Posts by Amorous Cowherder

Wacky world

Some severe irony that right wing nutters and Neo Nazis would use a TLD from a predominantly black nation.

What about tourism for South Sudan?

WeLoveThe.SS

ComeEnjoyThe.SS

Not going to end well

The number of times I've had to step in an deal with morons who've just downloaded some chunk of code, didn't bother reading it and turned a minor problem into a phone call home to the missus to ask her to shove our evening meal in the oven for whenever I finally get home!!

Same old story

Bury some nasty cack in the software, when it's well and truly ubiquitous and it can't easily be removed, apologise to whomever is whinging about it. Make minor changes but state it can't be "undone" without destroying something everyone uses, make a token payment to shut up the other party and continue to slurp the private data!

To those say they're not dangerous

Have you actually ever flown any sort of drone? Cheap drones can be very dangerous.

Very expensive drones have a lot of safety features built in, self correcting, safe-land, return-to-base, video feedback and easier to control. The cheaper end of the market are the ultra-cheap stunt drones. When I first started to play with drones I learned using a cheap £50 stunt drone. They have no safety features, next to no self-correction and are almost 100% manual control and take a serious amount of concentration. My first drone was a small 6" model, learning to get it up in the air it once shot across the floor straight into my legs and left me with tiny cuts and bruises on my shins. When the battery cut out you had 15 secs to get it down out of the air or it would simply crash down. Now imagine one twice the size, falling from sky into a crowd of half a dozen people or more, someone is going to lose and eye or get some minor injuries.

Not everyone buys state of the art pukka £1500+ drones with full video feedback, incredible self-correction and flight control, some people do it on the cheap and buy £200 jobbies off fleaBay that are almost completely manual and are very dangerous in the wrong hands. I love manual drones but you take them into the arse-end of nowhere so that no one else is around if something bad happens and you lose control, you don't fly them over a crowd watching a train!

Twitter IS a toilet

I see Twitter as a private company billboard, if they think you smell, have a wonky eye then they can ban you they like.

I think Linehan almost had it right, but Twitter isn't a toilet, it's a cesspit.

Looking like that?

I think I'll wait until they put some doors on the bloody car before I get in it!

Maybe not for quite a while yet

In 25 years of working with DBs I've yet to find a good SQL code generator. SQL is such a simple language, extremely simple to learn and use, not that difficult to master and yet when you start to go beyond 20 odd lines and use generators to build the code they always come up with the most stupid code that is never efficient. You always end up taking the skeleton generated code and re-writing it or worse jigging the database and data structures to suit it because the code is so complicated to deal with but sort of works. Sometimes people would rather do even more stupid things like duplicate the whole data set into more bizarre forms or start chucking indexes around like wedding confetti killing any hope of efficiency.

When I see a decent code generator for something as simple as SQL that produces a 1500 line explain plan for a 50 table join and it works perfectly, then I'll listen and you can start talking about code generators for more complex languages like C#, Python, Node, C++, etc.

Doesn't Kotlin rely on Java?

I thought Kotlin had a very heavy reliance on the underlying core Java class libraries, at least that's what I heard/read a while back. If so then sadly Java and Oracle are going nowhere, all you get is less need to learn direct Java coding but you will still need to know what's happening under the hood.

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"

Welcome to your wonderful free and open society guided by the ( human written ) algorithms of machines, start breaking down the walls and boundaries and feel the love pour in. Oh wait, you mean if we hand over control of complex global systems to machines with no more "sense" than a ZX81, machines we're barely able to fully understand running complex networks of interaction we simply cannot comprehend, things will start f**king up in a serious way?

Well blow me down, who'd a thunk handing over all that to a bunch of spotty CS college dropouts with a single year of studying humanities and ecology systems and with very little world experience, would dump us in this big old fecking mess!

Yep it was all Fred's fault, no denying!

Fine, blame that one person, make an example of them, drag them through the courts for as long as they live just to punish them for what they did but know this, it will happen again. I will stake my house on that bet because the management teams allowed themselves to be in a position that made them reliant on just one person, one single point of failure. In IT we live and die trying to avoid the "single point of failure", this is exactly what happens when that is allowed to happen and it goes catastrophically bad.

You vile unbelievers!

You will perish if you dare to deny the future of IT infrastructure! The cloud is magic incarnate! The cloud is the perfect solution to all IT problems! The cloud is all seeing and all knowing! The cloud is and forever it shall be! Cast off the shackles of your locally managed services and server rooms! See the all encompassing glory of remote, hosted infrastructure Do not ever doubt the cloud in all its glorious forms!

I remember my Mum, Dad and me heading to the Belgium Grand Prix in '76, I was 5 at the time and distinctly remember being absolutely terrified of the hovercraft ( with British Rail logo on the tail! ). In the dusty family albums are some shots of my Dad holding me, trying to calm me down with one of those big deep blue beasts in the background.

“Due to NHS Lanarkshire IT issues, the staff bank system and telephone are offline and currently unavailable”

Hold on there....

“Due to general NHS IT underfunding and outsourcing to crap offshore services in the east where no one gives a flying crap about the systems their supposed to be running, the staff bank system and telephone are offline and currently unavailable.”

Shame to see Oracle go this way but they've only themselves to blame. I started my DBA career 22 years ago on Oracle but since them I've grown to love other DB systems, PostgreSQL and SQL Server being my favourite.

If Oracle really want to make a difference then how about they follow MS's lead and put a few more toys in the box for free rather than charging for every single tiny little option. Oh and while they're at it, how about they stop installing options without asking customers and then when you're audited claim the customer installed XYZ and then taking the customer to the cleaners for a dirty great chunk of cash! The day we got severely audited by Oracle and crucified was the day I lost my love for Big Red and decided to learn MySQL, PG and SQL Server.

Game designer Pete Cooke knew about this 30 years ago!

Anyone else remember playing Tau Ceti the game on an 8 bit back in the 1980's?

I remember my first full eclipse as a kid. I remember the total silence in the middle of the day as all the animals fall silent was one of the creepiest things I experienced. I'd love to make time to travel to see another one day.

Not for every one I know, but dump your old number

I happily dump my number every 2-3 years and get a new one off whichever network is supplying me at that time. I know it's definitely not for everyone but it's a great way to get rid of people you dislike and only keep those numbers you wish to keep up with!

Tough? Pah!

Get 'em down my local on a Friday night, watch 'em tip some nutter's pint over and then we'll see how tough they think they are!

Oh come on

It'd be easy to gloat but come on, if you had a great idea to attempt to help very rich trust-funded tat-collectors fork over their cash by the suitcase on some daft idea of yours, you wouldn't do it? I know I bloody well would!

Shame, I really wanted Vertu to work as it proved beyond a doubt that there was several born every minute, not just one.

Hmmm, chalk up one more reason why investing in a nice chunky NAS box or two ( need to mirror, right! ) to store your music and vids is a good option, you're not beholden to some fly-by-night "service" that will upsticks and bugger off with your carefully crafted entertainment selections. Welcome to the real world Millennial types who seem to think the Internet is running on Unicorn farts and rainbows and where nothing ever goes wrong!

"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal" , said Picasso supposedly. Web design is artistry, and like any other line of work it has a large number of lazy people simply nicking other people's ideas which simply proves they never really had any true creativity or understanding of the skills they profess to have. In any business sphere there are a small percentage of people who are world class, then a big chunk of hard working types who know their stuff and then a huge proportion riding the coattails of the aforementioned.

As an aside, can anyone explain why web design was ever considered an IT skill?! While the rest of us toiled in the computer rooms of companies and schools, everyone else scoffed at us until the WWW explosion in the 90s and suddenly IT wasn't geeky or nerdy anymore when they saw how much skilled IT people earned behind the scenes. All of a sudden it was an excuse for artist types to look "retro-geek trendy" by saying they were working in IT when they were basically graphic designers working on computers.