* Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

6335 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015

LockBit shows no remorse for ransomware attack on children's hospital

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Time

To go and check my tape backups!

They are probably corrupt, damaged or otherwise unreadable.

In my experience anyway..

'I’m sorry for everything...' Facebook's Zuck apologizes to families at Senate hearing

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "I’m sorry for everything..."

Or is it that you're looking for job ?

A nice, cushy job . . .

Well, it worked for Nick Clegg. Swapped being entirely superfluous in politics to being entirely superfluous at Meta (but excelled at being a stuffed-shirt mouthpiece in both fields)

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

We already know that 82.68.0.0/14 seems not to be affected

Which is where my /29 is..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: It depends on the use-case

Strong disagree. More should run their own if they can

But not from a *residential* IP address block. Because it'll quickly get RBL'd (see my answer above).

I've run my own mail servers since the mid 1990's and it's one of the reasons why I pay the extra for a business line (apart from the vastly improved SLA and lower contention rates).

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Anyone using the IP for a self-hosted mail server" should just stop

Care to explain why? Not all of us want to suffer email down times and all the other crap that you get from many major suppliers.

Because you very quickly find yourself on RBL blocklists (all of whom are aware of which netblocks are residential and not commercial) and will block you very quickly. At which point, your SPF/DKIM settings won't matter an iota.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Or maybe your range - I'm on 82.x.x.x

Likewise

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

We've been with Zen for 15 years or so, but not had anything from them about this change.. Probably had the same IP address all this time too

they did get in touch with me but only to tell me I was migrating to "Full Fibre" free-of-charge (which is should be since I already have it..) as the consequence of them moving from using BT as backhaul to using CityFibre (who, ironically, were the people who managed to kill my fibre connection when they were laying their fibre into the conduits outside my house).

Apparently, it also comes with a new FritzBox (which I won't be using) as they want to get rid on any analogue voice setups as well..

(I'm sure that the FritzBox is a perfectly nice bit of kit for a standard home setup but I have a router-only setup that just passes everything on to my firewall. And the wifi/servers etc etc is on the safe side of the firewall, not plugged into a box with direct access to t'internet.

So no, I won't be taking advantage of the router installation thankyouverymuch. And if I mysteriously lose the /29 that I've been paying extra for for the last 8 years I'll be somewhat upset.

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: This could be a really big deal

nice seat for the driver and brain signal interface in the helmet

Sounds a bit MechWarrior-ish..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Uh oh

Xitler's not using the Mechanicus from Warhammer as a reference/aspiration

He already thinks he's the messiah so the small step to the Omnissiah isn't that big..

(And yes, Monty Python quotes probably *are* appropriate here)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Uh oh

Or maybe the idea is to stick a real brain in a Tesla?

Please tell me he's not taking inspiration from "The ship who sang" (Anne McCaffery)..

Probably not. Elon will admit that nothing has primacy over is own drug-addled thoughts and abhors the idea of giving credit to anyone else for one of "his" ideas.

The literal Rolls-Royce of EVs is recalled over fire risk

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

loudest sound you could hear in a Rolls-Royce was the ticking of the clock

Wifes great-grandfather owned a car garage down in Cornwall a geological era ago (and had the first taxi-company in his part of the world - then managed to gamble away all the money he made!). We have, on the chest of drawers in our bedroom, a 1920s car clock, mounted in a hand-made mahogany mount with a careful cutout at the bottom to allow the winder/adjuster to work.

And, at the top, a patch of lighter wood where the varnish has been worn off by years of thumb prints because that's where your thumb goes when you hold it to wind it up.

Apparently, that's one of the two things she'd grab if the house was on fire (the other is a painting her great-uncle did of his brother mending fishing nets in Canada ca. 1930). Nice i'm out-prioritised by a lump of wood and metal :-)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Required edits:

Rolls Royces merely occasionally fail to proceed.

[Queue tale of snapped half-shaft that clearly Never Happened (officially anyway)]

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Required edits:

"the super-luxury arm of BMW of [x]" is the quality really the same?

Judging by the loss of the famed BMW build quality, probably no.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Yikes

The spirit of electricity

That'll be the Chernobyl Apple Vodka that's waiting in my cupboard for 1st February..

(Yes, I am doing Dry January. And all those people that said I couldn't do it seriously underestimated my stubborness..).

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Again?

Yeah, MS browsers have a bad habit of staying open without your knowledge

Opens iTerm session, does a "ps -ef | grep -i edge", returns no results..

Oh yes - that'll be because I'm on a Mac (which, yes, has its own issues but isn't (yet) as fully-loaded with pervasive spyware as Windows). And using Little Snitch I can tweak exactly what gets to the outside world and where.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Public sector got accustomed that these businesses charge fortune and deliver little

We always have service credit penalties written into the contracts (we are not allowed to call it 'monetary penalties'). At least one outsourcer has withdrawn from the contract (and paid the termination fee) because the service credits that they owed us were higher than the remaining potential income from the contract..

(You are only allow a certain percentage per-month but when they fail the KPIs month after month, those service credits build up..)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Language

vague assurances about caring for staff, and a pat on the back for 'patience' with their mess

And promotions for the PM/team leader/manager involved.[1]

Got to be seen to be a success - perception is everything!

[1] Many years ago at a certain bat-winged purveyor of cellular base stations, they put in, at great cost, a factory management/ERP system. After many failed attempts to implement it, they eventually managed to get the 'factory management and parts management' of it into production. But, sadly, not the bit that actually handled the shipping of the final product. It either had to just sit in the shipping warehouse or, at vast expense, be shipped manually to the customer. The PM and manager involved all got payrises and big pats on the back for a 'project well-delivered'. Mind you, BWPoCBS was renowned for never sacking managers - instead they just got promoted to a role that lacked any ability to actually do any damage (AKA 'Special Projects Director' that had one intern reporting to them and sat all day in their office with nothing to do other than contemplate their over-full pay packet)

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

The sole of his shoe had depressed the guardless on/off button and he now faced the rest of the half holding the moderately strong action switch pressed in . Oh how we laughed

Many years ago (very much pre-rackmount servers), we had a bench full of OS/2 LAN Server (remember that?) servers (in sort-of-desktop cases - not even tower cases) on.a bench. The one that handling the MSMail postbox shares was by the room door, with a monitor on top.

One day, I was walking out of the door and I noticed that the monitor had been left on (this was when screen burn-in was a thing and also, if the monitors were left on, the room got quite hot very quickly since it was a glass-walled room that faced mostly south-west. There were blinds but they were mostly to stop people seeing in clearly.) so, as I opened the door and started to walk out, I pressed in the monitor power switch - or what I thought was the monitor power switch (like yours it was a press and release type). Then realised that the case under my fingers had the edge *above* the switch and not below. The servers and the monitors (both from IBM had the same push-to-release power switches with the server one being about 5cm directly below the monitor power switch..

Cue some frantic calls to my colleages to inform people that MSMail would be down for "maintenance" and, while I stood there holding the switch in, to shut down the server involved (and the MSMail POP server since it really didn't handle the postbox share going away at all gracefully..

Service was eventually restored. And we went round taping stiff cardboard flaps over the power switches on the servers, just in case. Fortunately, my manager at the time had the attitude of "it would have happened eventually" and there were no negative consequences (apart from that we carried on using MSMail)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: is to gradually push less

at the limit of your strength merely holding it where it is, and can't get it more upright not matter how hard you try, ... can really you afford to ease off and risk it it tilting a little further as a test?

Depends whether it's a motorbike and whether you own it..

Had my bike nicked once (lovely VFR750 - probably my favourite ever bike) and got given a Pan European 1300 as a loaner by the insurance company. It's *big* lump of metal and plastic and, even though a lot of the weight is fairly low down, once it starts to go over it's pretty difficult (unless you are Popeye with a handy can of spinach) to hold it up, let alone righting it.

I came close once (stopped on a verge, put the stand down only to find that one side of it sank straight through the tarmac.. Fortunately, I could hold it up long enough for my friends to help me get it upright again (once they'd stopped laughing anyway).

I thought it would handle like a pig but, assuming you use a slightly different technique of moving the bike under you, surprisingly nimble.

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "focus the team on the launch of the next-generation vehicle"

Why does that remind me of a certain Sinclair ?

More like Osbourne (the computer one, not the failed ex-chancellor)

Software troubles delay F-35 fighter jet deliveries ... again

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Are you out of your frickin' mind, Dave?

Insert disc 369 of 1,064 and press any key

Assuming that you bought the "any key" option anyway. If not, please insert your credit card.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Boeing boing boing

and it will be a bit more expensive

Cheap/Fast/Good - in normal life you can "choose any two". In aviation (so 'tis said) you can "choose any one".

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The Last

How old is your car?

Which one?

The one parked by the side of the house is 6 years old. The one parked in *front* of the house is 57 years old..

(One year younger than me and in better condition. At least when the Moggie gets a rusted wing, you can just remove it and replace it. Sadly, doesn't work with psoriatic arthritis..)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "the aircraft was towed off the runway eventually"

but concrete, and planes, and Atlantans

I read that last word as "Atlanteans" and thought "so that's where they are hiding nowadays"..

Major IT outage at Europe's largest caravan and RV club makes for not-so-happy campers

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

jeremy clarkson dunnit....

Nah - that would imply some technical capability or competence..

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Thanks for the Microsoft Word for DOS

"DisplayWrite"

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!

In my programmer days (where, on the DOS side we had to use DW4) we used to call it "DeathWish4" because that's what happened if you had to use it for any length of time..

Most people just used SGML in xedit.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Motif?

Including, of course, Windows where the object of every iteration is not to be like any previous version

If it wasn't the Marketdroids would be able to splash the "ALL NEW" crap over it. And the list of "new exciting features" would be a lot shorter and, as we all know, marketing is judged by verbosity, not ability..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Yes, but

Motif never caught on, though it was familiar from Solaris and other UNIX systems

To which me response, as someone that had to use it in work is "good". It was very much and MVP desktop/framework..

I think my first linux desktop was KDE on Mandrake/Mandriva (before it disappeared up its own backside).

Speaking of CUA, it was endlessly amusing (well - for about 5 seconds) that IBMs' flagship desktop application (for a while anyway) Lotus Notes was *utterly* non-CUA. CUA defines F5 as "Refresh", Bloats defines it as "force end user to reauthenticate". Yes, I know it was something that they bought in and they didn't want to alienate existing users but surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to implement a CUA-Mode switch? It seemed to have switches for pretty much everything else..

I only used/ran Notes for a couple of years and that was a couple of years too long.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Efficient interface

I am an olde pharte of 56 who was working for a living at the end of the 1980s

Ah - a mere youth then - almost 3 years younger than me!

My first job that actively used a computer was CAD - drawing location cases for railway signalling kit. Got bored with that, moved down to Plymouth to get married.. Then we both got jobs at the new airline CRS in Swindon and became TPF programmers (I had a spectacularly bad interview, partly because the interviewer had a really strong Swiss/German accent and, being really nervous, I had difficulty understanding him. They ended up offering my wife a job but not me. Her response was to say "well, I'm not moving to Swindon if he doesn't have a job" so they eventually offered me a job as well :-)

My first unix/linux was Slackware SLS 0.99pl15 (I think) - I had a friend who worked somewhere with Internet access (1993-4? Somewhere around there) and could download (and re-download when the floppies failed as happened with every 3rd or 4th floppy) it for me. This was on a 386sx25 with 4mb? RAM (tiny amount anyway) and, initally an 80MB hard drive, connected via an SB16 sound card..

Can't remember why I did it - probably because I was bored at work. I was with Demon at the time and they had really good FAQs on how to do stuff like dial-on-demand and fetchmail

So I guess my vi knowledge starts then - I certainly would count myself an expert - I know how to do what I need to do (add lines, delete lines, replace text, search and replace etc etc). I've never knowingly used emacs.. I do vaguely remember ed (from my auto-borking of my linux box) but I can't remember any of the keystrokes.

By the time I officially had a job herding unix boxes (1999 - post y2k projects - involved looking after the packet-switched networks, administering the BT Meridian PABX [1], doing user admin with NIS, building new servers and workstations etc etc - they initally gave me a Windows PC but, with my manager permission I dual-booted it into linux (can't remember which flavour)) I had 5-6 years of doing stuff on linux and, fortunately, managed to do enough reading in the days before my interview to talk like I knew what I was doing :-)

Sadly, I don't herd linux at work (we have very little of it) but do use MacOS as my main work machine and herd the 100 or so Macs that we have (and do a bunch of stuff on the Windows side as well).

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Efficient interface

But shared libraries with dynamic linking were seen as the way forward, so vi stopped working if /usr/lib was not available

I vagely remember that the Makefile (or was it the configure script?) for vi had a --static option which would build a static binary. Or is that just on the FreeBSD ports tree?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Efficient interface

The history of vi tracks from this. Once you get the hang of its obscure commands, vi is very powerful, allowing very quick editing with minimal keypresses

The first 'proper' editor I ever really used was xedit on the IBM mainframe which was similarly obscure but powerful (a metaphor for the whole VM/CMS itself and TPF - the OS I was programming for). Designed for use on 3270 terminals that didn't have the concept of interactive screen updates (essentially just a list of screen updates got sent so, in those days of scarce bandwidth and CPU/RAM, you wanted to send as little info as possible which made short commands important).The whole screen got repainted every time there was an update although only the changed fields needed transmitting to the terminal.

We didn't have physical terminals - we ran the IBM 3270 emulator on our PS/2 50/z PCs.. (and not a lot of people realised that they allowed a DOS shell in the background or that they could run quite happily under Desqview..) I still remember that the right-hand CTRL key was repurposed as the enter key so that people who were used to the layout of the hardware terminals could use their muscle memory.

Also the mainframe had Rexx for doing scripting - not that we used it much.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Cyberdreck

Wankpanzer

Don't recognise that tank model? Was it one that never made it into production in WW2 through someone finally coming to their senses?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Joke ?

Do they really intend to mass-produce and -sell them ?

Intend? Yes, Succeed? We'll have to wait and see (and be utterly unsurprised when the "mass" part is very, very limited. Won't stop Elmo from trump(eting) their success..)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Why do people keep trying to go off road in those things?

meant the leave the road any more than my Audi coupe is

Just asking - does your car have the (apparently) entirely optional turn indicators? Just that a lot of the Audis around here don't so it must be an expensive option..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Sports Futility Vehicle

That was the Tiger P (VK 4501 P) not Tiger II

Yeah - the Tiger II's always seemed to stop just below the crest of the hill, with only the turret peeking over..

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: scary

how about using DNA to predict a face and then using facial recognition on the predicted face. Utter insanity

Which smacks, more than a little, of Victorian-era eugenics.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

And no, the thought of what might happen if my programs were still around in another thirty years or so never crossed my mind

In the dim and distant past, when I was pretending to be an IBM mainframe TPF programmer (in the early 1990s) some of the code I was working with had been originally written in the late 1960s. Amongst other things, we were refactoring it to get rid of stuff like self-modifying code (they used every sort of trick to save space! - like reserving 200 bytes in the code segment then building some self-modifying code in it to do branching based on inputs. Not that big a problem when stuff was single-tasking (as long as proper input sanitisation had been done), *big* problem when everything became multi-reentrant).

Most scary? The fiddling with the tape logging code which *had* to be single-tasking so used spin-locks extensively. Mess that up and you have a 'makes-$6-million-an-hour' mainframe spending ages doing a core dump and re-IPL and a *very* unhappy VP of Production Services. I think I did more testing on that change than the sum-total of all my other changes..

I spent more time doing dev support than dev so eventually switched over full time. I *think* the stuff I worked on is probably still around

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Should have left some "bugs" in place

BREXSOD The Brtitish blue passport economy's screen of death

There FTFY

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Forewarned is forearmed?

wasn't available in Gin, which I mainly used

I mainly use gin too - with a nice tonic. Althouygh sometimes it's whisky (without tonic thankyouverymuch - I'm *not* a barbarian).

Sometimes, rum is nice too.

(13 days until January ends. And I can have a nice G&T again. Admittedly, I *did* need a break from alcohol because the 'one G&T' had crept up to 2 G&T then 3 G&T.. and the G wasn't a single either.)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: 2038?

I wonder how much of a problem the POSIX timestamp overrun is going to be

I'll be retired then so probably won't care :-)

(Unless someone wants to pay me mucho dinero to care.)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Time Bomb Y2K

Oh, and the person we had an argument with worked in IT at the time and by his own admission did Y2K checking

A hell of a lot of the Y2K people I worked with were purely script-runners with minimal technical skills.. that relied on the few of us that did have the skills to actually interpret the output and decide what to do.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

logical thought needed to connect all the work done before 2000 with the fact that nothing bad happened at 2000

I'm old enough to have been a Y2K contractor (and, unlike a lot of my colleagues, had actual support and techie experience beforehand). Spent most of my time dealing with non-Microsoft stuff (SunOS/Solaris/HP-UX/GuardianOS on firewalls/etc etc) - mostly because most of my contempories would freak if faced with a command-line and I'd already been using linux for about 4 years (and was a quick learner - this was pre-internet days so it was a case of "sit down with the manuals and learn how to do it")

Did some MS stuff as well and had the particular joy of seeing fully-patched and 'compliant' servers become non-compliant (or differently-compliant) with each successive patch. And applications (which at that point hadn't been patched) crash when the dates offered by the system differed from what they were expecting.

Then the Y2K projects started winding down, releasing lots of badly-trained and inexperienced 'IT engineers' into the contract market and my contract rate dropped and dropped - from £40/hour at one point to £15/hour - at which point it became less financially-viable to be a contractor.

So I blagged my way into a Solaris/NIS/network engineer permie job despite never having done it formally before :-)

Working from home never looked better: Leopard stalks around Infosys and TCS campuses

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: I look forward to a leopard making a guest appearance in a BOFH episode very soon

I'm sure that he could be put to good use among the beancounters

Hello chaps, meet our new Morale Officer, name of Panthera Pardus. He's *very* keen to personally interview slackers..

He has a very... interactive technique. He's always happy with the results.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: any fashion house

it should protect against the unwanted attention of Tiddles the leopard

Since it has a bite force of 621.1 Newton I think you'd be better off with kevlar-backed full plate.. (11th highest bite force in the animal kingdom apparently).

(Plus, the teeth would go though the chain mail links and then split them apart unless they were proper riveted links. Which are by no means cheap).

And, unlike most cats, leopards are happy to eat meat that isn't fresh so even rolling in a week-old dead skunk won't save you!

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

What you dont know cant hurt you?

Or, at least, only briefly..

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Emissions testing has probably forced them off the road

If they are over a certain age (1982 or older?) then it's a visual inspection only. A clueless MOT tester once failed the MM on emissions - it had passed the 1990's levels but not the 2010 levels. Our mechanic took him round the back and pointed out the regulations to him and we were promptly issued a shiny new MOT..

It burns very little oil - we check it every 3 months or so but rarely have to top it up.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

I also remember having a toolkit, gallon of petrol, engine oil, water, spare hoses, bulbs, plugs, etc and lots of rags in a box in the boot

Ah - you've seen our Morris Minor boot-box then?

Spare can of petrol (when she refills, that goes in first then gets refilled)

2L bottle of water

Antifreeze

Damp-start spray

Pack of light bulbs

Spare distributor cap

Spare coil

2 spare spark plugs

Small toolkit for fitting any of the above

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The comment on AC is pure BS

Just to guess maybe it takes away 5% of range

I think the "AC uses lots of power" trope is based on the old systems (as in 1970s and 80s) where they would sap a huge amount of MPG to use. Which is definately not the case with modern systems - the AC fitted to my Toyota has a negligable effect on the MPG (I was bored one week so measured the MPG of a weeks-worth of travel to work with the AC on and then again the next week with the AC off. Difference was about 2%).

So no, modern AC fitted to cars are not the power/MPG sapping units from 30 years ago.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Yes ... But

hree wheel tricycle with a maximum speed of 30-40kph, but with enough power to lug 400kg of crops or the wife and three kids 20km to a market town ... and back

I'm sure that there will be plenty of backstreet mechanics in India, China and Pakistan offering to convert a Tuktuk to electric. It could probably even use lead-acid batteries like the old milk floats..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

can have an 800km range with 10 minute recharge time

Saw an article about a new battery technology using charge-carrying nanofluid - essentially, you fill up with the fluid, as it passes through the battery unit it loses the charge and powers the car. Next fuel stop, you discharge the spent fluid (it can be recharged and re-used), fill up with charged fluid and continue.

It (currently) isn't in production but offers similar power density to the previous generation of batteries and is being actively worked on.

Found a link about it:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/flow-battery-2666672335