* Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

4248 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007

BepiColombo probe swings by Earth on way to Mercury – the Solar System's must-visit coronavirus-free resort

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Brilliant stuff

Clearly a non-trivial exercise in planetary and orbital dynamics. Your high-school physics won't cut it here, as you definitely require the use of General Relativity rather than Newtonian gravity so close to the sun (and deeper into any gravitational well too, of course).

Looking forward to the results in half a decade's time.

I'll raise a glass or two to the ongoing success of this mission

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

+++ Out of cheese error +++

+++ Reinstall Universe +++

+++ Redo from Start +++

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: I'm very sorry to admit this

And what the involuntary parachutist needed was a stiff drink, I would wager (that and some dried frog pills, most likely)

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Unqalified 'Z' list Celeb talks rubbish

Could perhaps put a tax on stupid remarks? We would need a properly calibrated scale in a properly approved El Reg Bureau of Standards unit of course (the Holden, perhaps, as in: the remark was stupid in the mega-Holden range)

16 years and counting: How ESA squeezed oodles of bonus science out of plucky Mars Express probe

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Amazing stuff!

Absolutely amazing tale of amazing engineers pulling off some amazing stuff.

Yes I have written quite some code, and some of it is even used in space research, but these people are absolutely amazing.

I'll raise a glass this evening, and doff my hat right now (grey Tilley, it's sunny).

NASA's classic worm logo returns for first all-American trip to ISS in years: Are you a meatball or a squiggly fan?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Honestly, just use both

The meatball reminds me of the heady days of Apollo, which got me hooked on astronomy and space exploration, the worm carries equally fond memories of the shuttle and many other missions. So just use both.

No, I won't come down, I am quite comfortable on this fence

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Superb stuff

A much-needed relief from the drudgery of working from home

If you thought black holes only came in S or XXXL, guess again, maybe: Elusive mid-mass void spotted eating star

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Only in Astronomy

does 50,000 times the mass of the sun not qualify as super massive. The mind boggles at such numbers.

Well done spotting this intermediate-mass black hole!

Stob's vital message to Britain's IT nation: And no, it's not about that

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Classic Stob!

Verily!

Sun storm probe OK'd: 'Our motivation is a fascinating signal that we have detected for decades but never been able to make an image of'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Interesting project

Basically a low frequency phased-array radio telescope (like LOFAR down here on the ground). In order to process the data, the precise position of the cube-sats relative to each other must be known down to a small fraction of the wavelength used, but at low frequencies this should not be a huge challenge

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Nice one

You had me for a brief moment, then I realized what day it was

Are you extracting the urine, ESA? Why, yes it is, from Moon dwellers to build homes out of lunar regolith. Possibly

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Pour me some beer

if you want that wall built faster

Hey, there are worse excuses for raising a glass

Don't believe the hype: Today's AI unlikely to best actual doctors at diagnosing patients from medical scans

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Depends what you want to call AI

Recently, AI has been associated with deep networks, and little else, whereas the name used to cover far more. I have been doing research into medical image processing, and in that area many new useful tools have been developed that have certainly undergone clinical trials. Very many segmentation tools, image enhancement filters, and visualization methods contain methods from statistical pattern recognition, neural networks, support vector machines, learning vector quantization, etc. Many of these are very good at finding needles in haystacks, or allowing the doctor to zoom in on suspect regions in huge 3D scans or pathology specimens (often Gpixel order of magnitude). These methods have proven their worth in allowing a doctor to make decisions more effectively. They should not, and never were intended to replace a doctor.

Personally, I much prefer developing tools that can explain WHY they think a certain classification has been made (e,g, benign/malignant) and how sure they are of their decision. Otherwise, doctors (and I myself) will view these methods with deep suspicion.

Corona coronavirus hiatus: Euro space agency to put Sun, Mars probes in safe mode while boffins swerve pandemic

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Pity that these instruments needed to be powered down, as valuable data will be lost (lives are of course infinitely more valuable). In many cases data gathering can go on without the need of people on site (I can access several machines at our uni to do experiments and download data from home), but apparently that is not the case here.

Damn you, coronavirus. Damn you. Now you've gone too far: James Webb Space Telescope, Moon mission work paused

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Mushroom

Sad, but necessary

The Moon will remain up there for a while, going there can wait, and isn't worth risking lives for (beyond the inherent risks of travelling through an environment that is trying to kill you, on top of a machine that could undergo a rapid, unplanned disassembly, resulting in something resembling the icon)

First impressions count when the world is taken by surprise by an exciting new (macro) virus

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Re: I Love You

Indeed, I do. I was working on AIX on an RS6000 machine, HP-UX on my workstation and another *NIX variant on the Cray J932 of our university at the time. I remember getting an e-mail, with heading "I love you" from a sysadmin stating that unfortunately, the automation facilities offered by MS-Windows weren't available on the system I was working on, so could I please randomly delete a few files manually, and send this message on to a random selection of my contacts (manually, of course).

(Yes, *nix users felt very smug those days)

Apollo astronaut Al Worden – once named most isolated human being of all time – dies aged 88

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Sad news

But he has had a great innings.

I followed all the Apollo missions avidly as a kid. Truly heroic stuff. When my kids next complain about being isolated due to school closures etc, I will remind them what real isolation looks like, without internet, netflix, whatsapp, PS4s, etc, etc, not to mention a sizeable garden to relax in. I should of course start the reminder with "When I were a lad we had proper isolation! ..."

I could get me coat, but I am not going anywhere,

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

Re: Shungite

and there I was thinking the 'u', 'n', and 'g' had been inserted to trick people into buying it

Good luck pitching a tent on exoplanet WASP-76b, the bloody raindrops here are made out of molten iron

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: ... from a lacerated sky

and those skies are our best bet to find an Iron Butterfly

Latest bendy phone effort from coke empire spinoff Escobar Inc is a tinfoil-plated Samsung Galaxy Fold 'scam'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

When the brother of a notorious drug lord makes you an offer that sounds too good to be true, it might be in your best interest to refuse (politely, of course)

Welcome to Superbork: Where high-street fashion meets high-strung Windows

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Times are strange

when you can truthfully report that a urinal in a motorway has crashed (and not due to vandalism). I encountered that in Germany, when a display full of the usual adverts built into the urinal suddenly displayed a message along the lines of "Android error count exceeded", and then proceeded to reboot. As the error message was perfectly timed with me starting to urinate I felt slightly disconcerted. One almost wonders if someone was trying to play tricks on the users.

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: fun facts

And Slartibartfast was Magdiragdag, as I recall

Astroboffin Kurtz ends 40-year quest to find a predicted one-sided vibrating star that was never seen – until now

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Maybe the star is whispering

"The horror! The horror!"

More seriously, very interesting result. Just goes to show the universe contains all sorts of (space) oddities.

Sorry, couldn't resist. The one with "Heart of Darkness" in the pocket, please

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

I have this mental image

(mental in more ways than one) of the BOFH getting his hands on this and using the afterburner as a creative way to get rid of evidence/beancounters/annoying users/the next boss, once he gets bored with windows.

Icon, because it is getting seriously close to beer o'clock here

Disk stuck in the drive? Don't dilly-Dali – get IT on the case!

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

The strangest things I have encountered involving floppy disks were people:

A) inserting a 5.25" disk in tiny gap between the two floppy disk drives of a PC

B) inserting multiple 5.25" disks into a single drive, because the installation program told them to insert the next disk and didn't tell them to remove the other (I still do not know how they managed that)

C) folding a 5.25" disk and forcing it into a 3.5" drive, and then being surprised I told them they had wrecked both

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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A glimpse into the dark depths of Simon's soul

Like Sam Vimes, Simon clearly knows he has hidden depths, and knows the things lurking in those depths should perhaps stay there.

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Who are you and what have you done with Microsoft?

Actually, MS producing a decent, even free program isn't without precedent. I really like MS-ICE (Image Compositing Editor). Great, easy, free tool to create mosaic images fully automatically.

Haven't tried PowerShell yet, nor do I feel an urgent need at this point

BOFH: Gosh, IPv5? Why didn't I think of that? Say, how do you like the new windows in here? Take a look. Closer...

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

"the world's first pneumatic suppository"

Priceless! Absolutely top notch episode!

Loved the moment of (near) silence as well

What's the German word for stalling technology rollouts over health fears? Cos that plus 5G equals Switzerland

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I always try to confuse these "ALL RADIATION IS DANGEROUS, WE'RE DOOMED" types by suggesting they should also avoid IR radiation (which has MUCH higher energy per photon, after all, it is much "harder" radiation). Common sources of IR radiation are, essentially all things around you, but fellow human beings in particular. Therefore, they should really avoid close contact with fellow humans, especially when nude. Some part of me hopes (vainly, no doubt) that some might follow this advice, and thus reduce the rate at which these numbskulls procreate.

Astroboffins agog after spotting the first repeating fast radio burst that pings every 16 days from another galaxy

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Re: Decoded signal....

Coat it is (nobody is trying to drive a bypass through my house, after all). Got the book, electronic thumb and towel at the ready (and a few packets of peanuts).

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Re: Decoded signal....

Alternatively, the message is ...

"WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE"

Should the message be from the direction of Sirius, the best guess would be:

"Go stick your head in a pig"

I'll get me coat

S20 Ultra 5G: Samsung unfurls Galaxy flagship with bonkers 108MP cam, 6.9-inch display

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

108 Mpixels in a phone?

I occasionally do shoot 100 Mpixel images but I use some serious optics, and even then it is hard to get really sharp images. Quite apart from all the physical reasons a tiny aperture will not give the same image quality as bigger optics, what is the point of imaging at this resolution, when 99.99% of the time you will only view it on your phone, fondleslab, or computer monitor? Don't get me wrong, many modern phones get great quality images, and for most purposes they fine, and rival shots taken with good cameras, and they are MUCH more portable. However, I will not ditch my DSLR soon, despite it "only" having 24 Mpixels.

Voyager 2 gets back to sciencing while 'unstoppable' Iran promises world more 'Great Iranian Satellites'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

"Far be it from us to nitpick"

I thought nitpicking was am El Reg all-time favourite pastime.

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Brilliant episode!!

"Computer Assistance Service Helpline"

Must remember that. Could come in useful

Voyager suffers a power wobble as boffins start the final countdown for Spitzer

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Amazing feats of engineering, all of them!

Doffs hat (grey Tilley once more) to all those involved

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Re: A GPS system

Odd that your friends' Nag Navs run on batteries. I actually got my satnav because the Nag Nav always fell asleep and started snoring after 30 minutes

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'd better be going

'No BS' web host Gandi emits outage postmortem, has 'only theories' on what went wrong

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: Chalk one up...

Good call. Interference from sunspots won't fly that well, given the current solar minimum. I also rather like "routing problems on the neural net "

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Indeed, many scientists (often from the USA or other English-speaking countries) came to the UK, lured by the kind of funding the EU provides. Few countries have the equivalent of the ERC grants, that give top scientist several million euro to do great research over a five-year period. The UK was often chosen as home base due to (much smaller) language barriers. If the UK is to retain such scientists, the government must do a lot more than just allowing them in. Without matching funding from the government, they will much rather come to the EU, I guess. It is very sad to see the difficulties we now face keeping colleagues based in the UK in a follow-up project to a very successful Horizon 2020 project in which they played a key role.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Progress

You had a desk to sleep under? We would have LOVED to have had a desk to sleep under. We had to sleep under soakin' wet Lotus 1-2-3 manuals, out on a concrete floor, and if we were REALLY lucky, the rats wouldn't run off with half the beads on our abacus, so we could keep on doing calculation when we had to start work at 3 in the mornin'

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Splendid Isolation

In my first machine (way back when) I had a Seagate drive that seemed to have a nest of young swallows in it, rather than crickets. I new the sound well as at my parents' place there were several swallows nests just outside my bedroom window. It was quite a nice sound to wake up to in summer, so I didn't mind the gentle chirps the drive gave mainly during startup (I was only too glad to have a whole 80 MB of space, after all!!)

BOFH: When was the last time someone said these exact words to you: You are the sunshine of my life?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Filling in totally random values just to screw things up is my approach. Swinging wildly from VERY enthusiastic to homicidally aggravated between categories should confuse interpretation. Alternatively, fill out "Not Applicable" whenever possible.

SLS goes vertical at Stennis while NASA practises SRB stacking

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Exciting stuff

I have very fond memories of the Apollo era. Fingers crossed for the upcoming tests

Ancient Ore Crusher or KillBot 2000? NASA gets ready to pick a name for its Mars 2020 Rover

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Marvin

has my vote, but then it might develop a pain in all the diodes down its left side

I'd better be going

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Facepalm

"Productize"?

Sorry, that must be some strange manglement speak or marketing-droid phrase that has hitherto escaped me.

Anyone using it in my presence should be warned I might not take kindly to such an act.

Alan Turing’s OBE medal, PhD cert, other missing items found in super-fan’s Colorado home by agents, says US govt

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

True, ms. Schwinghammer/Elliot/Turing/Insert-Name-Here makes as much sense as an Enigma machine with a loose wheel or two.

Windows 7 back in black as holdouts report wallpaper-stripping shenanigans

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Will they replace the start-up sound as well?

"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed"

seems appropriate now.

I'll be going. The one with the HHGTTG radio play cassette tapes in the pocket please

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: How did that work ?

Under MS-DOS, I typically used Norton Utilities' binary editor, and have at times managed to alter strings in executables and libraries in DOS, when access to the code was missing, or recompiling the whole shebang to correct a simple typo in the user interface took longer than performing the edits in code and executable or library. Under Windows, Wordpad could indeed be used.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

No beard here, and I certainly recall that bus. It is almost as if the Reg is insinuating that beards are some sort of storage device for obscure tech facts.

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Lovely little weekend starter

Great episode, once more