Posts by Anomalous Cowherd

Takes piss on plane, gets tossed off.

Sounds like a german film I saw once. Scarred me for life it did.

More!

4GB? Come on people. I'd pay over the odds for a 500GB disk with 32GB of flash in a heartbeat, but 4GB? Please, I wouldn't buy a 4GB memory stick these days.

Jawdropping

I'd never heard of this woman until now, but she's just fantastic

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2020705/LIZ-JONES-The-caring-professions-They-just-dont-care-all.html

All this time I thought these people were exaggerations so lefties (myself included) could poke fun at Mail readers. But they actually exist, and they're so much worse than I imagined! And then they send her to Somalia to cover a famine?!? Sweet Jesus, it's like Christmas in August.

Java install, but from where?

If Apple are dropping their JVM but Oracle doesn't have one for OS X yet, where does it get it from? OpenJDK?

Anyone with this dev preview care to give us the output of "java -version"?

There's much more to it than that...

http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/

Someone has been busy.

Done this a fair bit at the low end

We've hopped back and forth with a few different routes using the low-end stuff: Virtualbox, Parallels before finally setling on KVM for our 4 or 5 VMs

The only problem we've had here has been disk images, and our solution has been to always use raw disk images rather than compressed. When I haven't, I've eventually regretted it: the space you save with a compressed image isn't much, but the time taken to convert between formats when your server drops and you have to bring up a VM on your workstation under a different platform is a royal pain. Disk is cheap, time is expensive.

Whole thing smells bad

Am I the only one that's disturbed by the coverage on this? Listening to the press you'd think Giggs and his evil high-court judge henchman were attempting some Orwellian-style censorship, and the press were the champions of light and justice.

I'd expect it from the red-tops and the Daily Hate, but the Guardian, Channel 4 and BBC have all taken an unqualified "injunctions are bad" position. Yes, it was for Trafigura, but this is one family wanting privacy and (regardless of the truth) involves a fairly obvious attempt to extort money.

The press have a dog in this fight. And don't even start me on that smug fuck of an MP...

Exothermic?

Isn't there a law of thermodynamics to be satisfied here somewhere?

If these micro-porous ceramic jobbies convert steam to liquid water, at any sort of useful conversion rate they must be red-hot, right?

Yawn, another one.

The issue isn't the language - new languages are two a penny, there are already a good half-dozen that run on the JVM, and arguing the toss about closures, pass-by-reference etc. is like arguing about indents or brace placement - it's not going to impact a decent coder to get the job done.

The reason Java has succeeded is the class library, which is (by and large) not too bad. Yes, there are cockups - Dates, URLs, Image I/O and anything to do with XML springs to mind - but Collections, java.io, threading, java.util.concurrent, these are all well designed subsystems. This imeans I don't have to reimplement them, but even better: no-one else has to either, which means I can interface to 3rd party code with these constructs. No painful translation required. Well, unless you're using org.w3c.dom (my god, how I hate thee...)

Any new language has to match or it's a non-starter.

Christ on a bicycle.

Fantastic. This is the same Julie Mayer who backed notable technology inovater Spinvox (who I recall you're familar with Andrew), and Ernst Malmstein, who I had the pleasure of working for back in 2000. I say pleasure because I was a contractor, and so unlike most of the other 400 or so poor souls there I was paid for my last three months work.

I wouldn't trust either of them to run a branch of Dixons, let alone a tech company. But perhaps I'm playing the man unfairly, particularly when the ball is in such easy reach now that Facebook has a market cap of roughly $82 billion on the secondary market. Roughly the same as the GDP of Slovakia. Given China's current balance of trade, they could afford to buy the whole company in a mere 11 years.

Can anyone tell me what they produce? Anyone? OK, they're a service company, what do they charge for their service? Still nothing? OK, they're a media company, selling media space and marketing to their customers, like (say) News Corp. Like 'em or hate em, Rupert Murdochs's empire brings in $33bn a year in revenue with a market value of about $14bn. Facebook is worth five times that, pulls in 1/20th of the revenue ($1.6bn, extrapolated from their leaked financials), and is STILL looking for external funding. Personally I'd rather invest in British coal mining.

I'm two pints in after lunch and that's a bit ranty, but sweet Jesus, this is obvious right? Schoolboy stuff.

</rant>

His name might be Svenstrom...

But they call him "Mr Glass"...

1000 times any other programmer!

The smell up close must be overpowering.

Fixed in latest update.

10.6.7 is out and fixes this, apparently.

HDMI audio

The nVidia ION 2 is what handles the HDMI audio, and it's a bit of a pain in the arse - although I'd assume the tweaks required for other ION2 machines (I've got the Shuttle XS35GT) would work. I had to:

a) set the audio output to use "plughw:1,7" rather than the default. Check http://forum.xbmc.org/archive/index.php/t-89111.html or search for setup guides for XBMC on the XS35GT.

b) boot with the HDMI receiver (my TV) plugged in directly. For some reason running this through a Cat5 HDMI extender wouldn't work.

Works a treat.

5Ghz through walls?

My understanding is that 5Ghz isn't so hot through solid objects like brick walls - anyone done any testing on this? Given I can see 20+ SSIDs from my London mid-terrace on a good day, all on 2.4Ghz, there's an argument for moving frequency - but not if I can't get through the walls...

Misconceived indeed

> Theos criticised the BHA’s campaign as "misconceived" and "unnecessary"

I hope the BHA pointed out that was god in a nutshell.

Reminds me of a story from my Dad...

... who was working on an IBM mainframe back in the mid 70s. The beast kept resetting, and they eventually traced it to one of the data entry operators who wore nylon underwear and kept sparking the box into a reset.

Then there was the punch card operator who thought it would be a good idea to "recycle" the punched cards by pushing the punched bits of card back in the holes... bearing in mind the nearest computer was 1400 miles away in a different country (Sydney) with turnaround for a run in the order of weeks, this did not prove to be cost-effective.

Comedy gold, I know.

Awesome

I'd give my right leg for one of these.

No general internet data?

Ah, if only

"Arguably the most influential musician of the 20th Century" Bing! "Watson?" "Justin Bieber"

Why is it worth it?

It's illegal, it's apparently on a massive scale and it was condoned at the highest level of a large organization that has an unsavoury record of meddling in other peoples private lives. If you came home to find the News Of The World rooting through your underwear drawer, the fact you'd accidentally left your front door open wouldn't make it less outrageous.

Likewise if this had been done by the Met Police (who also arguably fit that description) you'd be up in arms, and rightly so.

Tip o' the hat to the Grauniad for their tenacity in chasing this one down, and a massive shitty brickbat for the Met, who have come out of this smelling strongly of NewsCorp.

hudson-ci.org is not new

<nitpick>It has been the domain for the project for a long time</nitpick>

I suppose I'll have to rename my CI virtual machine now. Damn you, Oracle, for your intransigence!

This came up on slashdot

A few punters there said the site would regularly email them a their password as part of a "reminder" email. So plaintext or not, it was recoverable, which is very bad - they should have stored a hash for comparisons.

Valuable training

In other news, CCTV footage of the terrorists showed them running up, down, up and down the stairs, before darting left and right a couple of times and shouting "B" then "A".

Fortunately snipers took them down before they could shout "Start" and achieve immortality.

The worm turns

It will be interesting to see which of his celebrity backers suddenly drop him like a hot spud...