Posts by H in The Hague

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Re: As irrational as it sounds...

"For an Enterprise to succeed in the long term they must truly think in the long term but that hasn't been happening in decades, at least."

Depends on the business model. Certainly a big problem in the US and the UK. But in, say, the Netherlands and Germany there are still many family-owned companies which take a long term view. One of my customers in NL turns over a billion euros a year, supplies kit to over a 100 countries (UK is an important market to them, and two key sectors in the UK are highly dependent on their products). There are still family members working in the company (after they've first gained experience elsewhere) and their focus is very much on the long term. So they really invest in their products, people and factories. E.g. I've interviewed some of their employees who celebrated their 50th work anniversary, and when they build a factory they do that on land they own - because in the long term that's more attractive. And they're profitable.

But that would be anathema to many US/UK financial folk :(.

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Expensive Lessons

"Maybe we need better training materials"

Training materials are expensive, not having training materials can be much more expensive.

(Disclosure: I write training materials, though currently for the heavy lifting industry rather than IT. Talking of crashes, some years ago folks at a nuclear power station decided they could lift a 400 t piece of kit themselves, only they got it wrong and dropped it on top of the reactor. Amazingly, no serious damage (though probably some clean trousers needed). Those lifting operations are now done by one of my customers, using procedures I wrote, No crashes, so far.)

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

"In 1990, RAM was about a hundred bucks per meg."

I have a distinct (but possibly incorrect) memory of S100 memory boards costing that amount per kilobyte.

Yes, I do have grey hair :)

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Re: Vintage Kit from the 1980's

Finally managed to visit there last year, after a decade or two of it being closed whenever I was in London. Yes, fascinating and well worth a visit for Commentards. https://www.testingworks.org.uk/

Incidentally, I got the same response when I tried to make a suggestion. But otherwise the hosts were v friendly.

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

"Good on the Dutch."

Usually the key issue in disputes like this is that under Dutch law parties to a contract have to be "fair and reasonable" to each other, and that can indeed override the terms of the contract.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: Honestly

"Surely there are metric diameters available ? 25.4mm pipe ?"

Careful with that: on the whole (at least in plumbing and chemical engineering (i.e. posh plumbing)) inch sizes refer to the bore (inner diameter) and mm sizes to the outer diameter.

So 1 1/2 inch scaffolding pipe is also referred to as 48.3 mm pipe, even though 1.5 inch = 38.1 mm. And to add to the confusion some pipes are available with different wall thicknesses so their inch size stays constant but the mm size changes.

Suddenly feel the need for one of these -->

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: Nothing like as traumatic

"even if the clean up is tedious."

Recently took some old drives apart. Decided to try and get the platters out to put into the 'Will be useful some day bin'. Tried to lever a platter out, then discovered it was glass, not aluminium :(. Just as well that I was wearing safety glasses! And that corner of the workshop needed vacuuming anyway :)

Also had to dispose of hundreds of CDs and DVDs with back-ups. Having them shredded turned out to be quite expensive. Cutting through a stack with a jigsaw wasn't a great success as the plastic melts and coats the sawblade. And probably not very safe. Eventually cut them up with tinsnips, that didn't take too long - quite therapeutic and meditative. Did that inside a clear plastic bag to catch any plastic splinters which were flying around.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

""-ize" is British, the canonical Oxford English Dictionary still prefers it to this day. "-ise" is a shift purely, as far as I can see, for the sake of modernizing, pushed by Chambers."

As far as I'm aware it has to do with adopting ancient Greek works in English, some should get an S, others a Z. But not an expert.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Never heard of Romex cables?

"There was a channel across the ceiling in the polystyrene insulation (no, really), at the bottom of which was a 1.5mm2 Cale to the cooker. "

Obscure fact for your next pub quiz: you're not supposed to put PVC-sheathed cables directly onto polystyrene foam insulation. If you do that the plasticiser from the plasticised PVC cable will migrate to the polystyrene. As a result the cable sheath turns into unplasticised PVC which is brittle and will crack when the cable is disturbed.

Time of the week -->

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

"For example, if there is a large wind farm and the wind is blowing hard, but the transmission lines can't take that much power from it, ....."

That's exactly what they are working on in the North Sea: producing hydrogen from offshore wind farms and piping that to the shore through repurposed natural gas pipelines. Or even new pipelines - transporting a given amount of energy as gas is much cheaper than as electricity (but you need to invest in electrolysers, etc.).

The Netherlands branch of the Institution of Chemical Engineers recently organised a session of very interesting talks about energy transition, hydrogen, electricity, etc.

In response to another post: yes, ammonia is an option for long distance transport and for storage. Hydrogen is probably better for short distance applications. Both hydrogen and ammonia can be used for a range of industrial processes. Most of the technology is available or being developed - it's now more of a social/economic/political issue.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

"bent at an angle from the airflow and never touched the ground anyway!"

Presumably when the car stops they'll straighten and then carry the charge away to earth, in an instant.

But haven't needed them myself.

But in relation to cars, your clothing rubbing against the upholstery when you get out of the car might also impart static electricity on your body, and such a strap wouldn't help against that.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

"It's blindingly obvious but we genuinly received a rota with "St. Ives" as the location. Yes, the inevitable happened."

I think something similar, but in the music industry, inspired the development of What Three Words.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Works for Latin too

About half a century ago a friend of mine got her English degree and found a job teaching at a small school in Cornwall. When she got there she discovered she had to teach Latin as well, a language she was completely unfamiliar with. So she started on the textbooks and tried to be one week ahead of the class. Needless to say, some annoying kid was two weeks ahead of the rest of his class and kept asking annoying questions.

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

Re: How much?

"I'd give them a tenner a year"

So would I, might stretch to GBP 12 :)

LLM aka Large Legal Mess: Judge wants lawyer fined $15K for using AI slop in filing

Marketing

From the article "who knows how models are being used in marketing ..."

Somebody at the US subsidiary of one of my customers writes 1000-word long bits of waffle about their machinery (the kit is actually v good). All perfectly good English, but devoid of content, some general observations about their industry, but nothing that informs customers about the products. Pretty sure that's been written by "AI". So then their colleague in Europe sends the copy to me, I edit it, cut it to 300 words and add relevant information. Doesn't actually take that long if you understand the machines - so a nice little earner for me.

Incidentally yesterday I interviewed a developer at another customer and they mentioned they might give their telemetry units more processing power, so they could implement Machine Learning (studiously avoiding the term AI, so they've actually thought about it.)

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Re: "putting even more addends onto the stack of stupidity."

"Keeping an old tinmans soldering iron handy"

Not quite at the same scale, but in the early 1980s I was a member of some sort of hobby club. One of the projects was to build a radio: started by drilling rows of holes in a sheet of aluminium so I could fold it into a chassis. Then installed the valve bases and tagboards for the wiring on it, then soldered all the parts using a 60 W or so soldering iron. Then built a cabinet out of plywood and mixed up some stain to finish it. Pretty stupidly outdated at that time, but now it would be considered seriously cool retro stuff.

So I asked the chap for advice when I went to get my own soldering iron and mentioned that I might want to do something with those newfangled transistors. He suggested just going for the 60 W model and being careful to solder quickly! So that's how I got my heavy soldering iron with the wooden handle, still got it somewhere. Though when I started assembling circuit boards with 7400-series TTL logic I did get a smaller one :).

Which reminds me I should really do something with all those boxes of valves and vintage radio components I inherited from my father-in-law. And the Rees Mace marine radio with rotary converter. Perhaps when I retire.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Tesla was all about PR

"powered by hydrocarbons either as turbines or fuel cells for a while yet."

Why turbines????????

They have a very poor efficiency. Which is why almost every power station that runs gas turbines uses a combined cycle where the waste heat from the turbine is used to raise steam to run a steam turbine. Not the easiest thing to incorporate into a car.

Though I think in the 1950s there was some turbine car project in the US but that didn't go anywhere.

What inspired you to mention turbines?

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Re: changed the look on XP to 'classic'

"Sad about Thunderbird and every major Browser ignoring OS Theme and either copying Chrome or Win 10."

I occasionally use the browser part of Vivaldi and that can follow the OS theme. You can find that with: Help - Vivaldi Welcome tour, then it's the first question.

Which reminds me I should take another look at the Vivaldi e-mail component. Thunderbird mostly works for me but I find it annoying that it keeps all attachments in both the Inbox and Sent files directories which therefore get very large. I much preferred Eudora which allowed you to place received attachments in a separate directory.

Have a good weekend ->

Rollable laptop displays to roll off the production line from April, says Samsung

Re: Hmm

"There is also this odd ball, not quite square display from LG:"

Thanks for the tip! Had been looking for a display like that for a while but overlooked this one. Received it a few days ago, the display is fine and the desk stand is very well made. Connects via HDMI or USB3 (can also power your PC).

First got a portrait display about 30 years ago, with a dedicated video card, then a CRT monitor which could pivot between landscape and portrait, again with a dedicated card - neither of which survived Windows updates. So very happy to now have a display which works with a standard display port and without special drivers. Impressed that my elderly, not particularly powerful laptop can drive its internal HD display, a 4K display and this almost 4K LG display at the same time.

That subdued CES has us wondering what 2025 will look like, tech-wise

"(Our clients all have a 4 year policy, we refuse to waste time troubleshooting hardware older than that)"

Hmm, seems a bit wasteful. In NL you have to write investments in hardware off over 5 years (or more) for taxes. And the 5-year old laptop I'm writing this on is just as functional now as it was on day 1, not in a hurry to replace that.

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: "right above the underground car park exhaust vent"

"Oh, don't worry, they won't be whinging for long."

As told me by an elderly Dutch chap who worked for their MoD a few decades ago (when cars had carburetors and no emission management system):

"We had a secure communications centre, with one wall on a public road. One day people started fainting in the coms room. They discovered that somebody on the road was tinkering with the carburettor of their car, sending lots of carbon monoxide straight into the air intake of the coms centre. Needless to say, the air intake was relocated."

That time of the week again -->

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

"This may be a novel idea (spoiler alert, it isn't) but how about a search engine that just takes search terms with the usual operators of and, or and not, and gives the results that fit including the null result if nothing fits"

Upvote for that.

That's a service I would happily pay for. Which reminds me I have to take a look at Kagi, Mojeek and Qwant which other Commentards have mentioned.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

"[ .. per another current thread I have ESP32s/ESP8266s monitoring water temperature, humidity, solar and battery inverters, and more, all feeding a Raspberry Pi running an MQTT broker and displaying via another ESP32 so I can see consumption and status across appliances.]"

That sounds interesting. Could you post more details or a link to the software, etc.

In fact that would make a really interesting The Register article.

Are Copilot+ PCs really the fastest Windows PCs? X and Copilot don't think so

Re: You mean there is difference?

"Generative AI creates bullshit in a highly efficient way, and is thus loved by marketing teams and executives!"

Yup, some of my work involves writing informative and factually correct marketing materials for high quality technical products - so I love AI bullshit, when it's used by my customers' competitors :)

My customers' customers tend to be middle-aged, critical technical folk with an allergy to marketing hot air. So the more hot air the competition produces, the more they drive sales to my customers.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Sometimes...

" instead of just releasing the relevant pressure rollers"

Seen worse. Few decades ago: some helpful person used scissors to remove the paper from the drum - scratched the drum, then not a 50 quid item you order online, but required a very expensive visit by an IBM technician :(

--> Almost that time of the week.

Don't open that 'copyright infringement' email attachment – it's an infostealer

Why OCR?

"... is packed with AI capabilities for optical character recognition (OCR)."

Why does an infostealer package need OCR?

Japan's wooden cube-shaped satellite rockets to space

According to the article "... wooden satellites [...] require less electromagnetic shielding, therefore allowing for a smaller design"

It would be nice to have an explanation of that - why would they need less shielding? In fact as the metal enclosure of a conventional satellite is likely to provide a degree of shielding of the electronics inside it, if anything you would expect a wooden satellite to need additional shielding. Or is my extremely limited grasp of shielding and EMI sorely lacking?

NHS would be hit by 'significant' costs if UK loses EU data status, warn Lords

Re: The reality of Brexit...

"No. There were UK civil servants, negotiators, MEPs, and representatives in the EU making 1/27th of the policy decisions. 1/27th of the say over the rules that run our country, economy and trade."

One of my colleagues used to do English language coaching for some Dutch civil servants in the EU. Around the time of the referendum they told her "The UK has a disproportionately large input in the development of EU legislation because they speak English fluently, and that's the language used in most meetings, and UK civil servants often have more subject knowledge than those from other countries. Can't understand why they want to throw that advantage away."

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Ways to encourage payment

"That was over ten years ago, and they are still a loyal customer."

Had a customer during the pandemic whose projects were really delayed by that. Was going to do some translations for them but they replied they weren't sure they were still going to be in business for long. I figured that as they were sensible folk I was willing to take a punt on that and told them so. By the time I got round to invoicing things were looking up again, and they paid within a day or two.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: The Rules

"1 - A five minute job never takes five minutes. More like five hours."

First law of time estimating:

- Make an initial guess (say, 5 mins)

- Double the number and use the next larger unit (so, 10 hours)

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

More translation mishaps

"Miles of specifications were translated, with some comical results."

Years ago there was a mishap at the Italian plant of a company a friend worked for. He commissioned a report by an expert, who wrote it in Italian, after which it was translated into English.

My friend thought it all made sense, but some of the forces referred to seemed to be out by an order of magnitude. Eventually they realised the Italian used 'daN' i.e. a decanewton, 10 newton. The translator had interpreted that as 'da N' i.e. 'per newton'.

A few European countries seem to use daN because it's conveniently close to 1 kg. That makes physicists shudder but technicians smile. The only example of this usage I've come across in the UK is Profi magazine (covers farm equipment) because the equipment tests for their reviews are carried out in Germany.

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

"Going to find the example, I've found a blog with a load more, including a humorous "Wines and Spirits" on a shop advising in Welsh that the location had "Wine and Ghosts", an offering of "Shear Madness" (a type of bird) advising of "Mad Sheep Shearing" and a warning that "Workers are Exploding"."

Likely to be unrevised machine translation.

A reasonable human translator will realise when a sentence is ambiguous or the subject is too technical and will ask for clarification or suggest you use another translator. Machine translation does not have that reality check. I recently came across 'pin fuses' in a tender document about air conditioning. Turned out these were 'veerveiligheden = spring-loaded relief valves". (Unfortunately there are human, supposedly professional, translators out there who actually do worse than MT :(. )

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

"Irked as it often takes my team longer to fix the crap than it would have taken for us to write it correctly, and we would be a much happier team and be able to more positively retain excellent staff."

That, unfortunately, seems to be the way of the world these days. Or at least what management and procurement departments prefer.

A certain large, local petroleum company used to have an in-house translation department which worked with specialist freelance translators. That worked well, the translators earned a good living and delivered good translations. Now they're working with larger, lowest cost translation companies. Well, apparently lower costs - unfortunately the company's engineers now have to revised the outsourced translations and the engineers' hourly rates are several times that of their former freelance translators. (I gather some of their current translators don't know the difference between 'insulation' and 'isolation'.) So any apparent savings are negated by increased costs elsewhere in the process. And one of my current customers seems to be using unrevised machine translations for some of their training materials - with unintended hilarious results.

As one of their former freelance translators, and current shareholder, that makes me quite grumpy :(

And it looks like this also happens in the IT industry - my commiserations.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Re: The ghost of 9/11 casts a long shadow

"... there was a fire axe in the cabin crew equipment."

One of my pilot friends got grief in the US because she had some small scissors in her hand luggage. She did point out that in another few minutes, when she got into the cockpit, she would have access to an axe - but no, that argument was not accepted.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: Company‑provided safety shoes and fit

"One Asian factory I visited had a full room full of coveralls, ...."

One of my European customers acquired a factory in Asia. First thing they did was to issue all the factory workers with safety boots and insist on them wearing those, instead of the flip-flops they were used to.

Re: Hard Hats and Hi-Viz...

"not in-house as a lot of the benefit comes from a mixed classroom where there won't be consensus on "how it's always been done")."

Umpty upvotes for that. Although it would be more convenient and cheaper for me (self-employed) to opt for e-learning I always like to go to classroom courses - often you learn as much from the other trainees as from the trainer.

"You'd think black would be more highvis against white then fluorescent yellow..."

Unfortunately folk - especially those whose approach to H&S is box-ticking rather than critical thinking - are too focused on hi-vis. I think that was originally designed when working near motorways, etc. i.e. needs large reflective panels which make the wearer visible to drivers, at night. But that's not always the best choice for daylight operations. During the day, and away from vehicle headlights there are more effective solutions such as https://www.engelbert-strauss.co.uk/jackets/e-s-forestry-jacket-kwf-3132090-60172-1299.html?itemorigin=SEARCH (developed for forestry but I also wear it on industrial sites).

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

"I'd be curious to know if the employee(s?) who made the mistake is still in the Company."

Why not? That's one mistake they're not going to make again.

As one of my customers in the heavy lifting industry noted "Sure, we could fire the guy who screwed up, but there's no guarantee the new guy is not going to make any mistakes."

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

This is your resident pedant speaking.

"Is this a Risk or Hazard?"

Hazard: what can go wrong (fire, electric shock, etc.) and the magnitude/impact of that.

Risk: hazard x probability of the hazard occurring.

So a meteor strike poses an extreme hazard x extremely low probability = low risk

Working on a tall ladder in a gale after imbibing a pint or two poses a high hazard x high probability = very high risk

You can go back to imbibing now -->

(yes, I did get an embarrassingly high mark for my last health and safety exam)

Seriously, understanding hazard, probability and risk does help us think about safety and protecting people. And gives you a tool to explain to box-ticking folk that there is usually no need to wear high-vis inside a building where there aren't any vehicles operating.

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Re: If that helps

"Beyond a certain size*range, the battery will outweigh the payload."

Not really, plenty of heavy tractors are now available as EVs, with a GCW up to around 100 tons or so:

https://www.terbergspecialvehicles.com/en/news/

And the new RoRo tractor prototype handles up to 150 tons I think. Apparently the main challenge when developing that was to cram the battery packs into a chassis which has to be short, given that it has to operate inside ships.

For these applications the higher torque of EVs and reduced noise and particulate emissions make them very attractive, especially when operating inside ships or warehouses.

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Re: Brilliant concept!

"I recommend you do, I am at 24.2.5.2 and supports both."

I just updated LibreOffice.

Two issues:

- yes, it can generate a barcode, but gives you no choice of the barcode type (and doesn't even tell you what type it uses)

- you can't easily toggle between the barcode/QR code and the underlying plain text

Almost that time of the week again -->

Re: Brilliant concept!

"Insert>Ole object>QR and barcode"

Thanks! (Couldn't find that with the Help function.)

I'm currently on version 6.4 which only offers Insert - Object - QR code.

Insert - Object - OLE object doesn't support barcodes or QR codes. Probably time I updated.

Re: Brilliant concept!

"1 - get a Code 39 font;"

Please bear in mind that Code 39 only supports uppercase letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_39

If you use MS Word you don't need to download a barcode font - might help to avoid security issues. The Word Help file explains how to insert bar codes & QR codes and switch between the code image and plain text. Basically, you insert a field, then enter the data for the bar code and metadata (described in Help) to indicate the barcode type, size, etc.

See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/field-codes-displaybarcode-6d81eade-762d-4b44-ae81-f9d3d9e07be3

For example: Ctrl-F9, two curly braces will appear, place the following text between them: DisplayBarcode "El Reg 123" CODE128 \d \t

For a QR code: DisplayBarcode "El Reg 123" QR \q 3

Then right-click the field to switch between displaying the barcode and the text (Toggle Field Codes).

Also works with Excel and mail merge I think, but haven't tried that.

Couldn't find a similar function in LibreOffice Writer, so in that case you would have to get a barcode font.

Used to tinker with this a few decades ago - thanks for the trip down Memory Lane.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

"Language evolves over time."

Ungelic is us.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Re: Reverse crypto scam

"Now, there's an argument that people who hold assets worth vast amounts of money should pay a wealth tax on them, but such a thing doesn't (yet) exist, "

In essence, there is a capital tax in the Netherlands. But then there's no capital gains here.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: Strangest?

"I hope they thawed the chicken first!!"

This is probably apocryphal:

A few decades ago the folk working on high speed trains decided they needed to test the windscreen for resistance against bird strikes. So, taking inspiration from aerospace, they fired chickens at it, which always shattered the windscreen, however strong it was. Finally they asked their aerospace colleagues for advice and were told "Thaw the chicken first."

A good weekend to all Commentards -->

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

"Could have been in the Nederlands, it used to be illegal to exceed working hour restrictions there."

Note from your humble correspondent in NL: even if you're right I've never heard of somebody being locked up for that. And that would only be possible after they'd been convicted by a court. So not in NL, methinks.

Still, almost that time of the week again -->

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Welding in a chemical plant

Peripherally related to this item:

Many years ago a chemical plant had a scheduled shutdown for maintenance and the installation of some steelwork, by welding. When they wanted to start the plant up again they discovered that the stray currents from the welding had burnt out a rack of instrumentation, which took several weeks to replace :( Very costly loss of production.

When arc welding you have to connect the ground/return close to the point where you are welding. If you use long cables and have a considerable distance between the grounding point and the welding point you can get nasty stray currents. And I imagine the long welding cables carrying a high current could also induce current in nearby cabling.

Apparently any further extensions of the steelwork on that plant were done with bolts or clamps, not welding.

BOFH: Why's the network so slow?

Re: Ahhh the good old

"And the wedding is tommorrow at 3pm*"

Please give her our best wishes.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

"For last years Basel English Panto Group production... we had a huge cauldron made of papier maché. It took some maneouvering to get through the door to our rehearsal room - and out again."

I was told "Panto in The Hague [several decades ago], one of the keen volunteers built a rowing boat as a prop. Only to discover that it was about 10 mm too wide to fit through the door [hoistway on the second floor]. Eventually we cut through the timber of a window frame so we could take that out and lower the boat down on a rope [across the road from the harbour - must have puzzled a few passers by]. Then screwed the [now structurally compromised] window frame back in place. [I think it blew out in the next winter storm.]"