete it

Easy, just open regedit, go to HKLM/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/run and delete the key for the popup, it's called "browserchoice.exe" or something similar. You can also delete the file from SYSTEM32 as well.

Tax department targets IT downtime

Not doing well

They don't seem to be doing very well, the Intrastat upload website has been down for the last 2 days.

Lloyds TSB's online banking system shows no love for Firefox

Works sometimes

It works with some of the machines I use and not others.

Desktop at home, FF3.5.2, Win2K, only works in Private mode, worked fine until about 10 days ago.

Laptop at home, FF3.5.2, Win 2K, works fine all the time.

Desktop at work, FF3.0.14, Win 2K, works fine all the time

Other desktop at work, FF 3.5.3, XP SP2, only works in private mode.

To Shane 8, this is a personal account I am trying to access, not a company one. We use Natwest Bankline for our work banking and that works on all 4 of my machines, at home and work.

All the machines have the same add-ins, NoScript, ABP, FlashBlock, ShowIP and DownThemAll

I had the "we only support Internet Explorer" from their help desk as well

UK cops eye shotgun cartridge Taser

Less Lethal

"The Home Office Scientific Development Branch are considering it as part of their ongoing remit to evaluate new less lethal technologies."

I notice these things are no longer referred to as NON-lethal, they are now LESS lethal.

Rosetta Stone rocks Google with trademark lawsuit

@ TeeCee

"In much the same way as they think "9/16 AF" is actually spelled "M10 and an air hammer with the torque limiter disabled"."

You nearly owe me a new keyboard for that one.

Pig flu promises holidays for all

Title

Not much use for those of us paid on the clock. If I'm off for 7 days or 14 days, SSP still doesn't kick in until after 3 days and is even lower than the paltry wage I get when I am at work.

NASA takes stick over feet and inches

@ ted frater

Back in the early 90s I worked at BAe Hatfield where they designed the wings for the Airbus. The wings were designed in imperial, then the drawings were sent to France and converted into metric. Then the metric drawings came back to Hatfield where we milled the main spars on a mill calibrated in thousands of inches. The spars went to Chester where the wings were built (in imperial), and finally the completed wings were shipped to France to be mated with other parts of the Airbus made all over Europe in metric. It's a wonder any of the Airbus planes ever got off the ground.

Today I work for a classic car parts company and pretty much everything we sell is imperial, and I still find it easier to estimate 10 thou than 0.25mm.

Level 3 burglary gang plead guilty

Maximum Sentence

What odds would you get that not only do they not get the maximum, if they haven't already got records as long as your arm, they don't even get a custodial sentence?

You did what? The trials of supporting remote users

Doh!!

1) I was doing support for a timeshare company with resorts in the Canaries and mainland Spain. While I was in the resort in the Canaries once I got a call from the mainland saying none of the workstations could see the server on the network. This was an old 10base2 network. I asked if any computers had been moved and was told "No", and then I got the head receptionist to go round checking all the T-connectors and terminators like I had taught him to do, and when he said he had done so, there was still no server.

I logged in remotely from where I was and couldn't do anything from the remote access workstation, nor could our hardware support guys back in UK. After 2 days of trying to sort out the problem, it was decided I should fly to the mainland to sort the problem, they had guests checking in on the Saturday and Sunday, I was flying on the Thursday so they were even getting ready to manually check people in using the book they had had before the computerised booking system.

I arrived on the Thursday evening and promptly went round checking the network cable, I managed to get the network working again by terminating it outside the locked accounts office, which was where I decided the problem was. Early Friday morning I went into the accounts office which was run by a couple of sisters. The younger one was in, and I found the source of the problem, the older sister's computer was missing and the cable was lying there with no T-connector or terminator. When I asked the younger sister where the computer was, I was told the older one had taken it home so she could do some work from home as she was 5 months pregnant at the time. So much for no computers being moved and the cables being checked.

2) Another time, the same company had sales offices in Eastern Europe which we ran on laptops. I got a call one day from the office manager in one office saying her laptop wobbled and wouldn't sit flat on the desk. I thought maybe one of the rubber feet had come unstuck from the bottom, so I got her to turn the machine over and check. No, all the feet were there and in the right places.

She told me she thought it was the 'big round thing' sticking out of the bottom of the machine. This had me very confused as I had an identical machine and mine sat fine. So I got her to describe what she could see, and we finally decided where I had a flat panel with slots covering the processor fan, she had a big round fan sticking out of the base of the machine. I asked where that had come from, and it transpired the processor fan had been playing up so one of the local staff had a look at it, he couldn't get a low profile fan to replace the faulty one, so he had gone out and bought the smallest fan he could find and then cut a hole in the base of the computer so he could fit it. Not only did his modification not work properly because now the machine was sitting on the fan itself and so even less air was getting through, but only a week before the phone call, the company had paid to extend the warranty on this particular machine by 2 years.

3) Back to our 2 sisters in the accounts office in mainland Spain. I got a call from the younger one saying that when her computer was switched on there was a buzzing on the phoneline, and if she tried to print from Word across the network to the deskjet attached to her sister's machine, the printer physically switched itself off. Both of these had me really stumped but I was due out to the resort a couple of weeks later so I left them until I got there.

When I arrived, all was as she said, the buzzing on the phone and the printer physically switching itself off. Knowing what the electricity was like in Spain I thought maybe we had an earthing problem, so I got maintenance to bring up their little plug which lit up in different ways depending on what the fault was in the sockets. The maintenance guy plugged the plug into the power socket and it lit up like a christmas tree, we both looked at the plug, then at each other and then backed out of the office very fast. It transpired the local electric company had been doing some work recently and somehow had managed to wire across two phases. We had an entire block containing 16 apartments, the offices and reception all putting out 415V through the normally 220V sockets, and they had been like that for nearly 4 weeks.

Lucky Mancs could get ID cards first, Jacqui declares

Travel to Europe?

You can't even fly from London to Manchester without a passport, and former colleagues of mine from Spain who could fly to France and Germany with just their national ID cards needed a passport to fly to U.K.. I very much doubt this government will suddenly relax restrictions if we all have ID cards, so that blows that argument for having them out of the water.

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

It's not Office

Linux will continue to have problems being accepted for the desktop in the UK certainly in small to medium sized businesses while there is one killer app not available for it, and it's not Office. You won't get Linux on the desktop in these businesses until there are Linux versions of Sage50 Accounts and Sage Payroll.

'Miracle' plane crash was no miracle

@Bird Damage

"Back in the mid eighties I went for an interview with British Aerospace in Hatfield, who at the time were just starting to roll out the BAe146 (In fact there were two of the first production planes off the line being guarded by the RAF after acceptance tests for Queenie's flight). I was given a great tour, and one of the items I saw was a prototype nose & cockpit, which had a big dent in it. I asked about it and I was told that as part of testing they had a big canon that shot chickens at 100+ miles an hour, which they used to assess the in-flight damage a bird hit would cause. Originally they had used live birds, but at some point they decided that this was cruel and started to use shop-bought ones as the mess was easier to clean up. I was told that the dent was made by a member of staff loading the canon with a frozen one instead of a fresh one."

Urban myth I'm afraid, back in the late eighties I was an apprentice at BAe Hatfield and as part of a 6 week placement to Shop Engineering Dept (engineering troubleshooting) I helped out with chicken gun firings on two occasions. The chickens were purchased from a local farm which had been supplying the factory since the DeHavilland days. Chickens were purchased in pairs on the day of a firing and were live until about 2 hours before the firing, the bodies were still warm when loaded into the cannon.

For those who don't understand the damage a bird strike can cause, one of the firings I helped with involved firing a 4lb bird at 250mph at the outer cockpit window of a BAe 146. The bird was fired parallel to the fuselage centreline, hitting the winow at about 60 degrees from the perpendicular. The bird slid back along the window and peeled open about a 25cm length of the 4mm thick duralamin skin where it was riveted to the window frame with rivets every 15mm.

On the subject of meshes over engines, Flight Test at Hatfield had asked for 5 years for safety cages for round the engines for when ground runs were being carried out. The cages were delivered 2 weeks after one of the flight test inspectors got sucked into an engine an killed.

IT departments VAT-whacked

Re: AC @ 21:48

Whatever Sage say, you have to have 2 codes, because you have to keep the old 17.5% rate in the system as well as having a new 15% rate. Example, if you have invoiced someone for something @17.5% before December 1st, and you subsequently have to do them a refund or credit after December 1st, HMR&C says the refund has to be done at 17.5% not 15%, that was the information we got from the HMR&C adviceline this morning.

Also, as purchase ledgers normally lag sales and nominal by a month, any new purchase orders going onto a system for delivery after December 1st will have to be at 15%, but you will still have purchase invoices from before November 31st to go on next month @ 17.5%.

Delayed disaster

What I'm looking forward to is the people who just go into the Tax Code table in Sage and change the 17.5% to 15% and then realise in the middle of January that their computer generated quarterly VAT return is complete garbage because they changed 2/3 of the way through a VAT quarter.

I think for something like Sage, the only safe way is to create a new tax code @ 15% and then on Monday change the default tax code for customers/suppliers from the 17.5% code to the 15% one and leave it like that for the next 13 months.

Northrop offer supersonic robot stealth raygun cyber-bomber

Title

I think someone at Northrop has been reading too many Dale Brown books.

Some of his books (the Dreamland series) include uber-stealth bombers (converted B52s) able to launch robot drones, use lasers to shoot down incoming missiles and link together electronically to share threat and target data.

Today is not Hadron Collider Day

Analogy

I was trying to explain to the lads in the warehouse who believe almost everything The Sun prints why the world wasn't going to end today. The best I could come up with for a bunch of car parts packers was:-

Imagine someone had designed a new car to break the land speed record, the media are already reporting that the car has broken the land speed record despite the fact that yesterday they turned the engine over for the first time and today they are seeing if it will actually run for a short while.

The lads finally understood that this was the first of many steps before the big bang which will cause Switzerland to disappear into a tiny balck hole, luckily if that happens I probably won't be around to have to actually explain to them what happened.

MS takes Windows 3.11 out of embed to put to bed

Still use it

I still use WfWG 3.11 at least one a week, have it running under MS VirtualPC on my Win2K box at work as we have a program which needs more DOS memory than you can get in a Win2K DOS window. We only upgraded all our machines from 3.11 to 2K 3 years ago.

I see someone also mentioned Netware, we still use a netware server to control the security on our otherwise 2K/2003 Server network beause Netware security is so much better Microsoft's.

Software outfit keeps Vulcan airborne

Beautiful aircraft

I remember seeing a Vulcan go near vertical at the RAF Waddington airshow a couple of years before they retired them, the whole ground shook, amazing sight.

My favourite Vulcan story came from the last year they took part in the Red Flag exercises in Nevada. Two Vulcans on the one team were getting close to their bombing target so the other team sent a pair of F15s to intercept and stop the bombing run. As the F15s approached the pair of Vulcans, they started pulling up and round keeping their plan form towards the F15s. At the very last minute, the Vulcans pulled up sharply and a pair of Tornado GR1s popped out from under each Vulcan where they had been hiding from the other teams radar and ran in at high speed to score four perfect bombing runs.

Airbus jets could be converted to fuel-cell propulsion

@Anton Ivanov

Rubbish. About the only aircraft that has a system to spin up wheels before landing is the Cessna Citation business jet (and even then it is an option, not standard). It uses compressed bleed air from the engines to blow on vanes to spin up the nose wheels only, not the main undercarriage, and this is not to reduce tyre wear, but to reduce throwing up debris into the engines when landing on rough strips.

Microsoft releases latest XP SP3 build

@JayKay

Here's my $0.02

Where is the multi-user accounts, stock control, order processing, payroll, bill of materials software for OS X? I couldn't find any on either of the websites you suggested for OS X software. Where are the Sage for OS X or Pegasus for OS X?

As some sort of office suite and a decent accounts package is all 90% of small businesses use, what's the point of having computers where one half of your software requirements is missing?

We still use Windows 2000 where I work because our much bespoked version of DOS Sage won't run properly under XP, and we have been quoted nearly £15,000 to have our bespoked version moved over to Sage Line 200.

Ordinary-fuel scramjet prototype suffers test failure

@Tim

Hypersonic wind tunnels tend to be very small cross section tunnels (about 100cm2) attached to extremely large pressure vessels. The pressure vessel is filled with very high pressure air which is then allowed to rapidly vent through the wind tunnel. This produces hypersonic flows fro fractions of seconds or sometimes as much as a second. The airflows over the models are studied using high speed cameras and Schlieren photography.

Sociologists: Studying engineering turns you into a terrorist

Typical bloody arts students

When I was doing my engineering degree at Southampton, a bunch of layabout arts and social science left wing students started a campaign called SCAMROC (Southampton Campaign Against Military Research On Campus) because they were jealous of all the research money the engineering and science faculties were pulling in for doing military research.

They managed to force the scheduling of a vote at the students union to demand students boycott all lecturers and faculty who received money for military research.

Fortunately the idiots forgot 4 key elements a) engineers don't like being threatened by arts students, b) the engineering faculty at the time was by far the biggest faculty on campus, c) engineers can organise themselves without having to plaster posters all over the campus and most importantly d) most engineers had already had a morning of lectures by lunchtime when the vote was taking place whilst most of the arts students hadn't even got out of bed.

Needless to say whilst engineers almost never attended union meetings, we flooded this particualr one and defeated the SCAMROC vote by more than 2 to1.

Computer system suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

@ James Pickett

Actually the cause of the Airbus crash was pilot error, failure to maintain sufficient airspeed and altitude to recover from a low approach to a runway with obstacles at the departing end.

http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/view_details.cgi?date=06261988&reg=F-GFKC&airline=Air+France

Mystery web infection grows, but cause remains elusive

It got us

Our webhosts have admitted it has hit a number of sites they host including ours. One of our customers has informed me that his anti-virus software reports Trojan JS/Downloader-AUD when he visits our site.

USB 'compact cassette' promises 1980s nostalgia, home taping

Re: C60, C80, C90 go!

I have a Plusdeck 2c and very good it is, I'm part way through ripping my 800+ cassette collection to MP3.

I was very disappointed when I read the article, from the headline I was hoping that PlusDeck were actually releasing the USB external version of their drive that they've been promising for a couple of years.

Balls blames parents, computers for English literacy slide

Games can actually help

I used to do the IT support in a school many years ago. We had a large Special Needs department in the school, and a large number of dyslexic children who had trouble both reading and writing. The Special Needs department had a number of PCs which the children could use at lunchtimes, and to give them something fun to play with, I installed Tetris on the machines.

After a few months we found a number of the children were making better progress with their reading and writing skills, and after some investigation we discovered it was mainly the children who were spending their lunchtimes playing Tetris. The perceived view was that playing the game was helping the kids hand-eye coordination and subsequently their reading and writing.

We didn't do any sort of test which would be considered to give qualified scientific proof that this is what was happening, but it did seem to us to be helping.

Massive fire on Olympic site

Asbestos

Radio news here in Birmingham is reporting the fire is putting asbestos particles into the air.

Red Arrows to fly at Olympics, Sun announces

Been done before

According to this link, the USAF Thunderbirds display team participated in the opening ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics

http://www.wingsoverkansas.com/features/article.asp?id=662

Reference kilo shows mysterious weight loss

Standard weight

Surely the standard units of weight in ascending order are feathers, bags of sugar, elephants, articulated lorries and jumbo jets.

Britannia triumphs over Johnny Metric

@Chris

"NASA is reporting that they've found the likely cause for last week's loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter. It seems one of the engineering teams was using English units of measurement while another team was using Metric units. Getting this straight is rather important when designing navigation sytems for interplanetary spacecraft, one would think." (from slashdot)

I used to work for BAe at Hatfield where they designed the wings for the early Airbus aircraft. All the design at Hatfield was done in imperial, the drawings were then converted to metric to be sent to Airbus in Toulouse. The imperial drawings were used by the CNC mills in Hatfield which worked in inches to machine the main spars. The spars were then sent to Manhester where the wings were built, again in Imperial. Finally the wings were sent to Toulouse where they were mated with fuselage sections which had been manufactured in metric in France, Spain & Germany. It's a wonder any of the aircraft ever got off the ground.

@Ian Ferguson

"Can't we at least have both miles and kilometres on road signs?"

What's the point, it's an offence to take your driving test in a vehicle which doesn't have MPH as the primary speed indication and also not having MPH as the primary on the speedo is an MOT failure.

Restored Dam Busters fly again

The PC Brigade have already got there

The Dambusters was shown on British television a few weeks ago and the name of Gibson's dog could clearly be heard to have been over dubbed as "Digger".

This page has been intentionally left blank

Interesting to watch

It'll be interesting to watch how the public react to the use of the word nigger in this case, because if there is an outcry over the use of the word here, I can forsee an even bigger controversy over the word in the near future. They are planning a remake the film The Dambusters, and not only is Nigger the name of Guy Gibson's dog (a black labrador) killed on the day before the raid, but because of that it was also chosen as the codeword to be transmitted when the dams were successfully breached. I can see there being a outcry if nigger is used in the film, and an equally big outcry if the PC brigade get it censored out of the film.