Posts by Dave Driver

Fifty years later, steam appears on British railway

@ Jon H

Nah the Flying Scotsman is an A3 class.

The whole point of building a new A1 (as opposed to any other class) is that there are no preserved examples of the class.

OpenOffice 3.0 - the only option for masochistic Linux users

Are we in a timewarp?

OO 3.0 is not new. I got it as an portage update for gentoo in the stable tree back on October 18th. It just installed, and it just worked. What's all the fuss about?

Paris cos even she could have coped with the update.

Blockbuster: DVD to Blu-ray shift slower than VHS to DVD

Why would I?

I only have a handful of DVDs to play on my thirty quid DooVDe player. It hardly ever gets used. Why would I buy a BluRay player?

I (heart) my TiVo.

OMFG, what have you done?

You stole 75% of my screen

Would it be boring to say I don't like the fixed width presentation?

Well OK I don't read El Reg in the full 3200 pixels of my multi-screen display, but I would like the choice.

Are you listening at Vulture Central? Have you understood that everyone hates it?

And you could have taken the opportunity to add an Eee girl icon.

Reg readers rage at comment icon outrage

Eee girl please

Can we have an icon of the Eee girl?

Should get plenty of use.

Paris cos she's the only female in the icon list ATM.

iGoogle personalises personal pages on other people's behalf

I don't get it...

Why would anyone want all this other junk on their google page? When I go to google I just want somewhere to type my search text. I don't want all this other junk cluttering up the page and taking longer to load. Am I missing something?

Until 5 minutes ago I had never heard of igoogle. What's the point of it? I have bookmarks to take me where I want to go when I want to go there.

Then again I'm one of those people who can't see why desktop search is such a big deal. I know where I filed my stuff so I don't need to search for it.

Nokia 6210 Navigator phone

Re-using model numbers?

Have Nokia made more than 10000 numeric phone models now and having to start again? There is already a 6210 - it was a fine phone, no-nonsense business phone.

When are they going to remake the 2110?

Barclays and HBOS slash contractor rates

If it happens again I'm leaving....

Happened to me about 5 years ago when I was working for a major pharmaceutical company. Most people stayed but morale hit the floor. I walked as soon as I could find another contract, which incidentally was better paid.

I just refused to cut my rate on my current contract. They just said, "OK, fair enough". Still there on the same rate.

Activist coders aim to deafen Phorm with white noise

Keeping your email address

AFAIK it is not possible to keep an ISP based email address when changing ISPs, and I don't think this is even desirable.

The answer is to register a domain name and keep it for life. Sure you may have to go through the pain of changing your email address but changing it once to your own domain is better than changing it every time you get hacked off with your current ISP.

Son of 419 victim contacts El Reg

Gullible Reg readers?

Are the readership of El Reg having a bad day? It seems that a number of commentators believe that the writer has been scammed. This is highly unlikely. It is obviously either another scam, or someone having a laugh.

Freesat launches in UK

TiVo

hmmm, when TiVo launches a new box that records Freesat HD without an external box. Meantime I'll stick with the trusty Series 1 with Freeview box.

I "heart" my TiVo.

Customers give Dell the finger over keyboard screw-up

Command completion

@Ishkandar

Yes I know how to use ed and sed thanks. Perhaps you would like to explain how that helps me with command completion in ksh or bash? It's not like there's a "set -o ed" mode.

In the same post you commented about writing Unix scripts - perhaps you think it is a good thing that you need three fingers to type a "|" character?

It helps if you are actually smart before you try to be a smartarse!

Eee keyboard

Surprised no-one has mentioned the Eee PC here. One of the most annoying faults about this otherwise brilliant bit of kit is the placement of the \ and | keys. These are ON the Zed key. To get a \ you need to press Fn + Z, and to get a | you need to press shift + Fn + Z. Pretty annoying when trying to do vi-style command completion and shell scripting. This is a Linux machine after all.

Bring back the ZX-80 keyboard...

Still waiting for the Eee girl as an emoticon, so Paris will have to do.

Sky One to resurrect Blake's 7?

Discworld??? !!! ???

What? Discworld has been on telly? How did I not know about that?

I suppose that was on Sky too. I have considered getting Sky but cannot fathom out the way their packages work. I can't seem to say I want this channel and this channel for a reasonable price of £x a month, I seem to have to pick virtually everything and pay fifty quid. They can forget it.

Nooo - not Sky One...

Bad news for someone like me who doesn't have overpriced satellite TV.

Mmmm, Servalan - object of many fantasies to a teenage lad like me (at the time).

The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons

:wq

Am I the only one who uses ZZ instead of :wq?

:x is the same.

Always more than one way...

Serious comments

> It is very bad taste to post a serious comment to one of

> <bold>Ms</bold> Stob's excellent articles. But as everybody else has ...

<BLUSH> You're right, sorry. </BLUSH>

Mine's the anorak.

Why does everyone knock vi?

It seems that every distro has its own favourite non-standard text editor, whether it be nano, pico, joe, kate, etc.

What on earth is wrong with good old vi? I have been using vi for 20 years. It is immensely powerful, has a small footprint, and is the same on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, FreeBSD, and probably every Unix style system around. FFS you can even get it to run on a DOS/Windows system. You don't have to re-learn an editor each time you use a different flavour of Linux.

The only thing wrong with vi is that is not particularly intuitive. Get over it! It really is easy when you get used to it. Pick up a quick reference guide off the web and invest half an hour in learning how it works. You will then never need to learn another text editor. You CAN learn to love vi - I do. I really do!

Asus avoids Atom to get next Eee PC out early?

It's been worrying me...

Who is going to look after the girl's Eee when she gets a bit too hot on the beach and goes for a swim?

Oh all right then I'll do it.

Mine's the one with the sun tan lotion in the pocket.

Microsoft gives XP an extra two years to live (kinda)

Re-installing your OS?

Is that normal then?

I installed the OS on my main machine about 5 years ago, and it is bang up to date right now - latest versions of everything. I don't expect to re-install it even in the next 5 years either - and it will still be bang up to date then.

I heart Gentoo....

Teacher's head explodes due to Wi-Fi, mobe radiation

Big scoop

Wow! What a scoop for El Reg to have been first to press with this story. I am surprised that the mainstream media have not mentioned this at all - today of all days.

Paris cos she probably would have swallowed this - along with all the other things she has swallowed.

BBC Micro creators meet to TRACE machine's legacy

New fangled gizmo

The BBC Micro was one of the later home computers to hit the market.

I cut my teeth doing machine code on a PET, then bought a Tangerine Microtan 65. My friends had other 6502 machines such as Ohio Superboards and UK101s, and the other stream was Z80 machines such as Tandy TRS-80s, Nascom 1 and 2s, and Sharp MZ80Ks.

Later came the crappy ZX-80 and after that anything must have seemed sophisticated, particularly the limo of 6502 machines described in this article.

Paris cos she was just about to be conceived.

Desktop Eee PC spied on web

Man on the moon?

Or perhaps, "capable of running a power station", the rather optimistic claim made in the advertising for the ZX-80.

eBay: 'We will lower listing fees'

PayPal are crooks

@Edward Pearson - NO THEY WON'T REFUND. If you sell something in good faith and the buyer pays you by PayPal, they can file a report against you for no good reason and PayPal will take the money back from your account. Even if you have already withdrawn the money they will give you a negative balance and take legal action to recover the money from you. So you have lost your item, lost your money, and you may even lose your clean credit record.

With PayPal it's seller beware, and they won't do anything to help you even if you're in the right.

Phoenix hijacks Windows boot with instant-on

LOGO

I WROTE a LOGO interpreter. I spent a year of my life on this (86-87) and it actually worked. It was a fascinating exercise in recursive programming. Mind you, it was written on a pretty modern machine - a twin floppy Olivetti PC, using Pascal. Perhaps I should have taken on a real challenge and done it on my Microtan 65 in 6502 assembler.

Happy days.

US in move towards GPS-based air traffic control

ADS-B

Well we've already got mandatory Mode-S transponders coming very soon for all aircraft (incl. gliders and balloons) in controlled and uncontrolled airspace, despite the fact that there's hardly a radar station in the UK that can read them. What difference does one more bit of mandatory kit make?

Private flying will very soon be beyond all but the very rich.

Mr and Mrs Renault cannot name daughter Megane

My Dad wanted to call me Lawrence...

but my Mum was having none of it.

I bumped into that Alan Sugar on memory lane...

TRS-80

The clue is in the name. In those days it was either the 6502 or the Z80.

Z80 computers included the TRS-80, Sharp MZ80-K, Nascom 1 and 2 etc.

6502 was in UK101, Ohio Superboard, Microtan 65, Commodore PET, BBC Micro, Oric Atmos, Acorn Atom, Acorn Electron etc.

Ah - happy days...

140mph YouTube boy racer facing jail

Using a mobile?

Don't see why he should get done for that - the dozens of drivers I see daily using hand held phones on the A1 don't get done.