Posts by Doctor Syntax

Transport for London asks Capita to fling Congestion Charge system into the cloud

Re: £355m for 5 years!!!!

If current conditions continue to apply the problem will be solved. Cities of present scale will become redundant.

In this case you've got to wait for them to make the mistake and have the inevitable result. Originally in CC security actually mattered;. Communications were point-to-point and none of your internet nonsense. Even internally subcontractors had to have secure production networks to handle the data. Now it's cloud.

Super Cali COVID count is somewhat out of focus, server crash and expired cert makes numbers quite atrocious

Re: Certificates are becoming the new DNS?

"nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."

And nothing more temporary than a permanent temporary solution.

Do I hear a faint echo of someone saying "How much? It's working now. You don't need it."?

But how refreshing to see someone resigning after a departmental cock-up.

Peer-to-peer takes on a whole new meaning when used to spy on 3.7 million or more cameras, other IoT gear

"we imagine those updates haven't made their way to all installations just yet"

Are the devices able to re-flash their firmware? If not then the only suitable update is (see above).

"they're designed to let non-tech-savvy owners access their devices,"

As we're now discovering, when you make tech easy enough so any fool can use it every fool uses it.

Programming pioneer Fran Allen dies aged 88 after a career of immense contributions to compilers

Re: Alzheimer's disease stolen another shining light

Amen to that. I'm losing an older cousin in the same way. It's even worse in present circumstances because with our renewed lock-down his wife can't even go and visit him.

Re: Sad on two levels.

Also sad in that the IBM of today would have chucked her out 20 or 30 years before the age she actually retired at and replaced her with a recent graduate.

RIP Fran Allen and the IBM of old.

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

Re: How about 'Rocketry?'

Or too many managers on their backs.

"Solve that actual problem instead."

Too hard. Solve the easier ones instead. This is a two Dilbert issue.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1999-02-17

https://dilbert.com/strip/1998-10-13

Re: Ban all Homonyms!

" If everything is described by a different word then nobody will get into trouble for accidentally making someone feel uncomfortable."

It's going to be a big job disentangling 'set'.

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

Re: Mind reading?

Since writing that how many adverts have you had for titanium sporks?

Re: Wot, no testing?

Being Google it might well be discontinued next year.

"Google said the feature had been accidentally turned on during a recent software update"

No problem, I accidentally didn't buy one.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: Rudest, Dumbest - same thing no?

The only response to that is to go two levels above them. Two because for the PHB one above the choice between defending smuggins to his boss and hanging him out to dry is a no brainer.

Re: It sometimes works the other way

Life's too short to carry a grudge but we have to do the best we can.

Re: Ambush

"There are offices we do our utmost to avoid, which we informally call Bermuda Triangles"

Ah, yes. I remember being very careful about choice of staircase to use when visiting the floor below to avoid walking pas one particular department.

Re: My example

There's a good argument for charging support time to departments or at least giving department heads a regular analysis or work done for their department.

Re: Ahh yes the

"This does not sit well with beancounter managers though."

When the need for the spare arrives you visit the beancounter, get them to confirm how much the lack of the production machine is costing per minute and then tell them that their machine is the only one with an appropriate spec to swap in.

Quite right. It's what users do* that rakes in the money that pays IT salaries.

*Well, some of the users. We all know the ones who are counter-productive.

Re: It sometimes works the other way

A frequent variant of this is trying to communicate with a company whose online "Contact us" is a very limited number of FAQs with no message link, an online chat service which is currently or invariably offline and phone. On phoning before even dropping the customers into an ACD system as limited as the FAQs, they're played a long recording to the effect that they could get in touch via the website.

British Army does not Excel at spreadsheets: Soldiers' newly announced promotions are revoked after sorting snafu

Re: Perhaps the person

But the results must be OK because we got them from the computer.

Re: Training

"training in any MS Office products"

Isn't it called IT of CS in the school curricula these days?

"The mistake was noticed quickly"

Not quickly enough.

Re: Perhaps the person

It was a major error made using a general purpose application to marshal data.

Ancestry.com: Let arbitrator decide on auto-enrolling membership lawsuit

In a sense it's a race condition but think the logic, if the particular legal system accepts it, is that if the clause is severed it's as if it was never there and if it was never there then it couldn't have invalidated the rest of the contract.

In practice I suppose it would depend on how the contract could function without it; for instance the contract might consist solely of the invalid clause and the severability clause.

Re: Using Ancestry.com is highly addictive

There are alternatives. Familysearch.org for one and, for civil registration in England & Wales, freebsd.org.uk is another.

Yes, it was severability clauses I had in mind as affecting "circumstances". I've never signed up for Ancestry - the local library has a sub - so I don't know if their terms include one.

Re: And let them...

Or dsp as they say in genealogy.

AFAICR from contracting in the UK an invalid term could invalidate the entire contract, at least in some circumstances. I don't know if that's the case in the US but if it is then it might knock out the arbitration clause as well.

Bought out by private equity? Worrying news for genealogists.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Re: They are creating a database ...

"I did suggest that adding a machine-readable data format (JSON) would be helpful on the last project I worked on, but this wasn't taken up as it wasn't common for people to be able to process it."

CSV is also a machine-readable format. The problem isn't having the data in a machine readable format, it's having the machine read it in the right way. People have a machine to read the CSV - it's just the wrong machine. For your JSON you'd also have to provide the machine.

Re: The 'Do it our way or not at all'

This is of limited value when the data arrived mangled because someone who passed it to the person who passed it to you didn't do that. Or possibly the person who passed it to them. Or an assistant who opened the CSV file that had been emailed to the boss.

Re: I have to use Excel at work

With a handle like that you're not the one to complain.

Re: Where is the outrage?

" I’m glad I don’t have to come into close proximity to you lot."

You're here aren't you? And the only comments I've seen here about removing derogatory language are those taking the piss out of such snowflakes.

Or just suffix them with "SE" for "stuff Excel". Other consonants are available.

Re: CSVs

I think you're going the wrong way, complicating instead of simplifying. What's needed is something that just displays CSVs without trying to do anything more, rather like a text editor just displays text without worrying about fonts and font effects.

Re: Why you don't use a spreadhseet as a database

I'm not sure a database is the right application for just passing tabular data around. If this were someone complaining about importing straight text files into Word and getting unwanted auto-corrections you wouldn't tell them to use a desktop publishing application instead would you? You'd tell them to use Notepad. Here's the problem - there isn't the equivalent tell-it-like-it-is equivalent of Notepad for tabular data.

Re: User Error

"It's not the tool. It's the choice of tool."

I agree it's the choice of tool. But the correct choice of tool isn't something more complex than a spreadsheet, it's something simpler. The standard PC, whatever the OS, doesn't have it. If it were text you'd have the choice of your word processor or Notepad/Kedit/whatever. For tabular data such as CSV you have a choice of spreadsheet or.

Re: They are creating a database ...

Are they?

Not necessarily. They just want a quick and dirty way of viewing and exchanging tabular text data. Excel is a case of "if you have a hammer...". An RDBMS would make that a sledgehammer. What's needed is something simpler, not something more complex. And I say that as a biologist who changed to become an RDBMS specialist mid-career.

Realistically the requirement isn't going to change. What's needed is a more appropriate means of fulfilling the requirement.

"As a curmudgeonly git I expect that whatever I type into an excel sheet should stay exactly as I type it - until I do something about it."

The triumph of hope over experience.

"And excel is a stupid program for any data analysis that is more complex than basic bookkeeping... Ok, that's three problems."

I'm sure there's a much larger set of suitable problems than that. However there are other problems for which it isn't suitable and for which a similarly accessible application doesn't exist.

Re: That is trivial to do in vim or XEMACS

Some-time biologist who moved into databases here. That's databases as a complete career change. You can keep your emacs but vi is hardwired to the fingers.

Nevertheless a database might not be the right solution here. As soon as you start talking about tabular data and databases in the same breath you start thinking about RDBMS but the time taken to set that up for what might be a one-off is probably not worth it. There's almost certainly a need for a simple way to tabulate data without making too many assumptions about the nature of the data. It's a principle I've observed many times; the more assumptions you make in the design of an application the less capable it becomes.

In this case take on the data as text columns which is probably the most minimal assumption you can make. If you want to flag the column* as date - or anything else - that's the time to let the application reformat the text. If you want to use a database to store the data you can, of course, have the application generate the schema at this point.

* Spot the implied assumption here.

"What alternative would you suggest?"

How about an application that tabulates data but defaults formats to text unless told otherwise on a by-column or maybe by-row basis?

Re: I must be missing something...

Files get passed around. If you rely on setting the program that opens them to something non-default you come up against the problem of relying on everyone to do that correctly every time otherwise munged files start getting circulated. It's a bit like you rely on everyone to use mv or rm -r correctly in root. Of course nobody ever got the latter wrong did they?

Re: How?

And are also liable to prostate cancer.

Search for 'things of value' in a bank: Iowa cops allege this bloke broke into one and decided on ... hand sanitiser

I suppose it's just possible that the lobby was easy to break into but the doors into the rest of the bank were a bit tougher. I suppose it's also possible that the only thing removable from the lobby was the sanitizer. I've come across a few criminals dumb enough for that but not dumb enough to choose sanitizer if cash were available.

Trump administration labels WeChat, TikTok ‘threats’ to national security, bans transactions with both

Two can play the sanctions game

Does China wait until January or will it move in November?

Re: Trump plans to use his Death Star in a democratic election

We laugh that we may not weep.

Q: What’s big, red and pulses UV light into the cosmos three times a night? A: Mars

The Universe is a strange place. Even our little corner of it.