Posts by Andrew Shirley

Lone Android dev 'almost brought down T-Mobile'

"incompetent" seems a bit harsh

Seems to me that he used a reasonable strategy to maximise battery life and him not knowing the connection provider's overheads for different actions isn't something I'd describe as "incompetent"

Adobe PSD pushes programmer too far

See also

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered

Mozilla Google relations strained by Chrome

Re: Am I missing something?

From the very page you linked to:

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers. "

Details of the other site's stats aren't avaliable (without emailing them) but I would guess they come from a less biased source.

Telco compares merger to Challenger space shuttle

See also

A local cab firm in (presumably) a bid to get to the top of yellow pages, chose the first 'A' word they could think of:

http://graeme.woaf.net/pics/taxicard.jpg

Apollo 1 went about as well as challenger, just slower and more horrifying. Just the image I want when climbing aboard a mini-cab.

How poor crypto housekeeping left OpenID open to abuse

@Defective by design

I wouldn't use openId for banking but if I type a password into irc/msn/whatever, I would rather change it in one place than many.

With the current system of isolated authentication, there is a tradeoff between remembering dozens of passwords (and probably choosing less secure ones as a result) and reusing passwords on many sites (which risks the password being leaked and makes changing password much more difficult)

Converting Groovy to Ruby

running intermediate steps

I have no experience of JRuby but it is worth noting that every version on the way from Java to Groovy was runnable on the JVM. This would, therefore, make a nice series of small refactorings to a codebase which has only recently embraced Groovy as well as Java

Microsoft Office Online falls into Halloween time vortex

date formats?

10/3/2008 vs 3/10/2008 maybe?

surely not, MS are good at dates.

Copyright nagware accord reaches 30

Re: Arrogant racketeers

If only they had sold more DVDs and picked less cockles.

Everyone should, clearly, be helping to save these poor folks by visiting your nearest market or dodgy pub. Or are they perhaps the organised crime/drug dealers/terrorists we hear about

China looking to develop scramjet missile tech

Re: Dolphins

They would probably be a bit annoyed by the missiles flying overhead but the explosion and resultant bits of ship floating/oozing past would really ruin their day.

'Microsoft' to compensate 419 victims

Re: I am still...

This is the first instance of this scam (that I have seen) which would benefit from good english. I always assumed they used bad english to play on the "ahh, poor unfortunate foreigner" aspect. In this case, there is no excuse.

PDF spam tsunami hits email inboxes

missing greg's point

people seem to assume that greg would keep the shares he bought. The trick is selling them before the spammer. you won't make as much (possibly less than the associated cost of buying them) and it is a risk (you have to judge when the spammer will sell) but it isn't simply giving money to the spammer.

NB. http://www.spamstocktracker.com/ shows the current price of the shares. The only interesting point is the qualative evidence in the note that says they rise minimally before diving. A table of theoretical maximum gains would be a lot more interesting than current prices.