Posts by DaveMcM 31 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2014
One of the products I support has an import routine which reads an XML file in for creating orders which uses node attributes to hold the data rather than the element values, and without fail there are several tickets a month raised by customers about it not working because somebody somewhere decided that Word would be a great thing to use to create / edit the XML input file and it had switched all the quotes out for the "smart" variety.
I've used Microsoft ergonomic keyboards in various guises for around 20 years so I was quite concerned when they suddenly vanished from sale last year, and although my current Sculpt keyboard is still working fine (apart from the "C" print having rubbed off the key and the 7-9 row on the separate numeric keypad I never really used no longer working thanks to the cat knocking a glass of water over it!) I may have to stockpile a couple of sets just in case they change their mind and it disappears from sale again... Even the missus has one after complaining about wrist ache with her "normal" keyboard and she now loves hers too after the initial weirdness to overcome years of muscle memory to adjust to the gap.
I recently "upgraded" to a car with Lane Keep Assist and while I can see it might be useful on bigger roads (those with actual lines down the middle!), I live in the Scottish Highlands where I'm far more likely to be on a single track road than a dual carriageway (nearest to my house is approx 30 miles away) or motorway (157 miles away) and on these smaller roads lane keep assist has tried "assisting" me into hedges, walls and ditches more times than I'd like to count because the already narrow road has narrowed a bit more and it doesn't know what to do.
First thing I do after starting the engine is turn it off, but as per whichever law dictated it in the first place it will turn itself back on every time I start the car.
I still have a copy of Visual Studio 2008 on my work Windows 11 laptop for this very reason - it is the last version that supported the Compact Framework SDK - and I am / was the author of a custom scanner app for Motorola ( / Symbol / Zebra) MT2000 series scanners which linked into our ERP software... The old CE scanners are still very much in use by some customers, although we are slowly trying to replace them with Android based hardware.
The clean install with previous version licence key still works great - I recently installed Windows 11 Professional on a new VM and successfully activated it with an old Windows 8 Professional retail licence key I had lying around. Depending how recently that licence key was associated with an activated windows installation you occasionally have to go through some additional hoops to confirm that licence isn't in use anywhere else, but it's always activated for me.
Good broadband in the UK doesn't necessarily require being near a big city - I get quicker (60+ Mbps vs low 50s Mbps both on FTTC Fibre 2) and more reliable broadband living in a little coastal village in the Scottish Highlands than I ever had when I lived on the edge of Leicester, and they are in the initial stages of installing FTTP around the village too, so it should be set to improve even more soon.
I get the same on the Tarbat peninsula in the highlands... a lot of my "nearest" shops show up in searches as being in Elgin which by boat they probably are at around 25 miles but to actually drive there around all the water is nearer 75 miles and I'd have to go through Inverness on the way!
I did a similar thing with a whole Man United theme pack - including sounds, icons and cursors - applied to a Newcastle supporting helpdesk manager who frequently neglected to lock his PC even when he wasn't in the office. I didn't have access to group policies back in those days but I did know the registry key to set to prevent him from changing it... and then went on holiday for a fortnight.
The software I work on every day still has a very old CrapCredit credit check function from before I started there over 16 years ago, so when attempting to place an order it will be rejected if CrapCredit() = true.
A few other examples of inappropriate naming in the codebase have been cleaned up over the years, but CrapCredit() still endures.
I worked at a dial up ISP back in the mid 90s and frequently had to deal with customers who encountered a wonderful "feature" in Netscape's email client - when the scheduled "check for new email" event occurred it failed to check that is wasn't already still downloading emails from the last "check for new email" event, so if you had a slow modem and lots of email it would get itself caught in a loop continuously downloading and duplicating the same emails.
Mojave hasn't actually dropped 32bit app support yet but it is the supposedly the last macOS release that will support them When you run a 32bit app it pops up a warning that the app may affect your computers performance and needs updating but it does still run. The complete drop of 32bit apps from macOS is going to be in whatever california based codename Apple come up with for the 2019 macOS release.
I have to agree with the Apple hardware comment - as a reasonably recent convert to Apple hardware my 2 and a bit year old MacBook Pro is still working perfectly, whereas the previous 3 "pc" laptops that came before it - none of which I would consider "cheap" with all being in the £600 - £700 price range - barely made it past 18 months each before batteries or trackpads or DVD drives gave up the ghost and refused to play any more or the inevitable drag of windows updates had reduced them to a crawl.
Three of the various PCs and NAS servers dotted round my house go by the names Holly, Hactar and Hex... The hardware gets replaced from time to time but the names remain.
Sir Terry will be sadly missed in this house after years of bringing joy through his writing.
I feel like I may have some rereading to do....
I've been having loads of issues with the program guide going AWOL and then evenrually crawling back into life for the last few months and I've also had a few things that I'd swear I'd set to record not record so this could explain it...
And then last week all of my planned recordings just vanished from the planner completely.... A reboot didn't do anything so I started re-adding them and after I'd set up the first 3 or 4 items the rest suddenly reappeared back from the void.
Hope whatever they say they're releasing today finally fixes it.
The Squeezepad app for iPad is pretty decent - standard "free" functionality is just to be a remote control for Squeezebox hardware but can also be made to function as a full on client too with a couple of quid in app purchase... Been using it a couple of years and it works brilliantly.
My first (like so many people) was a Netgear MP101 but sadly that died many moons ago.
Current setup is Squeezebox Classic connected to a Cambridge Audio Azure amp running against a ReadyNas NV+ for the server.
It was a sad day when Logitech abandoned all of the squeezebox hardware as it was all pretty good stuff, but at least the server software is open source and still under active development (albeit officially unsupported) at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Nightly_Builds
The double touch on the home button feature to drop the screen down and make the top of it thumb reachable is a nice touch and works pretty well, showing that Apple have at least considered one handed use issues, but even then the extra width of the 6 is still an problem for me and I'm still hitting the "change keyboard" button when stretching for the "numeric keyboard" button far more often than I'd like - maybe I've just got stubby thumbs?.
I'll admit the reasonably chunky case I've got on my 6 adds a couple of mm to the girth and doesn't help, but without a case the 6 is a thing of slim beauty with all the tractive properties of a bar of wet soap.
I've yet to see a 6+ in the wild to gauge the size of it but from comparison photos with the 6 my brain has settled on "too big" and left it there.
From what I've read elsewhere the fake apps are "legitimately" signed using an enterprise signing profile (used by companies to write and distribute apps internally without the app store - whether this profile is genuine or stolen in this case isn't clear) and the user is also asked to install and trust this signing profile as part of the installation process...
Stupid is as stupid does...
I've had mine a week or so now and haven't noticed any reduction in usable battery life compared to the iPad 3 it replaced - if anything I've actually been using the Air 2 slightly more that the 3 as it is so much lighter and easier to carry around with me.
It wasn't mentioned in the article (or if it was I missed it) but pricing wise there have been reductions above the 16Gb base model as the 32Gb is no longer an option so the 64Gb is now at the old 32Gb price and the 128Gb is at the old 64Gb price.
Well I can vouch for at least one of those 10 million sales as my pre-ordered iPhone 6 arrived safely last Friday lunchtime.
So far I'm very impressed although the extra size still feels makes it feel a bit unwieldy compared to the 5 and is going to take a bit of getting used to. I shudder to think how massive the 5.5" 6 plus must be to try and handle if the standard 4.7" 6 feels this much bigger than the 5/5s - maybe I've just got small hands?
Not that I would fully trust either but I'd be a lot more confident with Apple having my data than Google given that selling my data to advertisers / random people in the street is pretty much Google's entire business model.
As mentioned above the Apple "location tracking scandal" was a location cache file that was not being cleared properly and this issue has been fixed for a couple of years now. While the cache file itself it was fairly easily accessible by gaining access to an unencrypted backup or to the device itself there was never any evidence of it being uploaded / transmitted anywhere else.
While there is an open beta it is limited in numbers to the first million registrants (https://appleseed.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/) and I'm not sure if an open preview release has been made available through it yet - as far as I am aware the first 3 previews have been developer only.
I think as you mention the major difference this year is that people like me on the iOS developer program can get hold of the OS X developer previews whereas with Mavericks etc you had to be on the OS X developer program to get the previews.
I've currently got Sky fibre - signed up to it the day the OpenReach "Fibre broadband available here" sticker appeared on the cabinet at the end of my road - and I've had absolutely no problems in the 12 or so months I've had it - the connection is a pretty rock solid 40Mb down, 10Mb up.
Before that I was on Sky's copper offering and got a consistent 2.5Mb of the "up to 20Mb" I was paying for, but that is mostly a geographical issue and no other copper provider could have done any better - in fact Tiscali managed to do significantly worse on the same line which is what prompted the move to Sky in the first place.
In the Sky copper days I did manage to kill a couple of routers through overheating (my phone socket is down the back of my sofa by a radiator) but they were both replaced free of charge within a couple of days of a call to customer services with no quibbles, so what little customer services contact I've had with Sky has all been pretty positive.
My only experience with VM is them filling my recycling bin with dozens of flyers a month advertising tv and broadband services that I can't even have because I don't live in a cabled area!
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