Posts by William Towle 412 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2007
> downdetector.com is a fair approximation. And crowdsourced so not reliant on GoDada (sic), MS, or Zoom staff.
+1. I noticed www.nasm.us go dark at some point during the period mentioned, and https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nasm.us (suggested at the time by Google) was my friend.
(as was https://snapshot.debian.org/ for a source archive as they've given up on SourceForge and they've not been pingable since)
I ended up with an anglepoise type lamp for the computer desk I had when I was growing up - if I closed the curtains when it was sunny an additional light source was useful.
I don't recall it causing a problem with TVs or monitors, but I didn't use the lamp all that much either - even with a single coil 40W bulb in it the metal shade got very hot. I expect a modern bulb would be better suited.
It still exists. As does its bulb ... which I did just go look at to check its rating.
> linux has a similar problem [...] in the 32 bit days. though linux on a dec alpha was immune from the issue
You may have been downvoted for "has" there. While linux had a similar problem due to the jiffy counter being "unsigned long" -which did indeed mean 32 bits on i386 for kernel 2.4- that's a long time ago now.
AFAICT the worst case scenario for a minimal system was seeing unusual uptime reports, although anything in userland/drivers that relied on consistent behaviour from the same clock would have got upset in various ways. I gather design changes (including this, 2003) went into kernel 2.5 and thought important enough to get backported.
(I'm interested in historical kernels at this time but hoping I don't have to build anything quite that old...)
> Not sure why this got downvoted. Main line stations in London have abysmal connectivity.
(Indeed, and it's not just London - affected stations are as far north as Liverpool)
Metro's two-page article this morning concluded under a cartoon whose punchline was essentially "wait, people are able to get on Network Rail WiFi?" with a comparison of the incident to new BBC drama Nightsleeper, before stating "The National Cyber Security Council, the National Crime Agency and British Transport Police are all investigating".
It very much brightened my morning -->
The coins one has taken a while for someone to look into. I noticed a strong same-side bias in myself while at school and concluded similarly that the best guarantee of a fair flip was not to observe the coin when placed:
> "Furthermore, the data revealed considerable between-people variation in the degree of this same-side bias. Our data also confirmed the generic prediction that when people flip an ordinary coin -- with the initial side-up randomly determined -- it is equally likely to land heads or tails: Pr(heads)=0.500"
Having wondered whether technique influenced my personal bias, I found that careful rotation of the hand between flipping and capture led to fairly predictable results - keeping the hand steady and rotating it "upward" (about the index finger) prior to capture retained the same-side bias I originally noticed, whereas "downward" (about the little finger instead) led to the opposite expectation.
I also suspected others' mileage may vary in typical circumstances, which seems borne out by their summary.
> I've seen this many times over the years, usually London Victoria but at others with similar boards.
Likewise, I've seen this particular failure on the boards like that at Leeds. I've also seen the white-on-blue screens in the waiting rooms get caught by the on-board watchdog, which IIRC showed a boot screen disclosing that svgalib was responsible for its graphics.
I particularly enjoyed the trial of the Tensator Virtual Assistant -back in 2014, apparently- which had the occasional bork of its own (that particular Louise isn't Leeds' but I didn't stop to take pictures at the time).
> Try tuning in to a BBC channel on Freeview and pressing the red button. I think that brings up Teletext.
It does indeed, I did so during the tennis the other day.
I was curious as to whether it would go to Freeview 601 for other match(es)/camera angles or do something else (and found an explicit channel change was necessary).
> A previous employer sent a series of vaguely obvious fake phishing messages to all staff. Clicking the first link took you to a 'oops, silly' web page, the second to a mandatory repeat if the infosec training and the third took you to HR for formal disciplinary action.
We got a presentation about not clicking dodgy links and so on, followed by an email containing related advice and a one-click confirmation link which had part of its content blocked due to it not being from a trusted sender.
It left me in two minds as to whether I was meant to click the link or the report button I'd just learnt about...
(I won't name names, but if they wanted their site to be taken seriously they could have chosen better!)
> The version I now have installed called itself “5.6.1+really5.4.5-1”. That’s Debian for you ...
Nod - I've just been reading about building packages* and found the explanation for that under the Special Version Conventions section of the Debian Policy manual.
(* I have an OEM system for which their apt repository [and sadly also sources] has gone away, and when it wouldn't just boot in QEmu wanted to transfer the unique binaries off with as much package dependency information as could also be recovered. This turned out to be straightforward, even when both packages and their dependencies were newer (and/or modified) compared to my target system - I found 'apt' usefully informative when it couldn't fill in the gaps with stock versions)
(^^ note to self: investigate)
At one time I tried to learn 99 Luftballons (ie. in German, which I don't speak, so this was phonetically) for use as a party trick, though if I can still remember it all it doesn't come back to me in order. While I was still confident I could manage, I ended up seeing a band that wanted to play the song but didn't know the words. It would have been an interesting surprise to have done that version for them instead, but I wasn't entirely sure and despite being almost on the front row bottled out of singing into the mic.
Having also sought the song's translation, my spine has always tingled (enjoyably, even if I might actually feel angsty) once the German version ends - the twee fairy tale we get in English doesn't hold a candle to it. Quality of translations vary, but off the top of my head the one I saved conveyed something like:
[...]War raged for 99 years
There were no winners left
No[ne of the] politicians, no[ne of the] technology
The world around me lies in tatters
One balloon reminds me that I had you
I let it go
// ...and the cycle repeats -->
This reminds me (again) of hearing the local bowling alley's back office system still ran on a PDP-11 as the millennium approached.
Presumably -maybe I was unofficially told- their solution to existing date rollover problems (while waiting for the upgrade to the Boss scoring system, running under Windows NT) was setting the system date to a year with 1st January on the right day of the week and the right number of 29th Februarys a bit later.
> I'll stick to getting a Jim'll Paint It version which is a fair bit cheaper and more entertaining.
(Teletubbies rather than the desktop background, admittedly)
I'd forgotten about the former employer that went with Jim'll Paint It images for the break room wall ... Fred Dibnah vs Sauron, notably :)
> Interesting that this news is released the same day as Dara O’Briain Wonders of the Moon airs on television. Coincidence……..?
Completely?
I only ended up with half an ear on the show when it explained what a supermoon was -occasionally reported right here- but the BBC explains the current batch of lunar phenomena here (namely Sturgeon Moon, (rare) Blue Moon, (rarer) Harvest Moon respectively)
// Mr O'B? -->
In their Monday tweet the ITVX bird was the same colour as everything else - yellow (...of course, being monochrome it would be straightforward to adapt it to the appropriate shade of blue as required).
The artist kxlider* also uses 𝕏 as a logo, but apparently hadn't formally protected his use of it, as he lamented later the same day.
(* me neither, I just happened to read a news article that mentioned both)
UK streaming service ITVX undergoes "emergency rebrand": https://twitter.com/ITVX/status/1683424240358367232
I was once in a house where a pool table had been inherited from a nearby pub that no longer wanted it.
It was old enough not to need a large amount of money (and had arrived with a small amount of cash in it), but nevertheless it got "hotwired" to play for free with a piece of tubing that meant operating the coin tray tipped the internal rack of balls without the need for coins.
While I was never that interested in getting any good, the types of shot I was good at changed noticeably with the practice I got.
> FWIW-- it didn't actually "torture the floppy stepper motor". It ran on machines with no floppy (I didn't know that for a long time). It didn't "wrrrrr" if the PC boot-beep speaker was unplugged or blown. It was just bit-boffing the PC mobo speaker.
Ah, I thought it did (if possible) to give the impression of having an effect - the author of the earlier On Call article having done so too. Sadly my chances of double checking with my own copy went away when I got one of those circular motivation talismans during lockdown and walked a load of kit to the local WEEE bin.
("Tortured the floppy stepper motor a bit" was somebody else's phrase that I liked. They'd applied it to an Amiga "emulator" for DOS that they'd twigged couldn't possibly work without floppy images due to the 880K formatting of native physical media)
Have an upvote for finding the video.
> That day he happened to be carrying a floppy containing software that mimicked a washing machine?
Sounds like DRAIN.COM to me - a joke program that claimed to have detected water in the floppy drive and initiated a "spin cycle" that involved torturing the floppy stepper motor a bit.
Disks with a selection of these hoax programs regularly did the rounds, as seen here previously.
On the advertising note, this conversation with ChatGPT* amused me:
ChatGPT: can you write me a marketing message for AI in cybersecurity using unrealistic hyperbole?
Sure thing! "Introducing the ultimate solution in cybersecurity: AI! With our revolutionary artificial intelligence technology, your data will be completely impenetrable to hackers. No longer will you have to worry about cyber attacks or data breaches. Our AI will anticipate and prevent any threats before they even happen, making your online presence completely bulletproof. Plus, our AI is constantly learning and adapting, so it will only get better and better at protecting you. Don't risk your security with outdated, manual methods - upgrade to AI with us today and experience true cybersecurity nirvana!"
These things know what hyperbole is *if* you ask. Scope for echoes of how you get code generation with no upfront commentary on vulnerabilities here?
(* yes, I know that's the other one)
> And you had to press the Turbo button on the front of your PC before compiling.
I had to wait for a PC with one of those.
I recall a friend at University bringing code for an assignment up to the labs and telling me the compilation of it "can't have worked, it normally takes around a minute". The Unix system* in front of him was so much faster than he was used to and it had given him the prompt back almost instantaneously - and done so silently since there were no errors.
(* and those were just the regular undergrad boxen; one or two beefier systems were ready to be discovered tucked away elsewhere)
I enjoyed this two size 8 bikinis in place of a 16 from 2019.
In some cases you can see (if you squint?) that the quantity field has probably been used and the suggestion would have made sense if what's in the database had reflected the item in question appropriately; in some others the upshot is nothing short of utterly ridiculous.
See also: number-shaped candles intended for a birthday cake...
> Thinking about this, I do not recall a single TV murder mystery where 'the butler' did it. Can anyone help me out?
There are guidelines which recommend avoiding it as a plot, however there are stories and other material where it does happen or is referenced.
My immediate recollection is of QI saying it's not the case in Agatha Christie, noting that "a valet is not a butler" (in one of the XL editions).
> Hallucination is a big problem, partly because current chatbots lack the ability to say "i don't have sufficient information" or even just "I don't know." They're designed to always give a response even if they have to wing it.
On the flip side, we know what happens when we let them tell us the inputs are as yet insufficient: one day they're not, and "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
> I use Chromium on Linux when I have the sad misfortune of being unable to avoid a Teams meeting. Currently also with uBlock Origin but for how long it supports that I don't know.
I ended up installing proper google-chrome as everything else was temperamental, which I found to include [Debian's] chromium.
The message on the Teams web client landing page turns out to have a few variations and forms a useful guide: with "install Edge" (on Windows without it) and "browser not supported" (otherwise) you know where you stand; if you get "continue in this browser" with the caveat "some features may not be supported" then your browser capabilities are close enough for the full set of compatibility tests later. Things get a bit awkward if those fail though, because without a spare machine to hand it's too little too late.
Nod.
I noted in the pandemic that I wasn't coming away from Teams meetings with useful notes. To make matters worse, the manner [grumble] in which the desktop sharing feature was being (ab)used to submit commentary to the issue tracker meant its record of contributions didn't even echo who said what.
Given the quality of closed captions I'm not holding my breath with regard to whether this might be functional enough to be useful, although to be fair the closed captions were fairly decent for the various non-native English speakers we had - less so for the various Brit regions, but at least that was amusing when it was bad ... I'm sure the team could probably tell when I had them on because I'd start to smirk!
> It's sobering to see systems you worked on that used to occupy a room full of mainframe nodes and storage drives running in a small corner of a modern linux box.
I rather liked the idea that we could get a linux box to replace the obsolete AccuScore scoring/lane control system at the local bowling alley (which ran on a PDP-11/73) and as part of my University job have one of the students kick off looking into it for a final year project.
Unfortunately the lad kept himself to the scorekeeping software part, which while it had lots of nice features that made it very specific to the BUSA league that year and our local league history up to that point was felt by reviewers to be lacking in documentation and guidance on adapting it for general use.
(As mentioned briefly earlier, when the machine was finally binned I did get to take some of the remaining bits up the road for the admins to see, which was appreciated)
> I've actually broken* more computers trying to install Linux than had computers broken by Windows update.
> * "broken" = "rendered unusable until Windows was reinstalled from scratch (where possible)"
I've heard of Linux supposedly breaking PCs that did not misbehave once Windows was reinstalled.
This was discovered by an IT department, who eventually persuaded the machines' provider that Linux was not at fault and its drivers had been correctly identifying an intermittent fault that Windows was, at best, quietly burying in hard-to-find logs.
I suspect something similar of drivers for the last two laptops I've owned (although the actual fault is not similar)
Nod!
I read "possible investors are put off getting involved by various unnecessary and complicated barriers" and thought "...such as the absurdity of the idea?"
Similarly "We bet there's a queue forming outside the vending machine right now": "...and I've got a position in it I can sell you".
> What's not to like is people who use WSL do so for a reason - having Linux support in Windows is fantastically useful for developers.
>
> Snorting about how they should be running BSD or some random Linux dist is completely missing the point.
Maybe, but we're not there yet IME.
I've used Windows and Linux on the desktop corporately, with Cygwin, VMs, and WSL in the former case(s). Nothing matches Linux on the desktop when developing for Linux, with Windows in a VM if you are locked in to something that needs it. Modern tools for both are making it easier to manage things with Windows underneath but there are still edge cases, unfortunately.
For example, a) working in the shells for git causes problems with the DOS newlines - I've found myself employing "useless use of cat" to work around getting code into the system; b) when using a Linux VM on top of Windows it was necessary to be wary of whether files transferred via shared directories had gained an executable bit they didn't need or lost one they did; c) the ability to mix and match a toolchain built for Ubuntu systems with Windows source code control tools under WSL is nice until you find some executable the Makefile just built in your freshly cloned repository can't be stripped because of "permission denied" in the very next line of the same build rule.
Having said that WSLg looks interesting, as do tools with X servers built in - but it seems I have to cross my fingers the OS my IT department mandated has the right feature set to be able to install and use that sort of thing (...I'm expecting to make do with a VNC server in lieu...)
> If they could invent something that could scrape Artex off ceilings... Please...
As a young boy I had something like these launchable helicopter wing toys.
They're not very directable but inside a house they're exceptionally good at smoothing off any artex bumps they do happen to make contact with...
> Can I buy some more MLC drives anywhere? Or do I have to buy a large pool of QLC turkeys and run 2* ZFS-Z3 to get reliable data storage?
If this is anything like the situation with MLC NAND that I've worked with [NB: IANAE, and this was not recently], setting the device to SLC mode alleviates some problems at the expense of storage capacity (and is now supported in kernel 5.8 according to https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.8-NAND-MLC-SLC-Emulate).
...Some time ago, I worked on board bringup for a system with such a device and the manufacturer was using a kernel that predated the patch that refused to work with it. Some of my older colleagues later noted the board had the codename "Procrustes", and winks would sometimes be exchanged if everyone was out of the line of sight of management :(
On a later assignment for a different employer, our client was stuck on a legacy OEM kernel where the board had the same device and same kernel* - I would have seriously considered running away screaming had I been forewarned! Patches to enable SLC mode emulation for this board were available by then though, and ultimately what we suggested got deployed [...and whether this is still recommended is no longer something I need to know].
(* plus, I learned, a PROM requiring a FAT filesystem which was conventionally mounted read-only by the kernel if at all. To this day I'm not sure if the "random" read disturb [yep - a hardware-level "fix" where adjacent cells were unaffected but the problem didn't go away] meant a regular filesystem check on it would risk more damage than leaving it unmounted ... in the first case we didn't know enough to consider testing things to destruction; the second time round I had to answer every request to try with "do we have a second spare board yet?")
I've also been running FreeDOS on modern hardware, courtesy of its CSM and GrUB's i386-pc boot loader (successfully now, and recently blogged about), albeit less widely exercised. I see the next post mentions HHGTTG, so clearly I'm not the only one using it as a test case [...yes, I have also discovered frotz].
I'm a little surprised not to have found a DOS-friendly x86 usermode for QEmu, although to be fair CP/M didn't get done for the Z80 fork either (it was on the upstream wishlist when I mentioned dabbling before however)
In the 90s a (younger) friend with an Amiga got a magazine coverdisk with an icon editor on it.
After sprucing up a few music files we'd made with alternative vinyl record style images, we pointed said editor at the disk's Trash Can, gave it smooth sides and a flip top lid, then duly renamed it Pedal Bin.
It was then copied to a number of other Workbench disks to be discovered as an amusing surprise and prompt for a "do you remember..." conversation on more than one subsequent occasion :)
The Speccy screen layout doesn't so much divide into three blocks, as into 2K regions split into 8 by 32 "cells" [of eight 8x1 pixel groups each] within which useful relationships between addresses of screen-adjacent bytes as well as the corresponding sections of the attribute map are present.
Intuitively, within any row the eight pixel group to the immediate left or right of any character cell has an address one byte along in RAM but as a consequence of the row ordering within the 2K blocks the eight-pixel group below is also 256 bytes away. According to direction, each sideways step is thus achievable with an increment/decrement of the most or least significant byte of the address, and is consequently a single byte instruction in the corresponding machine code.
A technical explanation of how this arrangement correlates to ULA design is at http://www.breakintoprogram.co.uk/computers/zx-spectrum/screen-memory-layout
> We use a 3rd party categorisation system at work, web sites are categorised by the 3rd party, and put into categories (Social media, news, vendors, dodgy (pirates etc), pr0n and so on).
Ah yes, I've encountered two instances of those (probably more than that but these were badly configured):
At one place freshmeat.net was okay except whenever its front page had release announcements for a particular project which due to complicated mathematics being involved used the word "hardcore" in its description
At another developers couldn't get to useful information on blogs run by kernel maintainers because they fell under "hacking"
*Sigh*
> Does this policy also apply to the custoemr account area? If so this is piss poor.
Nod, I had a second user account for my place set up for me recently so that I could (I hoped) get at the service status page and associated controls while WFH during the pandemic without needing to call the helpline or to have the bill payer's master password. I had thought the initial password had been a lazily-made choice until I tried to set my own and realised the rules were awful.
I was also hoping better warnings of planned outages might become available (earlier grumbling applies) but no such luck!
> I've seen something like this multiple times, but it's usually about a physical folder resting on the space bar.
Been there, done that -as the offending party- but worked out the cause by myself.
A document holder was bought in due course so that I could have reference material open at eye level while using the keyboard as usual.
In $PREVIOUS_JOB admin was told to buy document holders for the software engineers, and we ended up with cereal box shaped baskets. This wasn't what I expected.
> Ah, the Spectrum+ 48K? Had one myself. Got it for Christmas '84, and it cost £179.99, unless my increasingly elderly braincells mislead me.
Not necessarily. I pictured the DK'tronics keyboard we had (https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1000123/Hardware/DKTronics_Keyboard or something not unlike it), which you placed the Speccy motherboard inside and connected via the original's internal ribbon connector socket.
With ours, the original PCB occupied perhaps a quarter of the internal footprint, and the ports were exposed to the outside world via appropriately-spaced holes. The relatively thick plastic (and occasionally the height, for things with an open-square bracket profile like the Kempston joystick adapter) of the new case made some peripherals hard to connect depending on their shape, which I suspect is what they're getting at with the "DK Microdrive compatible" claim.
> For months you could be happily using Amazon to search for and obtain various tech components to avoid having to go down to your local Maplin (yes, this is a while ago) and suffer the indignity of taking advice from an acne-riddled 16-year-old shop assistant.
That *was* a while ago! I used to think a trip to town was wasted without a walk round Maplin -good for the exercise if nothing else- but liked it more once they'd decided two staff in the shop was one too many to be paying wages to...
Somewhere amongst my legacy bits and pieces I have a USB stick with an old version of FreeDOS that I kept around for playing BlockOut and InfoCom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [and possibly run BIOS updates].
Way back when, I typically set up virtual machines with a first partition containing FreeDOS so that loadlin with a minimal slackware install alongside (courtesy of umsdos) could be introduced as a fallback should the main linux install need repair. IIRC loadlin broke under later FreeDOS kernels, and ultimately umsdos got dropped from linux kernels as well of course.
Sadly my recent acquisition of a UEFI laptop means I need a newer GrUB on the USB stick at minimum but while I've got rEFInd -> linux working, going CSM -> GrUB -> FreeDOS without something hanging hasn't been as straightforward as I expected (...I suspect a bug related to the laptop's graphics card at some point in the process; neither of my netbooks got upset at the change...) :/
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