Posts by Cazzo Enorme

Can't. Help. Myself.

Nice rack.

Just to add my tuppence

Comments here mirror my experience of offshoring. A three month development project that was eventually canceled after fifteenth months, during which time the Indian developers could not deliver code that compiled, let alone worked. I actually got so pissed off with it that I did the project myself, pulling all nighters so my other projects didn't slip off schedule. Took me two weeks - and this was for a system that interfaced with one the offshore firm "maintained" for another company, which is the only reason I reluctantly agreed for management to use the f*ckers in the first place.

It's not the language barrier, it's cultural. The offshore development firms I've worked with will promise anything to get the contract. In the case described above, they agreed to develop in Java, claiming it was an environment their developers knew. Turns out their developers were actually Visual Basic programmers, which we found out when we queried why the code was full of bizarre idioms and beginner style mistakes.

SWT - yuck.

SWT requires explicit deallocation of objects, doesn't use the MVC approach, and reflects the abomination that is the Win32 API. I'll stick to Swing thanks.

GRRAaaawwWWF!

Thems mutts can smell coffee and do'nuts. Hyuk, hyuk.

Takes me back ...

This reminds me of my comprehensive school, where the deputy head mistress was permanently sozzled. She didn't even go out of her way to hide it, as the bin in her office was usually full of empty gin bottles. I felt sorry for her, as she was a well meaning sort who just seemed to be losing it at the tail end of her career. That was probably the opinion of her colleagues as well, as she was allowed to see out her last couple of years until retirement without any bother.

Uh oh.

I've noticed that people quite often peer at the track listing on other peoples MP3 players on the London Underground. When I notice someone ogling my track listing I make a point of switching to something unsettling titled. "Suck My Dick" by Carnivore or "All I Want To Do Is Kill Her" by The Cure for instance. I'll have to be careful I don't get my collar felt by a plastic plod in future ...

V

Great to hear, but of the three "V" bombers, I always preferred the still futuristic looking Victor myself.

Huh?

Why are the w^Hbankers apologising for causing offense? Everyone found it bloody funny.

Gartner, Schmartner.

"Oracle has 48.9 per cent of the RDBMS market, according to Gartner, while MySQL is a number-one choice for web developers and embedded systems makers."

Gartner? So that's facts and figures plucked out of the air then. Having done a fair bit of embedded work, I've never seen MySQL used for a database in that application space. Berkeley DB and, more recently, SQLite certainly - but MySQL is too big and too much of a resource hog for a typical embedded application.

As for Oracle's market share, perhaps that figure's true of commercially licensed databases. However, common sense suggests it's only used as the data store for a minority of web facing applications - the number of which must dwarf the number of old style, conventional, in house data stores.

I wish ...

... that someone would start a "I don't give a fig about MySQL" website. Apathy prevents me from doing so.

FAIL

"Credit crunch" is a phrase not a word.

Sigh

I see the real ale bores are out in force.

@cc

You'll stick with Safari, despite Apple usually taking longer to plug published vulnerabilities than Mozilla or even MicroSoft?

Win, win, win

This is a win-win-win situation. Coldplay give away some of their possessions (their music itself is a crime against humanity), people stupid enough to be Coldplay fans part with more of their money, and a charity gets some much needed income.

ext4 bug

Dear God, is anyone actually using ext4 in production? There again, my illustrious predecessor used three or four different file systems on our Linux boxes, just because he could. That crappy journaling file system from IBM was the worst - memory usage through the roof as it tried to pre-cache everything by the looks of things.

Another obligatory Devo pun

I guess they had an Uncontrollable Urge to upgrade IIS.

Genius

When it comes to programming, if Donald Knuth is the daddy then Verity Stob is the mummy.

As for Robert Carnegie - I'll actually be using the toilet cubicle analogy in any future explanations to juniors about just what mutexes are for.

@boltar

The background downloading is specifically for IMAP. I've upgraded to the release candidate at work, and now I rarely have to wait for the pile of sh*te that is our company Exchange server to grind into action whenever I want to read my email.

Great article

In an amusing bit of synchronicity, one of the mailing lists I'm on has just featured a thread about an old adventure game for a minicomputer. Not only did a number of people recall the name of the specific variant of the game that the original poster had been looking for, but a few posted links to ports for different minicomputers and Unix operating systems.

Ship 'em to the Middle East

There's a shortage of camels in the Middle East at the moment, thanks to some sort of disease that decimated the population. Why not ship a bunch of the younger ones to the Middle East where they may be able to introduce a greater depth to the gene pool and thereby mitigate the disease problem?

Adblock Plus

I'm pleased to be able to say that the Adblock Plus plugin has been updated for beta2, especially since I've just sat through a presentation where they used Internet Explorer - I was amazed at all the adverts some people put up with while web browsing.

@Robert Hill

Spot on about the Symbolics shenanigans. However, IBM didn't "donate" the Postgres source code, it originated at University of California, Berkeley.

BMI

The BMI is a poor guide to obesity, but guess what? It's only one of a number of things a doctor will take into account before declaring you a salad dodger. For instance, my BMI alone would suggest I'm a fat git. However, I'm 6'5" tall (off of most doctors BMI charts), and a body builder, so all that extra weight is mostly muscle. The typical test done in addition to calculating your BMI is a caliper test - immortalised by a breakfast cereal advert which asked whether "you can pinch more than an inch".

A title should not be required

Can Michael provide links to some studies that back up his assertions? Or is this marketing bullshit?

I've now been using a Samsung NC-10 as my computer since the beginning of this year, and it's proved to be a fine replacement for the 17" laptop it replaced. I use it for the usual stuff - web browsing, email - but also for development (C, C++ and Java). Admittedly I don't use Windows, so perhaps my desktop is more suitable for the Samsung's screen size. If so, then the problem would be crappy configuration of Windows, not the netbooks themselves.

@ Matt 21

Oh they certainly go on strike for the fun of it - at least in Oxford and Abingdon, a notoriously militant area as far as postal workers go. I even overheard two sorting office workers on the bus having a laugh about it a couple of years back, saying that they had all walked out in support of a colleague caught thieving who they wanted reinstated.

I'm all for responsible unions who use industrial action where appropriate, but the postal workers are up there with the fscking London Underground drivers when it comes to taking the piss out of their customers.

Flash and then some

I've just read the research paper, and the claim that this is portable is complete horseshit. It only runs on an x86 platform, and even if it was to be made portable then performance would be awful. As performance is the only claimed benefit of this technology then it should be take out and shot. ARM netbooks are available and likely to increase their market share, so despite Apple switching to x86 from PowerPC it's far from an x86 only world.

On the security side of things, creating a sandbox for a Java virtual machine with it's straightforward byte code is one thing, but a sandbox for a whole x86 environment?

It's just another awful technology like Flash that if it gains traction will lead to further balkanisation of web content

Braces

Reminds me of a uniform problem conscripts used to face - braces (or suspenders to those across the pond). Some uniform trousers used to come with them built in - attached at the back and buttoned onto the front. To take a dump in a combat environment meant taking off all equipment and uniform jacket. Even braces that buttoned on at the back and front were little better, as they were a nightmare to do back up without also taking off equipment and jacket. Thank god that uniform designers saw the light and started opting for belts and elastic.

@HFoster

"What's wrong with starting anew?"

A Quantum Of Solace was definitely a break from the past, and all the better for it. I've heard that the next Bond might be the bloke who plays Stringer Bell in the Wire (like Dominic West he's a Brit by birth), which would be very interesting. As for the music, I'm not a fan of Muse, but would infinitely prefer them to the limited talents that are the Killers.

@peyton

"Go to the toothpaste aisle of any store here and you will find a plethora of whitening toothpastes."

And if you ask a dentist who isn't trying to maximise the money they can make out of you, they will give you the honest explanation that teeth whitening products damage the enamel. It's a bit like food colouring or waxing of fruit - it's about the perception of what's good or healthy rather than what is good or healthy.

Wow

This looks like the rebirth of the Zaurus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus). I had one of the CL3200 models, which was essentially an ARM based netbook with a touchscreen, much like this new gadget.

@Richard 102

Ah, the old chestnut about the Yanks saving the Brits in WWII. In think you'll find that all you did was speed up the inevitable - a Soviet defeat of Hitler. Which is why there were no US troops fighting in Berlin. Your lot would have also faced a far harder struggle against the Japanese in the Far East without the Brits and Aussies, but that's always conveniently forgotten isn't it?

As for solving their own problems, that's exactly what the Scots have done. They had a prisoner who was convicted in a dodgy show trial by a previous regime and with the connivance of the US government. So they gave him back to Libya. Saved face for your lot and the British government by stopping his appeal (which was at last going to hear some of the evidence that wasn't allowed before).

Anyone with more than a passing awareness of the Lockerbie bombing knows it is far more likely that Iran was the guilty party, acting in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet by the US navy.

A title is required

"PowerPC machines aren't supported"

Which is why the machine I'm typing this on (dual G5 PowerMac) is now running Ubuntu Linux. Still faster than the Intel thingy the guy next to me is using, and it has a far better screen. Apple keyboards are utter crap though.

They've got past form ...

Did a contract for this lot at the tail end of the 1990's. At the time the senior management had convinced themselves they were on MicroSoft's shopping list (probably because of the Nexis-Lexis stuff they owned). In a bizarre belief that it would make them an even more appetising morsel for Redmond, they banned the use of anything but Microsoft Windows across the business. This caused massive difficulties, as the existing infrastructure was largely Sun based. The whole support team in Amsterdam resigned en masse to work for another company rather than switch operating systems. It was quite amusing seeing overly paid consultants scratch their heads as they tried to get Sendmail working on Windows. Even better was finding cupboards full of decommissioned Sun kit, which they were happy to give away to staff (permie or contract).