Posts by Steve Kerr 214 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2013
I somewhat think that what the UK government will want to do is somewhat more draconian than what the EU are proposing.
I would even hazard that they will ask their friend, pooh bear to help - or at least the government mandarins that drive a lot of policy (regardless of the party in power) will.
Waiting for the UK government to make using VPNs illegal with a life sentence if/when caught!
Made mistakes with Amiga hard disk partitioning
Whatever tool I was using to do it (may have been inbuilt one) didn't compare the size of the disk against the size of the partitions.
From memory, you had to specify the start/end block for each partition.
Somewhere along the line, I got confused and managed to create a partition or extend it beyond the end of the disk, what this ended up doing (unknown to me at the time), was wraparound the partiton back past the beginning of the disk (as that's what this partioning app done) - this particular tool didn't check for validity it seems!
Only noticed some days later when weird things strted happening and files got corrupted - took ages to sort out that mass, I think I actually had some backups that I managed to restore (done to VHS tapes no less) - no idea what I lost but I don't think it was much as I was only about 19-20 at the time so didn't have much of importance!
Fun times!
Got windows 11 on a work PC now
Seems to be spending time fighting againt it - so many things are a pain, the most annoying the forced location of the task bar - I know there are probably hacks etc.. around being able to change it, though this is a work PC so there's a limit to what I can do to it (and also corporate policy restrictions). I prefer to have the start bar on the side but no, microsoft says I'm not allowed to do that with the default install of windows 11.
So my own PC, I'm waiting for something better to come along (new framework laptop when it arrives will have linux), gaming PC will be sticking to windows - maybe windows 12 will be better.
Mentioned in a previous comment on a previous article.
Company I work for used this as the opportune time to downsize their offices round the world where possible, 90% drop in space in european head office and moved to a managed office space elsewhere with some available hotdesking where needed.
So they've seen a way in saving a lot of costs - certainly in the UK but I would think elsewhere as well.
Suits me fine! (though I know for others home working does not suit them for a variety of reasons)
Only a passing comment.
You would think if you have software that is written to be public internet facing that they would an internal set of automation tools that continually attempts to exploit their own software
So you would have a segregated network where you would use the same sort of tools that miscreants would use and then coninually attempt attacks at a variety of supported versions of your software.
I know if I was running a software vendor, I would do something like this.
For some internal software in the past, I have done things to try to break it though people moaned about why i was doing this - I said, we need to understand what will happen to all the interconnected components if something goes wrong, e.g. someone accidently deletes the contents of a table in a DB or services fail or servers fail.
Basically, test it into destuction - it's also a fun thing to do and it means that when it goes live to customers you've tried to minimise the chances of failure, though people can be quite good at breaking things by accident!
When I worked for an bank, we had lots of AV and mail AV to protect our stuff.
We also had lots of issues with file server storage always being low - back when 100-200 GB of fileserver space was a huge amount
Whilst on holiday, we had that virus pass thru that zero lengthed all media files, that came from our owner back as we didn't (until then), have mail AV on those links as we thought they were trusted.
Anyway, we recovered about 70% of our file server disk space pretty much immediately (only reason I knew was someone called me whilst I was in France).
When I got back we got so many requests for restores where when checked responses were "please provide a business justification to restore madonnas greated hits" or some such.
only area that got media restored was marketing.
We were much more aggressive in identifying and removing music/films without notification after that.
Once flew to Albania for work and was on an airbus of some description.
Only about 40-50 passengers, the plane was at its weight limit.
The front few rows were filled and so were the rear few rows and only single window seats on the left hand side of the plane, someone wanted to move form the crowded front/back but was told this was not allowed because the plane was at its max carrying weight due to cargo and the seating arrangement was due to balance.
From gatwick it took most of the runway to get off the ground, landing in albania where the runway was short came in so low was skimming the fields for a minute then literally smacked into the tarmac just after the dirt and braked so hard I headbutted the seat in front and had to use my hands to push myself off the faceplant. Plane done a 180 at the other end with the wing actually over the dirt at the other end of the runway, was like doing a 180 at 20mph in a very large reliant robin!
As for passenger weight, I've seen a lot of videos from er....larger so called influencers bemoaning plane seat & aisle widths and saying that they should be given extra seats for free, to me, to be fair, should state your weight+baggage weight approx when booking tickets and pay the difference or refunded the difference at weigh ins at the airport - could be done discretely - only fair to charge per KG for travel, a bit like sending stuff via a parcel company!
I can see a use for this in a business setting - for instance, with a lot of WFH nowadays (myself included), rather than supplying laptops/PCs to employees they could do one of a couple of things.
Allow an employee to use their own PC to connect to a virtual PC on a hosted environment or provide a cheap thin client, like a RPi to connect, this means that companies can reduce phsyical hardware supplied to employees which would make it a lot cheaper.
Saying that, they don't need to run in some cloud providers environment as companies could just host it all themselves in their own environments using things like VMWare Horizon or one of the mass of other products out ther.
it wouldn't surprise me if companies go down that route, I fully expect that the company I work for would do that as literally only use the laptop for teams and outlook and my actual work is done thru hopping onto other secured hosts and from their jumping onwards.
I'm sure i read something a few years back about suggestions that the voting machines go to be checked & tested by the Nevada gambling commission where they would also hold the software in escrow. As they're good at making sure the software in gambling machines does not skew the payouts etc..
From memory, the voting machine vendors point blank refused.
i saw a video as well where they got members of the public to watch whilst a sealed voting machine that was used in local elections was made to produce the "correct vote", they were sat in the room watching this happen, they were shocked at how easy it was to manipulate.
there needs to be more oversight of these machines and their software.
There was a push to use open source voting software where the source code was open to everyone to view, don't know what happened to that initiative though.
Also, I'm not American or in the US so the above is based on being an outside observer on stuff I've read.
When I get round to it, going to set up a VM that talks out to a squid proxy that will redirect to a local webserver hosting my "bank".
The PC will be in its own subnet so can only see the local gateway which will route stuff specifically.
Going to group policy it to the eyeballs and then go thru the entertainment of wasting their time.
My current go to name to give them is Benjamin Chow or Ben Chow for short - say it together and then look up Hindi swear words :-)
We have some names rather than acryonyms for people - some of which is part of peoples names but won't say here.
We have named (internally in the team) certain colleagues as
Mr Shouty
Sargent Major Shouty (SMS) - ex army who believes he can treat civvies the way he treated people in the army, doesn't work!
Captain Chaos - he actually knew about this one and accpted it was was quite funny.
There are more but not saying those ones and many I've forgotten!
It's not a phone company problem, it's a social media company issue.
They're binding their service to a phone number and not an account, if it was bound to an account then this wouldn't happen.
huge copout from fakebook/whatsapp blaming someone else for their decision to bind accounts to a mobile number.
OK, there are other issues where companies send SMS messages for 2FA too so there are more complexities to it.
There's also a responsibility for the account owner to delete their phone numbers off of their social media.
So it's a mix of social media companies and the people with accounts with those services.
I would think there would be some kind of "migrating to a new number" thing in those apps, not that this wouldn't be used by identify thieves - it's a complex subject thinking more on it.
Giving up and going for a lunch break!
The company I work for is just in the process of dumping its London office, they don't want to pay for the space, but if people are WFH, they don't have to pay for it, so that's a win/win for them.
They are going to rent a small managed office as a "collaboration space" for the things where occasionally you do have to do some face to face stuff.
As most of my communication is with people in different offices in the UK, europe, asia & the US, it doesn't really matter where I am to work, the added benefit is that I'm on call so waiting for 90 minutes for me to get to the office or get home to look at things becomes a few minutes so the company wins on quicker support.
Saw some fancy websites.
Saw some quotes about how it's going to change everything
Saw it's fragmented already with many different metaverse sites.
Saw nothing of interest
Lost interest.
Looks like it's stillborn.
Wasted 7 minutes looking at this stuff.
Going to look at something more interesting which to be honest, is anything else.
When I was doing electronic systems in college - certainly with a few people that shouldn't have been allowed near anything electrical, we had one guy who produced entertainment.
They used to have these plug boards with which you could fit components that was sort of a bit like lego, you could slot in these blocks that had components and a description of what it was on it, they were powered by a separate 12v power supply.
We heard a big bang and everyone turned round to see a mushroom cloud billow up to and across the ceiling and a look of horror on the guys face.
We never worked out how he managed to cause a transistor (I think it was) to lose its magic blue smoke.
We did jokingly create the "Theory of Random Connections" off of the back of what he done which was the running joke for the rest of the college year.
Fun times.
Have some great calls with the scammers until they start swearing at me - much entertainment.
Although it's crap that people got scammed out of money, is a bit funny that the what seems to be the majority of scammers are themselves being scammed.
The icing on the cake is if those scum that scammed people out of money were then scammed out those illgotten gains.
I think she has done so much for country, even amongst her own problems in her own family, just like every other family.
I do mourn her passing.
I was at Windsor Horse Show last year when we were asked to just wait for a minute.
These 3 black rangers pulled up next to us, they were going pretty fast, surprised the first one didn't do a handbrake sliding stop.
The drivers door opened and out got the queen, was totally aghast as she was just in front of us, I've got photos of her that close too.
She was watching one of the native showing classes, not in the main ring either, just the side ring and they had a chair there for her to sit on and watch.
We went and saw some other things and when we can back past she was just leaving, getting in the drivers seat leading the way, we saw her driving on the road up to the castle and she was accelerating away from the others, she must have been doing at least 70mph! Total demon driver, it was brilliant.
After the loss of Prince Philip it was so nice to see her so happy at Windsor watching all the horse.
A great loss to the country.
Yup - charging significantly over MSRP whilst not actually dropping the prices to lower than the original MSRP for cards which are a couple of years old now.
So yeah, you're stuck with inventory because you're unwilling to drop the prices to something more acceptable to the market.
It's why I'm still using an 8 year old graphics card because I'm not paying those prices for yesterdays technology. Charging a premium for bleeding edge I can understand.
AMD have seen the writing on the wall and are starting to drop prices, Nvidia have their heads in the clouds still riding the crypto boom (and bust)
Unfortunately where I live the only fibre provider currently is price gouging the local area which I suspect won't stop until BT finally roll out fibre here.
Had a major row with one of their door to doors sales people that got aggressive after I said no, not interested. Believed he was entititled to know all the reasons why I would not switch there and then. His attitude pretty much sealed why they would never get my business even without considering their eye watering prices.
BT currently listed my area as before 2025 but I suspect will be after the heat death of the universe.
In a previous job turned up for a shift with a bunch of police that wanted to talk to me - scared the crap out of me.
Turns out, they wanted to listen to a voice recording of a particular line (lots of dealer lines & also some switchboard lines were recorded) and management told that to come to the building and I'd do it but didn't tell me that they were arriving.
These were analogue tapes that had something like 48 lines recorded and the tapes ran for 24 hours at a time.
Anyway, I ran thru a tape over a time period for one particular external line whilst they listened (and obviously I did too).
What transpired was there were some bomb threats being phoned in to reception, in listening to a scratchy recording, could hear a woman in the background and a child, it was one of the managers in the midsts of a mental breakdown phoning in bomb threats. Don't know what actually happened to him in the end. I was asked by the police about what I thought I heard.
Have had to listen in to a bunch of other dealer conversations which included hearing the sex lives of several of the dealers - oops!
I've looked at it (on a VM) and currently, I see nothing on it which is giving me a "wow, must migrate to this immediately" as opposed to "kicking and screaming and throwing my toys out of my pram"
For some people out there it may be OK as it seems they are trying to go for the MacOS type look but in a Microsoft way.
Maybe windows 12 will be better, to me, this is like the Windows Vista/8 version, they've tried something different, it's going to fail so they go back to something similar to XP/Win7/Win10
Still use my IPod Touch with stored music from ripped CD's and with Tidal in offline mode.
Was hoping they were going to release an updated one as it's useful for being small, good battery life and not having to worry about storage for everything else on a phone as well.
So when this dies or becomes incompatible with the latest Tidal App update will have to look for something else.
It's a shame as it was a really good simple product.
I think I know the confusion here.
From memory, (probably wrong), the filesystem was called Files11 or some such.
The file system had extensions to create databases as part of the filesystem with which you used FDL? (File Definition Language) that specified things like fields, sizes, types, bucket sizes, indexes and with that you can basically create a database file.
it was efficient, meant you could use standard backups as everything looked like a file, some really funky stuff.
My best effort was being able to pass commands to batch jobs real time using the OPER console functionality so could to a REPLY/TO the OPER prompt to direct the program what to do next, even done sanity checks on input - best one was a colleague saying it was impossible and couldn't be done and then me presenting, yeah, here's how to do it, I wrote this in a previous company. :-)
Been driven thru the back roads in Moscow back to the airport late at night on a terrifying journey after I flew over for a work meeting.
Outside of the middle of moscow, there is literally no street lights or electricity.
Picked up by some taxi driver and driven down narrow back streets was rather worried about exactly where we were going - think the driver saw the terror in my eyes and said "Is OK, no worries"
he was actually skipping the clogged main roads which are a nightmare, just everything outside was pitch black!
I was doing some work late one evening for a bank in Newcastle, we finished about 10pm.
In the huge foyer the length of the building, the customer said as I was a visitor, I had to go out via the main entrance and they would go out via the staff only revolving doors that had to be used with a staff pass.
They duly left and I walked down to the main doors to find there was no-one there, main doors locked and the customer had legged it and I didn't have their mobile numbers to contact them to let me out.
Waited there for 20 minutes thinking I was going to be there all night locked in at bank.
Then I thought I heard music, thought I was hearing things it was so quiet, took me a few minutes to identify where it was coming from, had to go upstairs and pinpoint where it was coming from, found it finally when I found 2 guys replacing floor tiles at the other end. Told them what happened and asked if they had a pass that would get me out of the door.
Finally made it out after being stuck for 30 minutes and still no security showed up - even waved my arms in the air a bit in case there was security monitoring cameras!
The customer did laugh the following day and said that should have probably made sure I could get out before they left!
Fun times
China is bad for a lot of things and certainly not condoning their actions, so ignoring the holes in the app, the probable monitoring and tracking etc....
Someone has posted the list at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/citizenlab/chat-censorship/master/olympics/illegalwords.txt
Digging thru it, the far majority is for things that are illegal and are pretty much terms for "guns for sale, drugs for sale, prostitutes for sale" though some really odd ones like "national tourism board".
Have only had a 5 minute dig as currently in the midst of my work day.
One financial institution I worked at many years ago decided to do a generator test late in the evening midweek - I was on shift that evening.
The failvoer goes Mains -> Battery -> Generator
On this test it went something like Mains -> Battery -> Generator (fails to start, everything goes black) -> Back to battery (everything comes on) -> back to generator (everything goes black) -> back to battery everything comes on -> batteries give out -> everything goes black and stays black.
No emergency lighting in the DC where the bridge was it turns out and no outside lighting to shine in thru the windows as there were none.
The hilarity, the mainframe batch runs that were in the progress at the time, the chaos - fun times.
So issues with the generators and lots of issues with failed batteries, lots of root cause analysis, lots of beefing up batteries, failover procedures etc...
There was fun at one bank where the generator fuel tanks spung a leak and flooded the basement canteen to a depth of 3 feet, they never did manage to paint over the diesel tide mark enough and their was a odour of diesel for the rest of the time I was there which never quite left.
It's more likely these boards were part of self builds or small company builds so they would not have OEM licenses for windows.
I originally purchased a Win7 license when it was released (not OEM tied).
I've been thru this when I had an i7 die and the cost of a replacement was laughable, it was more cost effective to build a new machine and transplant some bits that I could (decided to do a pimped out box, with RGB lighting and stuff - never again will I do this after the 12-14 hours it took over 4 days with huge amounts of internal wiring!)
So, new case, motherboard (switched to AMD), RAM - only things that remained were the original SSDs and the graphics card.
I booted it and rather expected it to blue screen and die and have to reinstall windows, instead it installed all the correct drivers, didn't complain and asked to relicense which took less than 5 minutes to sort with the license key.
So as much as I hate to say it, but kudos to M$ for making a seemless migration with the same install into what was pretty much a totally different PC with a different CPU and drivers and not had any problems since in the 2 1/2 years since it was built.
Just saying!
Shame that over the years it's all been turned into bean counters and strangled funding for Nasa where so much science and technology has come off of the back of pushing frontiers.
Would be good to see a second moon landing in my lifetime though the first I would've been mostly going "goo goo goo" and soiling nappies.
Dr. Evils empire.
I bet zuck has a Mr. Bigglesworth too.
Based on the current company i would suggest the board isn't dissimilar to Dr. Evils various henchmen, sorry, that wasn't PC enough, hench'various entities of inteterminate genders (72 gender types or some such on fakebook now), rocks, trees, a pot of pentunias currently speeding towards the earth wondering whether "they" will be its friend or whatever'
Started in computing with a ZX81 when they first came out, was 11 years old with a 16K ram pack too.
As much as people have mocked him over the years - he kicked off the affordable home computer market in the UK.
Yes, some of his products failed, some were ropey but the point is, he tried to produce new product were ahead of the time but unfortunately the technology of the era sometimes was quite up to it.
Here I sit, working in IT over 45 years later and a good proportion of the reason for that all started with the ZX81 created by Sir Clive that was purchased from WH Smith.
I read he was still tinkering as recent as last week.
So I raise my beer to you as the impact you had will carry on for many years to come and a name that will live on in human history.
Giving developers super fast machines with max everything means they don't care about efficency generally.
Give them yesteryears base models to work with and that will reduce bloat as they will have to work within the framework of what they have.
That's what I'd do!
back in the days of spectrums, c64s etc....software developers had to be so much more efficient to work within the limitations they had.
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