* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

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Re: Facebook and an angle grinder--

I see the components of a joke here about two straight lines getting together through Grindr. But I can't be bothered to assemble them. Bisection curious? I dunno.

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Re: Out of date building plans

Sounds more like Bagpuss to me.

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Re: we can't shake the image of ...

The floor was made of water and he was a hydrophobic wizard?

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Re: Out of date building plans

Carrie Symonds in BoJo Rabbit?

'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government

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I read that as Word + dog.

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Re: Oops…

It's a test & development environment for robot development. Therefore VAT deductible. And duty free.

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"You can pull data out of a database"

Type your comment here

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Re: the Ultimate Answer for data entry.

Christ almighty... do you think Deep Thought was trying to work out the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything using an Excel spreadsheet?

That would explain a LOT!

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"He"?

I didn't get any hint of sarcasm, no. Sorry. Not in that bit. Well #2, perhaps I was restating what they asserted, which would have been me agreeing with them. I wasn't being sarcastic. I do know what you mean about the IT consultants who are happy to take you out for an expensive lunch on expenses, knowing that THEIR expenses are actually going to be YOUR expenses if they get the contract.

And the point of #1 is that the decision to change must be based on risk analysis. It's not PURELY data collection, it's also data handling and data processing... it can be awfully easy to make a slip with a spreadsheet that can be very hard to spot, and if the ONLY validation of the output is that it roughly looks right or not, then that output better not be used for anything too important. Simple spreadsheets don't separate data collection from data processing.

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Re: One thing guaranteed to make me break down in tears...

Or it was requested that you MUST collect data on gender now (add an extra step that was previously optional) in order to ensure a balanced representation e.g in meeting planning - previously the quality of the data was so poor as to be unusable - so you made it a compulsory field. And when they discovered they couldn't leave that field blank they stopped using the app.

Yes, I feel your pain.

Of course, when the 12 month transition period is over and the ONLY input to the higher process is from the application as you retire the excel import module that's cranky as fuck and is no longer supported except by paying £eyewatering bespoke support fees, they complain that they suddenly have to cope with this new interface overnight and there was no warning or training. And there's no way that you'll get away with "You remember that day everyone went out to X hospitality venue for software training... no... they had coronation chicken sandwiches that you really loved... and Prosecco in the evening? NOW you remember... yes... THAT training... Yes, I know it was quite long ago and that you've forgotten now..."

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Re: in line with agile delivery best practice

Wouldn't even be able to SEND the response.

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Re: in line with agile delivery best practice

Any departments that respond "we are having difficulty completing the request because everyone here uses Linux" then they're ok.

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Re: Ah, sales...

They always seem to bring a technical sales advisor with them on a site visit now. If they point the end of their pen down whilst twiddling it means don't promise that unconditionally.

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Re: Oops…

Do they have a mini-fridge in the office for the Friday drinks parties, eh?!

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Re: One thing guaranteed to make me break down in tears...

Actually, re-reading that, I'm being unfair to my wonderful colleagues in the administration team.

They usually ask for the ability to filter and export as Excel because they often have to communicate their activities to other administration teams in the wider organisation, and they only seem to use Excel judging by the over-elaborate, Macro-laden, looks-like-shit "Applications" that come from there.

The conversation usually goes something like... "Your summary looks great, but can you supply those figures as an Excel file instead of a PDF please? Makes it easier to transfer it into a spreadsheet when we produce the summary figures for the end-of-year report."

I said "Applications" earlier... because I don't know the word for what they actually are. "Web Apps" are just websites with additional interactivity and functionality like a traditional application... what I see from Central are "Excel files with additional interactivity and functionality"... and I don't know what to call these "Excel-based data capture arrangements"... "Excrements" perhaps?

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Re: More Good Advice?

If they produce their written report in landscape format, i.e. it's just a printout of a Powerpoint, then you probably have your answer.

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1. Depends how costly a mistake in those spreadsheets is and how likely it is that a mistake is made.

2. If the spreadsheets really are that simple, why do you even need a bespoke SAP integrated cloud blockchain solution which involves 3 months of contract haggling and endless training? Either do it in-house or the requirement has been over specified in the modernisation effort - like adding in blockchain for no readily apparent reason.

3. If the thing you do, question you ask, is as you say, then you aren't an IT consultant (or at least not one from a company that stands to gain from getting the contract to produce the solution). In my experience IT consultants like that are actually from sales.

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One thing guaranteed to make me break down in tears...

is when I've been called into some autopsy meeting because something bad has happened due to a mistake made in an administrative task based around Excel spreadsheets. Actually, that's not the thing that makes me cry... the thing is when I've spent a month or more converting that administrative process into a database backed web app with auditing, sanity checking, roll-back features, immutable backup to the cloud offsite, user input warnings, multi-user capability, record-locking etc, importing all the historic data kept in the excel spreadsheets, checking it, fixing it, double checking it, getting someone else to triple check it, testing it, getting the most IT illiterate I can think of to test it for UI/UX quality, THEN taking something I think is finally a complete package that would work well even if it became the final version because of the way these things tend to work out, presenting it to the administration team as a beta for feedback and further refinement etc. (I think they call it AGILE now, but it's really how I've always worked), and getting back comments that it's absolutely brilliant but lacking only one thing - the ability to filter the data and export it as an Excel file.

And then I spend the next week crying into my teacup as I tack on my pre-built Excel export interface code and tweak it to match the application, knowing full well that all they're going to do is open the exported file in Excel and start adding new data to it instead of using the web app because that's the way they've always done it and that's the process they are familiar with no matter how closely I've tried to match the Web Application to the way I've observed the process being done. I know from experience that even if I create the export file as read-only and password locked, they'll demand the password to unlock it and make it read/write.

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Re: in line with agile delivery best practice

Sometimes??

Most of the time.

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Re: Ideal for data

Databases are ideal for data. Spreadsheets are ideal for... erm... well... spreading sheet I guess.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

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Re: re: In a global pandemic

OK, the exact details of how the vents work vary from design to design.

I was talking about specifically the design of the three I use (they're the same, I wash them in rotation and replace the filters once a week).

Some masks that I have seen, that I don't use, don't have a filter over the vent - like the ones intended to stop sawdust coming in. They're not appropriate. and indeed useless for disease control. But you can't generalise to all vented masks.

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Re: re: In a global pandemic

It keeps your face warm.

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Re: re: In a global pandemic

I use one of those... the vent is situated on the mask on the far side of the N95 filter.

The pressure profile inside the mask is not symmetrical throughout the breathing cycle.

What the one-way valve does is to stop the sudden, short, peak of much higher pressure forcing the edge of the mask away from the face so the breath can escape round the edges thereby NOT going through the filter. There is also only a double layer of cloth across the cheek parts, whereas there's a triple layer and a filter over the nose and mouth parts. The vent bypasses only the outer double layer in the area of the filter - there's no way for the breath to exit the mask without going through either a layer of cloth and a high-efficiency filter or two layers of cloth (in reality the single layer of cloth and the N95 filter are by far the lowest resistance path, so that's the way the overwhelming majority of the out breathing goes).

As one breathes in, the mask material is deformed as it is sucked closer to the face and the air comes through both the triple layer of cloth and the N95 filter.

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Re: People do not want it

Well, maybe not the light bulbs and all that... though they tend to communicate with some non-IP protocol back to a hub, and I WANT that hub to be on my home network, and have an IP address, and have a decent API with user-generatable authentication methods so that I can still use the kit I've invested in when the parent company has done yet another TITSUP* and their app no longer works.

"The Internet of Things" Start Up Perished.

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Re: re: In a global pandemic

I actually saw one woman in M&S pull her mask AWAY from her face to cough (and it was a proper phlegm-shaker) then put it back on.

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Depends how good your eyesight is... personally I need to don reading glasses to resolve things like how many colons are next to each other in a pattern of numbers which doesn't have any topological structure to it.

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Re: re: In a global pandemic

And there we have the dual-stack conundrum.

Almost there: James Webb Space Telescope frees its mirrors and prepares for insertion

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Re: One word.....

Gregg Wallace.

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I thought he shared an office with Newton Fahrenheit?

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Re: SO TRASHY

Troll. ;)

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Re: SO TRASHY

Length, width or thickness of a paperclip??!!

If you want less CGI and more real effects in movies, you may get your wish: Inflatable film studio to orbit Earth

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Re: Breathtaking

What about Ice-cold in Alex?

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Re: Solution looking for a problem...

Let's face it Arthur... these zeebs here aren't your ancestors. The human race is currently sitting around that rock over there making documentaries about themselves.

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Wasn't there very recently...

something about the first porno filmed in space?

Or did I just dream that?

APNIC: Big Tech's use of carrier-grade NAT is holding back internet innovation

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Re: That old chestnut

Are you talking scrap? Well, it is true that nails that can be recycled become very valuable indeed... but only whilst there is a demand for nails. It's odd how valuable nails are given that screws are available and have been for some time.

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Re: That old chestnut

But thanks to Nail Address Translation, I only need to know which house the nails are being used in. That way we can have way more than 4 billion nails. Indeed some of them could even be screws, even if to the outside world it just looks like a nail.

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Re: That old chestnut

I know people who hammer screws so...

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

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I bet that left more than a couple of skid marks.

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Re: Assisted cruise control

Yeah, it didn't have cruise. That was an optional extra. I read the manual cover to cover that night when I got to my hotel.

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My fiancée from many years ago owned an old and much loved Viva once, passed down through her family, customised by her ingenious father, particularly with some additions for a traditional English picnic sat inside the car looking out at the rain, and lovingly repaired once after the sump broke by lifting the whole engine out with a scaffolding pole.

I had bought some speakers and a cassette player dirt cheap whilst working in Canada (how I got it through customs I'll never know - I was young and naive). The Viva is built like a battleship - I had to cut through the parcel shelf and it took me the best part of a day to do it! I did a similar job many years later on a late model Rover 114... I ended up having to reinforce the parcel shelf and the door trims in order that they could take the weight of a decent set of speakers.

Happy days. Was quite sad to see that car go, but we moved to London and it wasn't practical to have a car in that part of town. Broke up soon after too.

I have a sneaking suspicion that her husband at least might well be a reader of these pages, not that I've ever met him.

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What was that book I read once?.. where the driver reassured the passenger that the car had the same safety features as any modern car, like the crumple zone located between the front and rear bumpers.

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Toyota describe it, IIRC, as "applying a force profile to the steering system". In other words, it makes the steering feel as if the white lines run on tarmac that domes up to a crest about an inch higher than the rest of the lane, similar to the way many roads wear over time.

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Oh I see! Thanks for the link. I missed it was Australia. I know someone near Coconut Grove... I'll mention it to them. I've never been over there, let alone driven there. I had superimposed my experience of a UK motorway... 3 lanes and 70MPH usually. The AEB is that twitchy is it?

That is a very shit road design... that long stretch of parallel road... quite disturbing to have vehicles on your right that aren't part of your traffic flow - we do have some appalling examples of similar, usually where there's a roundabout bypass lane on a fast road, but there's also a stretch of the M1 near Luton which has odd parallel running like this.

In the UK that style of road with perpendicular side roads and some housing nearby would be 40mph tops, which is a smidgeon under 70kph, I guess. If the road is busy that would mean you have a job getting over to the left, but even so I would drive that as two leftward single lane changes, not one double lane change unless it was practically an empty road. There's too many numpty people who undertake to risk doing otherwise.

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Re: Assisted cruise control

They charged extra for the little warning light that told them what the f*** was going on with the control surfaces when they kept resetting themselves to what the software thought they should be set at based on input from a single sensor, which they did in order to save money.

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Re: It would make Musk even more of a liar

It's a car with enormous potential... around 400V, I believe.

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That's the trouble with software for cars... there's often a back door or two.

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Re: New Name for Autopilot needed

Tesla's intelligent climate control starts pumping out the scent of fresh cut grass and cow pats...

ARTHUR: "You keep filling the air with cheap perfume."

VENTILATION SYSTEM: "You like scented air: it’s fresh and invigorating. "

ARTHUR: "No I do not! Why is the floor shaking?"

FLOOR: "Tired nerves and muscles are quickly soothed by gentle floor vibrations. Feel your troubles float away."

ARTHUR: "Just stop it will you? All of you, STOP IT! Turn the soothing music off! Turn it off! I order you to turn it OFF! Now listen. If I want to be toned up, calmed down, invigorated or anything then it’s very simple: I just have a cup of tea."

NUTRIMATIC DRINK DISPENSER: "Just dried leaves, boiled?"

ARTHUR: "Yes."

NUTRIMATIC DRINK DISPENSER, VENTILATION SYSTEM and FLOOR: "Then why did you build all of us?"

ARTHUR: "What? I didn’t!"

NUTRIMATIC DRINK DISPENSER: "Your species did."

VENTILATION SYSTEM: "You’re an organic life-form."

FLOOR: "Your lot did it…"

VENTILATION SYSTEM: "…to improve your lifestyle."

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Re: Totally to do with it

So is that why they put "Not Actual Game Footage" in all the adverts on TV now?

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Re: It would make Musk even more of a liar

Heck, I even read them cover to cover for the vehicles I'm just THINKING of buying. It also helps understand exactly what all the various purchase options are and what they do.

Foxstuck: Firefox browser bug boots legions of users offline

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Re: "Waterfox users were totally unaffected. ®"

Ah! Maybe THAT was what the launch technician was announcing - the musical accompaniment to the blast off. TV coverage of space launches is very important you know. Just ask Jeff.