* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

Alister

We had a similar thing happen with one of our clients - big rail travel provider - who we used to send performance figures to every month for their public facing website, page views and click-throughs and so on, which they based their ongoing strategy on. This is in the days before Google Analytics was a thing, and we had been using Webtrends to gain the metrics, but the client decided they didn't want to pay Webtrends prices, so they asked us to switch to ClickTale.

The following month, the results were completely different and bore no resemblance to the historical results from Webtrends - as I suppose Clicktales' algorithms were different to those used by Webtrends. This caused much consternation, and lots of angry emails as to why the website was no longer getting the same traffic as it used to.

If they had looked at actual online ticket sales, they would have seen that not much had changed, but it took a lot of explaining.

We, Wall, we, Wall, Raku: Perl creator blesses new name for version 6 of text-wrangling lingo

Alister

Re: Rebranding

Windscale -> Sellafield, Arthur Andersen -> Accenture -> Monday.

Windscale became Monday, who knew?

;)

Criminalise British drone fliers, snarl MPs amid crackdown demands

Alister

Re: Make it like owning a vehicle

In the UK, you have to be over 18 to buy a kitchen knife, or for some reason, a spoon

Alister

Re: "make it a crime to disable geofencing..."

If there's no geofencing in your home-brew software to start with... does that make it a crime?

Well yes, obviously you are dangerously subversive, and should report to your nearest detention centre for re-education immediately.

Alister

Re: What's the difference

What's the difference between a radio controlled plane or helicopter and a drone?

I think a primary difference is the amount of skill required to operate them. RC model planes and helicopters require a certain amount of skill to get them up into the air and stay there - helicopters more than planes - whereas most "drones" (mostly quadcopter designs) have built in automated stability and flight characteristics which require much less skill to operate.

And then there's the cost, too, fully flyable off the shelf quadcopters can be had for very little money.

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Alister

Re: More proof of address

Yep, I've come across that as well, Army ID is not on the official list of approved methods of identification.

Nor is a police warrant card, annoyingly.

Alister

Proof of address

Had a similar runaround when my ex-wife died. We had been divorced for more that ten years, but as the surviving parent of our children it was up to me to sort out the resulting mess (she was single when she died). However, trying to prove that I had any right to be managing her affairs was a nightmare, the usual proof of address wasn't much help, as I haven't lived at her address for years, and she had reverted to her maiden name.

SAP's CEO Bill McDermott quits: Will hand over to co-captains for Next Generation reboot

Alister

Make it so, number one

Subspace communication over, enterprise commander out

See you in Hull: First UK city to be hooked up to full-fibre broadband

Alister

If you live in Hull, why are you spelling it fiber?

;)

Is right! Ofcom says Scousers enjoy a natter on the phone compared to southern blerts

Alister

I wonder if the Mayor of Rotherham is called Steve Liverpool?

Edit: Nope, Councillor Jenny Andrews, apparently.

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

Alister

Re: "flew over to Marshall Space Flight Centre in my T 38"

And why did he have to burn $000/hour for a military jet instead of flying commercially?

Because speed.

iTerm2 issues emergency update after MOSS finds a fatal flaw in its terminal code

Alister

or call 0118 999 88199 9119 725... 3

You forgot the gap after 725

HPE's Eng Lim Goh on spaceborne computers, NASA medals – and AI at the final frontier

Alister

Impressive!

Running shrinkwrapped Red Hat Linux and software to harden the system against environmental factors such as cosmic radiation

Who knew shrinkwrap could be so versatile?

For the Mars mission, they can simply wrap the spacecraft in clingfilm...

Spacecraft that told us 'you're screwed' finally gives up the ghost after doubling its shelf life

Alister

Is that the whole of the Italian Air Force, or just a few selected individuals?

Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool

Alister

One of our client contacts was called Michael Hunt. Sadly he always signed his emails Mike Hunt.

FBI softens stance on ransomware: it's (sort of) okay to pay off crims to get your data back

Alister

Re: Effed up backups

I'm gusted to hear that you are gruntled, and I would hope that you are always sheveled whilst at work and never dress in a peccable fashion.

HP polishes the redundancy cannon, prepares to fire 16% of workforce

Alister

The company expects to reduce gross global headcount

...through a combination of employee exits (7th floor windows) and voluntary early retirements (Kzzzzzzzzrrrrrrrrrrrrrrttttt!)

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Alister

Re: the ability to remotely disconnect

I live in what is the third in a row of seven terraced houses - so the centre of the row.

In the bad winter a few years ago, we made the discovery that whilst the rest of the terrace gets their water fed from the rear of the properties, mine, inexplicably, is fed from the front, and so whilst all the others had no water as the pipes froze up, mine was fine, thank you... :)

Alister

Re: Guest column

C'est toute les couilles, ca.

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

Alister

Transmission Bus

I think I've posted this before, but it seems relevant:

Back in the early eighties, I worked on communications links for radio repeaters for public utilities and emergency services radios.

We had a rural repeater site on top of a hill, which had a microwave link to another repeater site on another hill about ten miles away. in between the two were a number of other ranges of hills, but all just low enough that line-of-sight was maintained.

This microwave link worked fine for a number of years, and then suddenly began to fail intermittently but always around the same time on a Thursday afternoon. It didn't happen every week, but say every two weeks.

After a lot of investigation, and a complete replacement of equipment at both ends, it was discovered that on one of the intervening hills was a small country lane which went over the brow of the hill more or less in line with the line-of-sight link.

Off that lane was a sort of lay-by or turning circle, which was used by the local bus service to turn round at the end of one of their routes.

The buses would drop off at their last stop lower down the valley, and drive up and turn round, and then wait for half an hour before starting the next run.

Turns out that most of the time, they used a single decker bus on that route, but Thursdays were market day, so they used to put a double-decker on the route on that day. If it happened to park at a certain spot in the lay-by, it used to neatly break the line-of-sight between the two repeater towers.

The only reason we found out about this was that we set up a temporary intermediate link (a van with a couple of dishes on it) in that lay-by whilst we were testing, and the bloke saw the bus come and park up whilst he was there, otherwise we could still have been looking!

The microwave antenna on both of the masts was at the very top of the mast, so couldn't be raised, but we managed to build an extension for the antenna on the other mast, and re-align the path just enough that it would be above the possible obstruction.

Alister

Re: Battleship!

"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!!"

Kaspersky warns of encryption-busting Reductor malware

Alister

and, for at least one victim, through a popular warez website over HTTP

I didn't realise warez was still a thing - it must be 20 years since I used a warez site.

Have you been Thomas Crooked? Watch out for cybercrims slinging holiday-themed fakes

Alister
Holmes

well I never

Who'd have thought that criminals would take advantage?

vBulletin zero-day KOs Comodo user forums – that's 245,000 accounts at risk of compromise

Alister

Or possibly they already had the change scheduled, and Monday would have been the earliest they could do it anyway?

Alister

It's easy to point and laugh

However here's a couple of thoughts:

The reality is for any large organisation, that there will be a change management process which has to be followed, and that process can take some time.

There must be a risk management process, and setting up an agreed maintenance window, and notifying users that the forum will be offline.

It's not just a single bloke in his mum's basement, who can decide to do the upgrade when he wants.

Secondly, VBulletin is notoriously fickle, and if you have any customisations or add-ons then upgrading to the latest version can really screw things up. To do that without any testing would be fatal, and obviously testing takes time.

Given they had five days notice, I'm not surprised they hadn't yet patched it.

In 21st-century tech dystopia, smart TV watches you, warns Princeton privacy prof

Alister

Re: I just want a fucking display - no Smartiness whatsoever.

And I will plug in my choice of content delivery hardware.

Like an Amazon Fire stick, or Roku, or Apple TV?

Chinese sleazeball's 17-year game of hide-and-seek ends after drone finds him on mountain

Alister

What's this, a "Drones are good" story?

Drones are EEEEEEVILL and don't you forget it!

IT workers: Speaking truth to douchebags since 1977

Alister

Re: Out of cheese error

My first computer was one of the old 2 megalith jobs.

Ah yes, a miracle of silicon chunk technology...

Alister

Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story of a supercomputer which was built to run military battle simulations, but the General in charge of the project had pissed off the computer scientist who was programming the machine.

So come the day of the big switch on, the computer would happily run through mathematical problems, but if it detected a military scenario, it would output a rude message about the general, instead of the expected answer.

The Pacifist

'Six' in the city: Kiwi sportswear shop telly beamed X-rated flicks for hours over weekend

Alister

Have you no sole?

600 armed German cops storm Cyberbunker hosting biz on illegal darknet market claims

Alister

600 cops eh ?

In the UK that's about six county forces worth...

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

Alister

Re: The English language includes support for lists

I thought he was starting a moan about prostate troubles

But wouldn't he have mentioned the colon?

Alister

Re: Back in the day

Don't be so obtuse

Alister

He'll never improve his French that way but tant pis SLASH merde.

ce n'est pas grave, Oui?

Reach out and touch fake: Hand tracking in VR? How about your own, personal, haptics?

Alister

from the land of clogs

Wot, Cumbria?

BOFH: We must... have... beer! Only... cure... for... electromagnetic fields

Alister
Thumb Up

And if you think the paranoia's bad now, imagine what it'll be like next week after the PFY and I pop up to the users' office later this evening with a couple of heat guns and melt everything plastic within 1 metre radius of the domestic units..

Brilliant Simon, just brilliant! You owe me a new keyboard, but I owe you several pints, so let's call it quits...

You are faking it! No, you are! No, AT&T is... Verizon, T-Mobile US execs form 5G circular firing squad on Twitter

Alister

Re: Do I need to wear clothes when I use it?

Just a dressing-gown with interesting stains down the front would do...

The Wun Show: Douglas Crockford has been sniffing JavaScript's bad parts again

Alister

Re: Not right in the head

You may be old enough to remember how the charity "Spastic Society" was renamed due to people using the word "Spastic" in a negative light.

And can't you see what's wrong with that? Spastic is the correct medical term for those suffering with various muscle related illnesses, and yet because the term was used in a derogatory fashion, it's original usage is now frowned upon.

In the same way, black as a description of colour is now considered incorrect, which is just stupid, and spade to describe a digging implement, and slope for a gradual descent, even dyke, to describe a retaining wall is now considered improper.

It is ridiculous that words which have been co-opted for abusive or derogatory use should no longer be acceptable in their original context.

Alister

Re: Not right in the head

I sincerely hope that I never "catch up" to the point of being hysterically hypersensitive about every mention of an illness or disability. That's a symptom of a much deeper sickness in society.

HMRC slaps Getronics with winding-up petition: It'll be sorted out today, blurts tech services firm

Alister

Blimey, you lot do overreact nowadays, I'd already looked up when the company was started before I posted, it was a bloody joke, you bunch of twats.

Alister

Getronics, founded 1887 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands,

Wow, those Dutch were really ahead of the game, they had electronics in 1887!

Black holes are like buses: You wait for one – and three turn up at once in galaxy merger

Alister

Re: Smash???

El Reg is a tabloid, didn't the red header give it away?

As a bronze badge holder you should know this.

Boffins build a tiny nanolaser that can be inserted inside our cells

Alister

Re: Clickety-clack

They definitely used the soundtrack of Strowger uniselectors, so maybe they had some real ones wired up?

Doing nights in a telephone exchange in the late seventies / early eighties, I will never forget the chugga-chugga-chugga-braaaaaaaap noise.

Alister

Re: Enquiring minds want to know:

Antlers are basically muscleless, jointless legs.

Really? And there's me thinking they were secondary sexual characteristics of certain cervids. Yes, they are bone, but they are discarded and regrown every year.

Moose antlers are even described as palmate.

They are described as palmate when they take on a flattened and spread out appearance, just like a human palm - or for that matter, the broad leaves of a palm tree.

Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

Alister

It is my understanding that the USPTO are happy to grant Patents without much checking, and rely on subsequent litigation to clarify the veracity and validity of the claim.

Let's hope in this case the Patent is struck down.

US lobby group calls for open standards to fight Huawei 'threat'

Alister

Re: Oops...

Yep, I thought, given that context, this quote was rather hypocritical:

they said given China's previous willingness to steal technology secrets, allowing Huawei into critical infrastructure was too big a risk

Seeing as Huawei have the most to lose, I would have thought.

Nine words to ruin your Monday: Emergency Internet Explorer patch amid in-the-wild attacks

Alister
Facepalm

Re: Microsoft Update Catalog only

just pull it in manually. Trivial to do.

Yeah, all 1.4GB of it. Bloody idiots. If it's so urgent, why make it part of a massive download?

Cumulative Update for Windows Server 2016 for x64-based Systems (KB4522010) 1420.6MB

Why worry about cost of banning certain Chinese comms providers? Fire Huawei, says analyst

Alister

CEO John Strand told The Register: "This is an important debate to have. "

Except you don't seem to want a debate, just impose your (flawed) opinion on everyone else.

After complaints over leaked Voice Assistant recordings, Google says: We hear you

Alister

Re: "audio snippets are never associated with any user accounts "

Heyup John, I didn't know you'd moved, when did that happen?

Oh, and I still think you do very well for 164, you look good!

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Alister

The courts are the wrong place to be doing this

The courts are absolutely the right place to be doing this.

A truly independent judiciary (as opposed to the American system, where Judges are political appointees) is what provides the necessary checks and balances to government.