Posts by Grumpy Rob

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Malicious Compliance

A loong time ago I was working on a project that used Allen-Bradley PLCs that we had to integrate with other software. We asked for a test PLC that ran on a 240V, but when it arrived it looked like it was configured with a 48V DC power supply. After a few acrimonious calls with an arrogant PM who insisted that he knew better we said Okey Dokey, and hooked it up to 240V - after hiding behind a desk :) PSU duly went bang, but only a disappointingly small amount of smoke. Shipped it back, and got a "real" 240V powered one, but no apology from the PM.

Good news was that it gave us one of a number of excuses for "extension of time" - the customer was a Government organisation who, as usual, had faffed around for years writing a spec, asking for tenders, reviewing responses, blah blah blah. At that point the project was now time-critical, so they made us the whipping boy by making us promise to deliver in a ridiculously short time scale (sound familiar anyone?). Luckily they were just as hopeless at contract management as everything else, so we managed to get enough time to do a reasonable job.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

Clickbaity title

What is it about The Register and Boeing? In Australia both Qantas and VIrgin have 737 700's and 800's which have flown millions of passenger-miles without any dramas. Concentrating on the aircraft make just gives the airline a "get out of jail free" card, if indeed there were issues with maintenance or pilot training. Does the Register think its readers are too dumb to comprehend that almost all commercial aircraft accidents are caused by a combination of factors? (Swiss cheese accident model)

Fedora Asahi Remix 40 served on Apple Silicon

Just remember - everyone's use case is different

As is usual there are multiple opinions here, seemingly based on "*I* don't think it's a good idea because..". But more power to the Asahi Linux people, I say. It gives me more choice, and if that's not attractive to you, well so be it.

I'm retired now, but a loooong time when I was working in a small office of mainly Mac users I was (and still am) a Linux zealot. So one day, as a joke, the boss handed me a brand new Macbook Air to replace my ageing Toshiba laptop (the business was very profitable, so could easily afford to do this. And all the Mac users thought it was hilarious!). I actually really liked the Apple hardware - the very early Airs were amazingly light and portable and had great graphics compared to my clunky toshiba. MacOS, not so much. So naturally I tried to install and run Linux, but ultimately failed to get anything working properly. And soon after the screen stopped working - maybe because the old X11 drivers had cooked the graphics chip??

Now I have a lot more time on my hands I thought it might be interesting to try Linux on Mac again, just for my own entertainment. But when I visited the Apple section of a computer shop I was really disappointed in the latest Apple laptops. For me their main selling point was lightness, but the latest "Airs" weigh a ton. WTH? And billions of pixels on an 11 inch screen are wasted on my old eyes. So I'll stick to my current Thinkpad, which is reasonably light, and has a good 1920x1080 screen. Runs Linu Mint and everything "just works". Fine for my more frequent travels.

To get back on topic, for me the best thing about Asahi is that in future it may save a few ageing Apple laptops going to landfill, and that is a "GOOD THING".

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: I need classic outlook

There's a security issue with IMAP/cloud provider. I know because a workmate a couple of years ago was hacked, first by a SIM swap on his phone. Then, because the hackers had done a bit of research they then went to his email and did the "Forgot Password" thing. Password reset via "his" phone, and they were in to his email. Being a good German he had a beautifully arranged folder hierarcy, with all his banking emails neatly stored in folders. So next was a "Forgot Password" on his bank login, and now they had access to his bank accounts. If he hadn't had all his email on the IMAP server he might have been a bit better off.

And, as usual we get sweeping generalisations about which is better, IMAP or POP3 (and about wines, and blondes versus redheads.. but I digress). But being a really old IT guy the only truism is "you need good backups, because software and hardware fails". Whether that's your own backups for personal emails, or company wide backups for company emails.

At least there's one thing you can rely on.. Microsoft will always change things ensure customer lock-in :)

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Chronos is right..

Short version - User Chronos said "..an operating system's job is to abstract hardware and then stay out of the way.." Absolutely right.

Now the long version - My wife was using Windows7 at work, and insisted on using it on her PC at home too. She did (still does) *a lot* of Internet shopping, with consequent flood of "your package is.." emails. I gave her a lot of coaching, but the inevitable happened and she clicked on an email link and, BANG, she had the cryptovirus going wild on her PC. She lost a lot of stuff that *I* hadn't backed up - my fault naturally. That finally convinced her, so I wiped her PC and loaded it with Linux Mint, put icons on the desktop for Thunderbird and Firefox and she never noticed any difference. If I told her that a new version of Windows was a "game changer TM" she'd be mystified, and if I told her she needed to buy a new laptop to run it on she'd be outraged. Bonus - I set up a script that ran at login and rsync'd her email to a local SBC file server (that I had setup to allow me to remotely save my email on my work computer). Still, everything else was still my fault :(

Meanwhile, I might be old but I'm still childish :) I run Linux mint and cinnamon, but for old time's sake I loaded the Motif window manager as well (Yes - I'm *that* old). If someone wants to use my PC I logout, change to Motif, and log back in. Voila - a completely blank black screen background, a mouse cursor, and NOTHING else. Now that's what I call a UI :)

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

You can't be serious!! (shouted John McEnroe style)

This whole thing makes my head spin. What planet are we on, where people can make statements that are complete bullshit and not get laughed off the stage? If the media were doing their job properly statements like this would be labelled complete bullshit, rather then just parroting what is said by the CEO/politician/etc..

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

So just where were you when that Florida influencer suggested on national TV that you could treat Covid by injecting bleach. No wonder the rest of the world is concerned when a complete idiot like that could again be in charge of nuclear weapons. I just don't understand how 'merkins can be so dumb as to vote for that charlatan!

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

"Python, Ruby, and JS have extremely poor performance for some kinds of tasks."

Anyone care to comment on which tasks, and relative frequency in real life? I'd think that by percentage the "really big" applications, with thousands of transactions per second, accessing millions of records would be a small part of Java app. development??

I'm retired now, but I'm really biased against using Java if at all possible. So much bloat, and with all the library dependencies complicating everything. "Just use Jenkins.." I was told, but that just made everything more complicated to set up, and more opaque when things went wrong. Not to mention bloody IBM Websphere loading its libraries first, introducing subtle, and sometimes not so subtle bugs. Gaaaah!

Of course there are so many different use cases out there it's impossible to generalise, but for the simple stuff I developed later on in my career I much preferred Python. But then I started off developing software for SCADA systems in assembler when core memory was VERY expensive. When we moved to RAM and C it was "luxury" (cf Monty Python).

Nearly one in two industry pros scaled back open source use over security fears

Clickbait title

I must say that I think the article title is clickbait - but then that's becoming more and more common these days. Sigh.

And I think the biggest security problem facing IT departments, well in Australia at least, is a shortage of people with IT skills. Doesn't really matter if it's open or closed source software - some clown will screw up the configuration and leave security holes. A friend supporting some software at a large semi-government organisation was gob-smacked when their outsourced Linux support person didn't know what logrotate was, and asked him how to install and use it. With that level of (lack of) knowledge how can you expect any thought to be given to security - they don't know what they don't know.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Why does this remind me..

..of the old days when Micorsoft deliberately made the Netscape browser crash out on Windows 3.1?

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Fun Police

More than 10 years ago I had to write a noddy web service to extract some data from a back-end system. It was called with an HTTP POST, and because 99% of the time at this client stuff didn't work because of firewall rules I implemented the GET as well - it returned the message "This is a web service - use the POST method you idiot!". So easy to check if the web service was running and the firewall rules hadn't been screwed up *again* - just point a browser at the service.

I was gob-smacked when years later, after a new IT outsourcing crowd had been installed, I was told that the message was offensive and I had to change it. In vain did I point out that it would never be seen by anyone but IT staff doing testing. Gone are the "good old days" when everyone knew about the original BOFH and Xtank, magic and more magic,.. and had a sense of humour.

I *did* smile when, a loooong time ago, I was working on some B2B software that printed barcodes. To modify the barcodes you had to log in as admin with password "xyzzy" (1 point for knowing where that comes from), and then got some extra menu items. Another smile when I selected "Help", and got the message "Yeah, like I had time do *that* too!".

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

A Real Flash

My first job (many many years ago) was in the Post Office telephone section. A young tech. was working on a fault in a relay rack. Turned off the 50V DC and went off to lunch, at which time one of his helpful colleagues wired a packet of flash cubes (remember them?) across the 50V supply. Tech came back from lunch, sat down on his bench, and turned on the 50V. Lit up the whole floor, and took years off his life. Can't do that stuff nowadays :(

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

What I don't get..

..is why you'd run Linux in a Windows subsystem??? If you want to run Linux (i.e. need the stability and security, don't need all the bloat and a bazillion services adding to your "user experience" barff), then just run it. If you need Windows to run a favourite program then run Windows in a VM, where it can't do too much damage.

FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

Re: Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

This is way OT, but I'll bite...

"..the folks who like conspiracies.." - sadly, this seems to be a case of preferring a conspiracy theory to a simpler explanation involving "ambulance chasing" lawyers exploiting a real flaw in car design to get publicity. Oh - and make money :)

And back then ALL American car manufacturers needed a kick up the arse to make their cars safer - just go to Youtube and search for videos showing car impact tests. It's truly frightening to see the older American hugemobiles pushing the steering wheel *through* the dummy driver's chest while more modern cars provide a lot more protection. So the end result was that all American cars became much safer. You may not like the way it happened, but it needed to happen.

Back to their old ways!

I'm still old enough to remember the Microsoft that put special code in early Windows to sabotage the Netscape browser. Don't believe me? Google it..Probably won't find anything with Bing :)

But now, the recording of all your keystrokes,the sending of all your computer and application details back to M$ to "help them give you a better experience". It's same old, same old.

My wife used Windows because she had to remote in to work, but a couple of years ago she was hit with a cryptolocker virus. I bought a NUC and SSD, set her up with Mint - she loves it. And it doesn't slow to a crawl during virus scans, INSIST on rebooting at the most inconvenient time after downloading Gigabytes of updates, run bazillions of services out of the box that mean the GUI is sometimes very slow and jerky, etc. Mind you - it was my fault that I hadn't backed up all her email, so any brownie points for setting up Mint negated by the loss of points for the email :(

And it *still* amazes me that M$ can't simplify the setup of a new computer FFS. Yesterday someone in the office unpacked their new Dell desktop with Windoze 10 "pre-installed". Well, there's an out and out lie for starters. It took forever (well, over half an hour) to go through all the palaver and questions, with so many unexplainable delays along the way. And, at the end the only applications installed were the bloatware ones!!! By contrast, install Linux Mint and you go through three or four setup screens in a row (with hardly any waiting except a possible disk format), then go and have a cup of coffee and it all installs unattended. AND you've got Libreoffice, media player, graphics viewers already installed. When will people learn?

Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection

A bit OT but..

Around ten years ago I was working next door to a solicitor. Running kismet to find the best (least worst) channel for our wifi, and I noticed the solicitor's wifi was not encrypted. Told them about it, but was met with a snotty "our IT expert says it's perfectly safe". Can't resist a challenge, so I captured their traffic for a couple of hours, then pasted together the text from some fairly innocuous barrister's advice. Dropped it next door, saying "I've read your email, do you want to read it now?". It *still* took them a week or so to get encryption turned on. And, of course, no thanks for pointing out the security issue. Sigh!

Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS

Re: Automation and Safety

Yeah - well I think the point is not that they couldn't "fly" the plane, but that they couldn't do it from "muscle memory" - while doing other more important tasks, like working out whether the engine was on fire, the wing was falling off, or something similar. The problem is task saturation - if all your mental effort is going in to flying the plane you don't have any mental capacity left over to work out what the problem is and how to fix/work around it.

Nowadays most pilots only get to actually hand fly the plane from takeoff to a few hundred feet up off the ground, and the last few hundred feet down when landing. The rest of the time the automation is on, because it's the most economical way. And simulator time is expensive, so airlines do the absolute minimum hours of that. It's no wonder pilots' basic flying skills get rusty. Have a read of this thread on pprune.org - rumours-news/388573-pilot-handling-skills-under-threat-says-airbus.html.

Automation and Safety

"That;s still Boeing's fault though.

Allowing untermenschen to buy these aeroplanes - when they are specifically designed to only be flown by 'real' men"

I assume this is meant to be sarcastic, but it has an element of truth. Aviation automation has delivered a great improvement in safety over the past 20-30 years. And the cost pressures on airlines and the great demand for pilots (well, before Covid, anyway) has meant shortened pilot training times - most of the time all the pilot has to do is program up the computers. But, on those now very rare occasions when things go wrong with the automation, the pilot has to very quickly work out what is wrong, and take control. In some tragic cases they can't work out what's wrong - e.g. AF447.

More than 10 years ago I was talking to an old airline check captain (who had flown 707s and 747s) - he told me how shocked he was when he was asked to do an initial assessment of a new intake of pilots for his airline. He said that he put all the pilots into the simulator, and more than half of the 20 or so couldn't hand fly straight and level while he was talking to them - they were automation-dependent. So you'd just better hope on your next flight that (a) nothing goes wrong with the automation, and (b) if it does *your* pilot is a "real man" :)

Devuan debuts version 4.0 – as usual without a hint of the hated systemd

My Rant - was Re: Happy days

Running Devuan3 both at home and at work - and it just works! Will upgrade to 4 soon.

What pushed me to Devuan were the occasions when I was shutting down my computer, and it said "running a stop job"!! I didn't *ask* it to run a XXXXing stop job, I *told* it to shut down NOW.

I've been using Unix and then Linux since the mid-80's, and I get increasingly grumpy as people add more and more "features" that I don't need:

- I don't have a problem with waiting a few more seconds while my computer boots up, I have to switch on the coffee machine too.

- I don't add and remove network cards all the time, so stop renaming my eth0!

- I don't want to boot a bazillion OS'es using different file systems, so stop messing with grub. I *used* to be able to remember the boot commands AND read the grub.conf for "old" grub, not any more. So I use extlinux, thanks.

- I want my core files in the directory where I'm developing the code - not squirreled away somewhere weird where I can't find them without wasting time reading documentation on features that I don't want or need.

- I want my log files in readable text format so I can quickly grep them for errors, etc. Not some binary blob bulls..

Ah - that feels better. Now for a soothing cup of tea..:)

Watchdog signals Boeing 737 Max jets can return to US skies following software upgrade, pilot training

The bigger picture..

Really annoys me that the focus is all on Boeing. Yes - what they did was unforgiveable, BUT Southwest Airlines have 34 737 Max aircraft, first flight on 1st Oct 2017, until grounding in 13th March 2019. Zero crashes, and as far as I know zero incidents. So how come Southwest can fly the MAX OK, but some South East Asian and African airlines can't? And in the case of the Indonesian airline there were three successive flights with the faulty aircraft (FFS!). One flight was completed with the stick-shaker going off THE WHOLE FLIGHT. In Europe or the US the first pilot would have landed immediately AND defected the aircraft. And the aircraft wouldn't have been flown with passengers until it was test-flown first.

My point is there there has to be a combination of factors to cause an accident, and at the moment everyone is attacking Boeing, while the airlines seem to be escaping any blame. How are things ever going to improve if the airlines escape their (deserved) share of the blame?

The cynic in me thinks that there might be some astro-turfing going on, since the ambulance chasers know that Boeing has deep pockets, whereas attacking the airlines may be much more difficult due to country of jurisdiction - but I'm old and deeply cynical.

Reminds me of the Japanese tsunami and all concentration on the dangers of nuclear power - FUKUSHIMA DISASTER sells papers. But the real culprit, who seems to have got away relatively unscathed, was the plant operator. ALL the newer Japanese reactors (22 IIRC) automatically and safely shut down. But the Fukushima plant was the oldest, NOT fail-safe, and well past its design life. The operator kept it running anyway.

So I do wonder about what is posted online, and who is behind it.

..Adjusts tinfoil hat..

X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned

What's wrong with stuff that works????

I get really annoyed by the attitude that if it's not under active development it's not worth supporting.

Take the Thunderbird mail client, for example - it's got all the features you need in an email client. No I don't want to edit HTML, or interface with the coffee machine, or... I JUST WANT TO READ MY EMAIL!!

Same with X - *my* use case is that I have a number of Linux boxes, and it's sooooo convenient to open xterms on other boxes and work on my on machine with big dual-headed monitors. Contrast that with the work I have to do on Windows boxes, where I have to RDP in, open a whole damn desktop. Or find out that the number of remote logins has exceeded the license limit, then ring up to get other rude users who stay logged in when they're not actually working to log off. And stop fixing my security - I know not to use anything vulnerable when the network is open to the Internet. But on my own secure network X works just fine. So please stop making it so hard to disable the "nolisten tcp" in X.

And what about grub versus grub2 - grub had a config. file you could read, and I could remember the boot commands from memory. Now there's a huge unreadable grub.conf file - computers are good at pre-processing text. I'm not. And what do you get in return? Dinky progress bars and graphics - in a boot manager FFS!!!

</rant>

That feels better - now for a nice hot coffee :)

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Fun with Laserjets

Another great thing about Laserjets was that, with the IP address and some simple scripting, you could write short messages to the display. My favourite message was "OUT OF CHEESE" - that certainly got a few funny looks from users when picking up their printout.

Unfortunately the place I was working at changed out all the old Laserjets with huge copier/printer/scanner units AND stifled creativity by password-protecting all the gear. The fun police are everywhere nowadays :(

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

Re: 16bit

"Some customers in the past have found that their bill is inversely proportional to how grateful they were"

A bit off-topic, but reminds me of my (long deceased) great-aunt who a loooooooong time ago worked as an operator in a manual telephone exchange in a country town. When you were connected to a subscriber, to charge them you pressed a button on the switchboard which clicked one unit on their billing meter.

If a subscriber became abusive the operators were always very nice - because they just kept clicking on the billing meter button as long as the subscriber kept yelling.

'Beyond stupid': Linus Torvalds trashes 5.8 Linux kernel patch over opt-in Intel CPU bug mitigation

Linus is right!

Linus is right, in that it's not up to the Linux kernel to solve security problems of the type that AWS is trying to mitigate. If the data you're processing is so sensitive what the hell are you doing running on something in the cloud? It's not just when you're processing the data that you're vulnerable - the input and output data has to be stored in the cloud too. But cloud providers have never been hacked - right?

I'm just amazed at the number of companies and government/semi-government organisations that are using cloud-based email and data processing/storage. Has no-one done a risk assessment of what could go wrong? But it seems the beancounters have taken over and cheaper beats secure every time - until an excavator or a fire takes out Internet connectivity and the business is left without any access to their corporate data for hours or even days. Yeah - much cheaper!

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

Horses for courses

One problem I've seen with software development is the old "when you've got a hammer everything looks lik a nail". Young programmers learn one language, and think that it's applicable to all problems they're given. So I've seen what should have been a simple web application run like an absolute dog because it used MEGABYTES of Javascript and MEGABYTES of HTMl to render a few simple and small tables. But the developer was using Java/Swing (I think) and some client side libraries that were HUGE. Who needs click-sortable columns on a table with typically three or four lines of data?? But the developer clearly didn't know any better.

Once you know a thing or two you can select Python for quick and dirty one-off jobs - it doesn't matter if it takes a few hours to extract/migrate data if you're only doing it once. While for a production task you may pick something more efficient and suited to the task - and (gasp!) actually do some thinking at the design stage.

One of my early jobs (more than 30 years ago) was writing the telemetry driver for a SCADA system that had three dual-CRT operator consoles. All written in assembler and fitted into 256k bytes of core memory.. including the OS. And the Interdata 32 bit mini had its performance measured in DIPS (dozens of instructions per second). As with a previous poster, when I sit waiting long seconds for a 4 page Word document to load on an i5 machine with 8Gb of RAM I just shake my head in amazement/disgust.

'Year-long' delay to UK 5G if we spike Huawei deals, say telcos

What could possibly go wrong?

Gee - I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't install equipment in the CORE of your national communication network from a country that:

- has recently been accused of hacking into businesses all over the world and stealing IP

- has the power to coerce a local company to spy for it while ensuring that that company can't tell anyone about it.

And if you think you can mitigate the risk by inspecting the source code then you're dreaming - for a start try looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code_Contest to get an idea of how you can hide stuff if you want. And then the nightmare of checking that *every* piece of kit delivered has the same firware, doesn't have extra hidden ROM, firmware updates are "clean", etc, etc, etc...

BTW - I would be just as suspicious about equipment bought from the USA, except that with the "Five Eyes" agreement they already have access to all our phone conversations anyway!

The bottom line is that if you don't have equipment designed and manufactured in-country you can't really trust it 100%. So you're already stuffed!

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

Coarse colonial

May not be relevant, but my favourite quote (not original) when sytems go down is:

Q: Why is a computer system like an erect penis?

A: Because if you f**k with it it's going to go down.

Seen it any number of times!

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0

Re: geez, the ignorance about systemd here is astounding

Well, let's see what Linus thinks about the Red Hat developers working on systemd (back in 2014).

http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html

Oh, sorry - Linus must be an ignorant troll too </sarc>

South Australia blacked out by bad bespoke software, not wind farms

Gosh, I like simple answers to complex questions!

There are a few contributors who seem to think network stability is really simple, but I can assure you it's not. Once you have a succession of big disturbances on the transmission network you are in uncharted territory. It's all very well saying that big rotating machines (i.e. coal-fired turbines) have lots of capacity to "instantaneously" provide extra power, but that's conveniently ignoring the problems involved in trying to keep widely separated generators in sync - there are transmission delays, reaction times of the turbine governors, etc, etc Even if the SA generation had been 100% coal-fired there's no guarantee that it would have stayed up. So it's just opportunistic to blame wind generation.

I certainly agree with the consensus that the introduction of lots of green power could have been better managed (hindsight *is* 20-20 vision), and griffo is right that this was a "learning event". But I get *really* annoyed by the pollies and pundits mindlessly (or is it duplicitously?) demanding cheap AND 100% reliable electricty - it's an engineering trade-off, you can't have both simultaneously.

And on the subject of the cost of electricity - it's a few years since I looked at the annual reports of the NSW electricity distributors, and they were then 100% Government owned. But from memory the annual reports showed that the distributors paid a total annual "dividend" to the Government of around a billion dollars, plus another half a billion odd in debt repayments. But "dividend" is just accountant bullshit for tax, since they are (well, were) publically owned assets. So a lot of the blame for high electricity prices lies at the door of our pollies, rather than "network gold plating" or green energy. Don't believe me? Well get off your bum and look at the publically available annual reports.