Posts by SeanEllis

Two words

Skype eight.

Count the domains

Since installing ScriptSafe, it's easy to see how many different domains scripts are loaded from. Most places have between 6 and 10.

The Independent is a particular bad actor here, with over 30. The highest I have seen is over 50. What's the largest number you've seen?

Any computer game after 1994...

... with the honourable exception of West of Loathing. It's well written, funny, bonkers, and only $11.

Simplistic solution to two problems

Scrapping Trident leaves a serious employment problem in Faslane and the surrounding area.

But the skills already there are in precision engineering, specifically small nuclear systems in portable pressure vessels. So don't shut down the yards; we need low-carbon energy. Retool to create a production line for small modular nuclear reactors.

Saves jobs. Keeps skills. Gives us things and expertise to export. Reduces our carbon emissions and our reliance on imported energy.

Doubtless this is overly simplistic. Any submarine engineers out there to point out why?

The Meaning of Stob

One column that made it onto the wall of my cubicle "back in the day" was your additional Meaning of Liff definitions. Even now, I refer to myself "climbing a Dollis Hill", and complain if people's programming style is "too pimlico".

Happy Anniversary, Ms Stob.

In a widely-publicised response, Microsoft said in early August that they would allow Skype 7 to work for "some time" after the September 1 cutoff they had imposed. Skype 7 users breathed a sigh of relief.

It seems that this might not be the case. In a conversation with Skype support (@skypesupport) on Twitter, they said to me:

"Hi. Good day. You are right, Skype Classic (version 7.x) will be retired on 1st of September 2018. Is there anything that you would like to bring up or share?"

I really don't think they want me to share my innermost thoughts at this point.

Good luck with the new job, Simon. And good luck with the new job, Rebecca!

Aargh

Looking forward to a new UI where we can only see 8 lines of code at a time, each in a separate speech bubble, with the top 25% of the window dedicated to showing us our own username, and the left 25% of the window dedicated to showing us icons for 3 features, in a font and color scheme you can't customize, a minimum window size that's too big, a maximum window size that just expands the whitespace, and a search control that takes 95% of the window title bar so you can't move the window without pinpoint precision.

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17408641-please-create-a-professional-compact-chat-layout

Following the trend

The most-requested features on the Skype forum for the last 2 years or more have been an option to choose the color scheme (essential for sight-impaired people and good for the rest of us), and the option to turn off the speech bubbles that eat screen real-estate like there's no tomorrow.

Neither of these are forthcoming, and for serious users every change to Skype seems to be a backward step.

The whole desktop Skype UI is a mess, and violates the most basic UI rules. I took all my feedback and stuck it into a blog post. Some of it is now a little out of date, but if you're interested, it's here.

Spelling is futile too...

"Resistance", surely?

I dislike ads mostly because they are attention-leeches. I do, however, understand that they are a source of income for sites. I think that Adblock is now ubiquiitous enough to become a micropayment broker to both block ads and pay for page accesses instead. Imagine I pay $5 a month to Adblock. I visit 1000 pages that are registered with Adblock payments. Each page I visit gets 1/1000 of my $5. This is standard micropayment tracking. How does this compare with ad impression rates?

Unit confusion

s/nanometres/nanoamps

Linus hates sloane squares

The great Verity Stob, late of this parish, anticipated the problems of comment layout in her own appendix to The Meaning of Liff.

In it, she defined the sloane square (n.) A program comment contained entirely in a box of ******s. A leicester square, incidentally, is a bastard sloane square where all the verticals are out of alignment as a result, for example, of the printer having the wrong tab value.

Linus, it appears, really hates both varieties of square.

Jean-Michel's Jars

Join France's premier electronic musician for a series of cookery programmes in which he demonstrates how to create the finest jams, preserves, pickles and chutneys while accompanying himself on the Laser Harp.

Contains flashing images.

Premature

Any explanation of an effect should not precede reliable replication of the experiment that shows that there is an effect in the first place.

Initial estimates of the thrust of this device have been reduced and reduced in line with the error bars on the increasingly accurate methods used to measure it. This is a classic sign of something with no real effect.

Of course, as always, I am very willing to be proven wrong. But at the moment it's just red flags all the way.

Very quick and dirty Tampermonkey script:

[code]

// ==UserScript==

// @name The Register clutter elimination

// @namespace http://moteprime.org/

// @version 0.1

// @description Eliminate duplicate story areas

// @author Sean Ellis

// @match http://www.theregister.co.uk/

// @grant none

// ==/UserScript==

/* jshint -W097 */

function addCss(cssString) {

var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head') [0];

var newCss = document.createElement('style');

newCss.type = 'text/css';

newCss.innerHTML = cssString;

head.appendChild(newCss);

}

addCss(

'#top_tease { display: none ! important; } ' +

'#news_bytes { display: none ! important; } ' +

'#right-col { display: none ! important; } ' +

'.dont_miss { display: none ! important; } ' +

'.story_grid_img { display: none ! important; } ' +

'.headline_row.hidden { display: inline ! important; } '

);

[code]