Posts by Will Godfrey

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

Not with webby stuff but an XML library

For years this had not been totally compliant, as it would accept XML with a blank line at the start (which apparently the spec says is a nono for some reason). Eventually they decided to clean it up, without bothering to tell anyone, and our code that had relied on the library exclusively suddenly failed to load any files.

It turned out, the devs hadn't noticed that their library was itself generating these blank lines on saving, and we had to do a hurried check for, and remove them when loading. I believe they eventually responded to the howls of protest.

P.S. We still make the check - just in case.

Re: Session ID?

Exactly what I was thinking might be the case!

Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's

Re: I have a little collection.

But including your own errors is cheating.

Re: I am NaN

As I said on a previous topic:

Never provoke a nan, she knows enough about you to totally destroy your credibility.

Captain, the computer has identified 250 alien stars that infiltrated our galaxy – actual science, not science-fiction

Re: Upvote for E.E. 'Doc' Smith

Rather an old one actually. I was reading his stories with a torch under bedcovers when I was a kid.

I was convinced they were true stories!

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Translation|:

"Whaaa. You just popped my artificial reality bubble"

Reality Check

Perhaps these do-gooders might like to think about the very real situation of the considerable amount of modern slavery. It's not called that though. One of the 'popular' forms is Zero Hours contracts - popular with the slave masters, that is. The victims don't have any choice.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

Re: Seems like a proper who, me

Which reminds me, I was supposed to do a backup run yesterday

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

Re: Once Flash finally dies

Well yes, but it's not the tool in the box you need to worry about, it's the tools that put it in the box.

This is just the one that was discovered.

How many more howlers are lurking in the code?

I doubt Barclays is worse than the other banks (nor better of course) so it makes me wonder about all the outages that occur and are never properly explained.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

Wouldn't work for me

There is only one brand of yogurt I like. It's that or none.

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

About this 'Taking Back Control'...

I'm not seeing a lot of it. Our gubbermint don't seem to be in control of anything right now.

The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com

I was going to say

"What could possible go wrong" but this isn't funny. It's insanity.

Beijing's tightening grip on Hong Kong could put region's future as an up-and-coming tech hub in jeopardy

Re: Welcome....

Indeed. As a country, we have a crap record on how we treat refugees.

We're no longer helping UK Post Office persecute postal workers with our shonky system, says Fujitsu

Even the cockroaches murmured

I can't remember where that quote comes from, but it is so appropriate here. Yet there is no doubt the truly guilty will get away scot-free, and indeed are probably actually still profiting from it all.

They probably know we hold them in complete and utter contempt, yet arrogantly carry on regardless.

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

For just a moment...

I thought it was April 1st already.

What did it take for stubborn IBM to fix flaws in its Data Risk Manager security software? Someone dropping zero-days

I really don't understand the attitude.

I know it is all too common, but why?

The software I work on doesn't have any security implications, beyond possibly freezing the desktop. However if I'm told about a bug in my code - especially if a proof of concept is included, it goes straight to the top of my TODO list (unless it's impossible to replicate). What is the point of doing anything else?

Belief in 5G conspiracy theories goes hand-in-hand with small explosions of rage, paranoia and violence, researchers claim

Be careful about definitions Reg.

You missed out the rather important word 'unreasonable' in your definition of paranoia. If someone is running toward you brandishing a machete with a maniacal scream, it is not paranoia to believe they hold (very considerable) hostile, and definitely personal intent towards you.

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Ah IT 'managers'

The people who either never actually had a clue, so were moved somewhere 'safe' or have been so long out of the field that they have no idea what's going on these days.

UK.gov announces review – not proper inquiry – into Fujitsu and Post Office's Horizon IT scandal

Meally Mouthed Diversion

Talk about obfuscation. There should be criminal prosecutions.

IBM blames 'external' network provider, incorrect routing, traffic flood for its two-hour cloud outage

Deny, Deny, Deny

Fits their entire business profile perfectly.

Yeah, great start after sacking human hacks: Microsoft's AI-powered news portal mixes up photos of women-of-color in article about racism

Be afraid

Be very afraid.

This is just a taste of the future. Those old SF stories where a computer decides a person is guilty of a crime that was never committed, or that someone doesn't exist, are getting uncomfortably close to reality.

From off-prem to just off: IBM Cloud goes down planet-wide so hard even the status page didn't work

It's cloudy here too

And it's raining pretty persistently. However if I stay at home it's nice and dry. Is there perhaps a moral there?

Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

Is it the weather? Covid-19? or what?

There seems to be a lot of troll activity around today.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Re: He used the wrong excuse

For anyone who doesn't know, arson is regarded as so serious that it has a top limit of life imprisonment.

Huawei launches UK charm offensive: We've provided 2G, 3G and 4G for 20 years, and you're worried about 5G?

Re: Insidious attack on the west.

I suggest you do some reading of history, before you accuse China of being the bully. They have survived millennia of being the victim rather than the bully. So maybe a bit of payback is overdue - not that I'd want to see it.

Fun fact

China is the word's oldest surviving civilization, and in spite of the so-called Cultural Revolution, is in fact little changed. America has the youngest, and it's already falling apart.

When open source isn't enough: Fancy a de-Googled Chromium? How about some Microsoft-free VS Code?

Another Vivaldi user here

I hadn't realised just how much 'standard' Chromium was tied to Google, and actually started using Vivaldi before I knew it had a Chromium base. It's reassuring to know I made the right decision under the circumstance.

I actually do a mix & match of browsers for different purposes, in the hope that nobody gets a complete picture.

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

There are so many problems with this idea

Where do we start?

Fortunately The above commentards seem to have covered just about all of them. Maybe we should be the ones running the government.

UK govt publishes contracts granting Amazon, Microsoft, Google and AI firms access to COVID-19 health data

See Icon

The only answer to this cesspit of corruption.

If Daddy doesn't want me to touch the buttons, why did they make them so colourful?

Can't remember where I saw this...

An SF story, with the title "Beware the tiny hand".

Hmmm. Actually I can't remember the story either - must be getting ol middle aged.

We have Huawei to make the internet more secure: Dump TCP/IP to make folks safer says Chinese mobe slinger

I'm actually surprised

Surprised that something like this wasn't already being planned by our very own lovable spooks and gubberment

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Re: I feel left out

10 years older than what? I'm actually over 70, and indeed have some health issues.

Oh, and whoever said 'rant', I don't do rant. Piss-take, yes, but not rant.

I feel left out

I never got any kind of of warning at the start of this pantomime (and yes I'm well over 60). I've not had any text messages either about not going out, nor recently that I now could. I'm not even getting any scam attempts - apart from the usual supposed bank telephone warnings and outlook folder full emails.

What am I doing wrong?

Office supplies biz owned by UK council shrugs off ransomware demand for 102 Bitcoin

Re: Email plus HTML/scripting is a disaster wating to happen

My mail reader is configured to display html as plain text, and show anything else that isn't plain text as a closed attachment. It runs absolutely nothing, but I can save things like embedded images without once actually viewing them.

Good!

I just hope more organisations and companies start taking this approach

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

This was absolutely the final straw for me. I'd already been trying devuan ASCII out on one machine. Once I heard of this all my other machines got blitted to ASCII, and a couple of them are now confirming Beowulf.

Snapping at Canonical's Snap: Linux Mint team says no to Ubuntu store 'backdoor'

Re: Debian and Debian derivatives

Been running Beowulf here on my two main machines for a while now - not seeing any issues.

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

Reminds me of...

If I be goin' there, I be-n't start from here.

7*7 = a simple equation for taking total control of multiple VMware-powered clouds

How?

Can someone explain please.

I simply cannot imagine coding even the simplest of user accessible systems without decent input sanitation.

SpaceX Crew Dragon docks at International Space Station

Re: Why the delay?

While I appreciate they were being ultra meticulous as a first run, it seemed that the guys on the space station spent most of their time fiddling with the cameras.

They've only gone and bloody done it! NASA, SpaceX send two fellas off to the International Space Station

Re: A Sense of Wonder

There's always (at least) one, and when there is a fairly complete vid they turn round and say it must be faked.

I was a teenager when they showed the moon landing. The improvement that have been made all-round since then are truly astonishing.

Ardour goes harder: v6.0 brings 'huge engineering changes' to open-source digital audio workstation

There is a wee detail you are missing. For a long time they couldn't fully support mp3 without buying licenses - not exactly the thing for a flagship FLOSS project.

I know some of the developers quite well and have the greatest respect for them.

On a broader point, regarding GUIs, somewhere on the net there there is an article discussing the merits various toolkits available, specifically with respect to high quality audio control. The author comes to the conclusion that none are suitable and the best thing you can do is design your own... if you have enough time!

Beardy Branson’s 747-assisted sat-launcher can’t get it up

At least they tried

They are on the steepest part of the learning curve. Getting the first of anything to work is where you find out all the stuff that couldn't be foreseen.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: Minimum spec?

Even on the small project I work on I use my fastest machine for actual development. Only when getting near to a release do I then cross-check with older and lower speced machines - these days including a raspberry Pi 3B. Occasionally I'll run it on an elderly EeePC900, or to be more correct I'll walk it

Record-breaking Aussie boffins send 44.2 terabits a second screaming down 75km of fiber from single chip

Re: Only part of the problem

They only said they succeeded in doing that, not that they couldn't have gone further. It might be the longest piece of fibre that had available

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Disgusting

Well, I was never especially proud of being British, but it never occured to me I'd get to be ashamed of my nationality.

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Been There Done that

My reward for carefully guiding someone through the perils of... ummm, 'guey' interfaces, while studiously not noticing their embarrassment, was lifelong loyalty.

P.S. 'guey' because the little pictures stick where you put them and remember what they did last time.

Linux desktop org GNOME Foundation settles lawsuit with patent troll

Good result

These trolls are terrified of the idea that an organisation will fight as a matter of principle to get their crap patents invalidated.

DirectX comes to Linux (via WSL2): Microsoft unveils tricks needed to flash a GPU at a penguin

Hmmm, more bugs?

I seem to remember something about a raft of security issues. Does Linux have so few that it needs more?