Posts by logicalextreme

'Unmute' named one of Oxford Dictionary's words of the year

Re: No phrases?

I've heard "you need to unmute" quite a lot. Phrases make it in to word definitions when they're idiomatic, and they naturally form part of the corpus.

Re: "Presumably Oxford Languages have liittle to do..."

You're gonna kick yourself when you see your typo.

See also: ducking

It's a hot beverage, like covfefe

Dell online store charges 16 million dollars for new laptop with paint job

Re: Windows screen capture

Careful, mine's taken to freezing the display and necessitating a hard power-off.

Re: Probably because the pigment

You misunderstand. The £12m is the cost of nuking the hurricane so that it doesn't interrupt the shipment of the pigment.

GitHub restores DMCA-hit youtube-dl code repo after source patched to counter RIAA's takedown demand

Re: Youtube

I had Facebook do that to some stuff during my brief jaunt on there. I suspect they use a service that's akin to Shazam. On Facebook at least, it'll detect small portions of TV shows and not just music.

Re: Youtube

And adverts. No ads from NewPipe or youtube-dl.

Python swallows Java to become second-most popular programming language... according to this index

Re: Sin tax

I was actually initially going to say the equivalent would be having the line outside the closing (curly bracket | brace), but then it occurred to me that that would control the variable scope in, say, C# but not Python. So you'd get shouted at immediately for making the same mistake, assuming the variable's useful lifetime was intended to exist solely within the block.

I hope "objectively sucks" was a premeditated pun :)

Re: "Why not? K&R is ~250 pages long"

Upvote for the last bit because I'm pinching that to use on all the people that are afraid of exceptions.

Re: "Why not? K&R is ~250 pages long"

I've rarely run into the issue except with stuff I've grabbed from the internet and then modified (and a lot less since I adopted spaces), but Git at least has commit and checkout options relating to that sort of thing. The tab/space settings in your IDE should help too, along with displaying whitespace characters.

Re: Sin tax

I've used it on plenty of serious projects, but those are indeed the sorts of things that can trip people up if they're used to other programming languages. Simplified scoping is the cause of the first, and I don't know what the name for the cause of the second is (being able to dynamically throw properties onto objects).

That said, you'd generally expect somebody using Python in a serious project to have the correct indentation come as second nature to them, and be consistent enough with their casing that it'd be glaringly obvious if they mistyped a property name.

Re: "Why not? K&R is ~250 pages long"

In my experience the biggest source of bugs in today's bug-ridden software is idiocy (this probably holds true for yesterday's and the day before's). I know absolutely nothing closer to the metal than SQL with smatterings of Python, C#, bash and Powershell but most of the bugs I've encountered have been stuff I can identify the root cause of, and it's normally nothing a swift punch to the offender's throat wouldn't sort out.

I'm with you in spirit though, and you rightly highlighted that security bugs are the inevitable impact of a glut of high-level programming. However I think the danger lies in programmers with a mindset that's perfectly content to know what they know at the level they know it — I've never seen much good come out of people who don't always want to know what happens under the hood when they're doing something. The people that do want to maintain at least a bit of passing knowledge of "one level down", as I call it, also tend to have an awareness of when they're out of their depth and will refuse to continue until they've either learned properly or called in an expert.

After Cummings' Barnard Castle trip, cheeky Britons started using the word 'vision' in their passwords

Looks like they try and crack them on their end, the hard(-ish) way.

GitHub warns devs face ban if they fork DMCA'd YouTube download tool... while hinting how to beat the RIAA

Re: Why is such a tool needed?

Another thing to add to the existing answers is that downloading things from YouTube is only a tiny fraction of what it can do. You can throw it at pretty much any page you see with AV content and have a pretty good chance of it getting that AV content for you. Streaming tech is a lot more complex than just a video file hosted publicly on a web server, and this tool knew* everybody's tricks.

* that is to say, clever hardworking people coded around those tricks for free to benefit the web's entire user base

Why, yes, you can register an XSS attack as a UK company name. How do we know that? Someone actually did it

Re: Reminds me of Mr. Bastards.

I remember an RS teacher in school telling us about a horse that had been named "Norfolk-In-Chance", with the expectation of similar commentary japes.

Much like the British on holiday, NHS COVID-19 app refuses to work with phones using unsupported languages

Re: What about multiple languages?

Precisely. If they're truly so pressed that they can only do a certain number of translations, then prioritising languages that will cover as many people as they know will have trouble understanding the current lot seems the only logical option.

It may be that the figures for such things simply aren't out there — I'm not sure if the census went into that level of detail, and it's nine years old now. It may even be that that's what they have done, and that's why the list of available languages looks odd. I'd still probably have just tried to nail all of them though. Guess this is why we're not government contractors :)

Re: What about multiple languages?

It's English. We're a bit of a weird one though what with having constituent countries, which can decide their own rules about official signs and communications etc. As far as I'm aware the UK's official language just refers to the language used in Parliament and its associated gubbins like the civil service.

Re: What about multiple languages?

Yeah, "supposed to" is the wording I didn't like. At best it's an ignorant misreading of what a "national" or "official" language is.

I have a pathological need to play devil's advocate though and wanted to get a dig in about the stupid app behaviour ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Surely you just press buttons harder ?

It was totally in keeping with the headline though, really. And pressing buttons harder really does seem to dredge some vestige of functionality from the ether.

Re: What about multiple languages?

Going from the "Main language" section of the 2011 census summary, there's French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Lithuanian and German representing European languages between Polish and Romanian. It looks like the article just chose the top three unavailable-in-the-app European languages from the ONS link referenced (foreign passport holders, from the same census), which doesn't have Spanish in the table.

I'd have hoped at the very least that the app overlords had gone for numbers and factored in stats on the percentage of speakers of any given language having little or no understanding of English, especially given the lessons one prays have been learned from the failure of national and local government to tailor messages about the guidelines and regulations to communities with cultural and language barriers. That doesn't appear to have happened, so how they're choosing the languages is anyone's guess. Maybe they repurposed the summer school grades algorithm to try and get some actual use out of it after seeing the invoice.

Though really there's no excuse to have not gone live with, say, all of the languages with 50,000 speakers or more in the UK — they've clearly done the legwork for translation (astonishingly stupid bugs notwithstanding), and translating content is easy and cheap (and would even help the precious economy that seems to be the only thing we're told matters so often recently).

Re: What about multiple languages?

I can't tell but this comment may have been suggesting that an appropriate behaviour for the app when a language lookup fails might be to, say, fall back on the most-spoken language in the UK as opposed to, say, shitting the bed and displaying a blank screen. You know, like anyone with a trace of i18n (sorry) experience would.

Not the best choice of words though admittedly and the use of a hyphen rather than an em dash is unconscionable

Re: What about multiple languages?

Glad it's not just me. My F-Droid's still showing me half of its interface in Spanish and I haven't had it enabled as a system language for almost a year. Occasionally a system notification will also decide to be Spanish with no ritmo o razón.

The fact that you can't (or couldn't, this may have changed) choose different languages for different apps was baffling to me, but not as baffling as getting a pick-and-mix within one app and seemingly random behaviour from the system. Having Spanish enabled at all (even if it's not the current system language) plays merry hell with language apps where you're trying to learn Spanish, too.

Experian vows to drag UK's Information Commissioner's Office to court after being told off for data-slurping practices

Re: " insisting Experian [...] informs consumers[...]" UPDATE

Thanks for that, I was looking for the logic that progressed "ICO did fsck all to Experian for being shits" to "Experian vows revenge on ICO".

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

It's got me wondering whether MS added all that stupid animated crap into Office for precisely this purpose — a "go faster" button for the beleaguered sysadmin.

Microsoft unleashes production-ready Edge Runtime. WebView2: This time it's Chromium

Re: "production-ready"

Not just dev tools. I've lost count of the number of SQL Server updates I've seen get pulled after a few hours or days, not to mention Windows Server 2019 being pulled shortly after release.

"production-ready"

Oooh, it's moved into testing already!

First, Patch Tuesday. Now, Oh Hell, Monday: Microsoft emits bonus fixes for Visual Studio, Windows 10 security bugs

Migrate to Office 359. Then you have a reasonable chance of not being able to see them.

Quick thinking and an explanation for everything – key CTO qualities

Re: I've been fired ...

Hate it when you get to the crucial moment and it's ruined by the realisation that the author was using a different extended character set.

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

Re: Spreadsheet day

There's some nice spolsky* context on that here.

* he's an adjective now Lana, deal with it

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Re: Alternative?

Dates are numbers, so I think it must just have strings and numbers and then differing behaviour based on how a cell is formatted (which is utterly cracked, as a DBA).

"general cause" :D

Re: Row / column limits

A thousand times yes. People's ire was directed at the Ribbon in Excel 2007, when it should have been at the limits.

I've come to assume that Microsoft knew that they'd be able to make more from per-user Office licensing than SQL Server core licensing, pricey as it is, because previously there seemed to be a perfectly obvious progression when you hit the more obvious limits of the software.

I think that it is pretending to be though. More and more and more features get thrown into it. The row limit was upped from a perfectly sane 65,536 to over a million. The column limit was upped from 256 to over sixteen thousand. Where before people would have stopped, taken a step back and asked if it was the right tool for the job (mostly…some might end up partitioning over multiple sheets before they start wondering, and there's always the odd person that can't think for themselves and never even considers that a review might be in order), there are now 17 billion cells up for grabs on just a single sheet of a workbook.

If we can get angry at firearms manufacturers and tobacco companies for being enablers, we can sure as hell get angry at Microsoft.

I only updated my CV to .docx a couple of years ago. Office 2003 was the last Office I could use and I maintained the file format in protest at everything that's come since.

Re: Alternative?

Graphical ETL, in my experience, is as bad as Excel if not worse. The more fluff you put on top of things to abstract people away from the data and the reality of what they're doing, the worse the data that comes out will be. I've reserved a special place in hell for SSIS, which in its defence is technically a free gift.

Re: Alternative?

I think that you'd probably find quite a few people who use Excel inappropriately are in fact silently struggling with all the nonsense it brings, and have a head far more suited to databases. You can see the lights go on in their eyes when you explain the basics of the relational model to them. SQL is just the fairly-standard means of interaction with that model, and as a bonus it didn't get arbitrarily rewritten to be upside down and back-to-front with keywords in a different language and character set in 2007 (that's the Ribbon interface, for those playing the analogy drinking game). Learning anything never ends, but if somebody's realised that it's actually going to solve their problems, they'll learn under their own steam.

Crucially, the pitfalls of an RDBMS don't tend to be data inaccuracy — standard SQL and the way numeric types are stored can admittedly make them a bit shit at maths sometimes, but they don't go fucking existing data up just because you looked at it funny. The fact that Excel has the concept of a "format" and no concept of data types makes it fundamentally unsuitable for anything but the most basic, unimportant data tasks.

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Re: Excel by print only

But yes, the way you interpreted it is certainly very important. I make a point of getting people to spot check my numbers because not only could I have made a mistake in the implementation, they could have made a mistake in the maths they gave me to implement. I've caught out instances of both by doing this.

Re: Excel by print only

I did think that Excel must almost certainly display a warning when opening a file with more rows than it can grok. Doesn't mean it wasn't ignored though, which would make it the fault of the person who ignored the message or the person that had made them afraid to ask questions.

The ire at Excel has just exploded in this particular instance because we've all been dealing with that kind of shit for years, inevitably involving spreadsheet cowboying, and we love a good "told you so!" when we get the chance because you can only do that every so often at work without seeming like a prize nob.

Re: Excel by print only

It wasn't a dig at the NHS (I've been trying to get into healthcare for years and have finally achieved that, at a company primarily owned by the NHS), I should have been more specific. It was a dig at legendarily-bollocks Connecting for Health, which is what she was a part of along with the mates and relatives she also brought in and almost sank the company with (and a more general cheap shot at the poor reputation of healthcare IT, which I'm now getting to see the roots of firsthand…but that's precisely why I wanted to get into it!).

Re: Excel by print only

No, you misunderstand. It was her spreadsheet. She didn't know that they could do the calculator bit themselves.

We didn't actually know what she wanted the calculator for when she asked for it. The guy that bit the bullet and responded told her about the calculator application built in to Windows. Then the pile of paper got waved at him.

Re: Excel by print only

One better. Watched a newly-forced-upon-us "Head of IT" (with experience in the NHS, of course) print off half a ream of spreadsheet and ask if anybody had a calculator.

All at sea: SAP was barely out of the port when it sank its 'social responsibility' voyage

Re: 5 per cent to diverse suppliers?

Maybe it's their sneaky way of announcing that they're reducing it to 5%.

Inflated figures and customers who were never there. Just another data migration then

Re: Inconvenient truth.

Was in a similar place a couple of years ago, one that was featured on the telly very recently. Had a nice little hissy fit from a director about how the new figures needed to also be incorrect "because that's what we've been using to plan everything". Refused to interact with her after that one and made it clear why.

Re: Hmm ...

Brilliant. I'm having that one.

Re: I bet inflated numbers happen everywhere

That money was simply resting in my account.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Re: Edge using chromium

All of you downvoters are monsters. You probably prefer Dairy Milk to Galaxy and strangle kittens.

Re: Sadly... this is the beginning of the end

I've mercifully not had any problems with it since jumping from 14.04 to 18.04 a couple of years ago, but from this behaviour it sounds like systemd and the newly cross-platform Powershell are a match made in heaven!

Re: Edge using chromium

I tried to follow your analogy but all I could think of is the fact that Pepsi is delicious and how much better it is than Coke.

Uber allowed to continue operating in English capital after winning appeal against Transport for London

Arguments against black cabs: rattly, noisy, large enough to block road visibility for several other classes of road user.

Anyway. Gett is linked to black cabs in several UK cities. Personally never used it because I had a good relationship with a local private hire firm, but I've heard good things from transport planners about its potential. Unfortunately Uber are uberiquitous enough to have dominated the market at this point, and outside London there don't tend to be black cabs everywhere you look — ranks tend to be clustered in the centre.

NHS COVID-19 app's first weekend: With fundamental testing flaw ironed out, bugs remaining are relatively trivial

Agreed. They can't even make people wear masks in shops, let alone demand people install an app on a device they may not own. I walked around most of a Co-Op the other day before realising my mask was round my neck and nobody said anything.

Re: Call me Mr Cynical but...

It baffles me that something that important is even the user's responsibility. The people responsible for delivering the test results to the testees could surely be delivering them en masse (and accurately) directly to the system that supports the app, given some sort of upfront anonymous identifier exchange.