* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

Page:

Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 is here

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Imagine how much time is wasted...

"The strength and weakness (imao more the latter than the former) of open source software is the freedom to go off and roll your own if you don't like the current version(s)."

Most people don't. When they do it's usually because someone has screwed up really badly. The exemplar of that would be OpenOffice suffering from the influence of Oracle. Even there is was mostly the OpenOffice devs who went off to found LibreOffice. Strength or weakness? Entirely the latter, I think.

Perhaps you could give us an example of your A>B>C>D process which actually turned out to be a in real life.

In the meantime, enjoy your adverts in your file manager - you're not going to be able to fork it.

Being able to fork something isn't only a menas of recovering from screw-ups, it's a disincentive to screw up in the first place.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: quis procurat ipsos procurates?

Where does your setup.exe come from? Which setup.exe is it? Did your setup.exe include a few dlls you may have already got from elsewhere just in case you didn't? If so how do you keep track of the different ones? You're dealing with a multi-step rpocess - first find your setup.exe. Download it. Keep it separate from all your other setup.exes so you know what's what. Then run it. That's not the easy way.

For sheer laziness apt install some-package wins hands down, especially if there are other dependencies which are needed.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Hmm

Agreed up to the point of Flatpack. Yes, bay all means put nails in Snaps coffin. Then build another one for Flatpack.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

You should run Linux then. Lots & lots of packages run out of the box. It's too late at night to even bother trying to think of one that didn't.

Google Maps just got lost for a few hours

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"I don't want to store a huge geographic database on my PC"

I assume your PC isn't providing some sort of service to other customers. What you choose to do on your PC and what a service provider choose to do are two different things. If you were running your state's emergency services you might well think it worth having that state's mapping locally resident or else second source Google Maps with OSM (or vice versa).

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Error saving filename.txt: Operation successful

Well, if you really want to delete a file and they weren't able to oblige you the first time it would be remiss of them not to let you have another go.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: an oldy

Or Private Parts.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

As you say, LibreOffice has the option but it's in the right place, in the save dialog. With Gimp saving back to the format you first opened is an entirely different item on the File menu. At least LibreOffice only does that for export to something like PDF or ePub.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Is Your Message Really Necessary?

"so yes, you couldn't delete a file if the disk was too full because it needed space to write the new tree nodes"

I've never checked to see if Linux does this but old-style Unix would declare disk full to non-root programs with some margin left for root. I've appreciated that when an overnight job went rogue and filled up a partition with junk messages.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: But we're experiencing unusual demand.

Covid has been a great help to them. It's given them an extra excuse that they can't have staff in the office, even if, when you finally get through to someone, the background noise makes it clear they're working at home.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: string manipulation

Add to that address formats that assume everyone lives in a city. Or that all street addresses have numbers rather than house names.

Ah - I think I've just realised something. A couple moved into a house opposite us and got its name changed to a number (15 greater than the previous highest number). Maybe they've been bitten by that one in the past.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

Multi-line statements. Bright spark putting two statements on the same line.

If I want to write something for my own use these days I tend to use Lazarus. I find that if I make a typing error such as that it doesn't necessarily work out where it was and throws an error some way further down on a line which looks right but was wrong because it was trying to parse it in the wrong context.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: an oldy

He's the superior officer of Major Error.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I was thinking more generally.

Certainly as regards error messages long numerals or alphanumerics are seldom going to be reported correctly. I do wonder how such error messages come to be generated.

Does some development manager tell a team "You can have errot numbers 00000333387000000 to 00000333387999999" while someone else has 00000333388000000 to 00000333388999999?

Are they some sort of mapping? Is the code file given number 00323334, the functions within it numbers starting 0000 and the errors within the functions also given numbers starting 0000 with the error reported as the concatenation?

A better approach would be to use a What 3 Words approach and map them to a short phrase which might be memorable enough for the user to remember and easy to map back to where the error was found. "Out of cheese" might well be a better way.

But there are other issues. Take the situation where the user goes to close the application with unsaved work. There are instances in which the user may reasonably choose to do this, one being that they've made such a bollocks that the easiest thing is just to quit and start again and a prompt which confuses the user into the wrong choice is not helpful.

Another, mentioned here recently is the GIMP prompt about unsaved work. The real issue there is that GIMP's idea of saving is saving work in its own format even if the user used it to edit a JPEG and pnly wants to save the resulting JPEG. In this case the "Quit without saving" option is quite often the one to choose as the user has already opted for the Overwrite or Export options which are the only ones to save as a JPEG. A bit of thought about that would maybe have steered the developers into a unified save function in which .jpg and .xcf were equally valid choices.

Getting that short message unambiguous can be crucial. A notice at a level crossing saying "Wait here while light flash" sounds OK doesn't it? In Yorkshire dialect "while" and "till" can have opposite meanings than expected. "Wait here while lights are flashing" is better.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Twitter to the rescue.

But we're experiencing unusual demand. We've been experiencing unusual demand for the last 10 years.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Why only an OK button on the popup?

The popup is only offering information, not alternative ways to proceed. If it opened and closed you wouldn't necessarily have time to read it. If it opened and offered no way to close you'd just complain.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: string manipulation

What sort of morons code these websites that say "Enter card number - no spaces"

A slightly better class of morons than the morons who simply say "Enter card number" but don't tell you they don't accept spaces or do but treat them as valid characters and truncate the entered string at 16 characters.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

Thinking you know where it's missing turns an error into a problem that you might not know you have until later.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

It tended to be a characteristic of compilers whose authors expected source to be on cards. There's not much else useful that can be done other than flag up the first error and stop. Blindly trying to continue isn't one of them.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: My favourite error message

"103: Program lost - Sorry"

It didn't even tell you who won?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

A question for all of those of us who are, or have been, developers: How much thought have you usually given to the wording of dialog boxes?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: String is Not a Valid Number....

... neither are most other words in the dictionary.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: My "favourite".....

Especially when the code has far too many characters, especially far too many repetitions of the same character and is imune from being copied.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

And possibly the month after for the errata in the errata.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

This is a consequence of using the wrong early implementation of Pascal. UCSD Pascal would have taken you back into the editor at the point where the error was detected. After growing up on batch runs of FORTRAN* this was a mind-blowing revaluation. Even more mind-blowing was the fact that it would also do this for assembler.

* For added fun once the compiler had been thrown off track by the first error it would consider most following lines as being in error even if they weren't so there would be pages of error messages of which only the first was necessarily true - although some of the others might have been.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

You could always fall back on "Problem between keyboard and chair" or "Problem with knob controlling monitor".

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I think that was his comment on quantum mechanics.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: This!!

"If El Reg allowed screenshots I could give plenty of examples..."

You don't need to. You could just include a link to a bank website. Any bank website.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Twitter to the rescue.

The only organisations which should attempt having one communication channel redirect the customer to another are those both small enough and competent enough to avoid this trap. Banks, by definition, are neither.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Experts in this field apply simple principles of psychology to minimize the infuriation factor of error messages."

And yet they achieve the opposite.

Microsoft datacenter to heat homes in Finland

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: reply to myself because I ran out of time for edit

I've read of suggestions of weights in a mineshaft but I'm not sure how much energy could be stored that way.

Client demo in 30 minutes. Just what could go wrong?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ah Cellnet

"BT didn't quite seem sure that mobile phones would take off, hence a joint venture and not using the BT name at the start."

They still didn't seem sure after Cellnet had been merged in so they split it off.

Devs of bcachefs try to get filesystem into Linux again

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Layering

This reminded me of being DBA for an Informix system which used mirroring at Informix level on disks which were mirrored at physical level as well. At least there was no file system involved as it ran on raw disk.

ITC judge recommends banning toner imports that infringe Canon's IP

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

And all done without mentioning the word "monopoly".

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"People accept ads in all sorts of other software"

Speak for yourself. A lot of us don't and won't.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

You just have to wait an infinite amount of time for that to happen.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I suspect that Splurg is another of those of us who've done so.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I thought multiple tabs in file manager was one of the latest catch-ups. Taken long enough.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So you are saying ...

"FOSS) Fix it myself or hire a programmer at a competitive rate to fix it."

Can't remember having to fix anything. It must be pushing 20 years since I wrote a line of C and that's because I was being paid. This stuff Just Works these days.

"Proprietary) Beg the monopoly supplier to fix it. Buy the next version and hope the fix is included and new breakages aren't."

Well, if you want to beg Microsoft to fix things, good luck. Personally, I'll stick with the FOSS route.

Edit: I'll just throw this in. One thing I did like about Windows back in the day was the cardfile program. It's one thing they dropped along the way. I don't think it can be made to run at all in W10. And that is one thing I have just written for myself - using Lazarus. If I had any reason to I could port it to Windows.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Y'know, I think you might have cracked it.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Added functionality doesn't get there accidentally. Somebody has to write it and, bugs apart, that's likely to be deliberate. This is a little too elaborate for a bug. Unless whoever coded it was sneaking something in for their own gratification we must assume they were told to. Telling them to do so must surely imply that usage was at least considered.

Where then is the scope for accident? Possibly exposing it at this stage? Hmmm...

Hear us out: Smartphone lidar can test blood, milk

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Too good to true?

"Think of it like the early days of Time Team as they went from metal detectors to radar and then lidar."

Those were for detecting three different indicators of archaeological interest.

Brit data regulator fines five cold-calling fiends £405k

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

What's the betting that these "firms" will go bankrupt

Which is why I advocate a PAYG (for the callers) of compensating the callee. Dial 1461 or similar and receive as small fee for taking the call, greater if you're TPS registered, taken from the caller's account. The going bankrupt before paying up trick becomes a matter for the telco's credit controllers who won't let big bills rack up.

Yes, it would require some monitoring to stop the bright spark who tries to get money from anyone who calls him regardless of who it was.

An yes, it would take some work and expense upfront by the telcos to set up the required systems. In fact, if OFCOM started proposing this I think the telcos would manage to solve this so far insoluble problem fairly quickly.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Russia will be further away."

Have you consulted Alaskans about this?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: The same will probably happen in the UK

That self-styled Unionist BoJo is making considerable progress on that front without horological assistance.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: The same will probably happen in the UK

GB time is also based on a meridian that's so far east it's almost off the island altogether so the winter mornings are darker as you go west as well as north. Permanent summer time might be acceptable in London, less so in Londonderry.

Devil-may-care Lapsus$ gang is not the aspirational brand infosec needs

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Why the crooks are ramping up their attacks so quickly is still unclear."

As is the reason why other crooks rob banks.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Nostalgia

"But I really don't understand why one would develop a compiler for such an inferior language. Just emulate your AS400"

Why lose performance emulating something instead of compiling to native code? The COBOL code carries out the business that pays the bills for the company. There's nothing inferior about that.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "guaranteed a job."

It's quite remarkable that... CICS is still so widely deployed - especially at a time when so many systems are being rewritten for no better reason than to be "modern".

Perhaps in this context modern means without CICs.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

As one of the dying breed who can remember old-style toilet rolls I don't think there's much of a difference except in the size of the sheets.

Page: