Posts by Kubla Cant 2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
Almost all the systems I've worked on in the past 20 years have used relational databases as their back-end storage. One curious thing I've noticed is the extent to which otherwise competent, even brilliant, developers fall apart when they start to work on a database.
It's the same thing over and over. A primary key is too much trouble - let's just have a unique index. Normalisation is for anal-retentive obsessives. Why use a surrogate key when we can index several attributes? Let's just pretend that the database is a kind of flat-file storage.
This surprises me. I'm a self-taught developer with nothing more than O Level maths, but it seems obvious that getting the data design right is fairly easy and pays big dividends. My colleagues, on the other hand, who have been educated and trained to a high level in this stuff, mostly fail to get it.
Sanger was a truly great Briton. In view of this, and of the fact that the Sanger Centre is in Cambridgeshire, and spells its name correctly, why does the article say "in 1993 he would open a research center"?
I don't believe there have ever been any research centers [sic] near Cambridge. There used to be Build Center [sic] and Plumb Center [sic], but I'm glad to say they seem to have failed to prosper, and now have different names.
What is it with glyphs, icons, hieroglyphs etc? We've spent 3000 years developing a system for unambiguous written communication, and we're getting to the point where nearly everybody in the world can read it. But instruction leaflets and public signs increasingly consist of a set of glyphs and icons like some pre-school party game. I look forward to the law suit where the plaintiff says he couldn't understand the instructions for his chain saw because they were entirely in picture language, whereas grown-ups communicate in words.
Do you remember the container loads of manuals that, for instance, VMS came with?
I certainly do. Six feet of shelf space. Even more remarkably, I think I read about 60% of them.
super-friendly quips and jokes
No jokes in the VMS manuals, admittedly. But I recall one of the RSTS manuals that described the excruciating process of linking executables in such a way that the system could swap overlay segments in and out of memory. The linker in question was called the task builder, and the manual contained a full-page cartoon of a workman, with the caption "Tommy the Taskbuilder".
Removing all the bends in country roads would probably cause more disruption than is justified. And it's not just the bendy roads that are a problem...
I drive to work across the fens near Peterborough. One of the roads I use is dead straight for about 8 miles, but that doesn't mean it's safe. Fenland roads float on some kind of brushwood mattress, and are continually subsiding. The surfaces are so bad that a common accident is bouncing off the road into the adjacent ditch (if you're lucky - river if you aren't).
A fascinating article. But am I the only reader to detect a conceited "I'm a scientist, so I'm always right" attitude? The author's belief in the infallibility of his methods is strikingly similar to the policeman's belief in the infallibility of his speed gun.
A bit more humility about the fallibility of the system he works in wouldn't be amiss. His attitude to the Sally Clark case, an appalling tragedy that resulted directly from the shortcomings of the expert witness system, seems to be "Shit happens".
It's important to distinguish between the justifications for out-of-hours work.
In many circumstances people do it because it's an emergency, or out of a sense of obligation to their team. The supermarket manager who spent Christmas day shifting frozen food was probably motivated in this way. The payback for this should be that you're more valued by your colleagues and bosses.
In other cases people accept the imposition because it comes with extra pay. I once bought a (second-hand) Porsche 911 largely out of the proceeds of out-of-hours support.
The real curse is the job where everybody works extra hours every day and takes work home, and nobody manages to use up the full holiday allowance. These companies are cultivating the vice known as "presenteeism". There's ample evidence that they don't actually get any more done than humane employers.
Taxes go up, taxes go down, new regulations for married couples, special exemptions here and there...
In most systems things like this are expected to be variable. Taxes may go up and down, they may be charged on different things and calculated in different ways, but the basic principle of taxation doesn't change. The rules change, even if the requirement to follow rules is fixed.
That's the difference between a computer system and, say, a clock. One is adaptable, the other always does the same thing.
I've used IE for years and years!
I don't think IE is vilified for the user experience it offers. The earlier versions, especially IE6, were a source of numerous problems for web developers and designers because they failed to adhere to HTML standards in some quite important ways. This has nothing to do with "MS bashing", unless you think that whatever Microsoft does is the de-facto standard.
When I was younger, I used to be a clumsy, slow and awkward girl.
However, just like the story of ugly duckling, people told me that I have really matured and changed over the years. I feel confident in my abilities now, and I'm eager to show you what I can do.
Pass the sick-bag, Alice.
I suppose this is some kind of confession, and it should read:
When I was younger I was a crap browser that didn't comply with standards and I caused the proliferation of invalid HTML pages.
However, just like the story of ugly duckling, people told me that I have really matured and changed over the years. Unfortunately, it's too late. By the time I became a swan there were lots of other swans, and many people liked penguins more, so nobody cared.
The reference implementation of the C compiler costs £0 including full Source Code.
Exactly! I doubt that there are any current languages for which you can't get a free compiler. Many of them offer a free IDE. In the Java world, it's a battle between four or five IDEs that are either entirely free or offer a free version. I think Microsoft offer some sort of .NET freebie. If you're truly perverse and you search hard enough I bet you can even get COBOL free.
the place you have to drive through when going to France
As @bigtimehustler points out, Belgium isn't a sensible route from England to France. Actually, I thought Belgium was the place the Germans always invade on their way to France. Perhaps the frequent German presence has inured its citizens to the imposition of identity papers.
I've had no problems using my paper licence to hire cars in Europe and use courtesy cars in England.
I refuse to incur the inconvenience and cost involved in getting a plastic photo card. But it's getting to the stage where I need to charge for wear and tear on my paper licence every time I'm required to show it, as I don't know how much longer it will last. The licence I paid for when I passed my test was a nice little red booklet. I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to replace it with a folded sheet of A4 paper - these things are supposed to last a lifetime.
I suppose the original value of the charts was to help record shops decide what to stock. Vinyl records consumed quite a lot of space and capital (before vinyl, shellac 78s consumed even more), so retailers would want to maximise their stock turnover by concentrating on the fast-selling titles.
It's all changed now. First of all, there's the "long tail" phenomenon where big online retailers can carry massively diverse stock, and then with the change to music downloads there's no relation between sales and stock volume, and the stock occupies negligible space.
I've rarely used a Tesco filling station where you didn't have to queue to pay. Which member of the queue is going to determine the targeted ads? Or will it be an average? Not much point if it is.
Can we give the system a nervous breakdown by shifting around in the queue so that it has to try to target an old geezer and a teenage woman both at the same time?
The word "faggot" meaning "bundle of sticks" is almost certainly derived from the Latin "fascis", which was notably used to describe the bundle of rods carried by lictors, the officials who accompanied Roman consuls. The bundle represented the right of the consul to inflict corporal punishment; when it contained an axe it represented his right to execute.
The best-known term derived from the fasces is, of course Fascism. In the flat estuaries of East Anglia, the rivers are contained by fascine banks, made of bundles of sticks that trap silt.
@frank ly: You're correct in identifying "operative" as an adjective, but mistaken in thinking the usage wrong.
"operative" in this context is an instance of an adjectival noun. The missing "man" or "person" is understood. Adjectival nouns are more common in inflected languages than in English, although there are plenty of English examples, because the inflection of the adjective supplies information about the implied noun. They aren't a recent invention, either; "cetera" is Latin for "other things", where "-a" is the neuter plural ending that implies "things".
That said, I have to agree that the "operative" usage carries overtones of officialese, perhaps because it de-humanises an operator by reducing him to one of his attributes. I think that's why I chose it.
May I point out that it's a sink plunger.
It clears blockages by establishing a seal around the lip of the plunger, which allows the operative to send shock waves down the blocked pipe by vigorously working the plunger while crying "Exterminate!". This would never work in a toilet because the outlet is too big for the seal to cover it.
My ex-wife puts knives in the dishwasher, and hers are always blunt. Mind you, they're crap knives to start with. The other problem is that the knife is always in the dishwasher when you need it.
I've never used a sharpener - the grinding noise as you drag the blade through it sounds too much like damage happening. For the past couple of years I've been using a ceramic "steel" , and I find it much more effective than the steel steel I used before. When I bought my insanely expensive Global knife, I couldn't persuade myself to get an £80 Global ceramic steel as well. I subsequently found a ceramic steel in Ikea, for £10 IIRC. Actually, the top-of-the-range knives I bought in Ikea are pretty good, too, and much cheaper than Global.
@Hungry Sean: "Sabatier" isn't a brand. It used to be a name used indiscriminately by manufacturers in Thiers , the French equivalent of Sheffield, but more recently it just describes any French-style cooking knife, typically with a triangular blade and a black handle.
A few years ago, when I couldn't find a decent ad-blocker for Chrome on Linux, I installed Privoxy, an ad-blocking proxy server. I haven't updated the block list for a good while, but it still seems to keep out most of the junk.
As it's a proxy server, rather than a browser add-on, it works transparently for all browsers. Also, it returns a dummy response for all requests, which I imagine makes it much harder for anti-ad-blocking software to detect the block.
many of the early DAB-only sets will have been replaced by newer models that are DAB+ compatible anyway
Why? My two DAB radios are in the same condition as when I bought them. Barring accidents, they should be good for about 50 years. If I'm compelled to replace perfectly sound kit that I've been encouraged to buy because of the next stupid fad I shall expect to be compensated.
Maybe your radios have a hard life and need frequent replacement.
You start off with a set of results you want to achieve. These depend on each other and on external factors. You arrange them in the correct logical sequence, reference the external factors, and connect everything together. If this doesn't produce the required output, you go through making adjustments and re-ordering until it does. Finally, you make sure that it's all syntactically valid and easy to follow.
A generalised description of coding, or possibly of journalistic writing. (If you're a great author there's probably a bit more to it, though I love the idea of Finnegan's Wake as the literary equivalent of obfuscated Perl.)
Scraping the bottom of the esquire barrel...
"Esquire" seems to belong to a different category from "Mr", "Mrs" etc, because of its usage. Nowadays it's mostly confined to addresses. My impression is that it became common in the 18th century, but that it was never used in the same way as "Mr". One can imagine "How very ill Miss Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy", but substitute "Fitzwilliam Darcy esquire", and it sounds absurd.
I have an idea that until the late 19th century "Esquire" denoted some kind of gentry status, possibly a man who was armigerous but not titled.
I seem to recall it's recent conventional useage (which has sadly lapsed) was applied to young men before they became a 'Mr.' i.e. when they got married - a little bit like Miss and Mrs
I thought unmarried young men were styled "Master", until the usage lapsed in the face of objections from young men called Bates.
Also, I believe it should be "its recent conventional usage".
if she made a sex tape willingly but under the assumption it would be private, then uploading it was a heinous crime
It was a pretty nasty breach of trust, but it wasn't "a heinous crime". It's not hard to think of quite a few other ways in which sexual partners can betray each other.
I doubt that you would be recommending a gaol term if he'd treated his friends to graphic descriptions, or even a private video show, though both would be a betrayal of trust. The distinction seems to lie in the scale of the exposure, which isn't really the moral issue.
@I ain't Spartacus: The question is whether our brains are just very complicated, but squishy, computers.
Gilbert Ryle's phrase "the ghost in the machine" exposes the problem of thinking that we have anything beyond a squishy computer to work with. If you once accept that mental processes involve something beyond the physical then anything goes. Non-physical thought processes are as intrinsically likely as gods, fairies and flying spaghetti monsters.
While "his" has the endorsement of grammar Nazis, "her" is espoused by the politically correct, and "their" has the overwhelming backing of popular usage, it's odd that all these groups would probably object to "it" and "its" to indicate a person of unspecified gender. In most cases it would be clear enough from the context that the referend was not inanimate.
@Chairo: a single thoughtless action, put on the internet by another thoughtless person
It's a wise policy to bear in mind that things you do in public are ... public.
If the woman in the story is posting pictures of men who catcalled her in private, then she's invading their privacy. But if, as is probable, they did it in public, there's no privacy to invade.
In these days of ubiquitous camera phones, surveillance cameras and Google vans, the only way to ensure that something you do doesn't end up on the Internet is not to do it in public. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not, but it's the way things are.
Freakonomics, or a similar book, contains a table that plots weird children's names against the terminal educational age of parents. The lower the TEA, the more exotic the more exotic the name.
My personal bête noir is people who give their children names that are already familiar forms of other names. If you want him to be known as Jack, baptise (or register) him as John. That way he gets a choice.
It's not the diphthong that ASCII threatens, it's the ligature; "ae" replaces "æ". To be fair, the death of the ligature is old news; even in the days of hot metal, many fonts, and many more compositors, didn't support ligatures. Strictly, neither "ae" or "æ" is a diphthong, which consists of consecutive vowels with distinct sounds (exhaustive information here).
The "ae" combination seems to have been on the way out for some time, anyway: "mediæval" is now mostly "medieval", even among a population as reactionary as medievalists, and I don't think "pedagogue" has been "pædagogue" in living memory.
it's just to indicate they are in the fast lane
There's more to it than that.
The left-hand indicator means "I am here in the fast lane driving my clapped-out Citroen at 150 km/h** and I find myself 2m from your rear bumper. I expect you to pull yourself over into the slow-moving traffic on the right so that I can accelerate myself to 155 and overtake you."
The right-hand indicator means "I hear you sound the horn because I have just swerved in front of you without warning causing you to brake yourself hard. You are a type of unkempt merino sheep!"
** He has removed the carpet so he can push the pedal down further.
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