Posts by Martin Gregorie

Re: Mindset

I've had Java code for which the documentation is missing

There's absolutely no excuse for this given that the javadoc tool is part of the standard development package.

If the project is using waterfall development, the people writing module specs really should be formatting them as a Java skeleton (class-level comment and header followed by method-level comments and empty methods - this way the documentation is part of the source from the off.

For other development methods, code reviews should automatically be failed if class and method level comments are missing or cause javadoc to report errors and/or warnings.

I think any programming language, apart from assemblers or COBOL that doesn't have an equivalent tool is severely deficient - they're not hard to write: I wrote one for C that generates documentation after the style of 'The C Programming language' by K&R and use it for documenting private library functions.

@KittenHuffer

but we wouldn't need to be looking at tree rings to date that event.

True enough, but looking at tree rings shortly after suitably close and bright supernova explosions are seen would be a good thing to do, both to confirm that this is a measurable effect and to get another data point on the C¹⁴ / brightness curve.

Re: Why does this not surprise me

Its comforting (NOT!) to see that HMCE's ability to manage IT projects hasn't improved even slightly during the last 30 years. Back then staff at HEO grade and below were OK.

Above that, fergeddit.

Re: Hydrogen storage

Another problem with storing compressed hydrogen is the weight of containers that can store it safely at the sort of pressure needed to match the energy stored in a similarly sized tank of petrol or diesel. The catch is that the weight of these containers is enough that, although the energy content per litre of hydrocarbon fuel can be matched easily enough by compressing the hydrogen, the total weight of the hydrogen tankful will almost certainly be much higher than that of the same sized tank of petrol or diesel.

Result: inferior performance and load-carrying capacity of the hydrogen fuelled vehicle when compared with its diesel or petrol equivalent.

Re: Sooner or later we're going to have to work out a way to fund all this.

Brave rewords users who accept adverts. I find this disturbing ...

But at least when you turn 'rewards' off, it stays off when the browser gets upgraded. This is unlike the so-called "privacy protection features" provided by certain other browsers where the privacy protection controls just get more carefully hidden and reset to default values which, oddly enough, always seem to be 'protection disabled', by the next release.

Must be lazy programmers: surely no company would ever think of doing that reset deliberately. .

Re: Earl grey or english breakfast?

Its nice to see a low cost, low tech solution succeed once again.

Some of us mainframers, at least those of us progamming ICL kit in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, were used to storing dates as days since 31Dec1889 in 24 bit words, which works well, leapyears and all, into the 22th century.

We still had problems with Y2K but that was due to the CODASYL gang, which decreed that the ONLY way a COBOL program could access the computers clock to get the date was with the statement

ACCEPT CURRENT-DATE FROM SYSTEM-DATE.

where CURRENT-DATE was required to have 6 digits that would be filled by a date in the format YYMMDD and SYSTEM-DATE was a system-defined name which was specific to the operating system and/or compiler. Unsurprisingly, as the century was not part of this CODASYL definition until sometime in the 1990s, almost all COBOL programs did the same and consequently they hard coded the century wherever it was required to be shown. Most programs written in assemblers and, I think, PL/1 together with a lot of 4GL systems shared this limitation and these were the systems that caused the Y2K panic.

The only COBOL system I was personally associated with that was written in the early 1980s and dodged that bullet had to deal with a wide range of date formats, some inexact, i.e. 'flourished 980AD' (i.e. they were alive then but we don't know when they were born or died). The required date range extended from the pre-Christian era, into the future to handle planned events. Precision varied equally widely, i.e. Euripides was alive in 55BC, birth and death dates unknown, Turold wrote the Song of Roland some time in the 11th century, while John Cage was born 5Sep1912 and died 12Aug1992, but we needed to invent our own date representations to make this work. So, we stored dates as Xccyymmdd where X was a code representing the format required for this type of date and controlled both input and display as well as validation rules. Precision was simple - we just set the day, month and year to spaces if they weren't known and the date display code formatted it appropriately.

Re: diamond anvils

Diamond anvils have been more-or-less standard equipment in high pressure labs since 1959, when the original paper was published:

Weir, C.E.; Lippincott, E.R.; Van Valkenburg, A.; Bunting, E.N. (July 1959). "Infrared studies in the 1 to 15 micron region to 30,000 atmospheres

I certainly knew about them in the mid/late 60s when I was a chemistry student and doing a summer job in a ceramics lab, but using X-ray diffraction and Mossbauer spectroscopy to analyse graphite intercalation compounds was more fun.

Indeed, but for the structure of the internet to automatically route around a network break you must have either (a) more than one route to every network node requiring guaranteed always-on connectivity and (b) make sure that the multiple routes are physically separated so that One Man And His Digger can't destroy more than one of the routes at a time.

A node or data centre with only one cable connection or with all its cables in the same physical duct can't meet that requirement.

Besides, you left out the obvious requirement that said node or data centre itself needs to be fault tolerant. If it doesn't guarantee something like 99.99% uptime then providing it with guaranteed connectivity is pretty much a waste of time and money.

Re: Similar issues

Japanese generally write dates as ccyy-mm-dd.

Re: “the decline of trustworthy sources of news"

Back in the mid '70s when I was working in NYC I don't remember any reliable source of news apart from the New York Times. The other papers were pretty much dross and so was radio and TV news.

For that matter, I still have a clear memory of visiting a friend in LA in the early 80s. The UK Govt (Kinnock?) had done anything pretty significant that I'd heard headlines about before hopping on a plane in NZ, so we watched the ABC news after arriving in LA. In an hour's news there were four main stories. Three were strictly local news (one was about a store catching fire in Ventura) that might have made regional news in the Beeb and the fourth was something Gubbermental in Washington DC - and even that was treated like the BBC would cover German or French political stuff. This 'news' occupied the first 10 minutes of the hour. The other 50 minutes was sport coverage and adverts.

Long story short: with very few exceptions (NYT, Washington Post) I don't believe the USA has had any reliable news services since the late 60s.

Re: Classic techie mistake

The full story is in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman", as told by the man himself.

IMO its a book that should be on every techie's bookshelf, partly because its very funny and partly because his approach to problem solving is well worth knowing about. Its excellent, readable history too.

His safe-cracking and code breaking exploits are fully covered in two stories, "Los Alamos from Below" and "Safecracker Meets Safecracker".

Re: "the third upset resulted in the aircraft entering an uncontrolled spiral descent."

Err, not quite correct. If G-forces increase until the airframe breaks up, the aircraft is in a spiral dive, not a spin. Spiral dives, if not corrected, always end up destroying the airframe, usually by disintegration as airspeed exceeds VNE (the maximum rated airspeed) or by impact with the ground.

Spins are totally different to spiral dives: they are a more or less stable state, which is why they killed so many in the early days of flight: the pilot must take action to stop a spin, but in the early days: nobody knew how to do that. This is why spin recognition and recovery is, or should be, an essential part of pilot training.

In a spin, one wing, the one the plane is turning towards, is fully stalled while the other wing is generating lift, so the descent is relatively slow. What happens if the spin as allowed to continue depends in the aircraft: a few will self recover (e.g. an SZD Junior glider with a light pilot), with some (a Puchacz aerobatic glider after 10-12 rotations) the rotation rate increases and the descent rate slows because both wings are now lifting (this is known as a flat spin) while other aircraft continue to spin at the same rate until they hit the ground.

Because a spin is fairly stable, the pilot must take action stop the spin, and to do that one has to know how to stop a spin as well as to recognise spin entry and to take action while still high enough to avoid hitting the ground during recovery.

Bottom line: the Zephyr broke up it the air, so it either hit turbulence strong enough to overstress it or got tipped into a spiral dive which its control systems failed to recover it from before it broke up.

Re: Bring it back

Doesn't work: horses are monumentally inefficient in converting fuel (hay and oats) into work (pulling vehicles), though I'd love to see a horse-powered airliner with its herd of horses galloping on a treadmill to drive the propellers and its pilot riding the lead stallion.

The United Kingdom probably cannot feed its current population without importing food, so horse-drawn transport is impossible here without a return to 19th century population and city sizes.

The USA does not have the farmland to feed the horses needed to replace fossil fuelled land transport and has not had this capability since the late 1960s. Thats even assuming that farms are not needed to feed people. This calculation was done in the early '70s during the first Oil Crisis and published in Scientific American.

Re: You had one job...

..,but the robot logs where it would have done it differently

Neat one: maybe a better approach to training an autonomous system too, because a dual log should be invaluable as training material.

I'm based at Gransden Lodge and have flown once at Dunstable, on a day with strong wind and 9 knot thermals. FYI my definition of 'strong wind' is when an ASK-21, flown two up, gets off the ground in its own length on the winch and finals is flown at 70kts - a good rule of thumb is 50kts+half wind speed.

And if the company must activate its lawyers, they should be pointed at the person who wrote that crap in the first place, not the one who discovered the flaw.

Better to pick on the project managers and designers rather than the coders. Its the project managers and designers job to , firstly, design a robust and secure system and, secondly, to make sure its adequately tested, bugfree and secure before it goes live.

If the project manager's bosses prevented adequate testing because deadlines or some similar external reason, then they deserve the blame if testing was incomplete and/or the application was insecure when it went live.

I can't help thinking that once / if it's up and running every glass of water to drink will have passed through a few thousand people and several electrolosys plants and probably a few fuel cells.

...so not a lot different to the situation back here on Earth if you leave out the electrolysis plants and fuel cells. I'd be surprised if there's any water on earth that hasn't been through at least one creature's guts.

Re: Refillable cartridges too..

IMO you're better off with a Laser printer - no jets to clog and no unreplaceable loops of head cleaning fabric to stop working when well covered with dried ink.

Sure, a laser and its cartridges cost more to purchase, but the simple fact that you never find the thing clogged up if you haven't used it for a month, combined with duplex printing sharply reduces the TCO.

I've had my current laser for almost three years and still haven't used up the half-capacity cartridge it came with, so that looks like a running cost of about a tenner a year for toner (3p/page vs 4p/page for an Epson inkjet) - and that's without allowing for wastage as inkjet cartridges clog or dry up.

Plus the cost of my monochrome laser and an Epson Stylus are pretty much in the same ballpark.

Boris and chums may hear and flog it off for a few pieces of silver

Thats a trick Boris and his predecessors learnt from Maggie: remember her "who needs industry - we're a SERVICE economy now" pronouncements? She forgot that a service economy needs punters to sell said services to, hence the current similarity of the UK economy and government to the B-Arc and its captain.

It seems to me that we'd be in a far better place if we had a bit more industry around and fewer financial leeches in their service industry. Apart from anything else people actually making and exporting stuff would be generating income to spend on services such as pubs, restaurants and entertainment rather than the current pyramid of service industry workers relying on being supported by other service industry workers.

Does nobody else see the odd resemblance of this to the medieval vision of crowds of angels dancing on the head of an unsupported pin?.

It would be somewhat hot on that planet, though. Living in a tent in the middle of a close-packed ring of blast furnaces would be but a pale imitation. I wonder if the locals would have evolved shiny silver skins. Either that or they are intelligent plasmoids who'd be right at home, if a bit chilly, living in the photosphere of our Sun.

Re: What are they going to do with the heat?

Current is an issue too: if they're going to run 10 Kw - thats 83 amps at 120v DC - through 1km of cable, the cable will weigh about as much as the shielded nuke. If it doesn't, then they may put 10Kw in but they aren't going to get anything like that out of the other end.

120v AC would make much more sense because the cable could be a lot thinner and the weight savings would almost certainly be much more than the weight of a DC->AC converter at the nuke and rectifiers at the far end.

Thanks for a very clear explanation.

Re: One way to spend the money

Surely it has little to no value or they'd never be dropping it, would have kept it or transferred it for a wad of dosh.

I can think of a couple of good enough reasons why a domain name, especially one used by a small business, might have expired, especially if it reads more like a personal, rather than a business name:

• The owner has died and their property, including the domain name, is still in probate.
• The owner decided to retire and no employees, friends or relatives want to take over the business

Re: Flagging falsehoods

I shall probably get massively downvoted for this, BUT:

The way to clear out most of falsehoods, hate-speech and vilification from social media would be reject all posts that are NOT signed with the poster's verified real name. This is how democratically protected free speech should handled on all media.

And please note that whistle-blowing is quite different: its the one place where a genuine complaint should not have its author publicly identified. A truly democratic society would have suitably safeguarded channels for use by whistle-blowers.

Until the above happens I, for one, will not not use so-called social media.

Re: Any news of a Libre_mail client

Evolution does everything I need for communicating with people and managing future tasks: e-mail, contact management, calendar plus a task list and memos.

I'm with you here: after working up to decent slide cameras (Leica IIIb,then a Pentax Spotmatic F) I bought a Pentax K100D because it uses my Spotmatic's lens collection. Its an excellent camera apart from bulk and its ability to destroy NiMH rechargeables in about 2 charge cycles. After that I got a Pentax WG1 Optio for convenience - this was an object lesson in lens quality vs MPixels: with 14MB its resolution is around 3 times worse than the K100D with its half-size 6MP sensor.

Most recent purchase is a Panasonic TZ70, bought for a visit to India: I knew the Optio's rear screen would be unusable in Rajasthani sunlight and it has an electronic viewfinder. It has become my main camera due to small size, electronic viewfinder and surprisingly good low light performance - Taj Mahal by moonlight, anybody?

Re: But...

If your fancy, data-driven predictive algorithm gets it spectacularly wrong just because the unexpected happened (pandemic, bank crash, military coup, whatever) then, ITS NOT A BLOODY AI, just a pattern matcher with insufficient predictive ability to deal with real world events. If the people who sold it to you claimed it was an AI and/or failed to specify its limitations and failure scenarios, then sue their arses off.

Re: Scummy company practices cause data loss

She resigned as director from Company A, so had nothing to do with Company A anymore.

Where did you get that from?

The story says rather clearly that company A collapsed, and that following the collapse one of the owners of company A promptly started company B and grabbed all the assets of company A.

Nowhere does it say that she resigned from Company A, only that the partners fell out with each other, which had some bearing on the collapse.

He should have waited until the winding up of A was complete before touching any of its assets and was, in any case, unlikely to be entitled to all the assets. This looks remarkably like sharp dealing at best and quite possibly, theft if the assets had any residual value after creditors, including HMCE, were paid..

Re: Bluetooth? Really?

Are TPTB really unable to think through some basic GCSE level science?

Of course. They're barely numerate and critical thinking is quite beyond them.

What do you expect from a bunch who studied politics and little else at uni before working as a researcher for a member of the party of their choice until they'd earned enough brownie points to be given a crack at a safe seat?

I have no beef with studying languages and humanities, but the idea that somebody can become an MP with essentially no practical work experience outside of politics really sticks in my craw.

Lets face it: the proportion of members of the House of Lords with experience outside the political sphere vastly exceeds the proportion of MPs with useful non-political experience. It wasn't always like this in Parliament. Unfortunately.

Re: The video

You mean like this?

http://sustainableskies.org/a-chance-to-unwind/

Re: Didn't notice a person either

Yes, I saw the man on the road too, standing still until the Tesla passed him and then walking into the central hedge. I agree that this is probably the truck driver, quite possibly having walked back to see what debris on the road caused his crash. Something like this would explain why he was standing, or moving very slowly and somewhat dazed, on a busy highway, rather than trying the flag down on-coming traffic or get off the road. Something drastic must have happened to the truck since its on straight road and doesn't seem to have hit the central barrier.

I also notice that the Tesla driver hit the brakes about the time he passed the person, so there is a good possibility that seeing the driver distracted him enough to stop him spotting the dead truck. His thought processes may well have been something like:

- Spots driver and thinks "Geez, there's somebody on the road! Better brake", all the while with eyes on the truck driver.

- Then, as he flashes past, still looking at the driver "Phew, missed him, I can stop braking".

- Followed in short order with "Bloody hell! Shit..shit..shit" BANG.

Re: Fixing the wrong problem

Thats an invalid argument for grep - its had the -Cn option for showing hits in context for decades now.

This fixes the split-line issue just as well as piping grep output into less fixes the long line issue.

Boiling the water dealt with this problem,

Upvoted. I came here to say that.

Tea probably was a health drink in 1690, simply because it was the only common drink to be boiled immediately before consumption, and hence largely microbe-free.

Re: Going while the going's good

What is this crazy percentage of GDP of which you speak?

NASA consumed 2.2% of the Federal budget 1959-1972, of which the Mercury,Gemini and Apollo projects took 50%, so about 1.1% of the Federal budget, or $28 billion. When you consider that the F-22 Raptor project cost half as much as the full Apollo project, that makes the cost of running NASA look pretty reasonable and better value than you assumed.

The total cost of building the US interstate highway system was $105.28 billion, or 376% as much as the full Apollo project. Was that an even crazier crazy percentage of GDP? - but of course you must think thats an even bigger waste of money because the US managed to win WW2 without it. So, I can safely assume that you've never, ever driven on an interstate highway. Because doing that would make you a hypocrite and maybe even an ignorant one.

Source for the quoted costs: Apollo Program Cost: An Investment in Space Worth Retrying?

https://christopherrcooper.com/blog/apollo-program-cost-return-investment/

Re: In keeping

The obvious, to me anyway, omission from the list, was Clipzilla. Clippyzilla is just a bit too friendly to MicroSlurp to float my boat.

Educated cable thieves? Shirley knot.

Replacing copper with fiber will only save telcos money if the cable thieves are high class criminals: those with enough know how to tell a fiber cable from a copper one before they dig it up. Those who can't are going to rip the cable out of the ground anyway, and only then realize that what they just pulled is worthless, and probably trash the fiber termination cabinet out of sheer frustration.