Posts by Nick Ryan

Re: Gun shells

Last my niece, who shoots air rifles at international competitive level, had a hell of a time trying to explain to UK customs that just because it read the word "rifle" it was not a "gun" (legally defined) and therefore it was fine for her to take it through in secured, checked luggage. She had checked with the airline a few times, including their head office and so on, who all stated that they had never come across this before - until they came across a more useful colleage who had. Returning to Australia they didn't bat an eyelid at the declaration.

Re: Lame excuse for no full fat HDMI

Micro HDMI connectors are an absolute curse. I wouldn't buy this as a result. Too many broken sockets...

Re: Robocopy

Similarly a "just try and compress it regardless" switch too.

Re: Now...

Usually it's not down to the IT department, it's down to the idiot original developers of whatever crapware was designed to work with Internet Explorer, rather than designed to work with well established international standards instead.

Re: I've mentioned it before...

It's just a shame that MS-SQL's interpretation of SQL transactions is so broken.

Therefore all DELETE or UPDATE statements are thoroughly implemented as SELECT statements prior to this, along with multiple, possibly unnecessary, clauses just to be sure.

Re: bye bye 2038

That's better than not using the month name and having ambiguous dates and is at least translatable by those for whom English, or even American, is not a first language.

Re: Excel

I'm fairly sure that at one point the cretinous piece of shit software parsed non-US dates like this:

Attempt to parse the date as a USian date. If this fails then try to parse it as a local date.

In a previous life I had to repeatedly tell a so called smart person to stop storing dates in string variables, and to instead use a date type variable. For months he wouldn't listen and his "amazing" software scripts kept on randomly failing on systems where the date format was not as he expected in his code where he kept on transferring date values by converting them to a string and then back again.

It's not impossible or always inappropriate to use a string form of a date as a transfer method but it must always be in ISO form and not any localised form at all (including USian for those who repeatedly forget that the rest of the world uses a different date format).

Re: Opposite problem

Earlier this year Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum from BT "installed" a fibre connection to our new office.

Their installation consisted of:

• Stuffing the fiber end point in an old carrier bag
• Without end caps on the fiber ports
• Hiding the end point in its bag under a cavity floor
• Providing a photo of a different site as evidence of installation
• Running the cable too short to reach the rack without it going diagonally across standing space
• Never testing the end point because there was no power (site was being worked on at the time, full power was available even if it required temporary extension cables)
• Never configuring the local exchange end.

Re: More ironic than Alanis Morissette ever was

On the other hand, in the past, such opinions led to many villages not having mains electricity or gas.

Yep... the abuse of personal data for monetary and power (political) gains are what Cumtings is all about. Personal standards, leading by example, integrity, trust? All worthless when one can (ab)use big/personal data to influence.

Re: Out of tree error

I guess the PC is still just a clever typewriter to some.

Yep, and these are the same kind of dinosaurs who insist on double spaces at the end of sentences and absolutely and utterly refuse to use styles or other formatting aids (multiple spaces and manual formatting the entire way)

A .PDF full of scans is very different to outputting a text document as an image - that's what I have exception to

Unfortunately if the pilot is unconcious due to lack of oxygen then being spread across a mountainside, or any other bit of terrian, is a higher risk.

How? The usual route appears to be to pretend that databases don't really exist and to instead use an abstraction toolkit to access the data. While these are passable for simple applications, unless used by a knowledgable developer it's very easy for dumb defaults to be used and for the database to be created by such a system. Utterly unmaintainable of course, and inefficient as hell.

This allows the "design" of a real-world "relational" database where the only indexes are primary keys and not all tables even have primary keys (oh hell was that fun to discover) and where foreign key constraints are managed solely at the application level and not at the database level. As in it's a database, but there's bugger all relational about it.

In one specific example a toolkit called CodeSmith was used, and for extra shits and giggles many queries were created as text rather than parameterised. It's not that CodeSmith couldn't be used sensibly, it just wasn't.

Re: Hammer used as a screwdriver?

I believe there are equivalent translations for most places in the world...

Re: Teams on Linux

One of the organisations is the professional body for her line of work and at a board meeting a few months ago, they spent so long trying to get everyone on line at the same time that they gave up and went with Zoom instead.

Re: good grief

I thought that Q was for kit cars and that military plates are distinguishable as they are black with silver/white text and a completely different registration scheme?

Yeah.... yet another abstraction layer....

One wouldn't want a CPU that's considerably faster than a CPU of five years ago to be able to execute an application without it feeling more sluggish and slow than the equivalent application five years ago.

Re: whoops - wrong disk

That's the best answer for the USB port issue I've heard :)

Lower Common Denominator development.

I guess we need to expect yet more PC "ports" which don't use the keyboard or mouse and restrict the user to tortuous arrow key style navigation.

Re: C++ seems to generate a lot of hate among the people who failed to lean it properly

The same is true of PHP. PHP is a very flawed language, with lots of ridiculous language constructs that appear to have been borne out of the designer hearing about a feature in another language but not understanding enough to implement it properly. On the other hand, its flexibility is why it's so useful at times and the same goes for C and C++.

The more capable, and often the more flexible, a language is the more unintelligible the code can be made. Generally, code should never be written this way and should always be as clear as possible even disregarding "clever" language constructs. In the end, clarity wins.

Re: Climate change

From what I remember there are a couple of other factors to take into account:

• The sun's gravity is slowly reducing due to enthusiatically ejecting matter into the solar system which is reducing it's mass by 0.4 trillionths of a percent per year.
• Earth is slowly moving away from the sun at a rate of about 15cm a year.

Quite how these compare in 500m years time...