Posts by Peter Kay

Stick a fork in floppies - they're done

It's all about compatibility..

If I remember correctly (and I never used Acorn machines), the disk format used was substantially different than on the PC.

There were, in fact, 1.8MB PC disks used in commercial products - most specifically by OS/2 Warp. XDFcopy had to used to create the disk and XDFLOPPY.FLT was the filter driver to read it.

Unfortunately whilst it worked on most drives, it did not work on absolutely everything and, IIRC, it was slightly harder to find disks that were 1.8MB capable rather than 1.44MB.

On a similar note, Microsoft once planned to do automatic floppy insertion detection - unfortunately two incompatible schemes were in use by the manufacturers. For the sake of compatibility they didn't bother.

I never did get around to using 2.88Mb disks

Almost dead, but still needed - I wish they weren't, though.

They're almost entirely dead at work, except when installing XP and needing driver disks, or booting to install versions of Unix when the optical drive doesn't work for some reason.

At home, though, I still have a taste for retro DOS gaming - and that often means floppies. They were never the most reliable of beasts, but modern drives aren't as high quality as the old ones as far as I can see, and old drives are worn out. I know they never tended to be completely reliable, but it does seem it's even harder these days.

There appear to be a couple of floppy disk emulators - an expensive (250 Euros) one from IPCAS, and a more homebrew ish (but probably more functional) one from http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html that works with home computer as well as PCs. It might even be worth buying one, as I like having access to the data on floppies, but retain no love for actually using the unreliable things.

Above all, I certainly don't miss 20+ disk floppy installs, and loved the first CDROM drives..

Ridley Scott talks up 'nasty' Alien prequel

Please let it be good

Alien Resurrection (4) was pretty shit, but if done properly it could be rather good. Plot and acting first, 3D second, please.

Hawking: Aliens are out there, likely to be Bad News

I'm not sure why we're in danger, really.

There are two scenarios assuming hostile resource mining/conquering aliens exist - either they have faster than light technology, or are moving at substantially less than the speed of light.

If they have FtL flight then the only possible advantage Earth offers is that it's a pleasant place to live, astronomically speaking. Plenty of other moons/planets offer resource that could be mined. The assumption is also that Earth like planets are also rare, which is undoubtedly true in terms of our local cosmic neighbourhood, but perhaps not so accurate given FtL travel and an almost infinite universe.

If they don't have FtL flight, then it's not a problem for anyone currently alive and probably not their grandchildren either, due to the distances involved. You also have to consider the thinking of a relatively slow colonisation ship - taking a punt on a planet broadcasting a SETI signal still being in a decent shape by the time the colonisation ship arrives. I would have thought it would be more sensible to have a self sustaining ship and a load of researchers on board working on terraforming and suchlike..

Cameron promises yet more Avatar

Who cares? It's useless until it's released in stereoscopic 3D

As a movie it has a sub par plot, extremely average dialogue and wooden acting.

The only reason to see it is the stereoscopic 3D, which is impressive and well integrated. Wait till 2011 and the 3D version comes out.

Omegle invites you to show world+Facebook your bewbs

It's not even a problem

Block the site, problem solved.

I don't believe sites mostly inhabited by adults should be dumbed down because there's a few children on it.

Add it to the site blocking software or the active parental monitoring that parents should be running to protect the children.. Don't restrict my world because you're too lazy to sort yours out.

(and no, I have no real interest in Omegle or Chatroulette or similar)

Lenovo ThinkPad X100e

X41 was high end - this is not.

The X41 cost well in excess of a grand. This is only 460 quid.

If you're lucky, you'll find a second hand X60/X61 on ebay for 400 quid, but that's still second hand.

The X41 is actually five years old. The X60 is now four years old.

Will DNSSEC kill your internet?

Alternatively, read the nslookup manual

nslookup -timeout=60 -q=txt -debug rs.dns-oarc.net

Microsoft slams coffin lid on Vista

No, but only until I'd updated the drivers

Once I did that my problems went away - specifically with the bundled ICH7 (specifically : SATA AHCI) drivers, and Nvidia drivers for the 7600GT.

Bloke threatens BT with giant plywood cheque

You can't pay them in pennies

There are defined limits to how much change vendors are forced to accept. From the Royal Mint :

£5 (Crown) - for any amount

£2 - for any amount

£1 - for any amount

50p - for any amount not exceeding £10

25p (Crown) - for any amount not exceeding £10

20p - for any amount not exceeding £10

10p - for any amount not exceeding £5

5p - for any amount not exceeding £5

2p - for any amount not exceeding 20p

1p - for any amount not exceeding 20p

Don't blame Willy the Mailboy for software security flaws

'Developer' is referring to the company, not a coder

This is a storm in a teacup. This is only an outline for a contract between companies, not for purchasing a copy of Windows. As such, it's no different from other contracts : the more you ask for, the greater the cost and the longer it takes.

I suspect the sentence should probably actually read 'The company supplying the application to the customer should not include code that is unnecessary to meet the requirements of the customer and weakens the security of the application'. The emphasis would be

even clearer if the author revealed it's contained under the title 'No Malicious Code'.

So, no, it's not putting blame on the individual coder.

However, there are possibly grey areas. If you ship a website to the customer, you shouldn't also be including Bit_Of_PHP_From_Another_Project_That_Shouldnt_Be_Here.PHP

There's also libraries. Unused functions in linked libraries may, or may not, be included nontheless, and they probably will be in the case of DLLs (function stripping is rare these days, SFAIAA). That's over to the lawyers again to argue if it is reasonable, or indeed if there is a difference between including unused functions which are known to be insecure, and unused functions that are later found to be insecure.

If the customer insists, I'm sure there will be a suitably large charge for stripping out all unused functions, and the trouble incurred in potentially maintaining a different source code branch..

Getting drunk the night before has no effect on exam results

Drink more beer :)

It'll build up your tolerance. 7 pints (of decent >=4% beer) over four hours shouldn't provide a crashing hangover.

However, it is my experience that whilst it doesn't provide a hangover, it can tend to impact on energy levels and motivation the following day, so it's not something I'd recommend if you have an important event to attend or prolonged exercise.

Pre-election budget targets politics, not policy

*double the current threshold* i.e. over 125,000

125,000 isn't that difficult to reach for a first time house. 250 grand is, I suspect, not that expensive in the South East.

The 'lad at work' isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. The GMPTE website shows that the journey is possible in 01:30. Sale has had a metrolink stop for well over a decade, so it'll take longer to connect to the rail network. Buses will always be slower and more expensive than the train, so this is not really a surprise, is it?

Pirates of the Caribbean say 'narrr' to Bulgarian airbags

Blech

Leaving aside the fact this is a tad demeaning to women full stop, I don't suppose they'd consider that some of us actually prefer women with an average build.. Never really fancied the female leads in POTC.

They never mentioned ample - just natural

Probably a good thing, too, because at size 6-8 a large busom is substantially less likely.. Given the average UK dress size is 16, something a bit closer to that would be appreciated.

Microsoft confirms IE9 will shun Windows XP

No it doesn't

Your own comprehension needs assessing :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd370990%28VS.85%29.aspx

It's built on DX10.1. 10.1 is not available for XP, ergo, no Direct2D.

Jobcentre ejects Jedi Knight

*commences stirring pot*

Of course, the three watchable films are : 4,5 and 3...

(there are good points in ROTJ, but a lot of it is quite poor. 3 is a lot better, provided you imagine that everyone is a moron)

Intel wants vintage x64 servers on rubbish heap

Depends on the Via chip

It's true that Via have had it for ages, but unfortunately it's not terribly good. OpenBSD did a few calculations a while back about x86 CPU vs crypto extensions and found that using the special extensions was actually slower..

Fixed in newer chip designs I believe, but certainly at one point, actually worse than nothing.

Former model sues Universal over 'x-rated prop' outrage

Interesting viewpoint..

I see that her lawyer thinks it's different for an 'attractive young woman' to get unwanted attention than the rest of us. Breaking news : it's no different, and none of us are entitled to attention from someone fitting our own personal definition of 'hot' or to magically block those who don't..

Steve Jobs Flash rant put to the test

They probably don't see the commercial advantage

PS CS4 does support 64 bit, so it's not as if they can't do it. Elements is a lower end product, so therefore less likely to need to support more than 4GB memory. The lack of 64bit support could also be a sales tactic to encourage more CS4 sales..

Microsoft shows Bottom to Young Ones

I'm sure there are good moments

Overall, though, it really does look rather dated these days.

Blackadder (series 2), on the other hand, has barely aged.

The Young Ones has aged badly

Wouldn't mind a look at Ripping Yarns and possibly some classic Who, though. Bottom is quite funny (if gross) on occasion. The Young Ones is best left in a cloud of nostalgia, though..

WD targets Win XP users to ease 4KB drive upgrades

Good point..

OS/2 can handle 2TB drives if you're running recent versions with JFS, otherwise you'll have trouble with partitions vastly smaller than that (HPFS chkdsk eats memory and is slow, even on recent versions).

FAT32 can allegedly handle 2TB too and even larger with massive cluster sizes, but DOS/Win 9x/ME doesn't support 48bit LBA. FreeDOS does, but who the heck is going to run FreeDOS with a 2TB drive? I suppose there might be some industrial data collection requirements, if you searched.

What?

I've only done some initial tests of Windows 7 in a corporate environment, but the signs are good. It's a lot better than XP on the same hardware, has better facilities for browsing networks, especially for using different privilege levels and there are distinctly less issues with group policy and Windows update. That's before you even start on the automated installation facilities.

If you're running extremely old and slow hardware maybe your situation is different, but I don't see Windows 7 as fitting into 'no performance benefit or useful new features'.

It'll still work, and OS/2 remains dead

The translation is carried out internally by the drive, so all that will happen is a performance hit. The drive should be clever enough to combine reads and writes, so it shouldn't even match worst case performance degradation.

I'm sure OS/2 might still do the job, but please do try a modern Windows or Linux installation. They're pretty damn good now. Leave OS/2 where it should be : boot it up every often to play a bit of Galciv 2 (which is also on Windows now, and technically way more advanced, albeit possibly a bit overcomplex).

Finding the way to the more interesting applications for Windows can be harder than the OS/2 world's concentration on Hobbes and Netlabs, but there's lots of interesting stuff out there, much of which is free.

I used OS/2 until 1999 for personal use and until a couple of years ago professionally (legacy customers), but it was time to admit defeat. I still have an old OS/2 system for running old programs, but Windows is better in every respect. OS/2 hasn't progressed architecturally and its software development has slowed to a trickle (yes, I still check its status from time to time. Yes, I'm running the very latest Warp 4 post FP15 kernel. No, I'm not spending 200 quid on eCS)

I never got to use eComstation, but WSeB was a complete bastard to get working even on some older hardware, not to mention the networking - and believe me, I've done some gnarly OS/2 installs in my time. Then there's the development.. some of OS/2's APIs may be more logical than Windows, but the environments and rich functionality of Windows means I would really rather not return to DOS/Gpi/PM programming, never mind having to write 16 bit code when going especially low level.

It'll work anyway - just be slower

The drive still presents itself as having 512 byte sectors, but uses more than that internally.

This was discussed on the OpenBSD list a few months ago; certain parts of the code (softraid in particular) have strong dependence on 512 byte sectors. So does qemu.

Setting the translation jumper led to an appreciable boost in speed. So it'll still work, it'll just be slower in some cases. Same with OS/2, DOS etc.

Young people are lazy, think world owes them a living - prof

I rather suspect you're trolling..

If not, is all your housing and other facilities the bare minimum that you require, or as is more probable - is there a bit extra comfort zone to expand your comfort zone..

Whatever happened to the email app?

Windows live mail actually isn't that bad

I use it for a particular mail server, because every other client apart from Pine hates its quirky IMAP implementation. Its top posting is annoying, but I do consider it a step up from Outlook Express. Thunderbird is a no go, and I must figure out why it seems not to apply its message rules all the time. It does, however, happily cope with mail stores with hundreds of thousands of messages in it.

I have difficulty with believing Opera's 'no folder' approach works well. Is it 'database like' or actually a proper database that can cope with hundreds of thousands of messages? Thunderbird isn't perfect, but there have to be at least 20,000 unread (mostly spam) in my inbox. I need message rules to seperate out the interesting messages from numerous mailing lists, notifications from facebook etc and suchlike.

It's also a bit unfair to say that Outlook is an awful mail client. Outlook 97 was awful, and 2000 imperfect, but Microsoft actually did care enough to improve the product.

David Atherton on football, why mags beat Google, and what he's doing next

Good luck, but more research might help

I'm not involved with the alarm industry at all, but to say there are no wifi products is flat out wrong. There are already different levels of wifi alarm certification, as I understand it.

I also wonder about this 'penny under Dabs' strategy. I doubt customers will switch supplier for the sake of a penny, but they may well buy all their product from one company if their headline item is much lower priced and the other items aren't much more expensive than the alternative. With just a penny under, there must be other factors than pricing.

Still, 500K to 5 million is pretty impressive, and he deserves his success.

Men lie more in online dating - except about their weight

Cheers! (I think...)

I'm not particularly like Mr. Logic - I do a lot of socialising and meet new people. The problems are age old ones such as one person not fancying the other (last week it was someone not fancying me, this week it is me running away from someone I find uninteresting and unfanciable), different requirements, distance and suchlike. I spent the weekend with more than one person who would probably be interesting and attractive enough - if only they weren't also attached.

Online dating at least provides a very large population of people to contact/be rejected by (if you want to be cynical). I can't say it's been staggeringly successful in finding anything beyond short term partners, but it has resulted in at least one long term friendship.

It's difficult to dispute much of that, however..

There's at least two extremely basic errors with what he's saying.

First, that lying is "not necessarily manipulative, but rather reflects a desire to be liked and to fit in". That may be particularly kind phrasing, but it is very definitely manipulation. The fact the intention is not a malicious one does not stop it being manipulation, even if the person has convinced themselves otherwise.

More seriously, the assertion that the lies people tell depends on the type of people they are. Without seeing proper analysis I suggest the lies people tell depends on what they have done rather than who they are. There might be a correlation between extroverts and number of partners, but that does not equate to 'extroverts lie about their number of partners because they are extroverts'.

Certainly, if the 'non smoker, rare drinker' I had a date with once had been upfront that the first thing they'd do on the date was light up a fag and expect a G&T I'd never have met them.. (I don't like dating smokers, for obvious reasons).

It's not really a surprise that people will present themselves in the best possible light, and when that continues to fail, will start lying to increase their chances of success.

The alternative is what, exactly?

It should be obvious that some groups of online daters are a little over-represented as compared to the real world because they lack the ability to socialise in places containing a suitable partner.

Leaving that aside, it can take a substantial effort to meet people in real life. It's not enough to be a rounded person with friends and hobbies - they have to be the right type of friends and hobbies to locate a partner.

The options therefore are to continually try new hobbies, find new friends or spend a considerable amount of time in places inhabited by single people of your choice; an activity you may loathe if you dislike the location. I submit that selecting new hobbies/friends/places where the emphasis is finding a partner/shag rather than enjoying yourself is substantially more sad and soul destroying than online dating.

Online dating is probably the best alternative solution. It can be done when you're not busy with anything else, it's always there and will more reliably deliver single people that can be contacted, as opposed to hobbies, parties and suchlike. The fact online dating has its own set of pitfalls that means it's not necessarily more successful than real life is a different matter.

David Atherton: 'I don't miss Dabs'

You do have to wonder why he had nothing else to do

I can see that if you're working 70-80 hours a week there might be some adjustment, but if you're working a thirty hour week you have more than enough time to consider what you might do with your retirement/large supply of cash. Is it just me that gets bored of staying up till 4-5am and partying after 2-3 days and wants to do something different?

Dabs isn't a bad vendor, but I do think it lost something when it moved to its automated system.

I suspect when he talks about taking coke he's referring to a very specific part of the industry; I doubt it's endemic.

I hope part two is a bit more interesting though; 'Rich man gets off his head on drugs' isn't exactly a revelation or even (sorry Sarah) particularly IT related other than as a cautionary tale about what can be wrong when you have too much money and insufficient structure in your life.

For sale: One des res nuclear bunker

Ideal for procrastinating writer?

Get someone to lock you in for a couple of days whilst you're forced to work..? Not going to get many distractions there.

Is it ta-ta for Flash?

Amanita design are a shining example of excellent use of Flash

Kudos to Verity for mentioning them, Machinarium was probably my favourite game of 2009.

It's also worth knowing that in addition to the downloadable version, there's a collectors version available from the likes of Amazon and similar, released in four days time.

Amanita aren't alone, either - although I'm not a huge fan of Flash in most information based websites, there's some very inventive uses of it out there.

Forgot your ThinkPad password? Get new hardware

This is not news

This has always been the case with Thinkpads and is a feature, not a bug. The hardware is in some cases genuinely difficult/almost impossible to get into.

The truth is that the difficulty varies across models, but is rarely trivial. It usually requires special programs and sometimes a custom cable.

If you don't want to get locked out, don't set a password..

Microsoft slams nails in Windows Vista, XP SP2, 2000

You've misread it - support ends in 2014

Try http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223

Support, including security hotfixes, ends in 2014. If you want non security fixes up until then you'll have to pay.

Misleading article

The article may be technically accurate, but it is misleading.

Windows 2000 is the only OS that will no longer be patched, security fixes or otherwise.

It is true that users of Vista and XP may need to apply a later service pack to maintain support, but the way the article is written some people could be forgiven for thinking that fixes are being completely dropped..

Virgin to offer 100Mb/s broadband by year's end

Impressive, but perhaps excessive?

I've got the top end Be Internet package - up to 24Mb down, actual sync is about 13Mb, throughput maxes out at 1.1MB/s (partly limited by a crappy built in network card in the firewall). That's on POTS - do remember ADSL2+ is a lot faster than MAX.

To be honest that's perfectly enough - even 4GB plus of Solaris comes down pretty quickly and time critical applications (i.e. streaming) never have an issue. I suppose if you wanted to stream high bitrate H.264/VC1 in real time it might be an issue.

What I'd prefer is a higher upload speed; remote desktop over a 1.3Mb link whilst the remote system is doing something is considerably better than 800Kb/s.

100MB has to be excessive for most people, even most businesses. Still, it's nice to know it's there.

Silicon Valley hypegasm for miracle shoebox powerplants

Russian and Norwegian pipelines

Don't forget Britain has had a pipeline from Norway for years, and another pipeline from Norwegian gas fields to British gas fields. I suspect it can't supply 100% of the UK's needs, but at least it's better than having complete Russian dependence.

Plan for top-level pornography domain gets reprieve

Women like porn too

I know it's a strange concept, but I'm really very certain that many women are also keen on porn...

Open source - the once and future dream

That's not a model that appears to have worked

It may be true at times that no one can be found to be blamed (or rather, there are political reasons to present that view), but that is not the same thing as the government wanting to take the project inhouse so that they can be blamed. Neither is it true that open source and a black box commercial option are the only two options. Microsoft, for instance, is not the only holder of the Windows source code - but the other people require strong reasons to gain access.

By definition, any sensible contracted development work has custom requirements. An e-mail server is available off the shelf, and reinventing the wheel is rarely a good idea.

Giving the source code of government funded projects back into the community may or may not make sense. If there's an existing open source project there's probably a case for funding their expertise, but if it's from scratch there's then the interesting discussion about whether the output of government should be free, charged to increase public services/reduce taxes and whether it would negatively impact the commercial sector.

So, no, I'm not necessarily convinced.

Yes, it probably does

To address the economic issue : a 20 year old living with Mum and Dad and spending all their money on computer kit needs less money than someone older with a mortgage, kids and a life.

Both are potentially doing the same job, so should be paid the same amount - the higher amount, that is. Who decides what's an acceptable life for the programmer to lead? Maybe you live in a bedsit, how dare the programmer expect a three bed semi! They should only be able to socialise once a week, maximum!

The delightful sentence 'once the project exists in a useful form' should be replaced by the old flowchart joke with the box containing 'then magic happens'.

Who pays the programmer to code the application to a useful status? After all at that stage it's not useful to anyone. Academia/megacorp/government does not do things 'to be nice' - they expect an income. Where does that continued payback come from? Once it is at a useful stage, why bother donating?

If you're not being paid for the work, why bother with the really boring tasks and uncommon failure cases that will be appreciated by only a few dozen people vs something highly visible that's appreciated by thousands?

Why bother doing this when you can get paid for more commercial work with probably less shit from the community?

What can, and does work already, is either commercial organisations bankrolling employees full time for open source work on a commercial basis, or contracting programmers for specific purposes - for instance the PCC compiler on BSD Fund. It then becomes a matter of capitalism - raise the price high enough and the talent will be tempted away from other options.

All software sucks

From where I'm standing open source still has some way to go. I spent part of the weekend trying to get some code working on an old CP/M system (I couldn't go out, so bugger off with the sad git comments). This involved playing with Windows 7, NetBSD, Linux (Mint in a VM in this case) and CP/M+. FOSS code was also involved.

Both FOSS OS were a pain in the arse to use for different reasons. The FOSS code (written for Linux) was barely portable across different versions of Linux, never mind different unixes.

Windows wasn't perfect either, but was mostly pretty good. CP/M was a bit awkward but not exceptionally bad.

The points being :

Despite 30+ years of OS evolution, shit happens, just mildly different shit.

Use the right tool for the job, no size fits all.

Linux is not a fucking panacea or suitable for all hardware.

The vaunted million eyeballs do not always help when the only eyeballs that can be bothered to look are your own pair. When a Windows installation package is provided it usually works first time. When Linux source is provided, it may not even work on Linux, never mind anything else.

Sometimes closed/commercial source has some large advantages. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy FOSS OS (especially BSD) and sometimes it's absolutely the right solution for the job. At other times though it doesn't offer a packaged solution that Just Fucking Works and lets me get on with more important things.

The myth of Britain's manufacturing decline

A rise in production is not the same as a rise in income

The value of the finished product is not the only factor worth mentioning. To take the argument to ridiculous conclusions, if all manufacturing shut down except for one factory selling widgets made of unobtanium laced platinum at 3 billion pounds each would that also count as an industry that is not in decline? The critical point is if the figures provide the value to the economy rather than the company (i.e. tax revenue). The Index of Production from ONS is not entirely clear on that matter.

It may be true that manufacturing does not magically protect from a recession, and certainly any manufacturer will be hard hit by the lack of demand from its recession hit customerbase. I note figures for the impact on the service industry are not provided either, though.

Fewer workers is only a good thing if the workers go off and provide a higher value to the economy as the writer grudgingly concedes.

It is no doubt inevitable that UK manufacturing would decline and be forced to increase its skillset (globalisation and cheap overseas labour will encourage that), Maggie or no Maggie.

Manufacturing output certainly has shrunk; the fact that the gross value of the output has increased does not deny this. Therefore, it is still perfectly possible to at least start the argument that Maggie destroyed industry and to question many of the author's assumptions.

Go search for it on google

All the figures are freely available at the Office of National Statistics.

Of course, it's still not clear whether the headline figure is output x average unit price (which it seems to be)

or more importantly : actual income to the country.

Westminster politicos told to grasp Vista nettle

It still doesn't make sense unless XP has been validated

Yes, I'll grant that XP is highly compatible with 2000, and that they should probably have validated it years ago. If they haven't, it still makes sense to go to Vista - any new validation has to be on Windows 7, not XP.

I have run Vista in 1GB and it wasn't actually too bad. For serious use I would want either 2GB (32 bit) or 4GB (64 bit) though. We don't know enough about the situation.

If they're running <1GB or any P3 era machines, Vista would certainly be madness.

It all depends on the timescale

This is actually a sensible decision. Vista is a solid, if memory hungry system after SP1.

It's entirely possible Windows 7 may be a better option, but for immediate implementation it may not have had time to go through the evaluation and staff training period.

Assuming that Vista has been tested to be a viable option and immediate installs are required, it makes sense to roll out some Vista and do a parallel evaluation of Windows 7. The alternatives are an untested release of Windows 7 or creaking XP.

Most hardware that runs Vista fine will also be ok with Windows 7.

Doctor Who attempted to overthrow Thatcher

Some old Who episodes should be left dead and buried

Some old episodes are decent, and it's true that Troughton could actually act. Unfortunately other episodes feature wooden acting, flimsy sets, pathetic antagonists and poor plotting. Some episodes were acceptable by the standards at the time but suffer a little when seen through modern eyes.

In terms of American sci fi you definitely left out Babylon 5. The Australians did well with Farscape too.

Mel was horrific (she's not always much better as Bonnie). Donna was, much to my surprise, half decent after they toned down her screechiness - somewhat better than Rose imo.

Peter Davison was ok

The least said about Colin Baker the better.. There were a few half decent Sylvester stories, but I really did get fed up with his gurning at the camera.