Posts by BongoJoe

Re: Participating in terrorist activities

Or as my father discovered in the heady days of the early to mid forties, that outside of Communist France they were being blown up to stop the advance of the allied forces.

Re: Sad state...

Street graffiti goes corporate. So when is the IPO set for? I have a mental image of a street artist surrounded by guys in suits... the lawyer, the PR guy, some staff... he's painting and they're having a meeting.

And in that meeting they're discussing Banky being laid off and the graffiti operations outsourced to India.

Re: Canada calling. Where can I send in my License Fee?

And don't forget all the pointless talent shows that you could ever wish for, cookery programmes galore and lots of cheap programmes encouraging you to sell your heirlooms at knock down prices to some conman in a funny hat and bow tie.

And next to no sport neither.

Re: Vote

If you're going that route I would hope a certain T Blair plays some sort of instrument too so I can include him. Air guitar, I think - can't see this man touch anything with real substance..

He has let a few pictures of himself with a Stratocaster be released. No doubt to show that he's cool and one of the people.

No dobut he'll soon claim that he played along with Jimi Hendrix in much the same way he used to watch Milburn play.

Oh, I have thought of another name: Lars Ulrich.

Re: biiig problem...

I'm curious. Why the downvote?

Have I said something erroneous or does the fact that some of my clients aren't using this latest week's Shiny offending someone?

Re: 192.150.16.235

Thanks for that; that's gone into the every enlarging HOSTS file.

Re: PAYG wins

One of the reasons why I went PAYG. And if one is really cheesed off then just change the SIM and number and tell your chums your new one and off you go.

Re: So Battleship 2, is it then?

...so, it's not the only way to be sure!

Re: Incompatability

What about the small of the back?

Which is why the Gap books are so good. One really develops a feeling (mostly of distaste) for everyone.

Moreover it's a sign of a good book when, years later, one can still remember the main characters' names.

Well, they could go further and shove in stuff like "-ENU" that they use on their server products to really confuse us all.

Whatever they call it, unless it does backward compatability in a backward and compatible manner then I won't touch it.

Re: Not unique

I also thought that the De Koninck brewery in Antwerpen also did this.

Re: It's getting worse

No doubt that the editorial team consultated Stephen Fry for technical guidance...

Re: Forget the 'WHEEL'...

There was that old quote about the signs of civilsation were along the lines of having a pub, a jail and a racecourse.

Re: BBC content is no longer worth the Licence Fee.

We've got rid of ours years ago. And we don't miss it.

For TV dramas there's always Netflix or even the iPlayer applications of the various channels.

To be fair I have only heard a few things about it. I haven't got a clue as to what it is, where it is and what it's supposed to do for us.

I am not rubbishing what may be, for all I know, a perfectly good working establishment but it does have a rather trite name.

I have left IT in the City a decade ago and, really, I have no idea what this is all about. So if I haven't a clue then I wouldn't expect many MPs to have a clue neither.

I know that the government is wanting everyone to get into coding because of something on the BBC (again only heresay as I don't have a telly) and if this is some sort of Blue Sky project to get IT moving and people into software development then I think that this is the wrong way to go about it.

If we're having establishments built up on a roundabout or around a roundabout (yes, I must look this up as I have a vision in my head that won't go away of Royston Vasey zoo) then we're going to get a hive of middle managers and HR droids sucking the life out of everything and making everything, as usual, London and Boris-centric.

I would be better if the government arranged with every multinational to ship out to every UK resident who requests it a free full development package from all the major corporations so that we can have a country full of developers living and working all over the country.

Re: uncrackable password

Such as ilovemysheep?

And then the Saes eat them.

Re: I don't see it working

"No, officer. I wasn't playing with myself as I passed by the school entrance. I was merely adjusting the volume on my iPad."

Re: Not WYSIWYG

That is surely the job of the template.

The trouble wth Word is how that it's evolved. Once upon a time it was simple everything worked on normal.dot as the default template. Any global 'templates' (i.e. .dot files loaded in the start-up folder) added code functionality and menu items to the whole Word session.

Then the concept of the document template was added. Here we could put the styles for the document as well as the layout and so on and so forth. Any VBA which was required for the template could go in here and this is where one should have had a Manuscript.dot template for the authors.

The idea by now was for the user to get rid of the normal.dot stuff. In fact, it was never ever a good idea to put any code, styles or formatting in normal.dot as it became something which had to be sacrificed from time to time as it ended up as Microsoft's scratch pad and all sorts of internal bonkersness went on in there.

Problems would then occur with users of MS Word when they didn't use document templates but instead formatted directly on normal.dot and this is then when things started to bork even faster than before. I always trained my clients to have a three layer 'trifle' going on: normal.dot at the bottom, the document template (the .dot file) and then the document at the top.

As someone rightly said above here; putting VBA into documents is the work of the devil. I agree, there should never be any code in any of the .doc files; they should either be in one of the global templates (I used to have dozens running which really made them not templates per se) or in the document template.

Then advance further to today. And we have Themes. This is complete bollocks and baloney; this ought to be in the templates and not in the document and MS have managed to break something that was more or less broken anyway. They've managed to wean a whole generation of uses off something that almost worked onto something that I have been spending (or have spent as I don't touch Word development any more) years on educating users.

But, hey, it's the Microsoft say. It makes things more dumbed down, more shiny and underneath they've really buggered it up.

Back to Scrivener; that works well and it does export to Word. Writing to Word via COM works really well. Well, to an certain degree. Which is why in my code when I write to Word in my nightly document runs (I tend to create at least half a dozen documents a night of over 100 pages of densely formatted text in tables, using tabs and styles) and I have found ways to stop Word exploding.

It isn't for no reason why I have a routine that I call every few paragraphs that I have had to write which I call PreventWordDeath() . The name of it may explain what it does. I've had to as Word is utterly borked in about every department but at least it's got a COM interface, has a good Object Model inside so it does the job. At least if one has struggled with it for decades and knows its many thousands of foibles.

Enough of this. I need a drink. My consultant told me this morning that I need to drink up to six litres of clear fluids a day and one can't get any clearer than gin. So this is me signing off my brain now...

Is there any other kind?

Philip K Dick would tend to disagree.