Posts by Dogbowl

Naked women cleaning biz smashes patriarchy by introducing naked bloke gardening service

Old, very old joke. That was done by Arthur Haynes way back in the 60s. Dr in Clover maybe? Sorry, showing my age.

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

Re: Possible Solution

Ahh Toyota keyless system. Do you know what a replacement key fob costs? I do and it's £280. I managed to obtain a new unprogrammed fob, cobble together the necessary software/leads and did the job myself for about half that cost. An interesting aside to this is that there is a guy up north in Leeds who can rest previously programmed fobs, something all the forums I've read say cannot be done (as do Toyota as well of course).

Who really gives a toss if it's agile or not?

Re: 'What's Real and What's for Sale'...

Ha! About 21 years back, working at Racal in Bracknell on a military radio project, we had a 'round-trip-OMT' CASE tool that did just that. It even generated documentation from the code so as you added classes and methods the CASE tool generated the design document. Also, a nightly build if it failed, would email the code author.

I have also worked on agile for UK gov projects a few years back when it was mandated for all new projects and I was at first dead keen. However, it quickly become obvious that the lack of requirements, specifications etc made testing a living nightmare. Changes asked for by the customer were grafted onto what become baroque mass of code. I can't see how Agile is a good idea except for the smallest trivial projects.

Zilog reveals very, very distant heir to the Z80 empire

4004! That was my first exposure to micros way back in 1976 I think. Programmed in binary as well on a custom made UV erasable EPROM burner.

I can also vouch for the TMS9900, always thought it had an elegant architecture and some nifty things like being able to execute an opcode present in a register. Context switching was neat, no push/pop business, same for interrupts. Sigh, those were the days what fun we had making industrial controllers from scratch all the way up to a forge control panel (Sheffield forge masters).