Posts by Lord Kipper III

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

BFF

BFF - ah, yes, I see what you did there

Voyager 2 found! Deep Space Network hears it chattering in space

I look forward to the confession of the flight operations engineer(s) who confused the command transmitted to realign the dish off the Pale Blue Dot appearing in a future Who, Me? regomised to Will of course in honour of the chap who restored comms from V'GER in that movie.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: Change window - cue the drums

Have an up vote for that Cosmograf reference.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Re: "an on-prem email server"

They are? Thermal management in space is really quite difficult (unless permanently in the dark but that then makes solar panels not too functional).

Wordle recreated in Pascal for the Multics operating system

Re: Performant?

Multics seem to to have a hold on universities in that part of the UK, us engineering undergraduates at Cardiff in mid to late eighties had the use of a Multics system although Fortran and Pafec was the limits of our excitement.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

https://www.airshipsonline.com/airships/ss500/Zorin.htm

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

Re: Lack of plannng

The gas fired Didcot B power station is just over the fence with also the old open cycle gas turbine generators (Rolls-Royce Avon powered for the power generation geeks) also still there. The original connection to the Nation Grid 400 kV infrastructure is still there also. 84 MW of diesel generators on site though - surely some opportunity for batteries such as those being installed across the UK by the likes of Pivot Power with the opportunity for Amazon to trade the batteries in the UK power market although their primary function would still be keeping the servers and support infrastructure running.

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

I take your Gemini 49 and raise you my Psion Wavefinder, can't say if it still works though as the last OS it had drivers for was XP.

Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts

Re: Not a Cossie, but...

Car Magazine once observed that the fastest vehicle seen on the UK motorways would be a white Astra van.

This page has been deliberately left blank

Back in my university days the Athletics Union (for non-UK readers, the umbrella organisation that managed all the university sports clubs) did a fine trade in clothing with the club name printed on the back Cardiff Rugby Club, Cardiff FC, Cardiff Netball etc. One of the departments in my faculty, Mining Engineering and Mineral Exploitation or Minex for short decided they wanted their own customised training tops.

The lovely lady in the Athletics Union asked what they wanted on the back, Minex FC, Minex RFC or whatever? Response was "Just Minex".

Which was exactly what was printed. The tops were very popular with more apparently sold than there were students registered to the department.

43 years and 14 billion miles later, Voyager 1 still crunching data to reveal secrets of the interstellar medium

Re: Often overlooked

Fear not, we simply beam Slim Whitman to deal with the invasion.

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

Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably

A common practice in my undergraduate days 30+ years ago running PAFEC jobs on our university MULTICS system. With deadlines due too many of us would be on and slowing things down. Some would be over confident, set the job running then go to the students union/pub only to return to discover that mysteriously their job had ceased to be. Can't possibly think how that could happen.

Skill now practised as a tool to stop my youngest son playing Minecraft on the desktop at meal times. He's not figured yet that I can connect to the Linux machine using SSH from my Chromebook and remotely shut the machine down.

China has a satellite with an arm – and America worries it could be used to snatch other spacecraft

Re: Low earth orbits will be unusable ...

Well, it has happened (although in Mexico and not in actual space);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoE4m8RqOWs

The Story Of How The CIA Stole & Returned A Soviet Spacecraft Before Being Noticed

NASA writes software update for Ingenuity helicopter to enable first Mars flight

I'm sure that if NASA can resist the temptation to 'improve' the printing on the 'copter that it'll only take a couple of patches to get right.

PHP repository moved to GitHub after malicious code inserted under creator Rasmus Lerdorf's name

"The main code repository for PHP, which powers nearly 80 per cent of the internet, was breached to add malicious code..."

then

"The PHP project is notoriously bad with infrastructure, it just doesn't have the funds to dedicate someone to it at the level necessary," said Mark Randall, a software engineer, on StackOverflow...

That's a little concerning then.

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

When I held an SC clearance for work, our headquarters security team were at pains to remind me that I had to notify them of trips overseas. When I asked if this was me asking for permission or just letting them know, they smiled and said that provided North Korea didn't suddenly become a popular holiday destination I'd have little to be concerned about.

One of the security team was ex-SAS and we used to chat about some of the 'exciting' things he'd done in the past while waiting for meetings to get going. Made his rather plain LinkedIn profile look a lot more interesting...

We'll explore Titan with a methane submarine, a methane submarine, a methane submarine...

May I say bravo for that headline, you truly have excelled your already high quality standards in coming up with the one.

UK's Space Command to be 'capable of launching our first rocket in 2022'

Re: Battle Space

Oh goodness me - that brings back hazy memories from my distant childhood. The railcar mounted spy satellite is quite possibly the only thing that the UK will be capable of launching for quite some time.

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

Ah yes, a text based upgrade. In the dark and distant past my employer started issuing iPhones to the selected senior types instead of the corporate standard Blackberry and the standard signature 'Sent from my iPhone' marked someone out as very special. One of my team suffered from a need to have status bestowed upon him and craved, more than anything to be able to have 'Sent from my iPhone' at the bottom of his emails. My group of engineers, not important enough to have even a Blackberry (Basic Nokia for you sunshine) exacerbated the situation by changing the standard Outlook signature to 'Sent from my iPhone' and awaited the fall out from our colleague.

Our IT director, always one to play along with a prank from the tame engineers simply told our colleague that they had five spare iPhones in the test programme and we five engineers had asked him nicely.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

Re: "278 fscking MB!!! For a printer!!"

Does CUPS in Linux offer direct cat photo printing?

Asking for a friend.

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

I once bought one of those cheap combination lock safes to keep documents in at home. Not especially secure but kept important things together and away from prying fingers (of children). Powered with a couple of AA batteries it started giving a low battery warning which of course I made a mental note to replace but never quite got round to. One day the batteries died and the safe wouldn't open. Never mind, I'll get the key that also opens it and was put in a safe place with all the other spare keys for cars and the house for such an eventuality.

Not there.

Ask the wife - 'Oh yes, I found it on the floor and it looked important so I put it in the safe'.

I now how really insecure those cheap safes are.

Own goal: $280,000 GDPR fine for soccer app that snooped on fans' phone mics to snare pub telly pirates

I'd expect more than a large GDPR fine from my partner (or indeed someone else's partner) if I were following the football on my phone whilst, ahem, partaking of some horizontal jogging.

Amazon boss snubs 'expensive', 'sub-optimal' relational databases. Here's looking at you, Larry

I briefly hovered over the 'report abuse' option but then thought that El Reg is a broad church and perhaps the gnome has an equally broad mind.

UK chip and PIN readers fall ill: Don't switch off that terminal!

Cars alternative

Meanwhile in Bristol (UK) where I work we have our own currency called imaginatively the Bristol Pound that many fine retailers and even the council accept in payment for goods and services. Should you live in Bristol and not just work there (rules of the Credit Union that runs the scheme) you can upgrade from the paper notes to an app based currency that uses text messages to carry out the transactions using either good old SMS or for the more advanced, a smartphone app. Each retailer in the scheme has a cheap candy bar phone that confirms the transaction between punter and the shop by receiving at text message. Not sure what the security model for that system and what the backend is like but provided the phone network stays up then it should be pretty resilient.

Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park

Re: Re:Victorian railways had a few exploding boiler incidents

As a young boiler maintenance engineer at Didcot Power Station in the early 1990s,the coal fired boilers had several safety relief valves dotted around the boiler operating at various pressures. Sometimes the valves would just begin to pass steam at normal operating pressure and make a noise which would put us in breach of our noise limits so we would have to drop load. Less MW generated meant less £ so especially in the winter we were encouraged to fit a device called a gag that would force the valve stem down onto the seat to stop the valve passing. This of course meant that the valve could no longer serve its intended function but as we had sufficient other valves and a repair would be immediately scheduled. One evening I was asked to install the gag on one especially noisy simmering valve but having applied the recommended force to the gag the valve was still passing steam noisily. I phoned the Charge Engineer (shift manager) reporting failure and that I was giving up and going home for my tea to be told to try a little more force as this evening, MW were really quite expensive and the suits in HQ would be quite disappointed that load would have to be reduced. I tried a little harder, still no success and was joined by a colleague offering a large spanner to apply more force to the gag. At this point I concluded that I did not wish my life to end in a sudden bang and steam whiteout due to the safety valve body splitting apart due to the use of unreasonable force, invented some Engineering Directive (a bit like Space Corps Directives but less funny) about the use of gags and went home.

My PC is on fire! Can you back it up really, really fast?

Re: You ever wonder?

Why wait ten years. Come on, you know you want to...

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

Cryptocuisine

Naturally, I would rebrand it as a Yorkshire Artisan Blockchain Pizza then it would fly off the shelves. Quite possibly, given time you would find this in Waitrose and even Bettys.

Don't panic... but our fragile world is drifting away from the Sun

Where's my towel?

Great. Thanks, I won't panic then. Oh, hang on. I have a house full of computing gear with Intel processors, our Chromecasts are regularly DDoSing our wifi and Donald Trump is still US president.

Perhaps I will panic after all.

<glass _half_full>The good news is I suppose that as Earth is getting further away from the Sun, the possibility of our home planet plunging into the Sun is receding.</glass _half_full>

China's first space station to – ahem – de-orbit in late March

Re: Coming home

Sheer jealousy mainly because they don't live there but of course there is Swindon's epic Magic Roundabout (oh just Google it!) which is nearly unique in the UK (and would absolutely terrify most American drivers who freak at the prospect of a normal roundabout).

Disclaimer, in don't live in Swindon but live sufficiently close to appreciate it from a suitable distance.

Re: Coming home

It was certainly north of the M4 earlier today as I was there.

Re: Coming home

That's a trifle unfair. Whilst there are undoubtedly parts of Swindon that would be significantly improved by a direct strike from a falling space station (the Brunel Shopping Centre being one such place) there are some lovely places, one of which possibly could be the Intel offices which will be needed intact to deal with the impacts of Meltdown and Spectre with UK punters.

OK, Google: Why does Chromecast clobber Wi-Fi connections?

Re: BT HomeHub?

I too had concluded that our BT Home Hub 5 was living up to its (perhaps unfair?) reputation of being terrible due to frequent Wifi problems at home preventing our teenagers from using their gadgets and me watching Star Trek on Netflix via Chromecast and I was on the cusp of binning it and buying someone else's router. First step on that BTexit journey was the £18 Openreach VDSL modem off ebay. Next step was finding a router that did not resemble a randy porcupine that Mrs Sinclair would be happy to see on the telephone table in our hall (in fairness, the Home Hub is relatively anonymous looking except when being hit by angy teenagers who can't find the reset button). As an interim, I plugged in a Home Hub 4 that I had serving up wifi in our garage and that appears to be working fine so far.

So it would be Google and not BT I have to blame for this personalised DDOS system that out four Chromecasts are providing (three permanently on and one plugged into the TV USB port). Thanks a bundle Google, at least I didn't splash out a sizable sum for a replacement router (although that's only because I couldn't get my wife's permission to buy something that had the performance plus bells and whistles).

Over to you Google.

Hotter than the Sun: JET – Earth’s biggest fusion reactor, in Culham

Re: Didn't they used to have a flywheel?

I was a graduate trainee at Didcot power station in the early 1990s and the control engineers desk had a special light marked JET Pulse that would flash when they spooled the machine up to warm the plant operators. Very impressive to see the impact the pulse had on the local system.