It's Donald Trump on the line...
he just phoned up to wash his head at us.
Posts by TRT
9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
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US govt proposes elephant showers for every American after Prez Trump says trickles dampen his haircare routine
Deep-root database: Kew Garden's 8 million specimen collection to find new life through data management
Friday 14th August 2020 06:24 GMT 
"...we have not historically pushed development of data technologies sufficiently far up our corporate agenda,"
"We were pursuing digitisation as a top priority of our scientific future to maximise scientific impact of our institute,"
Management BS detector going off here. Given his background is purported to be science, I wonder if he's caught something? Maybe his ability to spout weasel words was what got him the job? "Corporate agenda" indeed. Counterpoint the surrealism of the scientific impact...
Splunk sales ace wins sex discrimination case after new boss handed her key accounts to blokes deemed 'flight risks'
First alligators, then dogs, now Basil Fawlty is trying to standardise social distancing measures
Saturday 8th August 2020 11:11 GMT
Re: My preferred measuring device
I prefer the Bohemian ear spoon, myself.
I really should be able to let this go, but I seem unable to... that episode of Blockbusters where Bob Holness asked "What S is a halberd, a partisan or a javelin?" The correct answer is 'shafted weapon', but they gave the correct answer as 'spear'... which is totally wrong because a 'spear' is specifically a weapon with a shaft which can be used in one hand for throwing or thrusting, and you wouldn't throw a halberd!
University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online
Virgin Media CEO says Brit broadband biz 'performed well' in Q2, which is a weird way to say losses almost tripled
Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again
Firefighters to UK Home Office: Yeah, maybe don't turn off emergency comms network before replacement is ready
Irony isn't dead... Facebook sues EU on data privacy grounds for requesting too much personal data
Named arguments squeak into PHP 8.0, 7 years after first RFC
Monday 27th July 2020 23:20 GMT
I mean... a nice idea though JetBrains PHP tools already cross reference the PHPdocs and tooltip the parameter list. It could come into its own though when adding extra parameters to a function - if you have a long list of defaults which you barely ever use, then add a really useful one which most of your function calls need to pass...
What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible
As Corning unveils its latest Gorilla Glass, we ask: What happened to sapphire mobe screens?
Sunday 26th July 2020 10:56 GMT
Re: Anybody who says their sapphire watch face scratched
Percentages.
Tungesten Carbide is 50/50 Tungsten and Carbon. It's usually cemented with cobalt, though, which makes it more properly termed a cermet, or metallic ceramic.
The most carbon in carbon steel is 2% (ultra-high carbon steel), though cast iron has greater percentages of carbon still. Once you get up that high, the material become more and more brittle, like a ceramic. You just can't get 50/50 pure iron and carbon to hold together. But if you use iron OXIDE, then you can... and you get ferrite - a ceramic.
The size of a carbon atom relative to the spacing of the crystalline form of the metal determines how much carbon or silicon can be held as an alloy. If you add different atoms in then you get different physical properties; there's a whole range of ferroalloys.
Cisco restores evidence of its funniest FAIL – ethernet cable presses switch's reset button
Monday 20th July 2020 10:12 GMT
Re: Either way
You're holding the cables wrong, obviously.
But as to why someone would want a locking tab protector... give it a few years and the patching and re-patching activity will have woven 24 of the 48 cables into a kind of rope. If you then need to withdraw a foot or so of one strand of this rope in order to reach a different port or socket, say a new bank of sockets has been added during renovation works or because the original space was under specified, then you have a choice of
1) putting in a new, longer patch cable and leaving the old patch cable in place as a free floating end (this seems to be the usual approach!)
2) unwinding a bit of the twist by pulling the ends back through the knotted, live, rest of the bunch - therein lies the risk to the locking tab as you pull it back through say a dozen pinch points.
3) removing the whole of the old patch cable, binning it and replacing it. Whilst this might be the tidiest and "gold standard" approach, you're bound to be asked why the job took an hour longer than the guesstimate and involved additional items on the bill of materials (new patch cable).
VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide
Bad news: Your Cisco switch is a fake and an update borked it. Good news: It wasn't designed to spy on you
IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old
Monday 13th July 2020 12:25 GMT
Re: HR droids...
Only an hour for the pseudocode. And they gave a kind of cut down developer manual for the language on a separate reference sheet - just a load of stuff about syntax and a function description - this is how you assign a variable, this is how you form a loop, this is how you branch some code, these are the comparators used in the language, this is how you manipulate a string, this is how you write something to an interactive user, this is how you get an input from an interactive user, this is how you read a file from disk - that kind of thing.
Another hour was taken up with some kind of test to measure IT exposure and consisted of lots of questions like "A user presents an issue with a Windows PC that refuses to boot - describe the fault finding process you would use to assess their complaint", "In developing some code, the following error is returned on execution - describe how you would locate and fix this" and "Which acronym describes the general form of user interface which comprises, for example, an on-screen arrow controlled by a mouse or trackpad? - Multiple guess answer". And there was also a practical test, involving identifying a variety of components. Another hour was taken up with a panel interview and a tour of the tin and of the offices with a chance to meet the meat.
Monday 13th July 2020 08:03 GMT
HR droids...
During a restructuring when my role was under threat, I went for an interview for a more senior role that fitted me perfectly with one tiny snag. The head of HR who did the interview said that I ticked all the boxes except one... they were looking for someone with experience of SQL. I hadn't got this, because my 15 years of database experience were all obtained on three other platforms that were quite common at the time.
Anyway, I left that organisation... I wasn't going to take a £10k drop to a first-line support role which they said was all they could offer me, not after managing my own team for 5 years and with a further 10 years experience in R&D, and so I got a job on the South Bank. That interview was an eyeopener - they did some weird aptitude test which included an hour long paper in pseudocode. No warning about it beyond "allow three hours for your interview".
About 6 months into that job, I bumped into the former head of HR in a tube station nearby, she also had been restructured out of the organisation and was now working for City Hall on a temp contract.
"How are you? Did you find something?"
"Yes", I replied, truthfully, " at an organisation headquartered near here. I'm managing their SQL databases."
Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now
Microsoft to pull support for PHP: Version 8? Exterminate, more like...
Saturday 11th July 2020 11:43 GMT
Re: Nobody wanted it..
And I think my use of versatile was clear from the context I used it in, and which you lifted it out from. I wasn't talking about what PHP/ASP could and couldn't do or the relative merits of each in accessing SQL... just which platforms the hosting providers were offering to support the two different language sites I had. If anything ASP/.NET can probably do more than PHP, and probably quicker with pre-compilation, even though it often seems to me to be far less developer friendly than PHP and a little bit more intolerant of stuff like errors in modules that you don't find out about until a particularly rare set of events occurs.
Saturday 11th July 2020 11:28 GMT
Re: Nobody wanted it..
Well I was going to say good luck getting an ASP / .NET site running on a Linux server, but I've just double checked and apparently there's Kestrel server. So I guess you can do that. Versatile as in being supported by a wider range of base server configurations - works in many different environments. Just a gap in my knowledge... Wonder who maintains that? Is it supported? Seems odd, then, that Microsoft would effectively undermine its server offering in this way. I could understand if they wanted to bring everything in to a closed eco-system that they can monetise, but if ASP/.NET runs supported on a Linux / Apache platform, then losing PHP would just reduce the rationale for deploying their server product.
Friday 10th July 2020 23:03 GMT
Re: Nobody wanted it..
I'm baked in LAMP, but I was given the job of looking after someone's ASP site that they had paid for.
So I was effectively forced to get a Windows server instance and because PHP MYSQL is so much more versatile than ASP or .NET, I was able to find a hosting company that would support what I knew and what I had inherited.
That's the only use case I can think of!
University ordered to stop running women-only job ads
When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan
Well bork me sideways: A railway ticket machine lies down for a little Windoze
Sunday 5th July 2020 10:21 GMT
Re: Victorian computing
And the word circuit wasn't attached to hybrid. Hybrid was attached to the distinction between circuit switching and packet switching, and suggesting an intermediate situation where circuits where switched to convey traffic from one routing point to the next routing point rather than being established end-to-end, used, then torn-down. One might say that packet switching does similar, but the ROUTE is not laid down or pre-defined in packet switching, whereas with railway switching it is.
Saturday 4th July 2020 06:12 GMT
Re: Victorian computing
The signalling might be thought of as that... but it's the railway itself I was referring to, with the information about the train being considered as an analogy to header information and the train as the payload. There's an element of the whole route of the train being known in advance, akin to circuit switching, but during the journey the route is set block by block in response to information "carried" by the train, akin to packet switching. Though the train is not broken up and arrivies at its destination in one pieces rather than needing to be reassembled... apart from the old system of slip coaching of course which sounds like a horrendous idea.
MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs
Microsoft sees the world has moved on, cranks OneDrive file size upload limit from 15GB to more useful 100GB
Saturday 4th July 2020 09:21 GMT
Re: "Where can I find that file?"
Oddly that's exactly what our newest staff member was asking when she was confronted by the legacy of her predecessor who almost got how the Microsoft filing landscape and permissions worked. Anyway the data she wanted was almost inevitably somewhere in SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Office application storage, her computer's hard drive. Even if she sometimes didn't have permissions to see it because someone had moved a folder whilst tidying up and all the permissions had reset...
Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
