Posts by AndrueC 5086 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
Are we desperately short of coders ?
Actually, yes, we are. We have been for..well..basically forever. It's why I've loved this career - it's as close to job security as you're likely to get.
Whether that's the driving force for this or 'because we want to try' I don't know. I'm personally ambivalent to it. The tech is cool, I think our jobs are actually safe (but might change a bit) and anyway I'm retiring or semi-retiring next year ;p
At least Watson was an appropriate name, in all the books / stories, Watson never really masters the Holmes skills of deduction / problem solving
Except that he was a pretty good doctor.
Do not judge the character by the buffoonery in the old B&W films. He wasn't Sherlock's equal in criminal investigation but Holmes did not suffer fools and wouldn't have shared an apartment with him unless he was an intelligent and capable man.
Mine apparently is supported. Least-wise first I knew of it was when it appeared in Windows Update. Sadly it turns out the Taskbar tooltip issue is still not fixed. It's a pretty weird bug in the first place but they seem to be taking their own sweet time about issuing a release.
If you leave the club then don't be surprised if you don't get to enjoy all the benefits that membership gave you.
You also shouldn't be surprised if the club doesn't bend over backwards to help you out. We chose to leave so the onus is on us to deal with the consequences. That should include 'reparations' to the club for any damage we cause when we leave although it doesn't seem the EU is going that far.
Dunno how long ago that was but it's no longer the case now. I'm on the preview programme and I update VS many times a year with no problems. I've also over the years moved from 2k8 to 2k22 on this machine and uninstalled previous versions with no apparent problems.
Huh. VS starts up really quickly, yes. But then it's unusable for a couple of minutes because it's loading stuff in the background. Admittedly a fair chunk of that for us is R# getting ready but not all of it is.
I would far rather VS be honest and upfront and tell me to wait while it gets ready. That would be better than the current situation where you just have to keep prodding the thing until it finally seems to be up to speed.
'tis for me. Of course it depends what you consider to be 'large'. I currently have four VS instances with (between them) nearly 5,000 individual source files. If I try and include references between solutions that can probably be expanded to 7,000 files. Then of course there will potentially be references to several hundred more files courtesy of external dependencies.
There is rarely any delay with R# and if there is it's usually only a couple of seconds.
Typically each R# instance claims to be using around 2GB of memory but during heavy refactoring exercises I've seen it rise as high as 4GB before subsiding after a while. That fits in with my previous experience of R# which was sluggish performance and crashes during heavy refactoring. I can even switch branches without suffering now whereas that used to be another source of issues.
We also have a legacy solution which is I think over a decade old. It loads just fine and R# operates well. That solution I think only has a few thousand files in it.
I'm not trying to be funny (and historically I've tried to dump R# several times having a love/hate relationship with it) and I'm not a fanboi but since vs/64 arrived I've stopped hating R#. I'd hate to think of any VS developer not using it or suffering issues so I'd urge you to investigate the reason behind your problems. R# doesn't have to be slow or unstable.
Oh and FWIW I'm a major R# user. It's not something I consider occasionally. It's pretty much my primary editing tool. Any time I see something underlined my first thought is to tap Alt+Enter and see what is on offer. I sometimes think that most of my coding is being done by R# with me just directing it :)
yet still if i enable resharper for its superior unit test explorer/runner i can expect the text editor to hang for 20 secs at least and same when an intellisense window opens :(
That's weird. I have an aging i7 with 32MB of RAM and I have no performance issues with R# once the solution has loaded. I typically have three or four VS instances open all with fairly large solutions.
And still full of bugs. The UI is poor verging on awful and they seem to have no interest in fixing it. They occasionally bugger around with the icons or the menu text but that seems to be the extent of their ability.
It's the best tool available for me (Desktop and C# developer) but lordy the experience sucks.
On the plus side the move to 64-bits has finally given it enough memory that R# is no longer choked so it is now at least stable and fast.
I fear that Sir might have missed some steps in the wifi connection procedure. Sir has neglected to mention the need for foul and abusive language :)
I remember when I got Sky Q installed. The 'engineer' wanted to use wifi. I told him there was an ethernet cable ready and waiting but he said it would be easier to use wifi. So he asked me where my router was. I said it was upstairs but it wasn't a Sky router and anyway the wifi was disabled. I told him I use a wireless access point downstairs because it's a better signal for my laptop.
At that point he decided to try the ethernet cable and "see if it works". He plugged it in, checked the box and was astonished to find that it had obtained an IP address and was all ready to go.
After that he left. Sad to think that he probably still believes that it's easier and more reliable to connect a Sky Q box via wifi than ethernet. Hence the need for quotes around engineer :)
NAT rewrites the apparent source address of outbound connections. An inbound connection is not an outbound connection, hence NAT does nothing to it.
Wrong. What NAT does is make your entire LAN appear to be a single host to the WAN. Everything trying to communicate with me does so by specifying my public IP address. Thus NAT has to modify the headers both inbound and outbound.
When 192.168.1.106 sends a packet the router changes the source address to be the public address of the router and updates its internal table of connection mappings then sends it out to the WAN.
When the router receives a packet from the WAN one of three things is done with it depending on the target address 'type':
* Private IP address - Dropped immediately. Least-wise I doubt anyone has ever implemented a NAT system that did anything other than immediately drop the packet since by definition it is invalid.
* Public IP address - if it doesn't match the router's, drop it.
* Public IP address - if it matches the router's then look in the connection mapping table for a match. If found change the destination address to be the private address of the initiating host and send the packet onto the LAN. If no match found in the table, give up and drop the packet.
That would be a firewall, not NAT. NAT implementations don't drop packets, they just rewrite the src or dest headers.
And what is a router going to rewrite the DST address as? The router isn't going to just pick a random host on the LAN and send it the packet on the off-chance. The router has no idea what to do with an incoming packet for a conversation that it isn't tracking. The only thing it can do is drop the packet.
I think you're splitting hairs here. You can call it a firewall if you want but everyone else would call it the obvious implementation of NAT. There is simply no way you can launch an attack against my 192.168.1.106 from outside my LAN. You can subvert a connection that I have established but until I establish one there's nothing you can do.
The tech world is full of examples of great solutions failing while terrible ones prosper.
This is normal for human systems. It's a combination of 'I just want it to work now' and sadly effective marketing.
An alternative would be wait for the perfect XXXX before we do anything. But if we did that we'd have a very different world. Imagine what the world would be like if we'd chosen never to burn fossil fuels because of the impact on the climate. And that's not entirely hypothetical. Way back in the early days there were quite a few people who were concerned about the consequences.
Sometimes, heck most of the time, you have a problem that needs a solution. Any solution. Time and tide waits for no man and it certainly doesn't wait for someone to produce the perfect widget.
"The current Excel-based data commission is being used to develop an early pilot of the Dashboard, ahead of moving to a more performant solution over time, in line with agile delivery best practice," he said.
"The Dashboard metrics have been developed in collaboration with the cross-government Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) community."
Anyone for a game of buzzword bingo?
(Maybe go make some more babies or something....)
China isn't so good at doing that either. That was inevitable really, just following the usual process of human development. It's why overpopulation is probably a temporary problem and that underpopulation could be the next thing for us to worry about. It's already causing demographic headaches.
I'd like it to automatically 'focus' my colleagues' screen shares and to switch to full screen (a proper full screen) when one starts. I'd also like the searching facility not to be so damn useless (when you click on a found message you just get taken to the convo, not the message itself). I'd also like it to be easier to insert a code snippet instead of having to go through two or three obscure menus.
No. The problem is that it takes virtually no skill to download a package and follow what every other user does with it.
That's not a problem. That's a virtue. We want using these packages to be simple because otherwise we might as well write our own. That's the whole point of technology. To wrap complicated things up and make them available to more people.
This problem isn't unique to software development. Every industry relies on 'off-the shelf' components and that's all a package is. What's missing from software development is accountability and a proper standards authority.
When you buy a telephone from your local supplier you can fit it without knowing anything about the internals of it. All you know is what the connections are. That's exactly the same as a software package. The difference is that the telephone will have logos printed on it that assure you (subject to it not being a knock-off) that the relevant organisations have tested it and verified that it's safe and meets all the required standards.
The problem is that because software is so easy to modify and inherently complicated and evolves so rapidly I don't see how we can develop any kind of 'kite mark' or international standard authority for it.
I have two printers at home. A laser printer because I don't print much and toners last a long, long time. An inkjet because I have a model railway and it's useful for printing out top layers of scenery.
The laser printer is an HP of some description and is hard wired in. Every time I try to use it I have to fight for five minutes before it finally wakes up and starts printing. If I accidentally tell it to print something in colour it will stall for half an hour before finally rendering a B&W version.
The inkjet is a Canon of some ilk. A cheap unit that only has a wifi connection. When I want to print something on it it accepts the request immediately and springs into life. On one occasion I needed to scan something (a very rare event) but it did that without bleating either.
There's obviously something seriously wrong with one of these printers because it's not operating normally. But I'm not going to mention it to Canon in case they fix it..
:)
I remember many years ago trying to find out how Avast had leaked the email address I'd used to register. I use a DEA based system so I knew that only they ought to know that address yet I was getting spam sent to it. They refused to acknowledge that there was a problem (they claimed the address had been farmed from my address book) then the forum community joined in and I gave up.
I doubt any of them will remember that little spat but part of me has long thought 'I told you..'.
Other interesting statistics in the survey include the finding that less than half of developers who responded did not learn programming at university or an engineering school and that nearly a third were self-taught.
Nowt wrong with being self taught. It's given me a 30 year career. I remember once being asked to interview candidates for a role below mine with required qualifications that I didn't have. I don't have a single computing related qualification to my name and I'm (somewhat) proud of it :)
Yup, another satisfied LMS user here. For those who might be interested This is kind of thing we can do..although I never have.
I occasionally look for an alternative to LMS but I've not found it yet.
My main unit is a Logitech Touch but I also have an SB3 in my study for when I'm working.
I used to have a Slimdevices SB 2 but I can't remember what happened to it.
it was all about protecting the NHS, not about stopping people dying)
We were always going to have that problem. The only way to avoid it would be to have the NHS permanently funded and staffed to meet the needs of a global pandemic. That would be ruinously expensive and disgustingly wasteful of resources. It would result in thousands of qualified medical professionals spending their entire career sitting around waiting to be needed. No government will ever or should ever resource a national health service at such a high level.
If one day your entire neighbourhood drops by for tea and biscuits you will struggle to meet demand. Does that therefore mean you should have always had enough milk, tea and biscuits in your house ready for such an event? Of course not. It would be ridiculous.
What C19 has actually shown is that we've been resourcing the NHS quite adequately(*). Despite enormous pressures it has managed - so far - to weather the storm. Yes it's required help from the general public but this is a global pandemic. A once in a century event. You can't operate a health service year after year, decade after decade on the basis that once every hundred years there will be a five-fold increase in admissions.
(*)Not well (could be better) but adequate.
Well I'm not an astronomer so I don't see how that is relevant to my post.
But if you want to open the debate up to a wider audience then I'm fairly sure that the number of people who like to be outdoors in the dark is dwarfed by the number of people who like to be outside in daylight. Both groups are (sadly) dwarfed by the number who prefer to be indoors but they have no reason to care either way - unless possibly they save on their lighting bill.
And the number of people who would enjoy daylight before 7am is equally small, at least outside of Scotland perhaps. And the number anywhere in the UK that would appreciate daylight before 6am must be vanishingly small. So moving that hour to the evening benefits a lot more people than it annoys I reckon.
You can't please all the people all the time but the current DST system seems to work well enough for most people. It's hardly difficult to deal with and as I've posted previously most clocks can be replaced with ones that perform the switch automatically these days. Even watches can do it.
And I'll re-iterate that my comment about double DST was a personal preference ;)
That depends where you work. I think a lot of employers would be irritated if half the staff started work an hour earlier than the rest. And suppose all the staff want to work an hour early - will an employer be happy to have the business running out of sync with its competitors and customers? And what if you need to rely on public transport?
The advantage of the current system is that by and large everyone is working to the same timetable.
The problem with ditching DST (from my perspective) is that I'd want to shift my working hours forward and backward so that I could continue to 'move' an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening where I can make better use of it.
If the UK didn't have DST the sun would be rising at 4am in June. That means at least 3 hours of wasted daylight. I've said before that I'd support double DST for May/June/July in the UK and when I'm retired will likely wake up an hour earlier in those months.
I guess they work internally in UTC, so they need to know the offset to apply depending on where you live: Else your clock would be 8 hours off in St Francisco for instance (and let's not even mention Australia...).
Both vehicles need the time setting manually as well though. I could run my Corolla on EST if I wanted to even though I'm in the UK.
One thing that bugs me about the systems on my recent cars (Honda Jazz and Toyota Corolla) is that despite both cars asking me what timezone I'm in neither of them automatically enable/disable DST. I can understand that they might not want to stick their neck out and support DST because it's a bit of a movable feast but in that case why do the cars need to know the timezone?
Lol, probably hardware failure. Trying to deal with error codes from hardware is never fun because hardware developers never have understood software and they can't be arsed to give us enough information. This looks to me like a hardware error failing to be surfaced in a useful manner.
I've been there and thankfully rarely get involved these days.
I was developing data recovery software and was using SPTI to talk to the storage device. The first thing that gives pause is that it's accessed through IOCTL which I think all programmers would agree is never going to be a pleasant experience. But of course on the other end of that there is SCSI which is no great friend of programmers either.
So you can imagine my irritation when attempting to issue some SCSI command or other only to be greeted with error code 0x80070057 'The parameter is incorrect'. Thanks guys. Very helpful. One of the two dozen parameters I've sent to the device has been rejected. Maybe by the OS. Maybe by the device driver. Maybe by the device itself.
Thanks a *censored* million.
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