Posts by Laura Kerr

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

Re: Start it up

That was good, but IMHO this has a bigger cheese factor: https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/18/ms_boogie/

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Welcome to Groundhog Day

So he's been down in Brighton, yabbering about bank customers being "really excited about it". Cue a mahoosive attack of deja vu - nearly sixteen years ago, the Jacqboot was havering about how Mancunians were itching to get their mitts on ID cards. Which turned out to be a complete load of caca. Meg Hillier was equally enthusiastic. Or even more so, given the figures she conjured up out of thin air.

Of course, the BBC obligingly helped her along. I don't doubt they'll try the same trick again.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

modify… those backups

One would hope, in the interests of Senior Manglement continuing to enjoy the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, that they are aware of the necessity for redundant multiple backups and make every effort to 'maintain' them all in sync. For it would be tragic indeed if $OLD_BACKUP_1, with its magical healings were to be mysteriously overwritten by a restore of $OLD_BACKUP_2 which had not been so anointed. Great would be the wailings of the tax evaders in the face of the auditors' triumphant roar and fearful would be their expressions when they realise that instead of dining on caviar and roast peasant, they would henceforth only be keeping body and soul together with copious quantities of porridge.

Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth

Re: It causes condensation.

Every Saturday I get the Chigley skins...

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

"it will not be a criminal offence to not hold a digital ID"

Yet.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

It's cloud-first for the gubbmint these days. So an open S3 bucket will do the job nicely.

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

Re: And this

"start shovelling coal inter't steam engines like fuck...stop at King's 'ead Space Station halfway there for a pint of mild, quick fag and some carrots fer't orse."

Coal? Bluidy coal? You were lucky. All we 'ad were a couple of lumps of wood and when that run out, we 'ad ter gerrout and push.

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

Re: The window is closing

And the last AI model standing will be known as GIGObot.

OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort

Not long now before...

He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

"Yes, now there is a God."

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

Trump scrubs all mention of DEI, gender, climate change from federal websites

"And also looking very much like Berlin in 1933 to me."

Looks more like March 1938 to me, given the noises he's been making about Greenland. I hope Mette Frederiksen is a bit more clued-up than Chamberlain was.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Being polite is great

Same in Scotland!

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

Re: While I'm in the mood for conditional expressions . . .

"as for "Blind Among the Flowers" . . ."

Nothing means nothing to me.

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

Re: Live From Network 23

A Zik-Zak beer, naturally.

World of Warcraft Classic lead dev resigns to protest 'stack ranking'

Re: A perfect way to shoot yourself in the foot

Ex (thankfully) BT person here. That's absolutely spot-on. I have not-so-fond memories of being on performance manglement calls where we were all told "we don't have enough people ranked as 'needs improvement'" (or whatever it was called). Everyone who wasn't a sociopathic people manager knew exactly what a 'witch hunt' meant.

I was very glad to get out of there. On my last day, I deliberately nuked my laptop and Blackberry for no reason other than pure spite.

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

Re: what's old is new again

It was part of Arthur C Clarke's Venture To The Moon short stories - it was called Watch This Space, originally published in 1956. The quote you're thinking of is:

Whatever I thought of them, I couldn't help admiring the ingenuity of the men who has perpetrated the scheme. The O's and A's had given them a bit of trouble but the C's and L's were perfect.

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

A plague on Excel's house!

Excel has been both a blessing and a curse throughout my working life. A blessing because it's given me plenty of work fixing cock-ups caused by its being (ab)used for data entry and preparation, and a curse because I've had to set about fixing the cock-ups in the first place. Lowlights along the way include Excel outputs breaking batch loads thanks to its 'smart quotes' feature, a major row at a Very Big Bank because the 'test data validation team' were oblivious to the Software from Hell's propensities for arbitrarily reformatting dates, another series of little oopsies caused by the silent conversion of large integers into exponentials and data quality reports going haywire because saved CSV files had loads of empty trailing rows.

If Serco really are using Excel as a main data store, they deserve to be hung out to dry and permanently barred from getting any future government work, considering the money that Spaffer's spaffed on them. That's absolutely unforgivable.

See icon for what I'd like to do to Excel.

China slams President Trump's TikTok banned-or-be-bought plan in the US

Re: This is just thin skin Trump revenge

That astounding suggestion that the President of the United States is just having a petulant toddler tantrum...looks to be right on the money. Props.

What's the betting he only wants control of TikTok so that his Blueshirts can track down the perps if there's a repeat of the Tulsa prank?

Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific... for Microsoft

Meetings, bloody meetings

"Now, if I can just persuade them to reduce the number of Teams meetings that get scheduled..."

Aye. That's the big bugbear. When lockdown came, we went from office-based to full remote working literally overnight. The number of 'stand-ups', 'catch-ups', 'workshops' and whatnots transmogrified from a minor irritation to a major problem within a couple of weeks. When the manglement did a survey about how well we were all adapting, many of us pointed out that we could do some work or talk about doing some work, but not both at the same time. Meeting discipline was very poor, too. I think it was because a lot of folk weren't used to remote working. It didn't bother me, as I've done it on and off for the best part of twenty years.

To give the manglement full credit, they clamped down on it, and meetings are now back down to sensible levels. One slightly odd side-effect has been that we've got to know people better than when we were all traipsing into London each day and sitting at adjacent desks. All in all, I much prefer it.

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

eX-hamster

One of my student housemates had a hamster that he liked to have running around when working. "Had" turned out to be the operative word. One evening, we were all in our rooms working when the power went off.

A glance out of the window showed light still on in neighbouring houses, so yours truly checked the consumer unit. Yep, main breaker off. Maybe it was just a glitch. Shut off the power, reset breaker, power back on.

Clunk. Hello darkness my old friend.

Turned off all individual breakers, reset the main breaker, turned the juice back on and reset each circuit breaker in turn. All good until I reached the upstairs ring main. Clunk, power off again.

You guessed it. The hamster had decided to have a wee nibble on the mains cable on my housemate's PC. We found it behind his desk well and truly kaput with its teeth still embedded in the cable.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Covid jail "prank"

So, what is to stop some joker putting the app on a burner phone, adding in a junk postcode

It might do a postcode lookup - even the likes of Crapita can usually get that right - so you need to use a real one:

SW1A 1AA

Re: And what about the people ...

And Matt has joined us too (down 3). Hi Matt.

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

Classic tale of hero to zero. Back in the early nineties, there were two UK ISPs - Demon and the also-rans.

I used to run a big Fidonet mail hub, which included gateways between five different FTNs and also had an Internet gateway. KA9Q with POP3 support found on a now long-defunct BBS calling Demon in the wee hours for gated newsgroups and lovely old plain-text email. It worked well, but as the FTNs shut up shop, Fidonet dwindled, and Usenet filled up with crap after Eternal September, I wound it down before finally shutting up shop in 2003.

Oddly enough, I can still remember the last two newsgroups it was carrying - alt.cow.tipping and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork.

Things seemed to be freer and more fun back then, but yes, I am getting old and creaky.

Astroboffin gets magnets stuck up his schnozz trying and failing to invent anti-face-touching coronavirus gizmo

What a hoot(er)!

He obviously nose his stuff, but remember girls - this is what 'magnetic personality' on those dating sites really means.

Exchange some currency you want to? Guess the BIOS setup keyboard combination first you must, young Padawan

"This is not a dare, readers!"

Oh yeah?

UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house

Re: Johnson explains things terribly, about as bad as Trump

I’m no fan of Boris, but he’s doing OK in the circumstances.

Upvote and a pint from me. I can't stand Borat, but he handled it like a boss last night. Have to give credit where it's due.

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Re: Well done BOFH

I think it's a bit of both. Snake oil sales are definitely on the up, with product lifetimes measured in months rather than years. Crapware's far more abundant than it used to be, too. It came as a pleasant surprise to find that the code I'm currently maintaining was written by people who knew what they were doing. The last lot had more spaghetti than an Italian restaurant and ran about as fast as a sloth on Valium.

I think the rot set in around the time of the dot-com boom, when any dim bulb who could get some flaky HTML code to more-or-less work with an Access database could get away with swanning around spouting buzzwords and calling themselves an enterprise architect. Then, when dot-com became dot-bomb, those bulbs who were most proficient in bullshit were able to worm their ways into more senior positions, and rather than be threatened by talented people in junior positions, filled vacancies with people less able than they were. Classic Peter Principle.

I certainly wouldn't encourage my kids to go into IT. Roll on retirement.

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Re: Light the fire

They were called guiders round these parts, and old pram wheels with solid rubber tyres were de rigeur. No brakes of course, but who needs a straight nose and their front teeth anyway.

US court rules: Just because you can extract teeth while riding a hoverboard doesn't mean you should

Steve Martin is obviously his hero:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOtMizMQ6oM

Train-knackering software design blunder discovered after lightning sparked Thameslink megadelay

Eh? You watt?

Post Office coughs £57.75m to settle wonky Horizon IT system case

Obvious to anyone with half a brain

There's the flaw in your argument right there.

Windows 10 Insiders: Begone, foul Store version of Notepad!

Re: A good u-turn

"something as simple/fundamental as Notepad shouldn't be out of reach as a result."

'Zackly. I use Notepad for a lot of things, from codding up quick and dirty SQL scripts from CSV files - the find and replace functionality seems to have got better over the years - to transforming online chord charts from gaudy ad-festooned crap into something that's actually usable in a studio.

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

Re: Why?

Indeed. It's not difficult to make a gun in a home workshop. I'd guess the main challenge would be finding the right grade of steel for making the chamber, barrel and firing pin. Back in the 1980s, my dad made a working model of an anti-aircraft gun that used a cut-down rifle barrel and which could (and did) fire .22 rounds. The plans were published in the Model Engineer around 1942.

Weld can be bored through or ground off. I can't help thinking that the safest way to deactivate a firearm would be to so weaken the chamber that it would explode if the gun was fired.

I see your blue passport and raise you a green number plate: UK mulls rewards scheme for zero-emission vehicles

Re: Go Dutch?

"Why does a 2019 Vauxhall Astra weigh ~1.8 tonnes? The 1990's version weighed 900kg. And that's only an Astra - not some monster peasant crusher 4x4."

It weighs HOW MUCH? Sheesh, that's about the same as my Land Rover Defender, which is a monster peasant crusher 4x4. Not even my old V6 Vectra was as heavy as that. Are they casting the engine blocks from depleted uranium, or just piling on the bells and whistles?

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

Re: Books

BOS COBOL! There's a blast from the past, all right. My first job as a developer involved using it for data migration.

I've often thought that if Windows hadn't come along when it did, it might have faced some stiff competition from BOS Software. Being able to use a humble desktop PC as a mini with terminals attached was quite a thing back in the day.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

Re: I swear...

"And then there's the "I forgot I was crossing the road, because phone" cretins."

Plus the "I'm going to cross on red because female driver" characters. I've had several of these: I'm sitting at the lights with my indicator on waiting to turn left. Lights change, I start the turn and some numpty decides to step out in front of me. Some of them have even looked right at me before doing it. The last one got the full benefit of the Defender's light box and horn. He looked like a tourist; I hope his phrase book included 'you fucking idiot!'

I'm going to ask Santa for a set of bull bars this year.

s/teens/forties.

FTFY

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: Self fixing

"If the user wasn't aware that they needed a PC in order to connect it's a safe bet they wouldn't have been able to use the PC itself."

I suspect it might have been quite a common problem. In the run-up to the launch of Windows 95, I distinctly remember radio DJs repeatedly telling their listeners that yes, you did actually need a PC to use it.

Mind you, this was on Radio 1...

Gov flings £10m to help businesses get Brexit-ready with, um... information packs

Re: Maybe it's another Boris bluff....

"exactly what is the sovereign power in the UK going to decide to do?"

The logical answer is also the most psychopathic. But I wouldn't put it past Borat "Spaffer" Johnson.

1. Prorogue as planned and then bring Darth Mayder's withdrawal agreement back on 31st October with a simple message: 'this is the only deal available. Vote for it or we leave tonight with no deal.'

2. Irrespective of whether it gets through or not, engineer a reunification referendum in Northern Ireland and use every dirty trick in the book to ensure a Yes result. Spaffer could help things along by insulting the Irish at every opportunity. He's got plenty of form for that.

3. Ireland reunites. Bye-bye backstop / hard border.

And bye-bye Scotland. No way would Holyrood tolerate a referendum in Northern Ireland without our having one here. But both places are a long way outside the M25 and Spaffer might be glad to not have Ian Blackford tearing him a new one every week.

I could see him trying it, but see icon for what would happen in Ireland if he did.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Anyone remember the eyeball screen saver?

Scene: Yours truly doing some late-night maintenance on our Sun server back in the early nineties. Lights on in computer room, off everywhere else. Each PC was on, as I needed to wander round and test connectivity and printing. I'd turned them all on before getting on with the maintenance - IIRC, it was a SunSolve patch. To relieve the boredom, I'd set the eyeball screen saver going on each PC.

So there I was, alone in a darkened open-plan office with dozens of PCs each showing a moving eye.

Then came a rattle at the door. A particularly obnoxious road warrior had come in late. His hysterical scream was music to my ears.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Re: Goverment version of bollox bingo:

- Are sovrenty

- Take back control

- see icon

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

Re: An alternative border is obvious

And an Agile DevOps incremental delivery model :-)

BT to axe 90% of its UK real estate, retain circa 30 sites

"Sovereign Street was actually pretty good for the BT estate actually. If you had a problem on the flexi desks there I think you just had problems."

Yup, agreed 100%. If you were matey with the cafe staff and Frank on the front desk, it was a good place to work. I used to have a thing for the breakfast butties - if the staff knew you and liked you, you got freshly-cooked bacon and sausages rather than the old shoe leather given to those less-favoured.

But elsewhere, it was a different story. FM and cleaning was a case in point. After a few years in Sausage Street, I was shunted off dahn sarf to the smoke. Not long after I arrived in 120 Holborn, I noticed my rather expensive 1GB memory stick (this was a wee while ago!) was missing. Naturally, I assumed it had fallen out of my bag or I'd left it on the train, or something.

Well, about two years later, there was some sort of financial hoo-haa and travel was curtailed. I went back to my desk in Sovereign Street, and found nothing had changed, apart from some bar steward having nicked my chair and a thick layer of dust on every surface bar the desk. And lo and behold - my long-lost memory stick was on the floor under my desk. So much for carpet cleaning.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Re: so easy to get in

Unless you're trying to blag a free gig. Then your weapon of choice is an empty guitar case.

Banhammer Republic: Trump declares national emergency, starts ball rolling to boot Huawei out of ALL US networks

"block [Huawei] from buying components from American companies without Uncle Sam's approval."

Causing them to start rolling their own in 3... 2... 1...

It might take Huawei a fair few attempts to clone what they're currently buying from Jesusland, but let's not kid ourselves for a moment that they wouldn't try. And with their kit effectively banned from The Land Of The (allegedly) Free, whatcha gonna do, Donny? Nuke 'em?

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

Re: Nah. No sexism.

"you might be an old fart of a dudette."

Dudesse sir, dudesse! Really! Have you Americans no sense of decorum?

"The hipster clowns would just class you as "Dinosaur" or "Grandad"."

Mr King sir, you are most improper! Have you never heard of the Old Fartettes' renowned pastime of 'setting hipsters up for a fall by playing on their ignorance'? Really, young man, you should apply yourself. There is endless fun to be had.

"What about 'the old fart - cynical and experienced enough to just keep their head down'."

Oy, less of the sexism, you. 'Old Fartettes' are a thing too, I'll 'ave yer know.

Cops use bread and riot shields in desperate bid to contain crazed swan running amok in streets

Re: "breed"

Guid on ye, pal. A wisnae best pleased masel wi yon hack tryin tae scrieve in Scots withoot kenning the leid. Ye can aye tell - yon ower use o apostrophes gies it awa.

VP Mike Pence: I want Americans back on the Moon by 2024 (or before the Chinese get there)

Re: Saturn 5 again?

If it was cheaper to tool up for building them again, and possible to quickly iron out the problems that would crop up due to the loss of knowledge since 1972, that isn't such a daft idea. The Saturn 5 could put 30 tonnes into lunar orbit - that's quite a big chunk of space station per trip. If modules could be docked without needing meatware to bolt things together, it might be possible to build a complete station relatively quickly.

But if you needed to send meatware along, the payload reduces to about 15 tonnes.

Silent Merc, holy e-car... What is that terrible sound?

Re: Loud speaker mounted on the roof

"QM2-sized foghorn"

I like your thinking. After several near misses in the centre of Edinburgh when dumb tourists have stepped out in front of my Defender I'm seriously thinking about fitting a Peterbilt truck horn, like the truck in Duel had.