Posts by Soruk 480 posts • joined 30 Aug 2007
Back in the day, some BASICs were zero-based, so DIM a(10) had subscripts that went from 0 to 9, others went from 1 to 10. As an aid to portability, BBC BASIC went full Spinal Tap and the above statement allowed subscripts 0 to 10, thus allowing 11 members.
WHILE/ENDWHILE only appeared in BBC BASIC V for the Archimedes and later.
BBC BASIC is still being developed in three branches - firstly RISC OS continues to be developed and is now open source, BBC BASIC for Windows has branched to BBC BASIC for SDL2 and is now cross-platform, and the open-source Brandy BASIC still sees development on the Matrix Brandy fork.
My bodge was a hacked straight Ethernet cable modified to work as a cross-over E1. It looked ugly as hell and was complained about by our data centre manager every time he visited the place. We did try to replace it with a properly crimped E1 cross-over cable, which was met by our call centre going offline. The bodge was reinstated and the call centre came back.
It was finally retired when we changed call centre operators to one which received calls via SIP.
My first ISP too, 1998-2014. eridani.demon.co.uk, 194.222.240.191 and later 62.49.18.88 on ADSL. Sadly even by 2014 they were just a shadow of their former selves so when I moved house in 2014 I got VDSL with PlusNet, paying their one-off fee for a static IP. In 1999 I bought my own .co.uk based on my Demon domain, originally it forwarded to my Demon email but later on ADSL I self-hosted and continue to do that to this day. I even wrote a couple of tools targeting their systems, including pop3clean which made use of their *ENV extension to the protocol to delete spam from the mailbox prior to downloading (which I deprecated and removed when they moved to a Microsoft platform as the facility was gone).
So long, Demon, it's been a hell of a ride.
My Epson inkjet decided to stop working this week, so I've also ordered a Canon. Though I guess I shouldn't complain too loudly as I bought the thing at the end of 2000 and it has worked brilliantly until this week.
I also have a Brother colour laser printer that was being disposed of by my office. It prints B&W very well but colour prints aren't great and have a smear of magenta all over the page.
My manager did very similar during a major outage scenario. I was getting stressed while trying to bring back all the servers and services, while loads of people were demanding their particular service brought back first, to the point he sent a company-wide email requesting ALL requests for our team were to go via him. Then he asked us if we wanted some coffee. We all said Definitely! or similar, simultaneously. "Well, go on then!" was his reply. Took us a moment or two to realise what he was suggesting, but by getting us to get our own coffee gave us a much-needed break from the screen, even for a few minutes, that got the stress levels down, and arguably we got the systems back quicker than had we not stopped for five minutes.
Great manager, it really is a pleasure to work for him.
I'm reminded of an occasion at work when we did an out-of-hours upgrade to our CRM system several years ago. Some unfortunate engineer forgot that the out-of-the-box setting for the payment platform on the Windows component was to point at the test instance, which doesn't actually take any payments. This needs to be manually edited to point to the live instance when the software package is installed or upgraded. This is usually done, but is forgotten from time to time. This particular occasion was just the first time, but the one that bit us in the bum rather hard.
Unfortunately, this oversight wasn't discovered for a few days (may have been a couple of weeks, I can't remember exactly), until it was noticed a handful of live customers weren't being billed.
The practical upshot of this is I modified the start script of the main Linux package to query the config file on the Windows box and refuse to start if the setting was wrong. This has saved our collective arses a number of times since.
On the theme of cables behaving badly, the ISP I worked at sent me and one other to the data centre in early 2014 to fit a SIP to E1 converter box to connect to our then new call centre provider's Avaya kit. It absolutely HAD to be working before we left, and of course we needed an E1 crossover cable, and that's not the sort of thing we had lying around. Did we have any RJ45 jacks or a crimp tool there either? Nope.
So while my colleague configured the box I googled pinouts on my (now deceased) HP Touchpad, and calculated the adjustments required to modify a straight Ethernet cable. Again, no tools available so the cable was literally hacked into using a house key, appropriate wires cut and rejoined, twisted together and held together and insulated with electrical tape. It was ugly as hell and had no right whatsoever to work let alone exist, but it did work. Our call centre was online.
A few years later it was decided a proper lead would be crimped and taken to the DC. Sadly, this replacement cable refused to function as intended, or even remotely close to it, so the old hack-job cable was reinstated, with service restored.
The cable was finally retired in early 2019 along with the E1 kit when we changed call centre operators who interconnected with us using SIP.
I used this technique to recover data from a dying hard disc from an Acorn RiscPC. Drive attached to a USB adapter and a long-ish lead, I had it in a couple of zip-lock bags, let it cool down then just dd'ed the thing to my Linux machine. It ran long enough to get an error-free image of the entire disc, now that image lives on with an SD card and an IDE adapter, and the RiscPC has never run so fast! It's also much easier to back the thing up now as the SD card is easily accessible to be imaged.
My 72-year-old mum has finally migrated from Windows 7, to CentOS 8 with a desktop skinned like her other daily driver, an Acorn RiscPC. She's getting the hang of it pretty quickly, and made easier that she has always used Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice even under Windows so migrating that lot was a doddle.
MVNO operator giffgaff has recently rolled out a 2nd-factor protection against SIM swap fraud. They send a code as an SMS to the existing SIM and as an email to the registered email address, so you have to have one or the other to be able to carry out a SIM swap.
I recently tested this when I lent my mother-in-law a SIM to use while waiting airside at Heathrow before returning to China, with the instruction to bin the SIM on arrival. After she arrived, I performed such a swap to a spare SIM I had, using the code that arrived by email.
Of course, this requires that your email password and your giffgaff account passwords are secure!
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