* Posts by Vic

5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007

Blighty's Parliament prescribed tablets to cope with future votes

Vic

So she is stating that she (and presumably other MPs) don't do what they're paid to do and then make arbitrary decisions without any knowledge or understanding of the matter.

And you're surprised by this?

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Brit boffins brew nanotech self-cleaning glass

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Re: This glass for solar panels?

Being dry and dusty would that not mean they just need to be blown clean? I'd have thought the dust blowing about in a desert is not likely to be sticky stuff.

Rather abrasive, though...

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Re: Question

the material's thermal radiation rises normally up until 74 °C, before suddenly appearing to drop to around 20 °C colder than in reality. The rather surprising result could have potential military applications

Bugger the military applications - I want a teapot coated in the stuff...

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Gov must hire 'thousands' of techies to rescue failing projects

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Agile (aka making it up on the fly)

That's not actually what Agile is...

The Agile Manifesto is quite clear; it's about getting stuff working rather than succumbing to excessve process. Thus Waterfall and Agile aren't *really* all that different - particularly if you run Waterfall according to Benington's original description, which required feedback during the course of the project.

However, we don't do Agile according to the Agile Manufesto - we just fail to do proper requirements capture and documentation (and various other things as well, usually). And Agile without direction is a headless chicken.

And we don't do Waterfall according to Benington - we try to freeze everything before anything is known. And a frozen waterfall is a glacier.

Is it any wonder that so many projects go awry?

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Rumour speaks of arcane code which can drive a man mad, just by trying to read it.

Yeah, sorry about that. It was late, I wanted to get home, ...

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It's more likely that notice will be taken of the consultant because of what he's been paid. It cost more therefore it must be worth more.

That's certainly been my experience.

As a young engineer, I was frequently ignored. Very occasionally, it was recognised after the fact that my solution would have got the job done and avoided the fiasco that actually ensued from doing what the usual suspects said should be done, but more often, the whole thing just got swept under the carpet. I as quite despondent for a while.

Then I decided to start asking for more money. I simply doubled my rate. And all of a sudden, peolple listened to me. I was doing nothing different, I was just an expensive resource to ignore, so they didn't...

Quite depressing, really.

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Re: Nope

In the end there isn't a substitute for experience, the problem is that it costs more.

Not over the life of a project, it doesn't.

Paying one man £8000 a month for three months is a cost of £24K.

Paying three men £1500 a month for five years is a cost of £90K.

The former is more likely to get you the product you wanted...

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Re: IT degree?

Sometimes the right response is actually to make the team smaller - cull the half-wits and non-producers.

I find it's a good idea to seek out the people that are actually making progress and ask them (confidentially) what they want...

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In my department we've struggled to hire anyone over the last four years

I'll bet you use recruitment agencies. They're the source of most employment problems.

These agencies attempt to reduce the difficult problem of matching people to jobs into a simple word-search; as a result, you get agents with no understanding whatosever of the positions they're trying to fill, and you get CVs massively over-blown to try to get some of the buzzwords du jour. Neither is good for an accurate assessment...

IME, the most effective way to find staff is to offer your current staff a reasonable bounty for finding anyone that stays for more than a year.

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Asda slammed for letting vulns fester on its cyber shelves

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FAIL

Same old PR-speak...

Asda and Walmart take the security of our websites very seriously and we review our systems and software regularly

This tells me that at least one of the following must necessarily be true :-

  • Asda is lying through its teeth
  • Asda is not sufficiently competent to realise just how borked is their security

I'm not sure which scares me more...

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Re: PCI Compliance

Who the hell have Asda been using for their penetration testing?

They got a specialist in. He was the former Managing Editor of Wet Spaghetti Weekly

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Sorry, kids. Microsoft is turning Minecraft into an 'educational tool'

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Re: "“There has to be a purpose for using technology,"

Because school classes aren't for entertainment, they're for education.

Believing that is why you get crap classes.

All the best teachers I ever had considered entertainment to be an important part of education.

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India just about accuses Facebook of faking Free Basics fandom

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Re: Free Basics?

(and most know what they are getting themselves into)

I suspect you might have a "not" missing from that...

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Pentagon fastens lasers to military drones to zap missiles out of the skies

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Re: "given enough power, given enough beam quality, given enough altitude,"

its not too difficult to change the wavelength of a laser if you need to.

That rather depends on how you'r generating the laser. For many types, it would mean a complete strip-out and replacement with a different type of laser - assuming such type had actually been created and could do the job.

The COIL used on YAL-1 had a wavelength of 1.315µm (acording to Wikipedia). That's not changeable. To use a different wavelength would mean using a laser not based on iodine. That wouldn't be a twenty-minute refit...

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It's 2016 and idiots still use '123456' as their password

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Re: Nothing wrong with insecure passwords

it's particularly annoying when some trivial site insists on 87 characters, 13 symbols and no old password reuse, just to protect your my-little-pony updates

The other day, I registered an account with the Met Office.

Minimum 9 characters, at least one capital, one lower-case, one number, and one "special" character (which wasn't defined).

To get a wind forecast...

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Aircraft now so automated pilots have forgotten how to fly

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Re: The human pilots just do the easy bits...

Do you think Lewis Hamilton knows much about the engine sitting behind him?

Yes, I do. He might not know as much as the developers, but he knows more about that engine than you or I do.

Being a flyboy doesn't make you an engineer

Yes it does. Knowing how the engine works and how to diagnose and fix problems are part of the mandatory training for that engine type - that's why the rating specifies which engines can be flown.

You'd know this if you'd ever done the training; that you think it's a "stupid bloody question"[1] implies that you haven't.

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[1] Alongside your other incorrect assumptions about how the technology works.

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Re: The human pilots just do the easy bits...

That doesn't mean they couldn't.

How many hours do you have on jet aircraft?

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Re: The human pilots just do the easy bits...

They might have been unreliable but the point was they worked without a single computer in sight.

They didn't. It just wasn't a *digital* computer.

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Re: The human pilots just do the easy bits...

You can say exactly the same for a piston engine

You can say what you like. Doesn't make it true...

flood the cylinders and it stalls, too little fuel and it stalls

But if you run the fuel within the nominal fule settings, that will not happen at any stage of the flight. You can go to min[1] or max at any time - as long as you don't over-rev to the point where it simply falls apart, the engine will keep turning.

The same cannot be said for a jet engine; fuel control is critical.

That doesn't mean it needs a computer to control all that.

It needs some form of computation. Whether that computer be a human flight engineer, a mechanical computer, or an electronic one matters not. You still need one.

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[1] I'm ignoring ICO for reasons I hope are rather obvious...

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Re: The human pilots just do the easy bits...

The complexity is in the construction, not the operation.

Not for a liquid-fuelled jet, it isn't. Fuel flow is a critical operation - too fast and you overheat the turbine, too slow and you flame out.

Take a look at the Hunter turbine failures for what happens if you over-fuel. They were notorious for it.

Temperature is critical for the safe operation of a gas turbine engine - if it gets too hot, it can fail in seconds. That's why early transport aircraft carried a Flight Engineer, whose main job was to keep the engines at optimum temperature. Modern FADEC systems have largely replaced that job, but temperature monitoring is still a major part of the flight crew's job.

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Re: The human pilots just do the easy bits...

Gas turbines are even simpler than piston engines. They barely need any systems at all - just a starter system, igniter and fuel flow control.

Errr - you might want to take a look at a functioning jet engine.

Although they're theoretically very simple, getting one to work involves a fair bit of complexity.

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Airline pilots used to be ex military pilots and knew how to fly the plane.

WWII is effing long ago though.

The air forces of the world didn't stop training pilots at the end of WW2...

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Re: 1st

When landing in a light aircraft at a commercial airport, that is a llloooooonnnnnnngggggg runway

A bunch of us took a PA28 to Boscombe Down. I think we could have done about 3 or 4 touch-and-gos without turning...

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Re: "Swiss cheese" theory - lots of holes have to line up

The pilots *didn't* initially know they had a pitot problem.

Listen to the CVR. THey were discussing an airspeed problem. Now they might not have realised that this was down to a frozen pitot, but they knew there was an airspeed problem. The procedure for that situation is to set cruise power and fly straight-and-level for 60 seconds. That would have fixed the issue - but they didn't follow procedure.

Hope this helps, and that you don't mind the clarification.

I never mind any clarification, although in this case, I don't believe this is such; despite the additional lead-up events that you have outlined, the reason AF447 went down is that PNF couldn't keep his hands off the controls. If he'd had his hands in his lap, the aircraft would not have crashed.

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Re: Pilots will soon only be needed for taxiing (Not likely)

the young inexperienced pilots couldn't cope with the icing on the wings

There should always be at least one experienced pilot on hand.

The requirements for ATPL have been reduced - but you still need 1500 hours flight time to get there. These days, even First Officers often have ATPL, even though they generally only need MPL (200 hours).

I'm not familiar with the incident you describe, but the pilots should have been able to cope with the conditions they put themselves into...

Vic.

Internet of Things 'smart' devices are dumb by design

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Re: Nest has issued a patch after they found it sending location information in the clear

One that perhaps reacts to the weather, which to find out it probably needs to submit location information for a current report and forecast

I have a flight program[1] that downloads METARs for the entire country in a mater of seconds. That would leak no more than country information...

That said - how much diffrerence does a weather forecast *really* make to the job of a thermostat? If you have *very* large thermal mass or *very* poor insulation, I can see it being handy to turn on a bit earlier, but how often does that really apply?

Vic.

[1] Flight Assistant if you're interested. It's rather good...

How to get root on a Linux box, step 1: Make four billion system calls

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Re: If someone is able to run arbitrary code on your server

The main doors have Perl, Python and Shell written on them.

rbash can be very useful here - although it does require you to create a whitelisted set of symlinks to the stuff in /bin, /usr/bin et al.

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Recall: Bring out yer dead and over-heating Microsoft Surface Pro power cords

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Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

What's more likely is that the insulators between the cores are failing

That would imply a very low-quality cable. I doubt anyone would actually ship something like that.

I suspect - with zero evidence whasoever to back this up - that they've used a braided cable to make it more flexible. As the cable is bent, so the individual wires in the braid start to break, leaving the remaining wires carrying proportionally more current; that causes them to heat up more (and be more susceptible to breakage).

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LOHAN takes the stage at Oz Linux shindig

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Re: LOHAN

Not available in Europe due to EU regs cock-up.

What was the regs cock-up?

I ask because a friend of a friend of mine is involved in (very!) large pyrotechinics. Whilst I can't volunteer his services, it's always worth asking knowledgeable professionals about such things...

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Bigger than Safe Harbor: Microsoft prez vows to take down US gov in data protection lawsuit

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Re: Very important case

the US corp doesn't actually get access to the data

Yes, exactly - there is no Safe Harbour, and the only way to stay within EU law is to ensure that American companies don't get your data, even if they get your money.

MS has to win its case for this to be different. I hope they do.

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Re: Very important case

The impact on e.g. Safe Harbo(u)r is potentially huge

ITYM "devastating".

If Microsoft loses this case, there can be no "Safe Harbour"; all data held by American companies is outwith the protection required by European Law, and thus it likely[1] becomes unlawful to use any company to hold European data.

This is going to run for some time, because someone is going to have to eat a significant portion of humble pie for it to be over...

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[1] "Likely" as some data will be permissibly held with informed consent form the subject. But there's not going to be a whole lot of that...

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Re: Pot, meet Kettle

Microsoft have some fucking face

I don't care.

At least they are doing the right thing here, whatever they might be doing elsewhere, and whatever their reasons.

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Test burn on recycled SpaceX rocket shows almost all systems are go

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Sure the VC-10 did lots of things well but if it could achieve the same cost per seat mile as the 707 there's no way the 707 would have out-sold it the way that it did.

You're entirely missing the historical context.

Vickers built the aircraft because its biggest customer - BOAC - said it wanted an aircraft that could fly to hot & high airfields, and use the airfields that were currently in place. That was a design requirement, and everything else stemmed from that.

Once the VC-10 was in production, BOAC changed its mind.

The 707 simply could not perform to the requirement that BOAC had made; if it had stuck to its spec, the 707 wouldn't have got a look-in, because it couldn't do the job.

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Re: Desparate or Greedy

ME-163, the rocket plane. It used hydrazine. Quite a few went "boom" on launch.

More of them exploded on landing - the pilot had to run them out of fuel before gliding down, and then land on a skid (the wheels it used for launch were not fixed - they fell away at lift-off). Attempt to land with even a teaspoon of fuel, and the whole lot went up...

Winkle Brown was sent out at the end of the war to fly a captured one. He describes the ME163A as "a very easy and pleasant aircraft to fly as a glider". Under power, the ME163B "felt like being in charge of a runaway train".

The man was a nutcase. I'm hoping to get tickets to a talk he's giving in April :-)

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Re: Desparate or Greedy

Rocketry was very much in its infancy at the time of WW2

Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926. Von Braun's these built upon that work - that was published in 1934.

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Re: A Barge is not stable enough...

Those who suggest that a barge landing is inherently harder for the booster are incorrect IMO

No - it's definitely harder, because you have some uncertainty over the attitude of the surface you're landing on. But it's not *much* harder - and as we saw the last time they tried it, they've probably got it nailed...

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Re: Why not a catcher's mitt?

How about hovering over the ocean, then a quick flip to splash down with the engines facing up?

Why?

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Use a decent diameter cone, like how mid-air refueling boom has a margin

To quote a Vulcan pilot of some repute, in-flight refuelling is like "sticking wet spaghetti up a cat's arse". You shouldn't consider it trivial...

A returning first stage already has to do all the balancing to sit on its own flame, already has to do all the braking, already has to cope with all the heat - it might as well go a little further and actually land. Anything else is simply adding complexity without really gaining anything.

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Trump's new thought bubble: Make Apple manufacture in the USA

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Re: Here goes

They have quite a few decent people in their party and they chose THAT!

There were four candidates from which to choose. He was the only one that actually espoused anything other than "do whatever is necessary to gain power".

Corbyn had to become leader in that election. I doubt he will win anything further...

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Microsoft herds biz users to Windows 10 by denying support for Win 7 and 8 on new CPUs

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Re: Carrot & Stick?

Microsoft always screws up the driver model to make it easy for IHV's to render hardware obsolete. And, THAT, is what keeps the Wintel computer industry alive

Yeah, but it also means a cheap supply of second-hand, fairly new kit for us FOSSers :-)

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Re: I just don't get the Windows 10 hate

I'm sure no Microsoft fanboy.

First post! Welcome to The Register

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Re: Enough of this.

WINE looks like the "safer" option given the current state of play

I don't think that matters.

ReactOS is GPL-compatible - so if either camp gets something good going that the other one doesn't have, it is encouraged for that to be copied over...

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Re: Just wondering

Shirley we must be reaching a point where it's feasible to engineer an OS (and chips, maybe) that can run existing Windows software, without Windows.

If Oracle wins its suit and gets the courts to recognise APIs are copyrightable, it might become technically possible whilst being entirely illegal in the US...

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GCHQ summer schools to pay teenage hackers £250 a week

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Pint

happens to be my birthday as of half an hour ago

Happy birthday!

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KeysForge will give you printable key blueprints using a photo of a lock

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We once had a floppy disk fire safe to which the key had been lost

I once worked at a place that had one of those lockable plastic disk boxes. The boss was insistent that only certain specified members of staff had access to the keys.

He was most put out when I popped the hinges and took the disks out of the back...

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Ground control to Major Tim! Brit's spacewalk halted after NASA 'naut takes unexpected leak

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Re: Tasting water?

There are two sources of water in the suit, water from the cooling system which is cold, and water from the drinking bottle

There's also perspiration, should they exert themselves, and the breathing gas will be humidified to a minimum of 47mmHg[1]. If any part of the suit were to get suitably cold, that could easily condense.

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[1] That's the humidity of exhaled air; breathing anything drier than that means you will be losing water to your environment. Of course, being a rebreathing environment, the humidity should get to that level and stay there. Which is nice.

Vic

Re: Tasting water?

but that 'water' could have been any sort of chemical

It will be predominantly water.

Should that water have passed through the scrubber in the breathing loop, there will be other material in solution - NASA uses lithium hydroxide[1] as a scrubber material, so rather unpleasant, but in the concentrations we're talking about, it's not hazardous. Aside from that, the WOB of a wet scrubber is *much* higher (and so easily recognised), and it would surprise me[2] if they don't have telemetry to detect such conditions as well.

TL;DR: I can't see it being a real problem.

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[1] We Earth-bound rebreather divers usually use calcium hydroxide, meaning the "caustic cocktail" from a scrubber flood really isn't a big deal. But lithium hydroxide gets you more CO2 absorption for a given mass of material, and is less fussy about scrubber temperature.

[2] I haven't checked, so you probably should if you intend to quote this post...

Vic

shouldn't the astronauts also decompress to suit pressure while living in the pure oxygen atmosphere (otherwise they will get oxygen poisoning)?

No. O2 poisoning occurs at high pressure, not low; even pulmonary roxicity wouldn't kick in for a couple of days at the pressures we're talking about.

Ho about using He/O mixtures then?

Heliox would increase the inert gas load, rendering them more susceptible to decompression injuries without any benefit.

This is why the clever people at NASA - who participate in decompression theory discussions - suggest their astronauts decompress on 100% O2 before suiting up.

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You, yes YOU: DevOps' people problem

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Re: Well, yes it's a people problem

As a bleeding edger myself, continuous tinkering (oops, I mean devops) is my natural mode of working but most people I've worked with over the years are _not_ wired that way

IME, most people are actually quite amenable to change. What they want is to be consulted about it first; the coal-face crew are the ones with knowledge about how their life works, and the last thing they want is for some seagull to dump change upon them. But a quick chat can mean you produce something that fits your idea of improvement as well as theirs...

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Re: I wish I could believe in the promise of Dev Ops.

Developers really don't care about infrastructure.

IME, many developers just don't get multi-user environments.

So they produce code that works on their local workstation. But when it comes time to deploy to the production server, it suddenly needs to be run with sudoer privilege, because it starts a dedicated server process. On the same port as the OS-supplied server that is being used by others...

I don't have a decent solution, but I do start with refusing to accept such things. It might be a bit more work to get the proper daemon to do the job, but that's what needs to be done. Building your own, semi-functional replacement is simply a maintenance nightmare.

Vic.