Posts by Richard Pennington 1
92 posts • joined Wednesday 17th June 2009 14:32 GMT
Perhaps they should have sold it ...
... via a classified ad.
Re: Only in Britain...
Not just in Britain ...
On a visit to Washington DC a few years ago, I spotted a car prominently labelled "US Secret Service - Uniformed Division". There is also a turnoff from one of the Baltimore-to-Washington freeways, labelled "National Security Agency - Employees Only".
Suggestion for the next lunar lander: install a seismometer on the Moon, with capability to beam the results back to Earth.
Posted in British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'
Who is Big Brother?
Looks like Lord Sugar with a haircut...
Posted in Kepler continues exoplanet bonanza
Re: If we can detect these planets...
Spotting the radio waves could be problematic as there would be a background noise from the parent star.
A foot-long slab...
... should be called the Subway.
Re: Patients?
Only in Wales
Re: Funny
As a private individual, if you want to complain about Sky, you should therefore address your complaint to the *marketing departments of Virgin Media and BT*. It's called "leverage".
Re: Don't be evil unless there's money to be made by being evil
1 Timothy 6:10
For added irony, Google it.
Re: Unsalted hashes
You can be pretty sure that "j67-*^%fg" will be included in the next edition of the table.
Someone doesn't know their history of astronomy
There has already been a Vulcan (OK, they never managed to find it....)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)
07xxx xxx666
I claim to have the Mobile of the Beast
I went to the Los Angeles Disneyland a few years ago. At the time I had my own personal raincloud which had followed me from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back ... sure enough, it arrived in DIsneyland about half an hour after I did.
One thing about Disneyland in an extended downpour is that there weren't any queues!
Google Earth
Google Earth shows a blacked-out area - with obviously pixellated edges - at the position of "Sandy Island". Given that Google Earth uses satellite images, something is obviously amiss.
There is also a strange pinked-out area just NW of New Caledonia (which appears on at least one side to be bounded by barrier islands or atolls).
Icon because that's what happened to some of the atolls in this part of the world.
Interview Coffee
Many years ago I had an interview at a university spinoff, with free coffee provided. The coffee machine was the sort that started with real beans and a filter. Unfortunately they were less particular about the other ingredients ... have you ever tasted coffee with a couple of teaspoons of salt?
Re: I like the bit
... not to mention referring to coffee as a "perk".
Re: Testing
"an H-Car *led* the women's marathon at the Sydney Olympics".
So it didn't win. Did the battery run out (after <27 miles)?
I left my coat in the car.
Posted in Santander's banking website craps out
"an isolated group of personal banking customers"
... who were presumably "isolated" precisely because they couldn't log on to Santander's site.
Posted in Firm applies for .sucks domain
And after they've got(ten) used to .sucks ...
... somebody else will operate .stinks, and all the corporates will have to grab those domains too ...
Re: ASDA for jobsworths
That's because they haven't finished the 10 year stretch...
Posted in Battlefield Earth ruled worst film EVER
A lot of people have short memories
I can't believe that all of the worst films ever made (with one exception) were made after 1996.
Surely Ed Wood deserves some kind of Lifetime Award, for his persistence in producing lultra-ow-budget movies with some of the worst production values in history.
IIRC, when Channel 4 did a season of the worst 10 movies ever made, he had five entries in the list - including the dreck-classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Wood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
The faint blue light ...
The faint blue light is caused when neutrinos interact with the atoms in the ice, causing electrically charged particles (electrons and/or bits of nucleus) to recoil faster than the speed of light (in the ice, where the speed of light is slower than in a vacuum). It's called Cerenkov radiation.
Still, exceeding the local speed limit causes blue lights even at subatomic scales.
Re: anyone?
And who patrols the border between UKBA and the Border Force?
Posted in Satnav blunders blamed for £200m damages
Satnavs in taxis abroad
I have had the dubious pleasure of visiting partner firms in mainland Europe, and having all sorts of fun with the satnavs in taxis as I tried to get to their offices ...
(a) Visiting a factory in the less-salubrious suburbs of Paris, the satnav refused to accept the street address of the factory. I had to ask the driver to navigate to another house-number on the street and then point him to the position of the factory.
(b) Visiting an office in Rijswijk, near the Hague, on one occasion the taxi driver missed a turn. The satnav responded by repeatedly asking him to make a right turn ... which would have meant turning into a canal.
Faulty logic
It strikes me that the revocation check logic is wrong. There are three possible results:
(a) Revocation check OK; certificate not revoked -> OK, proceed to the site;
(b) Revocation check OK; certificate revoked -> warn the user (or block the site and tell the user why);
(c) Revocation check fails (no result) -> warn user but allow the user to proceed "under caution" to the site.
Perhaps the URL bar background could be GREEN, RED and AMBER respectively in the three cases.
And nobody noticed
... his screen saver kicking in
Unit conversions
Remember, when calculating how many Olympic Swimming Pools (or even Suez Canals) are involved, that the starting point is US gallons, which are smaller than Imperial (UK) gallons.
Perhaps across the pond they should use Panama Canals, rather than Suez Canals.
And in genealogy ...
... my great-grandfather was (and I'm not joking) named William Cockburn Dick. Cue all the schoolboy (and Reg editor) jokes...
Paris, because she didn't censor anything ...
Comet Watch
Watched comets never boil ...
Posted in Parody is illegal, say barmy bureaucrats
@AC 16:28: "Parody only works if you have read (or know) the original." Not quite. Lewis Carroll included in his "Alice" books several parodies of Victorian "improving" poems and songs, all of which have far outlived the originals.
Sounds like there is a gap in the market ...
... for heavy-duty "RIM-specification" restraints with several steel reinforcing cords running through them. So that the end result of trying to chew through them would be a large dental bill.
At what temperature does an ebook burn?
Somehow burning ebooks on sight doesn't have the same feel to it.
Finding your O-H bonds
Picking up a single O-H bond is tricky - especially when most of the blood & bodily fluids are made up of water, which has quite a lot of O-H bonds per millilitre.
A bit like finding a needle in a haystack made of needles.
As seen from Earth!
Mars is a planet well known for having occasional planet-wide sandstorms. I think one of those would qualify as "quite blustery" ... as well as being quite able to move the odd sand dune.
... "and then enter JavaScript into their URL bar" ...
In other words, Facebook does not correctly sanitise the user input into the URL bar.
Security FAIL on Facebook's part - this is fairly elementary stuff..
When I learned security ...
... one of the things to do was to sanitise user input. So no Javascript in the URL bar.
Security 101, really.
NO 51R NO is on the roads in the area of Camberley, Surrey.
Posted in PETA riled by Mario's raccoon skin suit
People for the Ethnic Treatment of Animals
Not the anti-animal-racist crowd again ...
Posted in Why your tech CV sucks
It's the mini-thread OP again ...
FYI, the 9-pager excludes not just the O-levels but the A-levels as well. The education section starts with a Cambridge degree and works upwards.
The thing I really hate is the agency which asks for a softcopy CV to put into their database to mine for keywords ... which is really asking for the "bullshit bingo" edition!
TVs
As in the Silva screen ...
Posted in Why your tech CV sucks
Invertment banker
I guess the upside-down stance comes from too much boot-licking.
Posted in Why your tech CV sucks
I have just been to a CV workshop...
... and it was very apparent that most of the attendees were looking for non-tech jobs, with little to show on their CVs.
Perhaps the highlight of the workshop was when they suggested passing off "being a mother of four" as "managing a small team".
All in all, it was great for increasing one's buzzword literacy, but did not address how to improve on a CV which describes 25 years of IT experience with 8 employers, following several Cambridge degrees up to and including a PhD.
There was one interesting point of debate. The workshop came down in favour of a one-page CV. My current version - somewhat cut down (it omits, for example, an occasion when I translated a set of project documentation from Italian to English as a sideline to an IT project) - runs to 9 pages. To me, a one-page CV is appropriate for a candidate with a one-page life.
I know that there are arguments for and against one-page CVs. Perhaps this is a good place to start the debate. Flame away!
Optional
Better a TV with a battery than battery with a TV.
And without the battery he never would have been charged.
But why is it round?
Among the asteroids, Ceres is a sphere (and has now been redesignated as a dwarf planet), and the next largest are Pallas and Vesta, which are marginally too small to pull themselves into spheres through their own gravity. But their diameters (however defined) are about 1000 times that of 2005 YU55. So 2005 YU55 is much too small to pull itself into a sphere.
Atomic number / Atomic weight / (etc.)
The atomic number (the number of protons in the nucleus) of iron is 26. The element with atomic number 56 is barium.
The atomic weight of iron is about 56 (naturally occurring iron is a mixture of stable isotopes, and the atomic weight is an average [weighted, so to speak] by abundance) of the atomic weights of those isotopes found in any particular sample - although there is not a lot of variation between samples). The weight of any particular isotope is *approximately* the number of nucleons (protons + neutrons, so iron-56 has 26 protons and 30 neutrons making 56 nucleons in all) in the nucleus. The approximation there is because both the proton and the neutron weigh slightly more than 1 unit, and we have to subtract out the binding energy of the nucleus. The atomic or isotopic weight also includes the weight of enough electrons (outside the nucleus) to make the atom electrically neutral, and subtracts out the binding energy of those electrons. The net result is that the isotopic weight of iron-56 is slightly less than 56 units.
The atomic mass unit is standardised such that the isotopic weight of carbon-12 is exactly 12 units.
You could say...
... that the ball's in their court ...
Surely ...
... this is covered by cannon law?
That's the one, with the bullet-hole in it...
Anybody up for putting together a comprehensive cookie-faker add-on?
1. Detect cookie
2. Substitute random garbage
3. Replace original
4. User interface to guide your browser as to which cookies get the treatment.
