Posts by Chris Wareham
277 posts • joined Tuesday 1st May 2007 13:15 GMT
"By those living inside London, it [Shoreditch] was known as a shithole."
Still is. But now it's one mostly inhabited by Hoxton Tw@ts.
Re: As with all new technologies...
Hmm, smells like Linden tree blossom ...
Re: Hagiographer
Interesting - I didn't think Crowley and L Ron Hubbard were connected, although a quick Google suggests the connection is tenuous. Hubbard was a member of a Crowley inspired group in the US, but it looks like that was in the 1950's, well after Crowley's death in 1945. They did seem to have a mutual acquaintance called Jack Parsons though.
Re: bloat...
"I find it very hard to believe that a competent engineering team, given a blank canvas and targetting a resource-constrained platform, would ever willingly implement their entire user-space application framework in an interpreted bytecode runtime."
Given the capabilities of modern SoC systems, it shouldn't be hard to believe that the userland is built on a bytecode interpreted runtime. Especially when the runtime in question was specifically created to work well on ARM processors - that's why they created Dalivik, a register based virtual machine, rather than using the stack based Sun one. The amount of work that went into Dalvik suggests it wasn't created for a quick time-to-market, although the dubious quality of some of the libraries may suggest too much emphasis was placed on the virtual machine at the expense of the API.
Re: Hagiographer
The first time I came that word was in the description of a book about Aleister Crowley (his autobiography, which was described as an "auto-hagiography"). Fascinating man - thrown out of Italy by Mussolini and written up by the Sunday Express as the "wickedest man in the world". He sued the publishers of the Express but lost, although I guess that means he would have been legally entitled to use that soubriquet if he'd wanted to.
The duplicated apps thing is hardly the fault of Android, that's simply vendors like Samsung putting their own crap on phones in the hope of getting some money from app sales.
The big problems with Android from a technical perspective are the forking of the Linux kernel and the "proof of concept" nature of the API. The kernel forking is hopefully going to be solved, although it's going to take a while given the amount of time the fork has existed in two projects with a high code churn.
The API thing is something I don't think will get addressed. One of the ways it manifests itself is that you have to cast stuff all over the place, since the object hierarchy is a mess. Bloody annoying in a statically typed language, since it opens you up to the similar kind of problems that dynamic languages suffer from. Fixing this while maintaining backwards compatibility would probably require a second framework for at least the UI side of things, much like AWT and Swing in the Java SDK world.
Re: More and better support for 64-bit ARM chips
I'm still trying to work out whether this is the same Eadon:
http://www.eadon.com
Re: Pabst Blue Ribbon?
As well as drinking PBR, hipsters all seem to smoke the same brand of cigarettes - American Spirit, particularly the menthol ones.
Posted in Review: Samsung Galaxy S4
"Many of you will doubtless be relieved to hear of the two things that Samsung has not messed with: the removable battery and the Micro SD slot."
Well that's my next phone upgrade sorted then, and by the time my contract expires CyanogenMod should hopefully take care of Samsung's software bloat. The lack of an SD slot rules out any of the Nexus phones for me.
Slightly off topic, but I winced when I read the bit about the Net Front browser. I had that pile of poo on the stock install that came with my Sharp Zaurus. As for this UI thingummy, it looks like a curved version of the menu system on the Sony PS3.
Re: Kill Outlook
I use Thunderbird with the Lightning extension. The downside is that I can't find a way to access shared calendars, but at least email and my own calendar are far more straightforward than in Outlook.
Re: Impressive
There was at least one botched switch from FreeBSD to Window NT. Prior to the switchover MS made quite a song and dance about it, so it was deeply amusing when the NT setup couldn't take the load and they had to failover back to the FreeBSD setup.
If BYOD means not being forced to use a crap, work supplied Dell laptop with Windows on it then I'm all for it.
Re: Eat charcoal
Charcoal is a (non-Daily Mail, scientifcally certified) carcinogen. I'd rather put up with the occasional air biscuit, although in Lester's case I think it's going to be more of an air banquet.
Posted in Ten ancestors of the netbook
I don't think the lack of a Windows option put people off the original Eee as much as the appalling choice of Linux distribution did. Xandros was awful, and Asus would have been better off partnering with someone like Canonical or RedHat in order to include a decent Linux install. As for hardware support, I never had a problem with Linux on a variety of netbooks (Asus, Dell and Samsung). The wireless chipset on the original Eee wasn't supported on other Unix-like operating systems at first though.
Re: Gap in the market..
There's something similar to audiophile silliness amongst musicians as well. Check out the number of "boutique" effects pedals that are just minor variations on designs from thirty or forty odd years ago, but sold for many hundreds of pounds more than the components cost. The worst are fuzz or overdrive pedals, which are incredibly simple circuits, but have entire forums and message boards devoted to them. Some of the people who post there must spend so much time worrying about which pedal to buy next that they never actually play their instruments ...
Re: The music itself is the problem
The loudness war is over, and a lot of recordings are now being mastered with an emphasis on varying dynamics rather than overall level. That's why the only question from the engineer when I last had something mastered was "do you want loudness or dynamics"? Of course, a lot of commercial dance music still relies on pushing everything up as high as the limit, but that's because it's intended for high volume playback where it would compress to a near constant level anyway.
Wonder what they mean by "MySQL developers from the early days of the project". In the very early days it was just a crude SQL frontend to another database (mSQL). When it became a standalone database it was also crude, so I'd have little faith in those early developers. It only became a vaguely decent database when they used the InnoDB engine, which was created by another company who also happen to be now owned by Oracle. Not that it was any good - I had a production system drop all indexes without warning around 2006. I'd been forced to use MySQL against my wishes, and have made a point of never using it since.
Re: my god
@The Alpha Klutz - "im going to spunk"
The small town in Bulgaria? I've been there and I can't recommend it. There's only one restaurant, and the dessert menu is rather limited.
Re: @ mutatedwombat - Raspberry Pi Phone
@AC - "I think Eadon is serious."
He's also started to refer to himself in the third person ... a sure sign of madness.
Posted in Galaxy S4 radiant, but has black holes
Re: Galaxy SII was superb! But I covet a pure Linux phone Stack!
Whenever anyone describes themselves as an "Alpha Geek", I always assume they look like this.
Re: Maybe
@AC - "if we go to 99.9% of the countries from which we receive immigrants or asylum seekers, we get fuck all in the way of accommodation for our needs and wants."
You sound like my parents, who take a box of tea bags with them whenever they go abroad. They also read the Daily Mail, much to my shame.
Re: The offer
If the offer was an out of court settlement, then they are almost always on the basis that it is not an admission of guilt. This means that many people turn down such offers and continue with their case in order to get an unequivocal admission of guilt. The problem is that some companies make offers even when they honestly believe they are not in the wrong, simply to get the case over and done with. Other companies go down to the wire without making an offer even when they know they're in the wrong in the hope that the stress of it all will cause the accuser to drop the case.
Re: law is for the poor
@cannon - "so what about james murdoch, rupert mordoch, piers morgan, any any of the other scum who hacked thousands of ppl's phones & emails?"
The net may be closing on James, since he was in a position to be aware of what was going on. Perhaps the massive pay off to Rebecca Brooks was to encourage her silence, but if it looks likely that she'll get jail time then she may spill the beans to save her own skin. As for Rupe, the slimy old bugger was nowhere near the chain of command at the UK newspaper titles so he's probably safe. The real travesty is Piers Morgan, who should have been jailed for insider dealing.
Re: Soldering on
Blimey, never knew the North Americans pronounced it without the 'd'. One of the weirder ways in which English differs from country to country.
Now I need to go and put something in the boot of my car, then head to the garage to fill up with petrol. I'll have to take care as I pull away, as I'm parked on the pavement and will have to use my hooter if anyone's in the way.
Now I need to go and put something in the trunk of my car, then head to the station to fill up with gas. I'll have to take care as I pull away, as I'm parked on the sidewalk and will have to use my horn if anyone's in the way.
Re: Heh
@Chavdar Ivanov - NetBSD on the Pi? Top man. I seem to recall your name from the NetBSD mailing lists as well. I'm trying to resist the lure of the Raspberry Pi, since I know I'll spend ages tinkering with it, but NetBSD support may push me over the edge. It would be quite neat to implement some sort of MIDI controller with it, assuming I can easily interface a bunch of sliders or rotary dials with it.
Re: It's not the hyper visor that counts...
<p>For reliability at any non-desktop level it still goes BSD, ...</p>
<p>Have to agree. Xen running with a BSD (or Solaris) as the Dom0 is rock solid and behaves well under load.</p>
Re: Xen is dead
If Xen's "dead" and and "obsolete" can you then explain why large hosting companies such as Rackspace have based there Cloud Computing offerings on it? In the real world, Xen is a fundamentally simpler and more elegant architecture than KVM, which is frankly more suitable for a desktop running a single virtualised instance of Windows than a server running many instances of Windows, Linux, etc.
Re: TicketMaster "Ticketfast" Charges
Re: TicketMaster and GetMeIn
Sometimes they skim almost all the tickets off to sell at massively inflated prices on GetMeIn. They do this based on the demand for "pre-sales" tickets - another scam in itself. Take for example a low key gig by a very popular band that my wife wanted to go and see. The pre-sales tickets went on sale on Thursday, and sold out in minutes. Come the following Monday at 9am, and no tickets went on sale - you were immediately redirected to GetMeIn, where the tickets were in excess of £100 each.
Re: Bullet proof, but not B.S. proof.
Multi touch was not an innovation on the iPhone. I've used devices predating the IPhone that had similar features - they were touch screen devices used for in warehouse automation. As as aside, one particular brand of screen claimed to be able to surive a .22 pistol round fired at it from close range. The sample screen we were given even came with a video on the accompanying CD-ROM that demonstrated the test.
Posted in Patch time for PostgreSQL
The vulnerability is of genuine concern, but the number of publicly accessible PgSQL servers out there is just as worrying.
Why on earth would you need your DB server visible to the Internet? All communication with it should be using an authenticated connection configured in an application running on another server or servers - the application servers themselves are usually not needed to be visible on the Internet, as they'll be behind a load balancer and / or something like Apache HTTPD.
Re: Hold on...
This is RBK&C - they're still reeling from the decision to go decimal
And they've never quite recovered from the revelation that one of their former MP's openly admitted to a gay encounter in his formative years. A certain Major Buff-Tweedy even had a coronary on hearing the news, because as all public school boys know, what happens in the Prefects room stays in the Prefects room.
Re: "Devo-max"?
Have an upvote for the Devo reference. Doo, doo, doo, doo ... pling, pling. "Crack that whip!"
It always amazes me when people manage to make their Java code reliant on a specific version of the runtime. You have to go out of your way - using classes in the sun.com hierarchy or coding in a home brewed version check - to fuck it up, but so many people do. It's down to the general incompetence of the typical developer frankly, and ironically Oracles's are some of the worst (SQL Developer, I'm looking at you).
Re: So what?
I've been running NetBSD since 1.3, and it certainly is a great platform both code and community wise. 1.5 was definitely a sweet spot for me as well, although the release with the second threading implementation was an impressive one with regard to performance gains.
Re: Document your tricksy shit?
If you're messing with crypto code you'd better know what you're doing in the first place.
It didn't really reflect on the maintainers knowledge of crypto coding - the original author of the code was doing something frankly stupid that relies on an assumption that uninitialised data will provide additional entropy. Nothing in the C standard precludes an implementation scrubbing freed memory, and I've worked on a platform that does exactly that by zeroing it out.
Re: Not the first time.
The OpenSSL bug in Debian was an interesting one. The package maintainer "fixed" the code based on the output of a static analysis tool that warned about a dodgy looking bit of code. The code was doing something that ordinarily is a no-no, but in this case it was being done deliberately. Unfortunately, the original author of the code hadn't seen fit to put in a comment stating why this was being done. So I'd argue it was ultimately a failure of the original author of the code, as dong tricksy shit like he or she did is only ever permissible if it's well documented.
Re: Pork holster.
Sounds like an entry from the Profanasaurus. Other delightful terms for Lady bits include: fish mitten, loosely packed kebab, furry vertical bicycle stand, growler, grotter, and c*ckwash. Not sure how many of those are going to make it into the Oxford English Dictionary though.
Re: Apples version of "I'm going to Disney Land" pitch
I guess Apple's thrown some money his way or the guys looking for a job.
Looking for a job I guess. MicroSoft have shitcanned .NET and Silverlight, so his incomplete clone isn't gonig to find any takers, and Novell have probably made it clear they see point in funding it any longer.
Re: MVP
That was a pretty misleading quote as well. He may have co-founded the GNOME project, but the biggest pieces (GTK+ and associated libraries) were the work of others. The subsequent work on applications and libraries were also the work of others, with the exception of libbonobo - an abandoned clone of MS OLE - and Gnumeric - a clone of MS Excel that was brought to a usable state by others.
Re: "Fragmentation"?
What the parent post said.
Miguel is incapable of seeing a project through to fruition. He abandoned Gnumeric, then Bonobo, then GNOME. Then he started talking about .Net and C# being the framework and language of the future rather than just Microsoft's clone of Java - at which point he'd clearly lost his marbles.
About the only thing he seems to have completed was a bunch of Linux graphics drivers for Sun workstations when he was still a student.
"Developers, developers, developers"
Surely it should be "Customers, customers, customers"? Because once the teat of government funding runs dry, that's what they'll be needing.
Posted in Keyboard, you're not my type
Re: Mechanical it is
Kudos to the first company that will integrate mechanical keyboards to notebooks!
My Sparc based laptop had a mechanical keyboard. I can't remember the brand, but they were eventually bought out by the folks that made Sparcbooks. The downside was that the steel case the machine was in, which meant that using it on my actual lap would result in the flow of blood to my legs being cut off ...
His own hair?
Never trust a man wearking a merkin ...
Re: "NBN Co says it is spending about 16 cents per cup..."
The Danish subsidiary of one of my former employees supplied free beer. This was a software development outfit in the warehouse automation industry, and that particular office had several glass fronted chillers full of beer which the employees were allowed to drink during their breaks. Those of us visiting from the UK office were extremely jealous, as all we had was an awful Klix coffee machine.
Her indoors will likely upgrade to the Q10 simply because it's a Blackberry with a keyboard. She positively loaths touchscreens.
