Posts by Stevie

Re: Bah!

I was not exaggerating, but you miss the point so much I have to wonder if you shouldn't pull over, doff your spaz-spex for a moment and actually take a look at the real world for a bit.

I don't give a toss if you want to pile yourself into a bridge abutment while watching stock quotes or (best possible case using unobtainium technology not yet on the horizon) a virtual reality overlay to "see" through fog (that is likely as out of date as the usual GPS nav system is) to obviate the otherwise very sensible need to slow the f*ck down.

I care that your exercising YOUR free will and indulging in stupidly dangerous activity endangers ME and my family and friends.

It's an unwritten law around here that it's always the drunk who causes the pile-up who walks away with a few cuts. Well, I don't want to be in the other cars when you step from the wreckage of yours, looking sharp in your Googleshades.

And yes, using a non hands-free phone IS illegal in New York, as you could have easily found out if you weren't so focused on getting that info directly at the eyeball while you drive. But that legislation will not cover these accidents waiting to happen because they *are* hands-free.

For once a politician is being proactive with a demonstrably problematical technology. I applaud that. Better to piss off a few Grogans (who can always move to Montana where I understand drivers are free to do pretty much what they want behind the wheel and good luck to them) than end up with dead bodies and no legal recourse.

Idle thought: I wonder how much damage is done to a human eye if someone is wearing these stupid things when their drivers side airbag deploys into their face at the speed of sound?

Re: Thankyou

"The man is a geek at heart and counted amongst his friends was one Douglas Adams. In my book, that speaks volumes, for no geek would *dare* to speak badly of that fine fellow."

Oh no? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Umptet is at least two volumes too big, Dirk Gently was a waste of my money twice and Douglas Adams' implementations of computer games suck balls because he either did not understand the basic difference between experiencing the Adamsverse passively and being landed in it or did not care enough to fund effective playtesting of same. I offer up both the HHGTTG text adventure and Starship Titanic in evidence M'lud.

Must get back to my Raspberry Pi.

Re: My most dificult RPi project at the moment...

Sparkfun sell something they call the Pi Tin. I used it on four machines so far with no problems. Snap fit, securely closed yet easy to open if needed.

Only problem if you can call it that is that there is no blanking plug for the GPIO access port.

Cheapest case I've found, too. It would cost me more than $7 to build one from Lego.

Re: I bought them

Seriously? You bought mains electrical fixtures in the USA and didn't realize they'd be engineered for US line voltage?

Re: UEA levels of incompetence

Fergit! Will I *never* be forgiven that business with the concentrated sulphuric acid? It happened in '76 ffs, and the only one remotely endangered was me. The bottle was empty long before it landed at the feet of those two lab demonstrators, at which point 90% or more of its admittedly high launch velocity had been mitigated by air resistance and drag, and I was the only one who suffered hearing loss from the explosion. And that got better. Sort of. Eventually.

Proper Science isn't safe, nor is it quiet. You want safe and quiet, don't be a chemist. Specifically, don't be a chemist near me when I'm being one.

Re: The official domain name system is broken.

The official domain name system was set up by a bunch of theorists with limited imagination and little real world connect for how their idea would actually be used. I mean, look at it: COMpanies, EDUcational establisments, ORGanizations. 19th century monolithic thinking meets 21st century infrastructure.

For all the talk, those "visionaries" had no real feel for exactly how empowering the World Wide Web would be (and a delightfully naive idea of what would be the most profitable for-pay leveraging of the technology from the get-go).

And when the marketers had gotten in on it, well, there went the initial intent. "Hey Mr Man-on-the-Street. What YOU need is your OWN DOTCOM!" (paraphrasing actual TV commercial from 1997-ish there). Classic case of an unenforceable standard.

The Genie is out of the bottle now, though. Can't go back. But it would be a refreshing change if the powers that be would get a fsking clue when it comes to not handing such useful domain names as "author" and "blog" to massive commercial for-pay enterprises.

Let's hope they market them responsibly and affordably.

Heh.

Re: While electronics is great fun

"I'm having trouble thinking of much you can build with a soldering iron these days that cant be done in code"

Well, you can't do this for a start:

http://colonelmoran.blogspot.com/2011/11/building-aethero-galvanic-exciter-part.html

And you couldn't build the thing that plugs into it either, which is too awesome for words (which is why the build blog fell into disuse)

Computer coding isn't making stuff. It's making pictures of stuff.

Wait 'til the young 'uns get a load of what I do with the latest thing I bought from Sparkfun. A bit o' solderin' some EL-Wire and a few feet of copper, brass and lucite and the magic happens again, only even more awesomely (assuming I can master the spokeshave).

Re: Good job, gentlemen!

Or, you know, you could just play Oh Canada...

Re: @ Snake

"We need a solution that involves relatively clean and sustainable power generation (fusion \ solar \ hydrothermal etc)"

I don't disagree with your stance, but the first is made of unobtanium, the second is known to be only feasible under certain weather conditions and is not a grid-compatible technology anyway (attempts to make it look like one are one of the things that are killing it in some markets) and the last has an annoying tendency to suck large mounts of investment monies only to move to a different place once the hardware has been installed - though a few places do have what has historically been a reliable geothermal power capability and I would argue siting server farms in Iceland where they could be powered easily and cooled ambiently (with filtering) most of the time and the country could do with the investment would be a sound globally thought out "green" solution.

We need to look at all power technologies together, not as a six technologies enter one technology leaves Thunderdome situation, and that includes the nuke power that *does* work today.

We need to stop deploying huge industries that suck power and generate heat and suck more power to get rid of it in politically astute but technologically inappropriate climates that make keeping cool a problem to start with. Broaden the "no moving parts" thinking. Put hot server continents in cold places.

And as you say, we need to expand the idea of "green" to mean "not just green in my vicinity".

Rant over.

Re: How about trying this folks?

Works well until YOUR kid has a play with your neighbour's iPad ('cos *his* kid let yours have a go).

Of course, you'd have thought this out better if you actually had any kids. Amazing how these issues can broaden one's mind once the same set of mad skillz used in a job are put to work looking out for tiny clones.

You'd be amazed at what pops out of the code then, and how quickly DINK logic, formerly a bastion of What Is Wrong With The World Today breaks down.

Example: Proper thinking can show why "Parental Oversight" can never be the perfect answer to everything - the basic premise (Parental Oversight is Omnipresent) is flawed. Think of a kid as a secured account to which everyone in the world knows the password and you can see that the problems of properly policing a child's experiences with anything are monumental and cannot ever be universal.

Or better. Just remember the stuff you did that your parents never found out about. Were they bad parents for "allowing" you to do that?

Re: I'm skeptical

"Batacitor" was the hardest thing to get past when I read "Riverworld", but after years of reading "supercap" (and seeing it credited with the most ridiculous possibilities by people who don't do science) I'm ready to give the word a chance.

Re: Meh, it's an Apple OS problem.

"Wrong, if you have Java 6 without the patch then you are vulerable.

Java is a compiled interpreted language and any exploit in the VM can be possible on multiple OSes in some cases."

But you see, since any time there is an "issue" in the Wintel world so many tektards are gleefully shouting about it you can pretty much get the gist within hours from the side of a milk carton, everyone else got the memo about Java from their browser weeks ago and, if they had any sense, took the suggestion seriously and turned the bugger off, since Oracle weren't being terribly pro-active about dealing with the problem.

In the Apple world the problems still exist, it's just that no-one talks about them (sometimes because getting a fix involves NDA paperwork - according to one famous Apple promoting geek). The uninformed Apple kit user - which is most of 'em - is rather hung out to dry on a string of increasingly untrue assumptions drawn using an internet crime model from the last century. No glee here in saying that, I use whatever comes to hand. Linux, Solaris, AIX, OS2200, Windows; all just tools needed to get the real work done (which isn't anything to do with computers as I keep reminding our "server division").

That bloke who was crying about not getting paid will likely either be overjoyed at the overtime or crying again soon - I'm told by our Java lot that installing 7 caused no end of problems in some of our legacy applications. Serves 'em right. We move money from place to place, we don't launch rockets or run massive shared world online games and we don't offer anything sophisticated in our website access because we don't need to. What we need is more Cobol* not closer ties to Oracle.

* which works, gets upgraded maybe twice a decade and has intrinsic money-handling data types that obviate stupid programmer lack-of-accumen. Never heard of scaled decimal young feller me lad? Let me introduce you to Mr Textbook. Mr Textbook, meet Mr Programmer's head.

Re: Meanwhile over at ipo.gov.uk...

"Surprisingly they have not asked to register their logo."

Probably because it was nicked off the side of some Mesoamerican pyramid or stele. It sure looks like it.

The endless grinding Monty Python "jokes", "references", explanations of the "jokes" in case you were so shirt thick you didn't get the point and expansions of the "references" cross indexing them to the "jokes" - all instead of getting on with showing me the bloody language - was what made me ignore this eminently ignorable language for years. I figured if the people behind the language couldn't even write a fucking manual that was readable there was little hope for the language itself being a write-home affair. I only started looking at it again because I bought a Pi.

I think it's funny that a modern language has significant whitespace. I thought everyone knew that was a Bad Idea by 1978, the year I got started in IT.