Posts by Kubla Cant

Re: just accept that mistakes happen

And 700K users is no small number. Many, many websites would kill to have that level of traffic.

And that's the point, 700k is small for gov.uk.

Since when does the effort required to build a web page scale directly with the number of users? Clearly a large user population generates more tricky infrastructure requirements, and a web application may have to take account of traffic levels on its server. But web pages are much the same whether they're used by 700k users or 700.

Re: 01/26/2004 would have been cleared

So the date is a number

Nice try, but that number is an offset of [unspecified units] from [unspecified base date].

Computer dates are a complete Whack-a-Mole. For confirmation, see the way Java has kept on introducing novel ways to encode and manipulate dates. It's now reached the point where you get a date returned from some function and have to spend 15 minutes reading the API docs to find several other functions you can feed it through to get the right kind of date for the next function.

Re: the South African, the Spanish, the Denmark, the Brazilian, the Nigerian, etc. strains

I thought the reason for calling it Covid 19 was to get rid of any accusations of national finger-pointing

I think the whole world knows where it came from.

Re: Oh dear!

...driver's handbooks are now online as well. Or, seeing as it was a BMW, a very expensive optional extra

The good news is that BMW manuals are stored in the entertainment/navigation system so you can view them on-screen in the car. The bad news is that they won't display when the car's moving, so you can't ask your passenger to look something up for you while you're driving.

Re: Thermodynamic Pedantry Alert

It wasn't her pants that were thermodynamic!

Re: Backup system destroyed by Fire

If the backup system has been replaced and is operational, what's the point of mentioning the fire in the story?

Re: Hands up who thought it would be the cleaner again

the one smuggled didn't have the local power cord but the one from their originating country

Wouldn't it be easier to change the plug?

@doublelayer: good point.

Re: I have questions

I wondered about prescription lenses, but I supposed you might not need them to see a virtual screen on a surface close to your eyes. I'm not actually sure how the eye focuses on something like that.

Then again, you might need them to see the keyboard clearly, or to read paper manuals and write notes.

Re: Proof reader

Before university I spent some time working as a proof reader at a company that built nuclear power stations. I still wince at the ignorant corrections I tried to make to stuff that I was too uneducated to understand, but I can't have made many serious mistakes because the power stations have all survived to be decommissioned.

The result of nine months proof reading was that by the time I went up to university my ability to read normally was impaired, with lots of sub-vocalising and spelling out of words. (Well, that's my excuse for not doing much of the reading required for a degree.)

Re: Doh!

They aren't deeply stupid. It's just that their thought processes are controlled by electromagnetic waves from Venus, so they suffer from crippling latency.

Re: Only once

It's not just a language thing. If a rotary control thinks it's a rheostat, it turns clockwise to increase stuff. If it thinks it's a tap, it turns anticlockwise to open*. Why didn't the first rheostats mimic taps? And why are phone keypads the opposite layout to calculators and computers?

* At least, that's what I thought until I had a new basin mixer installed recently. But the left-hand tap opens clockwise. It turns out that it's designed for both lever tops, where this arrangement makes sense, and capstan tops, where it confuses.

Re: crashed on launch and been withdrawn

techies in government seem to be paid nowhere near market rate

Been looking for a new contract over the past few weeks. There was a job with HMRC working on something with a deadline at the end of December. They were offering £1,000 per day (or rather, night) for 12-hour shifts. And it was outside IR35.

Seems they can pay what's required when they're up against it, but the Covid tier lookup tool evidently isn't that important.

Re: I shall also avoid flying 737MAX that means avoiding Ryanair

Agreed.

I've never really understood the intense odium to which RyanAir is subjected. As far as I'm concerned, air travel in the 21st century is a pretty vile experience whatever the airline. The flight and the associated horrors of the departure terminal are the price I pay for foreign travel. The difference between an expensive flight and RyanAir is that between nasty and very nasty.

But I won't fly on their 737-MAXes.

Re: Bluetooth mice

I used to use BT but found, when dual-booting Linux/Windows, I was constantly re-pairing said mouse whenever I changed OS.

I use a Logitech M720 mouse over Bluetooth with a dual-boot laptop. The trick is to pair a different connection on the mouse with each O/S. It supports three connections, and switching between them is just a matter of pressing a button on the side of the mouse.

Re: Programming interminable comments

The joys of statement terminators

There is no joy to compare with JavaScript automatic semicolon insertion. It's a "feature" created for script kiddies too stupid or lazy to terminate their statements. It almost never causes bugs*, but when it does, it will take hours to find.

*the classic bug is where you have "return<newline><somethingVerboseLikeAnObjectLiteral>;<newline>". It will return after the first newline. In the absence of proper function signatures, this will only be manifest if the calling code fails in consequence of the undefined value returned.

Re: Consumers need to know what aircraft will be used before they book.

It's interesting to compare Boeing's desperate scramble to keep up with Airbus and McDonnell Douglas's similar efforts to build a wide-body competitor to Boeing. The defect with the DC-10 cargo door led to several near disasters, but the FAA, under pressure from McDonnell Douglas, mandated a low-priority fix. When the defect caused the 1974 Paris air crash, the manufacturers blamed it on a baggage handler.

Re: Windows screen capture

Just tried Win-Alt-R and got a message "Recording isn't working/Press [Win]+G for XBox Game Bar". I have not got, and do not want, an XBox.

I've only just noticed that my keyboard no longer has PrtScr - the print screen key that doesn't*, or Scroll Lock, another non-Ronseal key.

* Yes, I know it does screen shots

Re: 50 years ago ...

Long, long ago, you used to be able to phone Microsoft UK for support, as long as you didn't mind holding for several hours. Their hold music was some wheezy electronic piece by Jean-Michel Jarre, so you could never really tell whether you were still on hold or were just listening to the noise on a disconnected line.

Re: Infantile

What's the status of hunting with dogs legislation back in blighty?

You'll end up with hunting dogs that infect you with Covid. Is that what you want?

Re: can a straight man be treated as a victim of a homophobic assault?

It is the perpetrator's motivations that determine that

Intention of the attacker is what's important here

Worryingly, something qualifies as a "hate crime" if the victim perceives it as such. But I suppose we can take it that they have to be a member of a victimized group.

Re: Sadly, no international jet-settng for me

A few years ago we were off skiing for Christmas in Austria, myself, two friends and their two teenage sons. All fine until the final passport check at the gate, where the Thomson Air jobsworth told us the younger son couldn't board the plane because he had a US passport which expired in less than three months, and apparently the Schengen zone won't allow that (why?).

His father undertook to indemnify the airline if he was refused entry, but no. So they unloaded his bag from the hold and the poor boy prepared for a lonely Christmas at home.

On arrival at Innsbruck we rushed round to the Border Police station, where they confirmed that although this rule existed, they would never enforce it in a situation like this. So we spent the first few days of our skiing holiday frantically arranging another flight and confirming with the operations department of the airline that he would be allowed into Austria. The mobile phone bill was nearly as expensive as the flight.

Moral: avoid Crystal Ski and Thomson (or whatever they call themselves now) like the plague.

Re: Flying rats

Maybe it could emit a Stuka-like wail when the AI detects chip-bombing behaviour.

the live and neutral pins have insulation on them so even when the plug is half out you're not touching bare metal

That's a fairly recent innovation. Older 13A plugs have pins that are brass all the way down.

Re: Don't you...

The weird thing is that JavaScript is shown as most popular in "Web, Cloud".

Web, obviously, and I know people write server-side applications for NodeJS. But I'm surprised, not to say disappointed, to find a misbegotten browser scripting language leading the field in the cloud.

Python is apparently most popular in IoT apps. If I was a Python enthusiast I'd keep that quiet.

Re: fish leather is a thing

Fish leather has been a thing for a long time. It's called shagreen. I once met a man who was selling reproduction 17th and 18th century microscopes. He'd had to source shagreen for them.

Re: What has happened to deterministic behavior?

Exactly. In every environment I've worked in this millennium it's been axiomatic that the code running in production is the code that's been tested. Especially important when CI/CD is in use.

Re: Chelmsford

the record for the most hair salons on one street

The late, lamented Douglas Adams told us about the Shoe Event Horizon, where everything in the world turns into shoe shops. Time has moved on. Now the towns of Britain seem to be being taken over by barber's shops, many of them, for some reason, Turkish.

How can there possibly be enough money in barbering to support all these places? And why have we lost interest in shoes?

Re: It should have been translated by a Dutch lawyer

In my experience, translations are normally farmed out to specialists. As others have said, the same is true of legal text.

The most plausible explanation here is that the freebie version is a placeholder that should have been removed when the definitive version became available.

Upvoted. But why does inverted text print "l" and "t" as descenders?

Re: No cursor keys

Not only will it make you a Pro Blademaster, it has a "Programable Genius Knob" for you to fiddle with. (You'd think a genius would know how to spell "programmable".)

This bag-for-life has fallen apart. Can I have another?

No. It's the bag's life, not yours.

Re: An ex employer did that too.

Everybody complaining about conflicting requirements should count themselves lucky. Most of the projects I've worked on lately have almost no requirements except the release date.

When the software goes into QA with inadequate requirements, the testers blame the developer for not refusing to start coding until they're clarified.

Then when it gets into UAT with two days to go before release, everybody blames the developer if the result doesn't exactly match their private wet dreams.