Posts by J.G.Harston

Re: Clueless users

And glod protect me from clueless lusers who enter telephone numbers as an unformatted string of random digits.

Phone: 1.1428E8

Re: From "Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors" by Matt Parker

Similarly leading zeros: Folio 0020

Stings of digits with an 'E' in them: product code 12E3

Long strings of digits: Source ID: 12345678901234

Slashes with digits: house number: 12/13

Things that look like dates. serialnum: 01DEC

The work-around around work-around around work-arounds I've had to go to. It's. A. String. Ooooo, it looks like a number. NO. IT'S. A. STRING!

Re: Y2K & Date Windowing - THIS IS NOT A BUG

A common method is a sliding window, eg $thisyear-60 to $thisyear+40 assuming more dates in the past are going to be manually typed in. (Because most of the dates my code flings around go into file stamps, I use 1980-2079.)

But really, the solution is for the software to scream at the user and refuse to accept manually typed two-digit years.

Re: Not just gender

"Now our global boss is pushing that we should have equal numbers of genders and colours."

While you may not have meant to write it that way, that is some of the moronic idiocy that's being pushed.

There's only 20% of black actors on the telly! We must have more!

Why? Only 5% of the population is black.

NO! We must have equal black, and equal indian, and equal chinese, and equal elbonian, and equal etc... And there are 66 difference genders, so the workforce must be equally 1/66th each gender.

Re: Imbalance

But how do you force children to take an interest in things they aren't interested in? I had zero interest in English literature, I was forced to take it, my grades were in the gutter. "What was Monroe talking about when he wrote this scene?" I. DONT. KNOW. It's just a nice story!

Re: Diversity should be a consequence, not a goal.

But the "forced change" required is to force women to enter engineering professions against their personal preference? Isn't that some sort of human rights offence? We call it conscription when it's the military. Historically, that sort of thing has also been called serfdom and slavery.

Re: Diversity should be a consequence, not a goal.

If we had coal mines, we wouldn't have any coal miners, it would all be machine-mined. Close to all the "easy" hand-mineable coal has been mined, what remains is super-deep coal that hasn't been mined because it was too deep for human miners, and previously there a) wasn't the technology to get it and b) we had plenty of human-mineable coal to get.

Re: Titles not necessarily constant

And in England the King is the King by the sufferance of Parliament, reinforced by killing or exiling previous incumbents who disagreed.

Re: Her son will replace her, as King Charles III.

Well, King Charles III issued a formal statement at 7pm last night, so it's official.

Re: She was a good one

Charles knows full well that the British monarch rules by sufferance of Parliament - enforced by exiling or executing those that disagreed.

Re: Will this actually help ?

I can't afford to be refused a job because they would have to pay me by my experience. Pay me for the actual work I do for you, dammit!

I got stuck on the Nottingham inner ring road going in clockwise circles - I could see my destination off the other carriageway, but could see no way of getting to go anticlockwise.

Re: "The OS companies have insulated themselves from user pain"

And... technology is giving us screens that are wider and wider. What shall we do? I know, let's use up loads and loads of the up/down screen estate!

Some of the document working I now do it's like looking through a letterbox - and it even inflicts websites, with a fixed, immovable, irremovable banner across the top of the screen.

Re: "The OS companies have insulated themselves from user pain"

They even break file formats.

I've just had to spend quite some time digging into the exact hows of how MSWord renders RTF files in different versions (programmatically generated data, worked fine for 20 years, identical files flow from column to column, page to page differently, which is a right bugger when the content is columnar data), and dig into the how of getting it to stop it.

Re: Agree and disagree

Agreed. I've tidied my Start menu to be almost consistanly one level deep, except for Programs -> Office -> MSOffice, Programs -> Office -> OpenOffice and Programs -> Office -> LibreOffice, and various "helper" stuff, for instance Programs -> Programming -> Vinculum (program) and Programs -> Programing -> Vinculum Support (folder)

Re: grouping programs by company and not application type

I have TextPad under

Programs -> Office -> TextPad and

Programs -> Tools -> TextPad

Re: grouping programs by company and not application type

"but who decides what "type" your application is?"

MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*NEVER* the OS or application writer.

Re: Coding is the easy part!

"This house has crappy wiring, why aren't the decorators diverting their effort into fixing it?"

Re: Peak Usability

There were things I could do under the hood in XP that were a LOT more difficult to do in Win7, and virtually impossible/impossible in WIn10.

Proper full screen. mode con cols=80 lines=25, runs as full screen should give me EIGHTY BLOODY COLUMNS AND 25 BLOODY LINES!!!! This is (one of the many) reasons I keep my XP installation going for connecting to remote machines like my PDPs 'n' stuff.

Re: The Sunshine State

To clarify things a little: repairs of existing infrastructure is an in-year tax-deductable cost; installing new anything is a capital gain, taxed if you ever sell it.

If you're careful, some "installing new" can be classed as repairs - single glazed windows falling out, replace with double glazing = repair; perfectly fine single glazed windows, replace with double glazing = capital gain.

Re: Cars are next, then your digital money

And clap every Thursday.

Re: Exceptions for such dual-purpose signs have been arranged.

Horses for courses, I've become a lot less heat tolerant as I get older. I hate the summer, there's a limit to how much clothing you can take off; whereas in winter you can keep putting on more and more layers.

Re: Exceptions for such dual-purpose signs have been arranged.

What "digging up the whole country to lay new domestic pipelines"? They used the pre-existing town gas pipelines. The only digging up was the new trunk network.

Over the years the domestic network has yes been dug up, but as the 200-year process or routinely replacing pipes as and when they wear out.