* Posts by Shez

45 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2010

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Shez

Re: It's still going on

I've had that issue with sharepoint as well, it allowed me to upload the file, but then no-one could retrieve it, turns out it was a hyphen which wasn't allowed. The admin modified some config file which then allowed it... if it's a valid character which works when you modify the config, why was it disabled by default, and why did it let me upload the file without warning me that no-one would be able to download it?

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Shez

why a new install?

If all the guy did was delete duplicate files then why did a new install need to be mailed out, surely it's just a case of copying the remaining files and renaming the copy back to what the now deleted duplicate file was called?

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

Shez

"What are they doing if it's a multi year process to switch over? Manually entering DB records for every single person?"

Basically that, the claimant has to register a new claim on the new system (after being invited to do so whenever they've got the new system ready to handle that type of claim)

BT wins £26m extension on NI Oracle finance system project

Shez

"The Department has commenced started a Programme of work (Integr8) to commence start the process of preparing getting ready to start for procurement of new Finance and HR technology solutions for Central Government."

so nowhere near actually replacing, and probably won't be by the end of the extension

Scientists repurpose hoverfly vision to detect drones by sound

Shez

Do hoverflies get stoned?

Just wondering after seeing the hoverfly in the video flying round what looked like a cannabis plant.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Shez

Does Diesel not go off?

I know petrol does, well not necessarily go off, but it degrades over time. I would have expected Diesel to as well, necessitating a complete replacement (ideally before it goes off so it can be resold while still good) of generator fuel supplies periodically.

Edit... just googled it and yes it does - apparently it goes gummy, however with the right additives and storage can be kept for around 12 months.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Shez

Yes, but in any well designed system the log drive is completely separate to any data/system drives

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Shez

Re: Wrong number

No, but there are unfortunately an increasing amount of business that seem to expect you to contact them via Whatsapp or Facebook etc, particularly small local businesses - plumbers sparkies etc. I tried to book my dog into a daycare place and never heard back from them on the phone, I mentioned it to a friend whose dog goes there who suggested I should try to contact them on Instagram.

Shez
Unhappy

I misread that at first and thought it was going to be Highway to Hell related.

Shez

I picked up Republic of Ireland towers from North Wales one time staying at a campsite on the Llyn peninsula.

I contacted my network provider, Orange at the time, a lady with an american accent on their customer support line failed to help, repeatedly telling me I needed to switch off roaming when abroad, I repeatedly pointed out Wales isn't abroad but she was having none of it, I was naming a different country to England and therefore was abroad and the charges stood.

3D printing site Thingiverse suffers breach of 228,000 email addresses amid sluggish disclosure

Shez

"the exposure of some non-sensitive user data for a handful of Thingiverse users."

I'm not sure I agree that email addresses and unsalted password are non-sensitive

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

Shez

Re: LOL

Providing humans for people to speak to on the phone cost far too much money

Brit says sorry after waving around nonce patent and leaning on sites to cough up

Shez
FAIL

reminds me of...

https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/19/bt_claims_ownership_of_hyperlinks/

Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate

Shez

Re: Losing my mother's marbles

It seems the subtle complexities of technology seems to be a useful identifier of a failing mind.

I was the first in my family to realise something was amiss with my mother when as the family IT support I was asked for help to log into her online banking (which she had used for a while regularly without any issue). She was being prompted for three characters from her password and had to use a drop down list of all letters and numbers to select the answer.

She duly entered the first and second characters it asked for correctly, but she couldn't handle being asked for the 10th character from her password. When I asked why she said there wasn't a number 10 in the list. I had to explain that like the first two boxes it was the 10th character in her password. She still couldn't get it so I asked her what the tenth character of her password was, she answered "ten". In the end I had to take the full password off her and identify the 10th character (which was a number) so I could get her logged in, then go downstairs to discuss it with my dad.

It was a while before my dad started noticing issues and it then took quite a while longer to get her referred by the GP as when she was taken to the doctors, she could answer all his questions perfectly "Who is the prime minister", "what's the date" etc and appeared normal in all respects.

Ganja believe it? Police make hash of suspected weed farm raid, pot Bitcoin mine instead

Shez

Re: Co-located cannabis farm + bitcoin mine

Probably because they grow on trees in tropical forests which take years to start fruiting and grow up to 50m tall.

Communication Workers Union to hold national ballot for members at BT, Openreach and EE over strike action

Shez

Re: BT

OFCOM's rules is about the maximum charge, BT/EE and the other operators don't need to take full advantage of that every year.

HP bows to pressure, reinstates free monthly ink plan... for existing customers

Shez
Unhappy

Not available for me

They removed the 15 pages per month plan for me a few months ago, I'd upgraded due to needing to print more for a few months then when I tried to downgrade the lowest option available to me was the 50 pages per month for £1.99. I've just been on and the 15 pages per month has reappeared for me, but at a charge of £0.99 per month so I can't get back to the 15 free pages per month that I started on.

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

Shez

Sue Bill, or George or Mike or Whoever?

Trying to work out if that was a deliberate reference to the Johnny Cash track A Boy named Sue

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Shez

Re: Cubic metres? cm^3? ?? What is its abbrev.??

As is Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

Shez
Facepalm

Re: Very sad, but...

And we're already complaining about the £100 bn cost to build HS2 - just wait till the maintenance bill comes in.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Shez

Re: Failing switches?

"Are you also opposed to light switches? After all, you can just remove the bulb."

that would also be a fairly modern ability thanks to low energy lights, i wouldn't have fancied removing a 100w bulb after it had been on for a few hours.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Shez

Fictional Engineer

This episode of Who Me makes me think of our change process.

When considering the risk of a change and what could go wrong, we assume it's being done by a fictional, and rather clumsy engineer we call Hugh Jass.

With another NHS overhaul in the offing, £200m up for grabs in northern England for pretty much anything related to IT

Shez

Re: We already have all the consultants we need

Do ants have throats?

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

Shez

Re: Want one

Half the size, but twice the thickness

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Shez
Facepalm

Favourites

Around 2000 I did a desktop rollout in a hospital, after the first few I got the first call to say a user had lost their favourites in Internet Explorer, could I go back to have a look. I had been backup up the favourites (for it was merely a folder in the user's profile or my documents folder) so wondered how it had been missed as I walked through the maze of corridors to the consultant's office.

Upon arrival I checked the favourites and sure enough, nothing there, I went to the back up from the old machine and checked favourites... still nothing. I asked the consultant to show me how she accesses her favourites. The consultant opened the browser, clicked the down arrow at the end of the address bar and pointed at the blank list that dropped down.

Possibly the most worrying thing is that I only have 6 bookmarks (as they're called in Chrome) because I do the same thing and my attempts to remember to save URL's in browsers properly have repeatedly failed.

HMRC 'disciplined' almost 100 employees for computer misuse over 24 months

Shez

Re: It's not clear from the article what the offences were.

Which is probably where the 8 people fired come in.

All this is really proving is that HMRC have methods and procedures in place for auditing, detecting and taking action against people who you wouldn't want handling the financial data of the country's citizens.

Good on them.

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

Shez

Free Parking

Tesco have made the parking free in Gateshead so there is some good which has come out of it.

Truckers, prepare to lose your jobs as UPS buys into self-driving tech

Shez

Re: Doomed to failure

DLR in London has been level 4 since it opened in 1987

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Shez

Re: colourblind

I think Klingon would be preferred by many of the Data Centre colleagues I've worked with.

What made a super high-tech home in Victorian England? Hydroelectric witchery, for starters

Shez

I believe the swing bridge is still powered using the original equipment installed by Armstrong's company, although it's much rarer for it to swing these days.

Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park

Shez

Re: Engage pedant mode.....

Water Vapour and Steam are both usually invisible.

Steam is a gaseous form of water (i.e. no air present). Water vapour describes molecules of water in the air, the water in the vapour can be small droplets of liquid water (multiple molecules joined together) or a gaseous form of water (individual molecules).

Steam can be released into the air where it will mix with the air and form a water vapour. The visible plumes which are often referred to as steam is the condensation of water vapour within the air to form droplets of a visible size - note this is still a water vapour because it is water in air.

You must be yolking: English pub to launch eggstravagent Yorkshire pudding

Shez

"And East Midlands "Airport"? You call that an aiport? That ain't an airport, THAT'S A LIE!"

have you ever been to Durham Tees Valley airport?

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

Shez

this must be why Apple made their batteries non-removable

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

Shez

Re: If the engineer has a quiet moment...

you might be thinking of a ground start, which is where to signal to the exchange that the line has gone off hook, the phone briefly connects the ring wire to ground so the exchange can detect the current passing.

Western Dig's MAMR is so phat, it'll store 100TB on a hard drive by 2032

Shez

Underwhelmed

Maybe I've been spoilt by the historic increases in capacity, but a 10 fold increase in 15 years doesn't sound all that impressive to me. If that's because we're getting to the limits of the technology then I suspect another technology (whether that be flash or something else) will come along to take the low cost mass storage crown.

Gov claws back £645m in BT broadband from subsidy

Shez
Facepalm

"...and at least I'm not giving the BT weasels anything.

I've got to admit that I'm reasonably happy with EE's 4G->Ethernet widget. "

erm, not wanting to start another discussion like the BT/Openreach thing above, but you may want to look into who owns EE these days.

Private sub captain changes story, now says reporter died, was 'buried at sea' – torso found

Shez

Re: Starting to make sense.

Not only deliberately mutilated, with the arms, legs and head removed, but also in a way which appears to have been an attempt to prevent the buildup of decomposition gases, the torso was also attached to some metal as ballast.

It's sounding less like the honourable "sea burial" that was first implied, he clearly didn't want the torso to be found.

Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard

Shez

I used to work in a hospital...

...it was never dog pee I had to worry about

This many standards is dumb: Decoding 25Gb Ethernet and beyond

Shez

Re: cat-8?

The category of cable refers to the cable alone, you can terminate a cable with any compatible connector you want, in this case RJ45 is compatible with Cat-7... it's just not supported or used much.

3... 2...1... and 123-Reg hit by DDoSers. Again

Shez

Re: Why oh why

yeah, the domains aren't really used so it's just cheap parking for me.

Slim pickings by the Biggest Loser: A year of fitness wearables

Shez

Re: left handers

I think ambi is short for ambiguous not ambidextrous when referring to sexuality

Smartmobe made 'intermittent bright flashes and a hissing noise' in Biz class seat

Shez

Re: Some sense at last

is it really that sensible to put an electrical device in an electrically conductive container full of water?

Ultimate bacon sarnie scrap starts to sizzle

Shez
WTF?

Re: For me

"Much better to leave enough room under the grill to do both the toast and the bacon."

grill? - where does the grill come into cooking bacon? if this is the ultimate bacon sarnie it has to be fried - in the fat saved from the last lot of bacon, none of this olive oil malarkey.

Labour moots using speed cameras to reward law-abiding drivers

Shez
FAIL

Speed is the answer

It seems that Labour (and many other motoring organisations) have overlooked the fact good driving is not all about speed. If they honestly believe that they can determine a good driver based purely on the speed they travel through a known monitoring point then they're wrong. Driving is a complex skill and any reward for good driving should take all elements of that into account.

I assume they only plan to reward drivers who not only stay within the speed limits, but those who use the inside lane, and who ensure they indicate correctly when pulling out to overtake before returning to the inside, and observe a suitable gap between themselves and the car infront, and keep their car in good working order (will the camera's check for broken lights even if they're not switched on, or deduct points for using fog lights unnecessarily), and who haven't just slowed down to pass through the monitored area, need I continue?