* Posts by Matthew Barker

107 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2007

Palm Pre developers told to read a book

Matthew Barker

But what about...

Was this a revisionist recounting of the iPhone SDK?

When the iphone came out, Jobs specifically asked for patience with getting the real SDK...at least that was my memory. And when it came, it showed more than a year's worth of polish.

Just a thought.

Cheers.

DataDirect takes on EMC in the cloud

Matthew Barker
Thumb Up

Other products have been quite good

Having worked with DDN's other products for the digital media space, they've earned my confidence that this product should be first-rate.

I wish them luck, it sounds like a cool idea.

SCO inks last-second life-saving Unix pact

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

I wonder...

What kind of person is Darl McBride? He wants to stay on and man a sinking ship?

Please, summon the kraken and finish this thing.

Paris because she has a cute pet kraken in her swimming pool.

Hackintosh maker files for bankruptcy

Matthew Barker
Alien

Xerox!

If not MS, it must be Xerox, getting even with Apple for stealing their ideas...or something equally exciting and unexpected.

Probably, the real funder is SCO – this has a remarkably similar sound to the SCO/Novell wrangling and could be a pet project of theirs.

Governator revives anti-violent video game crusade

Matthew Barker
Thumb Up

More info...

This guy has some credibility and a long history.

http://www.killology.com/bio.htm

He'd probably agree with the causation.

I saw a child, first exposed to the violence in a Disney movie screaming with anger and threatening to hurt people.

SCO threatened with Chapter 7 destruction

Matthew Barker
Alien

Perhaps there's hope yet...

Maybe the remaining execs can escape in their trusty Moller SkyCar.

Botnet hijacking reveals 70GB of stolen data

Matthew Barker
Stop

Password rotation?!?

You what? Password rotation makes little to no difference here.

This thing is reading the passwords directly, there's no cracking or guessing needed.

It's like a coroner doing an autopsy on a murder victim and testily observing that they didn't brush their teeth or clean under their nails.

Sacha Baron Cohen scars Paula Abdul for life

Matthew Barker
Stop

@Chris

So you think that American Idol is much worse than "The Hopefuls" and other similar shows, then?

IBM boasts Sun-HP server pact pillaging

Matthew Barker
Stop

And...?

Not to pick nits, but you know there are also customers moving in the opposite directions as well.

Also, if one is considering only HP & Sun, it seems funny to also add EMC to the pool...unless

it's being added to inflate the numbers of course. They wouldn't do that, would they?

Russian schoolgirl invents inertioid-driven Venus rover

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

Dean drive

Something frighteningly similar was patented sometime back as the "Dean Drive". Except

in the Dean Drive (tm, I'm sure), the weight was slid into the center during one part of the rotation

and out to the extreme over the portion of rotation that was in line with the desired direction of

force.

Sounded like something fun to play with or simulate, but not to patent.

Cheers.

Next-gen SQL injection opens server door

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

Hiltonian mechanics

But what does all of this have to do with Paris Hilton?

Microsoft Songsmith ad trumps Seinfeld shocker

Matthew Barker
Linux

Competition

I think this is s'posed to be competition for GarageBand and for the music tutorials Apple added in the new version. So you don't have to learn anything from those hoity-toity big-name musicians. Instead, the computer plays your own genius composition, as we've seen in the "You! Tube!" video.

I can't wait to see what open-source project springs up to duplicate this thing on Linux. It'll probably have lots of techno sound accompaniment with creatures from some MUD to follow words across the screen.

Mac OS 10.5.6 problems? Apple suggests shampoo

Matthew Barker

More than just the combo installer needed

I always use the combo updater.

I had all of the difficulties you mention at the end of the article. Mostly had to do with anything that does heavy network usage.

The only solution that worked for me was to download Maintenance.app from titanium software (titanium.free.fr) and run *all* of the steps, then reboot.

Then remove my user caches (~/Library/Caches/*) and my Mail caching folder (~/Library/Mail), which Mail would recreate when I restarted it.

After that lot, I had no more trouble. I suspect there was some inconsistency between versions of cached data somewhere.

Anyway, the above steps have, thus far, always sorted out such issues...thus far.

So what will happen to Sun?

Matthew Barker
Thumb Down

Impairment of good will

1.65 billion of Sun's loss was a writedown due to new and fairly complicated accounting rules, called a "goodwill impairment'. Apparently, the intention of the rule is to make CFOs think twice before the company undertakes a merger or acquisition.

If you look up goodwill impairment, it's kind of obscure in explaining how it's an actual loss. It looks like it's really just a loss on paper.

Without that, the loss was 65 mil.

Also, when I looked at the quarterly report, I'd seen that the cash in bank was 3.1 bil., not 2.3. Am I missing something?

Cheers,

Matthew

US forces want man-hunting robot wolfpacks

Matthew Barker
Alert

Not just used in someone else's home...

these kinds of tech are easy enough for a government to deploy against their own people inside their own borders, where they wouldn't want to use a missile, as they do in someone else's home.

Still, if they used them to examine the schools full of children they've been blowing up in Pakistan, then they might be more prone to *not* killing people.

Custom-car creator preps electric Porsche

Matthew Barker
Thumb Up

If it's under 100k...

It'd be a better alternative than that leccy from california with the wonky transmission.

Cuil feasts on Salmon of Nonsense

Matthew Barker
Happy

Seems to be improving

Every time the Reg has reminded me of Cuilllllll's existence, I've checked it again. They seem to be working to fix problems; it looks better each time.

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

Nuns on google

I searched google images for pictures of nuns. Got a few porno ones on the first page and loads on the second page. Now I don't know what to think about nuns.

Putting a mule on a cloud: one man's battle with Amazon S3

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

Gerund...

Would Gerund Computing be any better? HPC code to take the load off of all of those marketing folks (who brought us the term "inputting") usually tasked with creating new technical terms.

Baptist church in assault rifle giveaway

Matthew Barker

Christians

There's a thing that Christians refer to as their "Holy Book". In it, there's a statement to which they often refer: "God is Love". And their Saviour has said one should never even speak harshly to another person or they were in danger of judgement.

I guess guns are implements of love rather than hate.

AJAX browser vote exceeds 'wild' expectations

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

The average person will not care

AJAX means something only to developers, not to end users.

"Does the page render properly? Then we're sorted."

The iPhone's love/hate relationship with hackers

Matthew Barker
Happy

@jan

"your walk would have been so much more relaxing if you skipped your rant/winge/blame/inferno."

Nah, it was quite relaxing; I only thought about what I was writing during the time I was writing it. And while you responded, I was blissfully thinking about what I was doing then. Definitely water off a duck's back.

Nor was there inferno, rant, or winge, just some quiet observations that the general tenor of the conversations seemed to be going for a more and more predictable degradation. And that I was packing it in, had something better to do with my time, and was offering an example to anyone else who might've been willing to accept the suggestion that the lack of meaningful discussion on the noted topics was becoming commonplace.

Cheers,

Matthew

Matthew Barker
Stop

Haxies anyone?

The time-honoured tradition of Haxies on the mac is continuing on the iPhone.

Nobody complains about this on the Mac. EVERYONE seems to complain about

it on the iPhone.

Developer whingeing is now firmly linked to the iPhone SDK not being out fast enough and not being all things to all people in one dot naught. Probably we'll next have developers filing suit against Apple for mental anguish and break-up

of their marriages.

I'm giving up on reading any news on the Mac:

1/ Rumours constantly abound as though they mean something real.

2/ Developer whingeing over not having everything now.

3/ Flaming religious wars any time anyone posts a pro-PC, pro-Mac, anti-PC, or anti-Mac statement.

I think I'll go for a walk on the beach whilst the whole jamboree collapses in an inferno of blame and whingeing.

Cheers,

Matthew

North Carolina will pay IBM $750,000 for 10 jobs

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

Who's paying the employees?

This is about the annual salary IBM would be paying them, minus the benefits.

So that makes them State employees.

Hopefully they'll have the same level of job security as a regular state employee.

Foldable sports plane gives Everyman a chance at crashing

Matthew Barker
Stop

MP3

Well, I guess it's just what we need: an MP3 player to distract the novice pilot already lacking in attention span.

I'll wait until the first collision between one of these and a jet liner full of passengers.

Apple partially rehabilitates Sun's DTrace

Matthew Barker

System problem fixed or not

Just examining what's been said:

Note that the [tempest in a teapot] that formed around Adam's findings was about not being able to examine DRM-handling applications such as iTunes.

Quoting your article:

"...that will help you profile and debug your code more effectively, and fine-tune your application's..."

Notice that Apple is saying "your code" and "your application's", the operative word being "your". Not Apple's.

Adam had an argument about the method of excising such applications chosen by Apple had affected some of the statistics/counters of the entire system.

So it sounds as though Apple has changed something...with all applications showing up. It's not clear about whether they addressed Adam's specific complaint.

About the complaints of many others chiming in on comments to Adam's post: many of those were about whether Apple was playing by some "righteous" set of open-source community rules or if they were "pandering to the gods" of DRM.

This latter is a religious issue and probably not worth considering.

Google takes another bite out of NASA with 42-acre research center

Matthew Barker

Re: Really?

In the years I was at SGI, that was only ever known as a sales building.

NetBeans 6.1 packs welcome additions

Matthew Barker
Thumb Up

Works a treat

I've tried it on Mac OS and Solaris.

I expected it to work well on Solaris, but it also works quite well on Mac OS (even PPC).

Remote debugging is really good.

Thanks, NetBeans folks.

IBM hopes to patent 'dealing with chaos'

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

I sense an opportunity here...

Picture it now, a supermodel boards the plane on which you've already taken your seat...

The IBM system kicks in and an optimized expert at dealing with the ill-tempered and potentially explosive is dispatched to the scene. The loop at the end is because the supermodel may overwhelm all attempts to calm her and more optimized experts have to be dispatched to the scene.

Paris because you don't have a picture of an exploding supermodel. Perhaps you could replace the flame icon?

Cheers,

Matthew

Welsh couple cop Mosquito flak

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

Not a new problem

Through the time I was in my 20s, I used to encounter some department stores which had not turned off the ultrasonic motion detectors, though the alarms were not armed. In some cases, I was given a terrible headache if I tried to stay. I resorted to asking them to turn them off, if they wanted my business.

Putting such sounds out where non-offending youths will also be affected is clearly not the right answer. If I were a neighbour, he'd have a fight with me on that point.

Probably lodging a government case against the local police would be better.

If that failed, then he should go buy some goslings from a local farmer so, when they grow up, he'll have 20-30 lb winged attack dogs. He can then disclaim responsibility for any broken limbs the teenage ne'er-do-wells suffer as a result.

Paris because she would think the geese were cute...until they attacked her.

Cheers,

Matthew

So what's the easiest box to hack - Vista, Ubuntu or OS X?

Matthew Barker
Heart

Love match between the "trolls" & "fanboys"

The heart has been repurposed for this post...

Quite impressive...15 times Anonymous appears.

The string "tard" only appears 3 times in this page (until this post). And one of those was Bastard. I think this might be a good sign.

Fanboy (or variants fanbois, fanboyz) appears 10 time (again, +1).

Not *very* creative.

I think the Reg's comments pages are becoming chatrooms for the pairing of "trolls" and apologists.

Maybe a dating service could be established...or "no-holds barred" mud-wrestling match to be webcast from the Reg website. In the latter case, my prediction is that more so-called fanboys will show up than "trolls". "Trolls" usually seem to like the cover of anonymity – or am I playing a troll with that last comment? Also, I predict the first whining will be heard from the "fanboys". But, in my experience, trolls are also prone to wingeing.

In any case, I favour the dating service. Then they can all look meaningfully (and contemptuously) into one-another's eyes and breeding a new generation of American corporate CEOs, leaving room in the comments pages for any really meaningful and thoughtful commentary.

Cheers,

Matthew

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run

Matthew Barker
Coat

The price of complexity is...

...an expensive language-specific track at an industry convention...

From the article: "And yet they found a curious thing: every year for four years, C++ was the strongest track at the show. With zero advertising! That says something about the market. That says that there are problems that C++ is solving."

Faulty reasoning: It could also say that there are too many people still having difficulty getting a leg up on the language. Or maybe the convention conveners are getting a leg over on the attendees.

I see folks using all sorts of OO languages. C++ is the one I've seen folks wrestling the most with since I started using it in 1989.

On the "++" side, I do like it better than Perl, which has an even better bug-hiding system. And I have seen high-perf server systems, written by experienced C++ geeks, having portions rewritten in C to squeeze out better performance.

Still, like my grandmother used to say: most performance improvements are algorithmic. So it doesn't much matter what language you write in, as long as you can speak it.

Unfortunately, when the original coders have left the company, the comments are missing along with design docs and original requirements, it does matter very much when you want to maintain the code.

Cheers,

Matthew

Japanese bank sues IBM over 'difficult' system overhaul

Matthew Barker
Paris Hilton

Difficult is polite...

I think it's because "Difficult" is the polite Japanese phrase.

The more direct, Western equivalent would be "Impossible". I'd read this to say IBM took 4 years and gave us nothing. AND they've got lots of PR mileage out of it.

And if, 4 years on, the system still isn't implemented, it doesn't sound like it works.

Cheers,

Matthew

Paris because at least all of her big blue projects succeeded.

Die for Gaia, save the planet?

Matthew Barker
Coat

Nothing like quoting loony extremists

It always helps push emotional reaction toward the opposite extreme.

In which case when can put our ear buds back in our ears and forget about it.

Probably the truth lies somewhere in between and is not as tragic as quoted, but is also not nearly as rosy as Simon would have us believe.

Unless one really thinks that technology can conquer all. Maybe we can clone an army of Julian Simons!...er...I hope he doesn't eat much.

Cheers,

Matthew

Human rights group pleads for condemned Saudi 'witch'

Matthew Barker

we're so much more advanced than they are

After all, we did tape the eyes of those we electrocuted so they didn't explode...even if we later found they weren't guilty.

And it was a real military doctor who was injecting plutonium into all of those folks in the US to see what effect it would have, not some backwards tribal. That's good, isn't it?

The list is long, and the "yea me, fuck you" mentality lives on.

Exploding Flash catalogue rocks Dutch e-commerce site

Matthew Barker
Happy

I laughed, I cried...

I shit my pants.

Quite funny. Made me want to shop there.

Matthew

Polished NetBeans means Ruby

Matthew Barker
Thumb Up

So it's not just me...

I tried really hard to like Eclipse and it became a full-time job. Frankly it sent me back to XEMACS. Someone else showed me NetBeans 5 in use on their project and I was sold. 5.5 was even better and I'm looking forward to trying 6.

Kudos to the developers.

Cheers,

Matthew

Miserable? It must be U

Matthew Barker
Happy

Best decade of my life thus far...

Reverse for me: My 20s were complete shite. I was the most miserable I've ever been. My 40s have been fantastic...the best part of my life thus far.

Probably means the boffins'll be round my place to give me a good kicking for being an outlier.

Cheers,

Matthew

Indignant reader defends Idiot 2.0™

Matthew Barker
Boffin

Woe to us in this age of specialization

Are journalists really now not allowed to understand the subjects about which they write? That sounds like real specialization!

"I know how to turn the know, but I'm unqualified to push the door open."

And is the keeping of public diaries now really considered journalism? I was hoping it was a bad dream.

Is our blogger hero the only "journalist" who knows anything about fields of endeavour other than writing?

I s'pose the Renaissance was all a mistake. If all of those smart chaps had just

stuck with one specialty instead of actually studying and learning about multiple areas of human endeavour, we'd not have any need for these bloggers to set us straight and point to specialization as the shiny road to the future.

Cheers,

Matthew

PS: The Reg needs to add a new comment icon for comments about bloggers.

US Army plans robot planes operated by non-pilots

Matthew Barker

Predator B crash...not just pilot error

The "pilot error" in the Predator B crash should obviously be, at least partly,

attributed to the stupid, stupid, stupid design decision to use the control lever

intended for controlling fuel to the engine in one mode also control the camera in the other mode.

This is the kind of thing that the NTSB has often been good at catching. But I'm

shocked that it wasn't caught by anyone in doubtless long chain of approvals to purchase that hunk of crap. I wonder what other silly design flaws exist in these

craft. And I wonder what sort of tragedy will be required to counteract the

huge "investment inertia" that calls for continued justification for their

poorly-considered use.

If they can't even get the controls laid out properly, what hope do we have to

escape from one going crazy.

US man sets himself on fire and cuts off his own arm

Matthew Barker
Stop

@bws

I've also worked with, in, around heavy machinery. If you have, as you said, then you must've

had some sort of safety instruction, or there were signs on the machinery, or you're a quick study,

or stayed far away, or are just lucky.

People make mistakes. I've never seen safety lessons available for old farm machinery.

What's dangerous is sometimes really obvious in hindsight

and not so obvious in foresight.

A lot of students start out thinking they'll wear long-sleeve shirts in a machine

shop when it's cold. A good instructor will correct them, a bad one will let them

lose their arm or hand. The good instruction is clearly based on the painful

mistakes of many people who've gone before -- and whose genes are no doubt

intermingled with your own.

It's easy to be smug from behind the keyboard.

Matthew Barker
Stop

Thus...

the field of Ergonomics exists to prevent just this kind of thing, but folks do get

somewhat cavalier about well-known machinery after 20, 30, or 40 years of operating

it. And sometimes they can't afford the newest, coolest equipment. And sometimes

people really do work 16-hour days on such machinery.

There was a kid (about 11, I think) on a farm in the northwestern US. Some machinery with an auger for moving grain caught the sleeve of his jacket and pulled his arm in. When trying to free the first arm with the other arm, the second sleeve got caught as well. He managed

to keep the rest of him out of it it, but lost both of his arms.

There's an article addressing the number of deaths and injuries due to farm machinery

here: http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/The_real_cost_of_food.html

It's probably not much good for sarcastic jokes at the expense of someone else but

is worth reading for those who want a perspective on how lovely life is for those not

hauling in 6 figure salaries in front of a keyboard.

Perhaps it's not so much funny as uncomfortable and tragic. We get to sit in front of nice, safe keyboards and pretend that they're injured only because they're stupid: "They'll be doing us all a favour if they snuff themselves out of stupidity."

Nice.

Drunken Indian elephants take on electricity pole

Matthew Barker
Boffin

There's a clear parallel here

It's clear that these are reincarnated football thugs. Or perhaps they'll

*be* reincarnated as football thugs.

Did MoD chopper buzz sunbathing au pair?

Matthew Barker
Black Helicopters

14 tons?

I couldn't find any reg units for it, but that's far bigger and heavier than the average "eye in the sky" news helicopter!

That's as heavy as 2 20-year-old volvo automobiles.

Oscar Wilde voted top Brit wit

Matthew Barker
Joke

Other famous Brits...

I think you can have George W. & Paris Hilton as well, please.

NBC to Apple: 'You're fired!'

Matthew Barker

Store

If I have a store, I get to say what I'm willing to charge and to pay for products that are sold in my store. I also get to say what suppliers are OK to deal with and which are a pain in the arse.

Simply keeping things in perspective.

Boffins flick Quantum vacuum switch from suck to blow

Matthew Barker

Read The Register, change your pants

I laughed so hard, I became momentarily incontinent. Must've been that gecko saute I had for dinner. So maybe those feet really were "floating in oil".

Cheers,

Matthew

Adobe embroiled in War of the Fed-Ex Kinko Button

Matthew Barker

Still not so simple

As I said, it's not so simple. Having worked on just such a product and service, I understand just how complicated this can be. Frankly, I don't know how far Adobe has taken this, but consider this 10k foot view of some of the factors to be considered...for EACH print provider (from which some of you will be able to infer further work that has to be put in):

1/ how do you show the user (reliably) what their print job will look like?

-- Note this has to correlate to the paper selections, the bindery selections,

etc. that the particular provider has available on a per-location basis.

There has to be a price associated with each printing variable and bindery operation. All of the operations or selections that can affect the final look of the print job have to be representable and price-able on the client machine. The information has to be updated in real-time from the particular storefront for the particular print provider...

you don't want to send your important, urgent print job to a local store, not knowing what it might look like and also find out they're out of the particular paper you want. And if you're not going to show the user what it looks like, then there's no point in offering this linkage.

2/ Data models to support all of the possible variables have to be worked out and

verified...for each print provider. The structures have to be there in the back-end.

3/ the ordering system has to be set up and reliable. The fulfillment and handling of refunds has to be reliable.

Matthew Barker

Re: You what?

My experience is that Adobe does indeed provide some country-specific customisation of their products. (No, I don't own any of their products, nor do I work for them, nor do I like their PDF reader).

This tempest-in-a-teapot is likely confined to North America, and maybe US. I don't know if FedEx/Kinkos are in Canada.

Matthew Barker

Rocket science

Anyone who thinks this thing is simple should look into just what the

functionality is and start thinking through how they'd implement this same

service.

I neither work for Kinko's nor do I work for Adobe.

This is a hard problem that looks simple on the surface because they've made

it easy for the user.

If you don't believe me, start figuring it out on the process end, the business

end, don't stop at the basic client engineering.

Cheers,

Matthew