* Posts by Will Godfrey

5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007

GitHub Codespaces: VS Code was 'designed from the get-go' for this, says Microsoft architect

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Something wicked this way comes

Sorry, but that is my gut reaction to this. If anyone can demonstrate how this is a good idea, I'd like to hear it.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Something quite simple

Nemesis

dictionary definitions:

1. a source or cause of harm or failure.

2. an unconquerable opponent or rival.

Australian contact-tracing app sent no data to contact-tracers for at least ten days after hurried launch

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Can't be explained by incompetence

I don't believe any degree of incompetence could achieve a clusterfuck of such proportions. Therefore it must be malice.

'A' is for ad money oddly gone missing: Probe finds middlemen siphon off half of online advertising spend

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Where's the problem?

A basically dishonest system is being robbed by basically dishonest people. Looks like a perfect match from here.

Senior MP tells UK Defence Committee on 5G security: Russia could become China's cyber-attack dog

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Unhappy

Scary stuff

First that people keep spouting this bullshit,

Second that others actually believe it.

Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS

Will Godfrey Silver badge
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As I said before

I've been using it for years. Does everything I want, and that's before this upgrade.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Trust the user for good tests

In the early 80s I wrote a pinball game for the BBC B. Unlike those on the market at the time, the ball in mine followed something like a parabolic curve, and you could get real control of the speed. This worked fine for me and a bunch of friends, until a new guy joined us. After familiarising himself with the game, he complained that sometimes the ball would go 'through' the flippers. We didn't believe him at first, until he was able to do it repeatedly. It turned out he had dramatically better reaction time than any of the rest of us, and (like in a real pinball machine) timed the flick so just the tip of the flipper hit the ball to get maximum velocity. The code was slow enough, and the look-aheads far enough apart that this came between two of them. The solution was one of the very first bits of 6502 assembler I did.

P.S. I was quite proud of making rebound speed dependent on where on the flipper it hit.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Nothing changes

Without access to precision tools I had to mount a Raspberry Pi on a panel. Lining up for screw holes in the panel, and then threading them would have been a nightmare so I eventually came up with the idea of using plastic standoffs (the type with a peg to push the board onto). This presented two problems. Being able to line up the holes (again). A peg small enough to fit in the raspberry Pi mounting holes. The latter are 2.7 mm.

The solution I came up with was to use a rat-tail file to careful increase the size of the holes, then thoroughly clean and scratch up the panel, and dollop quick-set epoxy on the other end of the standoffs, then prop the whole assembly against the panel till it set - seems to still be OK after a couple of years.

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Will Godfrey Silver badge
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Re: Great story, well written

hear, hear.

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Alien

It's a decoy

The real invasion fleet is coming sneakily from behind the sun.

Resistance is futile: Some Cisco security appliances are ticking time bombs of fail thanks to faulty resistors

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Almost certain it's an underspec device

If it was a placement problem I'd expect it to fail pretty quickly, but these seem to carry on for some quite long (indeterminate) time, which suggests they are underrated by a fairly small amount.

Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Thanks for this.

I went along for the ride right from the (BBC B) start, and now have a Raspberry Pi with RISC OS installed on it.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Cheers...

What gave the game away was that it would instantly crash if all data and address lines went to zero

Capita to continue managing Brit teachers' pensions well into the 2020s

Will Godfrey Silver badge

You misspelt the title

Capita to continue mismanaging ...

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

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Thumb Up

Doffs Hat

I've pulled a few tricks in my time, but nothing that approaches this for sheer Class!

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Are the tab V spaces wars over?

That's the only explanation for this being the new essential thing to fight over.

Want to put a satellite into orbit for US comms? Whoa, says Uncle Sam: Where's your space crash risk assessment?

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Commentards are right onto this one.

Just about everything I thought, while reading this has already been said - well done people.

I just hope Satan is preparing a very special place for Pai

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Been here before!

Our people fitted a new central process control unit in a plastic film factory. This had just about every test imaginable before being fitted including being hit by brownouts and static discharges. However, once installed at the location demanded by their engineers all sorts of random errors were occurring. This was in the middle of the factory on a partition attached to the back wall and at the top of a flight of steps. It was months before we identified the problem, and only then because one of our engineers took a laptop there to make notes of readings and it kept crashing. One of their production workers commiserated and said that their mobile phones would sometimes freeze if they went there. In a moment of inspiration our guy asked what the partition was there for, and was told the 3 phase supply for the entire factory complex was behind it.

Vietnam alleged to have hacked Chinese organisations in charge of COVID-19 response

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

No Surprise

Everyone is calling this a war, and of course in a war the first casualty is the truth.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Mushroom

Well I'm glad it's not just me

I detest the buttons that aren't buttons, and uniform washed out appearance.

IBM == Insecure Business Machines: No-auth remote root exec exploit in Data Risk Manager drops after Big Blue snubs bug report

Will Godfrey Silver badge
FAIL

Does not compute

Stranger: "Hey! You left your door and a couple of windows open."

Home Owner: "Fuck off."

Zuck loves free speech so much Facebook will censor 'anti-state' content in Vietnam after telcos 'crippled' access

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Shakes head

I don't know whether he is an alien pretending to be a human, or if it's me that's the alien. Either way, I simply can't get into the mindset of people like him.

Vivaldi browser to perform a symphony of ad and tracker blocking with version 3.0

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

I'll be watching out for this

Now if the Adslingers were even half-way reasonable none of this would be necessary, but unless that happens it's full nuclear here.

Apart from a a few tightly selected web sites.

Do not adjust your set: Here are three stories about the IT industry doing some good during COVID-19 pandemic

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Nice

Good to see people oiling the wheels.

Facebook sort-of blocks anti-quarantine events – how many folks are actually behind these 'massive' protests online?

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

What to do in an emergency

What should happen:

Get everyone as safe as possible as quickly as possible. Move research of the problem into top gear.

What all politicians and most others do:

Find someone to blame as quickly as possible. Silence anyone who contradicts this.

Who can we count on to slow Huawei's continuous growth? US prez Donald Trump and COVID-19

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Comparison?

How well are the competition doing though?

With Trump & Co. still apparently on a suicide mission, what's America's financial state looking like?

Something a bit phishy in your inbox? You can now email suspected frauds straight to Blighty's web takedown cops

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

In fact I would expect the simplest way for the scammers to screw this is to keep reporting legitimate mainstream sites from across the world, using faked (scraped) email addresses.

Lockdown endgame? There won't be one until the West figures out its approach to contact-tracing apps

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Re: An App?

You forgot one.

My phone is a very dumb one that doesn't support bluetooth.

(upvoted you anyway)

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

Will Godfrey Silver badge

I seem to remember the BBC Model B used RS423 - which rather surprised everyone, but to all practical purposes it seemed to behave exactly the same as 232.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

An oldie, but a goodie

A communications problem

Customer: {mumble} {mumble} {complain} getting worse {mumble} You fixed the last one so why can't you do this one?

Us: We would if we could get the parts. Most of the chips on the board have been obsolete for years. We just can't get them anymore.

C: {woe} {woe} But the machines have years of life left in them.

U: Well, as we suggested before, we could always fit modern controllers to them as they fail. This could actually work out cheaper than trying to fix the old ones.

C: No, you'd have to do all of them at once and I can't afford that.

U: Why would we have to do them all together?

C: Because they all have to talk to each other.

U: Well, modern controllers can be configured to talk to the old system.

C: No they can't. There's this special system installed by Radiospares.

U: Pardon?

C: The machines can only talk to each other with this. There's some board or something fitted in all of them.

U: {collectively scratches head and asks around} Can you be more specific? None of us know of any system that Radiospares have designed, and we have never heard of them doing installations.

C: {smugly} Well it *is* an old system so I expect you young engineers haven't have come across it.

U: Does it have a name or anything?

C: Yes of course, and a model number. It's the RS-232

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Coat

Re: Luxury

Programmable with a pair of wire cutters and a soldering iron.

We need a maniacal laughter icon!

As nice as Pai: FCC chairman comes out in favour of Ligado Networks' 5G proposal, despite criticism from airlines and military

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Regression

Is there anything at all in America that isn't going rapidly in a downward direction?

I wouldn't mind (apart from the harm to my friends over there) but it screws up everyone else.

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: Cables with labels on

A place I once worked for had a system of route numbers, not cable numbers. This was for highly distributed Audio/Video systems, so you'd see a number on a balanced audio patch panel and the same number would appear on all cables and interconnects right up to the mixing desk. With almost all bundles, there were also a few unconnected lines with a totally different series of numbers.

We lost another good one: Mathematician John Conway loses Game of Life, taken by coronavirus at 82

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: excited us Biologists

Probably the most poignant and respectful tribute anyone could make. Randal is particularly adept at these.

Started from the bottom, now we're near: 16 years on, open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape draws close to v1.0

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

I've been using it on a regular basis for all the intervening years.

I'd be quite lost without it.

Animal crossing? Nah! Farmyard frolics, courtesy of Novell and pals

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Interesting where people end up

My brother went through agricultural college, and did very well there. Then emigrated to Australia as a £10 POM... He got a job as a traveling salesman - and not even for agricultural products!

Stop us if you've heard this before: Boeing's working on 737 Max software fixes for autopilot, stabilization bugs

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Short answer: It wasn't.

Longer answer: They claimed it was no different to the original design - just some small 'improvements', and the regulator let them get away with it.

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Boffin

And another thing

Sitting on my desk is a home-made amp with FM radio. I built the lot from a mixture of available drawings and my own ideas. That was in the early 1970s. It's been pretty much in daily use ever since. The only change being a replacement volume control a couple of years ago. I could probably still get the parts for, and fix anything else that might go wrong.

I wonder if anyone could home-build a DAB radio? Any takers?

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Many problems

^ THIS ^

At least 1000 x

Honor 9X Pro: Better specs can't save this smartphone from a barren app store

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

Not Buying

The only really good thing seems to be the absence of both google and facebook.

Also, call me when you can get a week's basic use as a phone between recharges.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Awww

I do love a story with a happy ending.

ZX Spectrum prototype ROM is now available for download courtesy of boffins at the UK's Centre for Computing History

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Re: Troubleshooting a prototype

They also have a habit of slowly walking out of their sockets, so often all you need is a bit of gentle thumb pressure until you feel then shift.

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: Keyboard?

From what I can see in that picture I would say better... considerably!

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Re: 16KB

I seem to remember the ZX81 was only 8K.

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: acurate

What's the point of beer o'clock, when there are no pubs open?

Australian digital-radio-for-railways Huawei project derailed by US trade sanctions against Chinese tech giant

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Pint

Brilliant!

Have one of these as well as an upvote

Huawei signs non-aggression patent pact with membership of Open Invention Network

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Good luck to them

I have far more confidence in Huawei than the likes of Cisco... or come to that any US based company.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Am I surprised?

Sadly no. I get the horrible feeling we are still just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Is there any part of Boeing that can be regarded as up to standard?

Stob's vital message to Britain's IT nation: And no, it's not about that

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

But but...

What about the poor spooks? They'll never be able handle such arcane communications.

Lost in translation and adrift in cloud storage

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Coat

Re: The problem is not beheerder

Rather like fire safety - always ensure you have two exits available.