Posts by Bill Gray

Re: Faux AZERTY

I switched to Dvorak decades ago in hopes of relieving severe carpal tunnel(*). The keyboard has US keycaps, and I can switch between QWERTY, Dvorak, and Russian layouts. Which does puzzle my wife and daughter briefly on the rare occasions that they need to use my computer, until they remember to set the QWERTY layout.

Converting 'password1' to 'кфжжбыщр1' is another benefit.

(*) The carpal tunnel went away. But I also switched to a split keyboard and a more ergonomic desk, so I don't really know what did the trick.

Re: One question

I can date this with some exactness.

In July 1992, I quit my day job and started work on astronomical software (a star charting and desktop planetarium program). In spring 1993, I took the ~200 MByte hard drive out of my computer and visited a friend at his workplace; we burned the software and data onto CDs. I think the burner was well in the thousands of dollars range (readers were much cheaper). I sent the recorded CD off to be stamped onto CD-ROMs. I repeated the process a few months later for version 2.0.

In summer 1994, I had my own CD burner (a pizza-box sized peripheral) and used it to burn the master copy for version 3.0. It was a slow device and not something most people had, but they were out there, with Win95 a year away.

Re: Cause and Effect

My favorite example of cause/effect confusion :

https://xkcd.com/925/

Re: Indian Immigration Visa

Fair enough. Though as a middle-aged US person with only US citizenship, and looking around at the right-wing loons (and some of the left-wing loons, and some non-political loons) in my country with some horror, I wouldn't mind having a backup.

"mid-life crisis" / "over 60s club"

<sad voice> I just turned 61. My life is almost half over. </sad voice>

Re: what fun it was writing configuration scripts in the Hayes ‘language

I'd almost completely forgotten about Hayes modem commands until a few years ago, when the scam/telemarketing calls on our landline became a near-hourly menace. (In the US, telcos profit from these and are disinclined to stop them. I don't know if that's an issue elsewhere.)

To my surprise, I found that I still had an old PCI 56K hardware modem, with the ability (among other things) to scan Caller ID data. Combine with a bit of C code, a check against the NoMoRobo database, and those calls got one ring and then were disconnected. (I played with having them responded to with a fax tone, but that didn't seem to help.)

It seems to me that having a PC (or, say, Raspberry Pi) be able to interface with phones, either landline or cellular, ought to be a straightforward thing, not requiring one to have kept some obsolete kit for ~20 years. Perhaps it is, and I didn't find the "current" solution. Admittedly, once I found one that worked, I didn't look much further.

Tie a piece of bread, buttered side up, to the top of the cat, and you have a perpetual motion machine. Harness the resulting power, and the battery on your phone never dies.

Re: Ok... I have to ask

Our local recycling center has a "gift shop" where people leave items of possible interest to somebody else. A few months back, I found an HP-15C there, in quite good condition. Started it up, and it worked Just Fine. (I gather they're noted for long battery life.)

A bit before that, I got a Versalog slide rule at Goodwill. No battery issues at all with that...

Re: Just set the entire moon to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC +0) ...

> I'm pretty sure it's only so on certain days of the year

You are correct. There is an 'equation of time' correction, which can cause a sundial to run about a quarter hour ahead or behind mean solar time over the course of a year. (Except for some really clever sundials, usually with an oddly-shaped gnomon or other way of correcting for this.) Thus, where I live, the Sun is due south at about 11:36 AM local time, but it can be between about 11:21 and 11:51, depending on the time of the year.

Also, note that the sun will only pass overhead if you're in the tropics, and then only twice a year.

Re: print car number plates on takeaway bags to discourage customers from littering

> Do they not do money-back deposits on cans & bottles in the UK any more?

I'm in Maine, where it's the same five or ten cents a can. Back when we started with returnables, in the mid-1970s, cans and bottles mostly disappeared from the roadsides. The deposits have been mostly unchanged since then; with inflation, some people feel it simpler to toss the items out the window.

Must concede that while the proposed scheme would identify litterers, actually getting lawn forcement to pursue such cases might be difficult.

Re: ronnabytes ...

There were better options.

I'd kinda hoped that they'd extrapolate from the last two, zetta and yotta, and go with (say) whitta, vonta, urga, etc. in reverse alphabetical order. (I suppose you could have, say, xena between yotta and whitta, but I'd be inclined to skip it.) I don't always remember the order of the "higher" prefixes. I may have to come up with some mnemonic, the way I remember the taxonomic divisions, kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species, with "Kelly, please come over for good sex".

On the bright side, these do maintain a run of descending alphabetical order.

So, no plan to actually change anything?

Re: SOCRadar

For what it's worth... I gave it a try with one of my domains. It came up with an accurate e-mail address (no surprise) and two supposed passwords. One was a throwaway password on LinkedIn, which famously leaked numerous passwords years back; I already knew that one was out in the wilds of the Interwebs.

The other supposed password didn't ring a bell, but I could easily imagine it was leaked by some other insecure site. (Sometimes, I wonder if "insecure site" is just redundant. Most days, I don't wonder.)

Perhaps somebody signed up somewhere with that email address...

Precisely. SOCRadar presumably just scraped various leaked lists, including the LinkedIn one. It'll be a mix of throwaways (such as mine and maybe yours), some "real" addresses/passwords, some for accounts discontinued 15 years ago, and probably a lot that are purely made up and sold to gullible would-be crims. I could see that being a workable scam. After all, if you purchase fake credentials and they don't work, you don't have much recourse for getting a refund. (Or you might think they'd been changed.)

The only way I could see SOCRadar knowing which are which would be to try them out. Some people would probably object to that.

Re: You say that, but

They have literal mountains of research showing exactly the opposite

Funny, that. My research uniformly shows how wonderful my products are! (Well, at least the parts of my research that I've made public. The rest is for in-house use only.)

More seriously, I could believe that advertising is, in many cases, effective. That doesn't mean it works on everybody. Even if (say) 99.9% of spam is ignored/not delivered/elicits profanity, the remaining 0.1% makes some scammers profit. And somebody once said, "Half my ad budget is wasted, but I can't tell which half."

Re: Mb99 -> Tc99m

Just checked the El Reg units table, and you're right; there's no time unit. This oversight should be corrected.

Any ideas from the assembled commentardiat, aside from the Gov't (US: Gummint) U-turn? (It'd be nice to have units for shorter and longer time spans. We could obviously have nanoGUTs, megaGUTs, etc., but I think we can do better than that.)

Re: A cloud in a kilt

I think the idea that denizens of a cloudy planet wouldn't know about space was common in science fiction before the Mariner 2 flyby in 1962, when it was still thought that Venus might be a hot, swampy, inhabited planet. The only two examples I can think of are :

- _Tumithak of the Corridors_, written in the 1930s (humans land on Venus, are immediately killed, Venusians realize there's an outside universe, build spaceships and invade Earth). Don't remember the author.

- Don't remember the title, but Heinlein wrote a story in the 1940s in which humans have colonized the poles of Venus, the equator being uninhabitably hot. One character explains to another that the natives near the north pole think humans came from the south pole, and vice versa; tell them about Earth, and they think you're explaining your religion.

Both predate Douglas Adam's fine work, and I think Asimov and/or Clarke may have touched on this subject as well.

Re: Banking/Insurance

A simple divide-by-four will work between 1900 March 1 and 2100 February 28. Which might have led the above to be expanded to...

3) What's the likelihood this will be used after 2100 February 29?

The nature of the assignment isn't mentioned, but if it involved birth dates... in 1991, my then-100 year old grandfather, and many others born before 1900 March 1, still walked the face of the earth. If it involved hundred-year mortgages, there could have been problems nine years later, on 2000 February 29.

strlcpy/strlcat will silently truncate the copied string. Sometimes, that's what you want, but I find that usually, it indicates a problem. You basically need two functions : one says "truncation is expected in this case", vs. "truncation means something went wrong; stop now and emit a hopefully helpful message."

After years of trying various solutions, I now have supplemented strlcpy/strlcat with 'error' versions. With these, if the string doesn't fit into the specified buffer size, you get a message and an assert() is triggered.

Similarly, I have an snprintf_err() function for cases where a buffer overflow should be a red flag.

In theory, these could just be replaced by the non-_err() functions on non-debug builds. However, 99% of these calls are not in high-performance code. For the remaining 1%, I would use

I've been writing C code since 1987, and have been slow to the party on these points. Kinda wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self about the value of adding in these "idiot checks". I don't think I've had security issues as a result, but Dog knows I've certainly had "code-not-working" issues.

Or it was a signed seven-bit value.

Re: Correction !

It would appear that we don't need no stinking badges. (Perhaps a change in policy?) Write, for example, <ä href='https://www.rickroll.org'> link </ä> (except without umlauts) and you can provide a link to the obligatory site. You will note I am unbadged.

Re: Should NOT be allowed to vote!

Unfortunately, I would expect that some spamming politicians either have caught on to this or will do so. If I were a spammer for party/candidate/cause A, I'd craft obnoxious spam (pardon the redundancy) that appeared to come from party/candidate/cause B.

Re: Expected more

Sorry, lapsed into astronomer-speak, where "secular" = "linearly changing over time", usually opposed to "periodic" = "changing back and forth around some mean value". The seasonal changes are periodic. The overall trend to a slowing earth is secular.

I probably also should have noted that most of the gradual (secular) change in the earth's rotation rate is, of course, due to lunar tides. That causes a transfer of angular momentum; the moon recedes at about 3 cm/year, and the earth rotates slightly more slowly.

I conjecture that the downvoters thought I was blaming global warming for leap seconds. It's a measurable factor, but that's mostly just because we've gotten really, really good at measuring the earth's rotation. And, in fact, we've had a slight speed-up in recent years; we may yet see a negative leap second. Kinda early to say, but there have been reversals of that sort (all before leap seconds were adopted.)

If we do reach the point where there's a negative leap second, I'd expect lots of arguing in favor of abolishing leap seconds. I'd bet lots of code is not currently set up for such... come to think of it, my own code doesn't account for negative leap seconds, and it'd be some serious work to do so. (Though on the bright side, we don't have the "one second repeating" issue that occurs with positive leap seconds.)

Re: Where does it all come from?

Interesting. Looks as if the plastic removal really ought to be done at the mouth of the Yangtze.

I say that only somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I would ass u me that the density of garbage is greatest at these river mouths. Then again, you presumably also have much more shipping traffic at these locations; running their "sweeper" back and forth is going to be an obstacle course.

Re: negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit

Dunno how "global" this is, but in the US, we have time/temperature signs, usually on banks, cycling between displaying time, temp in degrees F, and temp in degrees C. I've always wanted to hack one to also show the temp in "degrees" K. If I ever do so, I'll try to remember to leave out the degree symbol.

(Though truthfully, I'd prefer the now-obsolete use of Absolute and Centigrade. I appreciate the desire to honor Kelvin and Celsius, but there's something to be said for designations that actually tell you what's being discussed.)

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

Julian date format != Julian calendar.

Julian date format (in this context) means expressing dates in year and day-of-year format. It is a mangled version of "real" Julian dates, which are a straightforward count of days elapsed since noon -4712 Jan 1. The name is unfortunate; you can have Julian-format dates for the Gregorian calendar, as occurred here.

The Julian _calendar_ is the one where any year divisible by four, including century years, are leap years. Your note about the Gregorian fix is correct.

Re: Google's minimum viable response

"...I mean, Google isn't a pubic utility..."

Are you sure? They've always seemed like a bunch of (censored)s to me.

Aside from that, you are correct; even if Google (or other tech giant) really did Take Our Customer's Privacy Seriously, it'd be easy to mess up. About your only way to stay safe is leave your phone at home, don't do any searches for sensitive topics, and don't drive your own vehicle through any of the various licence tag scanners used for toll collection on the way.

Re: "This code makes my shoes sad."

Sounds downright sandalous to me. I'd lace right into him with a thorough tongue-lashing.

Re: High angle of impact

I'm the Bill Gray mentioned in the article. But my only connection to the Planetary Society is that I wrote a couple of articles for them, quite a while back. (One of which, coincidentally, was about Chang'e 2 and its flyby of the asteroid Toutatis, which involved similar sleuthing to figure out what China was up to. This would all be much simpler if the China National Space Agency would just tell us what they were doing, the way ESA and NASA almost always do. But I'll admit that it's more fun when CSNA leaves us little puzzles like this to figure out.)

Re: Measurement creep

I'm 57, and used a slide rule a bit (not much) in my early teens. Not sure what happened to it. I now have two of my grandfather's slide rules (pocket versions with not many functions) and recently picked up the Versalog at a thrift shop. Basic calculations are quite straightforward; developing the facility to tackle anything really complicated would probably take more practice than I'm apt to invest. Definitely an elegant computing instrument for a more... civilized age.

Re: All risks are relative

Forgot your troll icon, eh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban#Definition_of_assault_weapon

I'll grant you, it's an arbitrary distinction, sort of like the legal distinction between fruits and vegetables. Your average citizen would probably say that "assault weapons" are "weapons intended solely to kill lots of people at once, as opposed to what you'd use to defend against an armed robber or shoot a deer or other 'legitimate' use."

Since the "intent" is not necessarily clear, they went with a more arbitrary definition that (they hoped) would roughly line up with what they actually wanted and be good enough for government work. But you knew that.