Posts by Pomgolian

French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools

Snowball's Chance in Hell?

Well these days Hell isn't as hot as it used to be, what with Musk and Trump walking the earth, so anything is possible.

With a couple of million to chuck at an office suite, the killer app excuse looks increasingly thin. I can imagine the French will be their usual bulshy selves and their users will want to to flip the bird in the direction of Uncle Sam and I suspect this attitude may well help them make a success of it. I do hope so.

FYI my daily work rig is Mint and has just been updated from Mint 20 after about 5 years. It does everything I need and nothing I don't.

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

How about...

Putting a 100% tariff on Tesla?

https://www.businesstoday.in/world/canada/story/make-them-pay-canada-puts-trumps-first-friend-elon-musks-tesla-in-the-crosshairs-of-tariff-war-463097-2025-02-01

Two asshats, one stone.

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

Or...

Perhaps it should nuke the base from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

An honest question

I'm really bemused about how much the alleged development costs are when I review what they actually produce. It doesn't look to me like WordPress has done very much at all of any significance and it's still the same poor featured blogging tool it always was. Yes there's a new block editor that lots of people hated, but to do anything useful with WordPress you have to install a ton of plugins and page builders etc. So, what exactly are they spending the development time on because it's not readily apparent in terms of functionality.

Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware

Re: "Always keep a second passport"

These days I have both a UK and an NZ passport, quite legally. Using the NZ one is preferable when traveling through places such as Dubai. We've noticed that UK passport holders seem to get extra security checks but they couldn't give a rat's about New Zealand. Of course when we arrive at Gatwick the UK passport comes out and it's no questions asked.

Musk also wants to fight Microsoft in legal grudge match with OpenAI

Re: The United States of Clownland

Really? Then someone is going to have to redefine what full raving looney is, I for one was sure he'd got to that point long ago.

Perhaps the official Reg standards need to include the Musk as such a unit? One Musk being equal to one month of Elon's AI trained Xcretiions.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Sports Sponsorship

It was Jasper Carrott IIRC

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Cut the grass

As an expat Pom living in NZ, and having just returned from a three week visit back to blighty, I noticed that nobody seems to cut the grass anymore. I lost count of the number of road signs obscured by grass or trees. The Qashqai I was driving had a feature that was supposed to recognise speed limit signs but a lot of the time it failed because they were hidden behind a hedge. Adaptive cruise control worker pretty well though, perhaps too well - it leaves you very little to do and that can be a tad soporific, which brings it's own problems.

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Legacy Code

I took on a new client recently. They had a custom PHP app written by an old guy who was retiring. Among the jewels he left was a page containing a form that proudly stated:

Do not use apostrophe's [Sic]

I didn't know it was possible to despair for two different reasons simultaneously, but I managed it.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: POP3 is horrible

And THAT'S the huge issue. If you change providers (change ISP, for example), you lose your emails, don't you? With IMAP, unless you make a local repository and manually copy all your emails to those folders, you lose your emails, correct?

Yeah, but no, but I've done this many times, and I usually point imapsync at both the old and new mailboxes and go to the pub. Probably beyond the realms of your average Joe schmo user but it is possible with very little pain, once the metric ton of Perl dependencies are installed.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Re: Would love top, but...

I'm a fan of pCloud. Not only do they have an app for Android that automatically pushes pictures and videos up to the cloud but they have a Linux GUI application and also a Linux command line client that works really well. Any photos I take are on my PC which runs Linux Mint a few moments after I've taken them.

I run the command line client on a couple of servers for backup purposes all from the same account. No need for OneDrive here!

IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing

No Sht, Sherlock

The safest, most sanity-maintaining way to use X is not to.

I'll drink to that.

Oh, for dual icons.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Norse gods

Back in the day when I briefly worked at Hull Uni, it was all Norse Gods, mostly on Sun SPARC kit

ANZ Bank test drives GitHub Copilot – and finds AI does give a helping hand

Re: One intriguing finding…

Absolutely no surprises there.

It's only when you have a bit of experience that you know what questions you really should and should not be asking. This is experience born out of years of figuring out the hard way how to do things. When you learn like this you retain that information and have a deeper understanding of the problem. By contrast if someone is always telling you what the answer is you never remember and you keep asking the same dumb questions. Thus in 30 years time when the last of the experienced programmers have actually died out there will be no one to take their place. Then again, if the output of AI generated code is fed back into the input, the quality of the output will inevitably fall just like continually photocopying a photo copy. The only question is whether this all comes to fruition before all the greybeards have hung up the keyboard.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Re: Coprolitic

No shit!

Activist investor to GoDaddy: Cut costs, improve sales, or sell

Duh!

Having experienced their "support" when trying to help out unfortunate souls who unfortunately are their clients, they'd stand a chance of retaining clients if they had at least a basic level of competence.

Re: Sorry guys...

You could do worse than https://affordable domains.co.nz.

I have over 200 domains with them and I'm quite happy with them. DNS refresh is more or less instantaneous.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Angle Grinder

I once had an HP laptop with a dodgy power connector. I managed to procure a

replacement from Alibaba for about 0.001c, but the original proved rather tricky to remove. My poxy 25 watt soldering iron couldn't generate enough heat before the metal can surrounding the connector radiated it away.

Judicious application of a 10,000 RPM 7" diamond cutting blade made short work of the metal can and I was able to remove remnants by "metal fatigue". The remaining pins were no bother for the mighty 25W iron.

Youngest daughter was much impressed and Dad's hero status reinforced.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Snotty!

"warning signs a mole rat could see from Mars"

Gotta chortle at that one.

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update

Blinked, nearly missed it

This happened to me, did a quick Google to see what the story was. No joy there so I tried again a minute later and it all worked.

All this in the same week I finally gave them my card details. Not massively inspiring. But then, Micros~1.

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

Show us the stats

Windows owns 75 percent of the desktop,

Last time I could be arsed to look it was hovering around the 90s. I can't believe 1 in 4 people are using Macs so this must mean it truly is the year of the Linux desktop. Or is there one Chromebook to rule them all?

Larry Ellison mea culpa as traffic cop stops Big Red boss on own island

He only bought 98%

but 100% was available for purchase, so he was charged for the full 100%

Confirmed: Asteroid shoved by Earth crash probe DART

Re: DARTs and Pool?

It's as good a plan as any - have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.

Re: Has anybody thought..

"I think. I am neither a mathematician, nor an astrophysicist."

But every second counts! 18 seconds at the speed of light is 3.348 million miles which is a lot more margin for error than I'm comfortable with. Then again at that speed it's all relative. I'm no physicist either, and certainly no Einstein.

Has anybody thought..

What the effect was going to be on the larger Didymos asteroid? Surely there is some effect now that Dimophos has less mass? Gravity or something? Is it now on a collision course? All this just as Bruce Willis hangs up his hat. We're doomed, I tell ye, doomed!

New Outlook feature: It freezes up when dealing with tables in emails

Proper Rendering Engine

If memory serves, Outlook 2007 dropped the Trident rendering Engine in favour of the one built in to Word. There were howls of pain among the marketing crowds back then due to the mess that made. Perhaps now is the time to switch html rendering to Chrome. If it's good enough for Edge..

There is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter

Re: Translation.

"easier than having to worry about whether your printer is local rather than in head office 2000 miles away"

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/26/windows_10_printer_bork/

With the latest Windoze updates, a 4,000 mile round trip is the least of your problems.

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

Nuke from orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

When I bought my HP Pro book, the first thing I did was remove the NVME drive and shoved the SSD from the recently deceased laptop that necessitated it's purchase. Apart from having to disable secure boot, it booked up straight away with no issues, no drivers to install and all the hardware functional. Who needs to bother installing?

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Not happened to me, but

On the advice of my lawyer, I have an envelope somewhere in the pile of papers on my desk, addressed to her indoors. It contains all the important passwords and whatnot for just about every significant account I have. Apparently lots of folks have wills, but lots don't leave their passwords available, and it's a 'mare shutting down accounts and gaining access.

Thunderbird is coming to Android – in K-9 Mail form

Me too. If nothing else, maybe K9 will gain the ability to authenticate with oAuth2, which is required by Gmail these days. I had to remove my Gmail account because the failure warnings got too annoying and frequent.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Seems to have ended well in this case

Usually without a shroud of evidence.

How these crooks backdoor online shops and siphon victims' credit card info

Re: Ah, but how?

Bang on. Unless you have a heads up on how the site was compromised in the first place, removing the affected code is useless because it'll be back again by morning.

Does this affect all shopping cart systems or is it specific to a particular code base? Magento anyone? Asking for a friend.

Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted

Unique emails

This sort of grotty tactic is one of the reasons I use a different email on every site. It's easy to both know which idiots misuse it and also to block them when they do.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

Indeed. I was always amused by the chiropractor I used to go to, Dr. Bach-Price. About £30, IRRC

Re: Full names please.......

I used to have a client who always introduced himself with his full name every time he called. Nice guy, Phil McCraken. I never saw fit to oblige.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS media released with APT fix as end of support nears

Re: Problem with ESM

Absolutely. The $750 per server is doable, but the minimum charge or $2,500 isn't. They're shooting themselves in the foot with that.

Still using Skype? Good news! After HOURS of meetings, Microsoft reckons it knows when you're Not Active

I'd Settle For It Doing What I Tell It

By which I mean when I set my status to Invisible, ferking remember that and don't set it to anything else until *I* decide, manually, to do so. Since the Upgrade to 8, this has been a major pain in the arse.

So Brave: Browser biz sics Brit watchdogs on Google's info slurpage

Re: _c_a_t__/_e_t_c_/_h_o_s_t_s_

Yeah, I got some really messed up page, like a huge mobile site rendering on a desktop and a Google I'm not a robot CAPTCHA pop up when I posted it. I kind of saw the irony with that given the contents of the file.

cat /etc/hosts

cat /etc/hosts

0.0.0.0 www.googletagmanager.com

0.0.0.0 www.googleadservices.com

0.0.0.0 googleads.g.doubleclick.net

0.0.0.0 ad-emea.doubleclick.net

0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net

0.0.0.0 doubleclick.net

0.0.0.0 www.doubleclick.net

0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com

0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com

So phar, so FUD: PHP flaw puts WordPress sites at risk of hacks

Re: Good alternatives to WordPress?

concrete5.org

First A380 flown in anger to be broken up for parts

Emirates

Having just made two trips from NZ to the UK in the last month, flying Emirates via Dubai on an A380-800 I found it a really comfortable trip. I'm 6'6" with long legs, and there was plenty of leg room in cattle class. In flight entertainment is great, too. I'd be sad to see the A380 go. I've flown other airlines including Air NZ and nothing came close to the A380. Virgin Atlantic had perhaps the most pathetic amount of leg room ever -I guess Virgin is simply a tighter fit...

Linus Torvalds decides world isn’t ready for Linux 5.0

Windows 3.11 -> 95 -> 98 -> 2000 -> XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10->Mint

FTFY

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

Whatever happened to...

IPv5? Just asking...

NAB mainframe turns its TOESUP* after power outage, offline 7 hours

Also Broke BNZ in New Zealand

New Zealand's BNZ are owned by NAB, and there was much wailing and nashing of teeth over the ditch for a few hours when nobody could pay for a latte or petrol etc. Cashpoints and cards were out.

New Monty Python movie to turn old jokes into new royalties

Sounds like....

...daylight shrubbery to me

Apple somehow plucks iPad sales out from 13-quarter death spiral

Re: Or maybe...

Exactly. Bought her indoors a new one last Christmas, because the one I'd bought in 2012 was S...O.......S..L..O..W and didn't hold its charge very long. New one's noticeably more plasticy/tacky feeling though.

WordPress is now 30 per cent of the web, daylight second

Wordpress is NOT a CMS

Please stop referring to it as a CMS it isn't. It's a blogging tool. Just because all sorts of crazy shit is built on top of it does not make it a CMS, or even a good idea. It's a piss poor insecure mess that I've had to clean up more times than I care to remember.

Apple tells GitHub to fork off: iGiant steps outside DMCA law in quest to halt iBoot leaks

@Boohoo4u

but not if someone forks Github first.

That was fast... unlike old iPhones: Apple sued for slowing down mobes

That probably explains..

..why my five year old iPad is like a snail on the tortoise's back.

And another thing: If the battery degradation is so great as to warrant this, why not fit a bigger fecking battery to start with, rather than trying to make every new model even slimmer than the one before. I for one wouldn't mind an extra 5mm thickness in exchange for a battery that pumps out the power for 5 years. It's a premium product and should be bloody well engineered like one.

WordPress 4.9: This one's for you, developers!

Re: But...

Oh, you'd think so, wouldn't you?

But read this:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/31/wordpress_security_fix_4_8_3/

and

https://blog.ircmaxell.com/2017/10/disclosure-wordpress-wpdb-sql-injection-technical.html

and then go and find a CMS that actually does walk the walk.