Posts by VinceH

Re: Is it on?

"And can someone tell me why credit/bank card forms ask for the 16 digit number with no spaces or dashes?

Is it really so hard to parse '^([0-9]{4}[ -]{0,1}){4}$'"

Quite - that's long been an annoyance for me. What's worse is that I'm absolutely sure I remember correctly, and when e-commerce was first starting to take off, many forms would accept card numbers formatted with spaces.

As you say, it's trivially easy to parse the number and strip anything unwanted (give a 16 digit block with no spaces to the back-end, if necessary - but let me type it in with spaces!) - but more importantly, it's easier for the user to double check what s/he has typed if it's spaced out like that - especially older people, or those whose with less than 20/20 vision.

And don't get me started on those that force you to switch from keyboard to mouse when what has to be input can very easily be done from the keyboard. Duh! Offer the mouse method as an alternative method for those less adept with a keyboard!

(And that includes making sure your fields can be easily navigated using the tab key - don't put too many unnecessary stops (extra links) along the way, and FFS don't use CSS lay the page out in such a way that the tab order becomes an illogical mess!)

Re: Journey time

"I fear, if rushed it's more likely to be "I can see a human croaking after setting foot on Mars""

Yes, well, while I want to see someone set foot on Mars, I'd also prefer them to have done all the necessary homework first to minimise the risks as much as possible - I didn't suggest they should rush it.

It's not as if I'm expecting to kick the bucket in 2029 or whenever. I'm hoping to make it until at least 2030. :p

Re: Whut?

That episode was a little bit questionable, wasn't it?

The first thing I thought was: "Pandas monthly, huh? Is she 'reading' it in the same way people 'read' Playboy etc for the articles?"

Then Matthew commented to Sooty "You have to wonder what it was that she was reading exactly that she didn't want you to see ... possibly a guilty secret there."

Then a little later, she read out an advert from a blatant paedophile: "Are you under six years old and less than thirty centimetres tall?" =:o

The other three puppets were trying to spy on her in the bathroom - under the claim that they just wanted to know what she was reading. Yeah, right.

I dare not watch any further!

Re: Applause

At that moment, 67P woke up and thought "Why the hell are the idiots on that little planet throwing things at me? Well, live by the sword, die by the sword..."

And changed direction.

Re: Latest Con

"That'll be £1 extra per ticket please"

Yes. One of the counter staff at my local Vue tried to upgrade me from a normal showing to the extreme nonsense - by actually ringing that up on the till without asking if that's what I wanted. He then tried to justify it on the basis that "it only starts 10 minutes later than the normal screening" and "But it's better because [claptrap]".

It annoyed me because if I wanted to see that version, I would have *asked* to do so. At best, what the guy on the counter should have done, if unsure, is ask me whether I wanted to see the normal or extreme screening *before* ringing it up and asking me for more money than I expected to pay.

That was a good few years ago, and I haven't been there since. (And I love seeing fillums on the big screen - I used to go a lot.)

I'm stubborn like that.

Re: Sage has been like this since forever...

Yes, I know - and/or to a subscription model for their software.

However, that's irrelevant, because the version of the software I have (Sage Accounts 2013) works perfectly well, so I have no reason to upgrade any further (and nor do I want to due to a disagreement I had with Sage a while back - mentioned elsewhere in these comments).

The bottom line, therefore, is just because Sage are trying to push people cloudward, doesn't mean I have to follow the sheep - and nor does it mean I have to stray into another cloud-bound flock.

Although I don't really have the time, I have been (on and off for a few years) toying with the idea of writing something of my own- far less feature rich than big packages like Sage, but containing functionality that covers all the things I need to be able to do (and making up for some annoyances I have with the software). I'll need a very big supply of round tuits for that, though.

Re: Error, error. Does not compute...

Are they referring to the telemetry?

Re: Bah! 4VinceH

To avoid the potential straw man that may be looming, I did not say anything about the "wrong" language. With that out of the way, let's look at what I actually said.

I said that if I was to do it I'd use C because I mostly program in C. That's the same logic behind my mention of RISC OS: I mostly program on RISC OS.

If you want to identify the real 'cop out' though, look a little more carefully, because I've mentioned the real reason I can't do it twice.

From my original comment: "But sitting down and setting all this up? Nah. Time's too precious at the moment - so kudos to the guy for doing his version."

And from my reply to Spudley: "Actually not - if I did have the time to do anything like that, it would be written in C (or possibly BASIC) and most likely run on RISC OS."

To clarify, I'm extremely busy at the moment, and don't have the time to write something like I described. If I did have the time to sit down and do any programming¹, I'd be an idiot if I didn't use that time to finish existing projects that I'm behind on, instead of starting a new one - especially one that has no practical purpose.

The one bit of programming I will be doing somewhere in the next week or two - which won't be in C and will be on Windows rather than RISC OS - is to update a very old piece of software I wrote for a client. And that's because the time is being paid for by the client.

^{1. Or even related tasks such as writing a manual for an existing piece of software that desperately needs a manual to be written.}

Re: Seriously tough...

Can you do that over the phone now? I'm impressed!

"Why? I would have thought Hebrew would have been a better choice..."

Because it's to do with religion, so when someone at some point declared 'this because that' it was set in stone (so to speak), regardless of whether or not it would actually make any real sense at all if anyone ever asks why.

Re: A clever move

Or attended a 'Sticky Vicky' class entitled 'How to conceal things about your person' performance. Lessons take place in Benidorm.

Re: Micro Men

Here's the link Tom can't post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Re: En route from CAI to NCL

"Not necessarily an Acorn Archimedes.

Could easily be RISC OS running on a Raspberry Pi."

That's not a Pi - if it was the Pi build of RISC OS, the switcher icon (the acorn icon at the far right end of the icon bar) would be a raspberry. It's also not an Archimedes, because to the left of the acorn it shows a monitor icon rather than a palette icon. It's probably a RiscPC or A7000/A7000+ - I'd guess one of the latter because the drive icon in the (far left of the icon bar) is labelled VB7000.

Re: Big pipes are the only protection

"The (totally non-ironic, honestly) part of this story is that the vast majority of the traffic is coming out of IoT "security" devices such as cameras. I'm surprised that El Reg didn't pick up on this part."

Yes. Brian's post on the subject was quite long and covered a lot of related issues, but it would have been worth mentioning that - just a single sentagraph since this is a Darren Pauli post. Another thing worth mentioning would have been Akami's estimated cost of continuing to defend against the attack, and the estimated value of the free protection Akami were providing:

"In an interview with The Boston Globe, Akamai executives said the attack — if sustained — likely would have cost the company millions of dollars. In the hours and days following my site going offline, I spoke with multiple DDoS mitigation firms. One offered to host KrebsOnSecurity for two weeks at no charge, but after that they said the same kind of protection I had under Akamai would cost between $150,000 and $200,000 per year."

Multiple breaches, with lessons not learned after the first?

See also: TalkTalk.

See also: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/23/if_your_company_has_terrible_it_security_that_could_be_a_rational_business_decision/ (which I already know you've read because we replied to one another in the comments).

Re: Maybe he pissed off a customer?

"I got ripped off by the local fish-and-chippery, who gave me change for a $10 when I'd given her a $20"

I had a similar short changing problem once in a nearby Chinese takeaway that I used quite regularly - probably once a fortnight. After a brief exchange in which the woman insisted I'd given her a smaller note than I had, I simply said I would never again give them my custom - and all these years later, I still haven't.

Something else I've never given them is my excrement. That's just vile.

Mind you, I didn't get any abuse yelled at me, so perhaps I would have given them some waste product if I had received any abuse.

* thinks

No, no, I very much doubt I would.

Of the few I know, though, all but one of them had signed up with TalkTalk within a month of the breach being in the mainstream news. If they'd signed up now, I'd still be inclined to point out their history, and my flabber would still be gasted by the choice, but considerably less so.