Posts by Stevie

Re: inAPPropriATe capitalisaTion

I imagine it would be "Grommit" in a world where your handle was "Stop Forth".

As a trainer once said to a Cobol class I was in before most of you were a twinkle in the postman's eye:

"In programming there are only a few words which you must spell correctly. After that, it is only important that you mis-spell them consistently. Inability to spell was one reason I got into this game."

The man was right. The article was full of yptos. He was also wrong. Corrections should be reported using the link. But of course, to write articles predicated on "reader proofing" is to approach journalism the same way Microsoft approaches software releases.

And we all know how we like that, don't we precious?

Re: Spotted the problem?

So am I understanding that the Army paid Capita to develop a system which it than retains the rights to market?

Why isn't the contract written to grant Capita a provisional license to re-distribute ITS bought-and-piad-for code, and to ensure a lifetime service on the results?

And why isn't the penalty clause that the Capita staff must stay on board until the contract is delivered in full, and that if delivered late the said staff will be considered under recruitment themselves and get sent to boot camp prior to posting to places foreign and dangerous?

Given the holes in this sorry thing it would have been far more effective to recruit an Army IT team to do the job itself.

Re: I am delighted with my Planet Gemini.

Wish I could say the same for my Peachy Printer.

Re: control

Nonononono.

Control is from LeCarre's "Tinker, Tailor" universe.

Re: Bah!

You can certainly kill people with the proper use of mistletoe.

You say "Hey! Look at that mistletoe!" and when they take their eyes off you you shoot them.

Re: Buffy Bouncing

I preferred watching the Borgette 2 of 36D running around the corridors of USS Voyager.

Indeed, it was the only thing that made the show watchable for me.

Re: Garmin does the same thing.

Not according to recent practical experiment, it don't.

Long Island, Belt Parkway, Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Staten Island Expressway, Goethal's Bridge, I95 South to Sunny Florida, Land of Giant Anthropomorphic Mice. No suggestion that this journey would be improved by a trip into scenic lower Manhattan for an hour at the hands of the NY Traffic Cops (who at rush hour have the job of madly waving you away from the signposted routes to the way out of Manhattan so you can fully savor the chaos).

Return trip unblighted by cries of Garmin GPS desperate to go on sightseeing tour of TriBeCa and SoHo at night.

So: Shenanigans.

Re: Piloting still needs a list of waypoints

We used to call those waypoints "road signs" when I used to drive all over the UK in search of work and drink.

If you need an address that works always, you need (in the UK) an OS Map and the grid reference of where you are going. Or you could use Lat. and Long. and use a compass, sextant and chronometer (at which point I reckon the GPS is actually the better deal given the cost of a serviceable sextant and the cloud cover this time of year).

For most car-accessible places you don't need such things. You takes your compass and do the longest bits by poor-man's dead reckoning (I'll drive south-west until I see something I know is near where I need to be) then pilot using terrain features pulled off the map until you are there.

If you need an internet metaphor to do the job, no problem, it's your head you are working with.

Re: Malta driving

"Or you can alternatively use Waze, edited and maintained by the users....It's got me around New Zealand, 20 states of America and Malta, all at no extra cost for maps."

Not bad, though the Ordinance Survey can show you a quicker route from Manchester to Sheffield.

Re: The worst my Garmin has ever done

I had that happen just last week. I was heading up 192 in Kissimmee Fl trying to get to Coliseum of Comics. I was about a quater mile from having to make the U-Turn and pull into the car park when the until-then Trusty Garmin ordered us to make a left now. Intrigued, we did.

At one point on the single track road we saw a sign "Road Narrows".

"Where do you keep this GPS?" I asked, after we had finished laughing hysterically.

My wife said "Next to the old TomTom".

"Well there you go! The bloody TomTom has infected the Garmin with Stupid Route Syndrome!" I yelled.

We navigated the chicane with one wheel in each roadside ditch, and drove slowly past what looked like a Buddhist commune c/w outbuildings gilded to eyewatering levels. As more statuary and architecture became apparent we became less sure of the Buddhist attribution and entertained the possibililty of vile cultists a-la HP Lovecraft.

Eventually we reached the place we wanted to be after a needless diversion through banjo-player country, swamps and non-euclidean architecture. The route had, I estimated, cost us at least ten minutes.

Re: New cars too

The patch is actually a rectangle of denim designed to be taped over the GPS screen.

Re: key is in the ignition

Tee Hee. The latest iteration of the Steviemobile has a keyless ignition system. I am halfway to being unprosecutable in Victoria!

Re: Can't use smartphone GPS in Australia

<mode=Clouseau> Yes, yes, very sensible, the burning phone scenario, yes.

Er ... is it possible that the recent spate of the forest fires was causéd by drivers hurling their blazing Australian cell phones from their vehicles?

Re: Less bits

That's *fewer* bits.

Re: I use a map.

Using known points of reference to trace a longer route is called "piloting", and is one of the two forms of navigation used since navigation was invented (the other one is called "dead reckoning" and is how ships discovered new places by crashing into them before the advent of the chronometer and an established meridian baseline against which to calibrate it).

It has been around for centuries, and you've been doing it since you could walk. Neat, eh?

No routers needed.

TomTom

TomTom has idiots working for their route algorithm. Both of ours used to insist on entering Manhattan when going past it.

Once I set waypoints across the Goethals Bridge, Staten Island and the Verrezano Narrows Bridge in order for us to travel from New Jersey to Long Island, NY. The bloody TomTom started yelling about making a left turn, but I told my wife to ignore it. Then I grabbed the device and zoomed the map out so I could see the route, and, yes, it wanted us to go across the bridge, back into NJ, then take the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan, turn right around and take the same tunnel out of Manhattan and the same bridge back onto Staten Island before resuming the route I had planned.

Several times it tried to get us to drive into Washington DC while I was driving around it on I295. Once I was tired enough to let it persuade me and it took me into a road blocked off with concrete blocks and chainlink fence. It looked like Beirut after a particularly successful urban uprising.

There was also that beyond stupid "Keep left ... then ... turn right" thing on multi-lane highways in rush hour.

I switched to Garmin after my wife did when TomTom announced it would no longer support map updates on our models and urged us to buy a new device.

Last week I got a survey from TomTom asking what they could do to improve.

I gave them a point-by-point list, starting with "break the fingers of whoever came up with the route planner".

e were actually driving through what had been the old Peugeot factory

Sounds like you were actually driving through my alma tomata Frederick Birds Infants School.

Fond memories. Not.

Re: I'll Bite.... Yes, I know he was trolling

I was once asked if I had any interesting/humorous suggestions for the title of a chapter on Euclid in a math primer a friend was writing.

I suggested "Here's looking at Euclid."

He went with that after shouting at me that he'd been working on a pun title for over two days and come up mostly dry.

Re: Using a sundial at night

Nonononono! NO!

It's night. The sun is on the other side of the earth. You must hold the phone under the sundial to mimic the sun.

Azathoth's nebular nodes. They'll be voting next and there goes civilization as we know it.

Re: scott

AC because who wants to admit to working with Oracle in these pages?

Re: The Usual Response...

" it needs to be secure, and you need to be able to remember it."

And the one they always miss: You have to be able to type it reliably without visual cues.

Let's face it; everyone who has a short password likely started out with a longer one but all the retyping got old fast.