Posts by Roger Lipscombe 59 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007
I _think_ that Automattic wants the login credentials for the accounts associated with the _events_. That is: not the organizer's personal deets, just a way to recover control of the event pages if the organizer goes dark.
The article could do a better job of explaining this, I think.
Now, it's an entirely separate issue why an organizer might have recently decided to have nothing to do with WordPress events...
Decades ago, I worked for a company in the UK (probably now absorbed and/or defunct) that wrote outbound dialler software. The user would provide it with a list of numbers to call and then it would take a number from the queue and attempt to dial it. If the call wasn't picked up, the number would be put on the retry queue for later. Relatively simple stuff.
The problem was this: when the number was taken from the queue, we'd put the configured outside line prefix (usually a '9') on the front before dialling. Then, if the call wasn't picked up, *that* number (including the 9) would be put on the retry queue. When we grabbed a number from the retry queue, we'd put the outside line prefix on it -- again.
As I'm sure you've worked out by now, after a few attempts, every number in the retry queue would start with '999', which would have resulted in us spamming UK emergency services with calls as fast as we could dial them (which, in the end, depended on how many external lines were connected to the switch).
Fortunately, we discovered this bug in pretty short order, while we were still developing against the test switch, and before it had any real outside lines connected to it. It got fixed before the end of the day, and the engineer responsible had a good story to tell in the pub after work (and had to buy the first round, obviously).
"an "inadvertent misconfiguration" during the provisioning of UniSuper's Private Cloud services resulted in the deletion of the subscription."
This is word salad (I should know; I've written customer-facing incident reports in my time). Sounds to me like someone fat-fingered a Terraform plan (or similar) against the production account. I don't know why they're getting to shift some of the blame onto Google.
"It turned out that it was some unknown impurities in the original batch of ingredients that made his potion work."
Reminded of this Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evV05QeSjAw - wherein the holes in Swiss cheese were disappearing because everything's too clean these days -- it takes a certain amount of straw dust to give the hole-causing bacteria something to nucleate on.
See also the loss and subsequent recreation of the recipe for the aerogel used in US nuclear weapons (look up FOGBANK), wherein -- again -- an impurity in the process turned out to be essential.
"we can't ignore illegal behavior that deprives customers of access to the tools and solutions they want."
I'm failing to see how bundling Teams with Office *prevents* customers from using Slack (or whatever) instead...
Personally, I think the EU should sue Microsoft because Teams is crap.
"However, if you were really keen, it was possible to obtain Windows XP Professional X64 Edition".
Yeah. I had a copy. If I remember correctly, it came in a dark grey case. I might still have it around here somewhere, but that would require digging around in the boxes we've stored under the eaves.
"when they see one priced at X and another of the same capacity priced at X+n, they'll not unreasonable conclude that the former is the one to go for, because they genuinely don't see any benefit in paying the extra for the one next to it."
And also the reverse: some people will get the more expensive one because "it's more expensive, so it's obviously better". You make a bigger % markup on the more expensive one, and you've got the consumers coming *and* going.
A colleague of mine had to get in touch with (I think it was also Dell) support because his graphics card had stopped working. It took escalating to third line support before they would accept that "no, I'm *not* putting it back in the PC -- a large chunk of the ceramic is missing from the chip, and I can see the silicon" was sufficient to RMA the board without running through the script. We're not entirely sure what caused the failure, but the magic smoke *really* wanted out on that occasion.
I'm pretty sure (or cynical enough to believe...) that the "entire ride process" is a superset of the "entire ride". You'll be getting adverts while booking the ride, while waiting for the ride (through obnoxious notifications on your phone that you can't ignore because, well, you're expecting a ride), doubly-so while in the car, and then probably some more adverts in between the car and submitting your feedback.
I once plugged in an ISA card while the PC was running. I want to say it was a Sound Blaster AWE32, but I don't *think* I'd have been that careless with something that expensive, so it was more likely to be a cheap network card, like a DEC Tulip or something.
Nothing went wrong. No smoke, no fzzt. Nothing.
I rebooted (to load the drivers). All good.
"watch someone try to work out the wiring in most living rooms where you have two pair of two way switches"
For whatever reason, our kitchen has 3 switches for each set of lights -- one by the hall doorway, one by the dining room doorway, and one by the back doors. When we had some electrical work done a few years ago, I think it took the sparky several hours just to figure out what the hell was connected to what.
To be fair, though, we've been in the house for nearly 15 years, and I've still not figured out which switch goes with which lights.
Flying into Vancouver on a business jaunt:
Them: Can you take the electronics out of your bag, please?
Me: Are you sure? It's pretty much *all* electronics.
Them: Yes.
Two laptops (netbooks, fortunately), a couple of USB/serial converters, an ethernet switch, and the associated power supplies and assorted cables... Took me a while to cram it all back into the bag.
Back before everyone had a GPS-enabled supercomputer in their pocket, I was at a startup looking to make GPS kit for skiers and snowboarders. So I was taking the prototype with me on a personal skiing trip. Clear plastic box containing the antenna and a custom-built circuit board, ribbon cable to a separate battery pack. All tucked inside my helmet bag along with a roll of duct tape.
After a few minutes of the security guard running it back and forth through the scanner (I was obviously not putting a fragile prototype in checked baggage), I finally asked "would you like me to explain what that is?"
After explaining, I was allowed to take the prototype into the cabin. The duct tape had to be checked in.
"Printers both older, contemporary and newer than it all support Postscript. So why didn't it? No idea."
Because PostScript is a fully-fledged programming language. You can even render the mandelbrot set in it, *on* the printer. That costs money, because you need to put a fairly beefy (for the time) CPU in the printer.
HP PCL is simpler, but still provides for font rendering (and vector graphics?) on the printer, so you still need something relatively beefy in the printer to do that.
Manufacturers can save money by doing the rendering on the PC and sending a simpler rasterised image to the printer. Hence the custom printer drivers.
Plus, I'm assuming that Adobe charged a license fee for supporting PS (and HP for PCL), so there's that, too.
When I was younger, we had intermittent, and progressively-getting-worse problems with the phone. This was back in the days of landline phones with actual dials on them. After some investigation, involving pulling out the sofa, we discovered that the rabbit (who usually lived in a hutch in the garden, but was house-trained) had acquired a taste for the cable insulation and had started chewing through the cable in multiple places. I figure that he would stop chewing when he received a mild electrical shock and then next week would try again in another spot. After judicious application of electrical table, and a ban on the rabbit entering that room, the problem was solved.
I had 64MB of RAM in my Windows 95 PC -- at the time that was considered a lot of memory.
I remember that I had to take half of it out whenever I wanted to play GTA, because DOS4GW didn't like having as much physical RAM as virtual RAM. When I got in touch with someone at Rational they were all "oh; we never considered that someone might actually have 64MB of memory".
My father was renting a VCR (also JVC, I think) that was no longer "supported" past Y2K, so the rental company simply sent him a new one in late '99. They didn't ask for the old one back, so I did some Y2K checks -- can I set the clock to some time in 2000, does it deal with the leap year properly, can I schedule a few recordings, etc.?
It all passed, so -- hey -- free VCR, I guess!
I used Dropbox as a convenient way to get photos off of my phone (via DropSync; the Dropbox client for Android was never very good), and to synchronise my KeePass database between devices.
Then they broke the Linux client. I now use Google Photos for the former and BitWarden has built-in sync.
Everything else I need is either in OneDrive, Google Drive or GitHub.
Then they started sending me "thanks for signing up emails" a month or two back, even though I've had the account for several years.
I'm out. I'll be exporting my stuff and deleting my account this afternoon.
"A beer, a command line ..."
I first encountered Slackware in '94-'95, while a student. One morning I woke up after a night in the Union with an incipient hangover, with a plan to install it. So I sat down and turned on the PC. Turns out I'd managed to install it the previous night, successfully, while very very drunk, presumably with the aid of a kebab.
He's only safe while he's physically in the embassy, right? Why don't we suggest that the Ecuadorians move their embassy? A suitable property just became available on Grosvenor Square, I believe.
They move, he doesn't. He's no longer in an embassy; he gets arrested. They move, he attempts to move. He's on the street; he gets arrested.
This seems appropriate: Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck.
> It's a laptop with ONE DRIVE BAY.
Are you sure it has a drive BAY at all? My Acer ultrabook (granted, it's from 2013 or so) has a 128GB SSD in it. Except it doesn't; it has 2x 64GB SSDs in it. I assume they're soldered onto the motherboard somehow.
With RAID enabled in the BIOS, Windows casually treats it as a single volume and you'd never know. To use Linux on it, you need to enable AHCI (which it *does* allow, unlike -- allegedly -- these Lenovo machines), at which point you need to monkey around with software RAID to get back to a single volume.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
