Posts by DJV 2397 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
The one piece of text in that Google notice that really pisses me off and demonstrates Google's arrogance is: "A review cannot be requested for this restriction" which roughly translates as "We can do what we want and there's nothing you can do to question it, suckers!"
I used to merely hate Google, now I totally loathe them.
Thanks for that - I just found a PDF download of Feynman's chapter "Safecracker meets Safecracker" and read it. Most amusing! The download can be found here:
https://www.openculture.com/2013/04/learn_how_richard_feynman_cracked_the_safes_with_atomic_secrets_at_los_alamos.html
I used to have an absolutely mental cat who loved Doritos - they did make him fart horrendously. He loved milk (the cow stuff that's not good for them, not the made-for-kitties stuff) and you had to hold him back from the bowl you were pouring the milk into as he was so impatient to drink it he'd start before you'd finished pouring and end up with it all over his head. He also once ate up some orange jelly that had contained pieces of mandarin. His brother developed a taste for Bailey's Irish Cream Whiskey and would drink neat rum if he could get at it.
You're right! I have received notice from the lichen's lawyers that I am to be sued by their clients for libel. So, due to the speed (or lack thereof) of their metabolism, myself (or more likely my heirs) will face the courts sometime around the year 3786.
Yeah, Auntie Mabel had one of those after she'd been at the sherry originally destined for the Christmas pudding and singing "I Won't Decorate Your Christmas Tree This Year" at the top of the stairs...
...just before she was suddenly at the bottom of those same stairs.
You were lucky to have something to type on! We had to input our operating system using binary switches ...
...and when I say "binary switches" I mean manually pressing together bare wires that had thousands of volts going through them...
...all while standing in a puddle because the server room was in the gents!
Doesn't surprise me - it completely fails the "fit for purpose" label. I tried it out a couple of years ago and found it wasn't even possible to input all the relevant details about the way I worked. The result it gave for me was, as expected, completely wrong.
Many years ago I wrote some code which automated minor schema changes in MySQL for websites. It's still in use and handles:
* creating tables and their indexes in newly set up databases - all tables are automatically created the first time the website is accessed
* adding new fields added to a table (in most cases it can add new fields to a primary key);
* deleting non-critical (e.g. non-primary key) fields;
* adding or removing indexes;
* renaming fields provided no more than one field of a particular type and length is changed simultaneously. If it discovers, say, two VARCHAR(100) fields being renamed simultaneously it reports that it has no idea which one needs renaming to what new name and gracefully exits;
* non-destructive field type changes - i.e. nothing that should lose data. E.g. changing VARCHAR(40) to VARCHAR(100), TEXT to LONGTEXT, INT to BIGINT.
The code that does this compares the schema derived from the code view of it against the MySQL view of it (from the DESCRIBE statement) and runs the appropriate update depending on the changes detected. The code is either executed once a day or if an SQL statement fails. So, adding a new field to a table (via the code) and having that field requested will silently fail the first time it is used, which causes it to then call the code that updates the schema. Then it tries the SQL statement a second time (a second fail will stop the program). So, the whole process is transparent to the user who just sees a new field added and the system appears to carry on without a hiccup.
The whole thing removes about 99% of the need for manual hacking around with the database so has probably saved me hours of time.
A friend of mine had problems with her computer. So, she reached behind it hoping to find a reset switch. She found a switch without any problem and managed to switch the PSU from the normal 220 volts to 110 volts. I managed to rescue some of the data off the hard drive - the motherboard, CPU and RAM were all fried.
Another tale from my apprentice TV engineering days.
I was sent out with an engineer called Mack to help collect a TV that was no longer required by the family renting it. The TV was on one side of the fireplace, the double mains socket on the other. At some point in the past the mains lead had been extended (using a now-illegal taped up connection) by someone in the family. The extension part of the lead was pinned to the skirting board by cable clips before it ran underneath the carpet and around the fireplace to disappear behind a cabinet before reaching the wall socket. Mack asked if they wanted to keep their extension wire - they did - so he asked them to unplug the other end, which they did. He got out his side cutters and chopped through the wire next to where the taped up joint was. There was a loud bang, Mack was suddenly wearing a very surpised expression and the side cutters, whose handles were thankfully insulated, now had a hole where their blades had previously met.
"Oh," said the member of the family who had done the unplugging, "I think it might have been the other plug."
Now that takes me back! Our first TV was rented from DER when the family lived in London - it was probably around 1960. The first one we had was actually a combined TV + radio receiver. We were forever calling the engineers out because the radio part kept going wrong. I think it got swapped out for a TV-only type after a while (we already had a separate valve radio at the time). I do remember that you had to turn both the TV and radios on at least 5 minutes before the start of any programme you wanted to watch or listen to as they needed that time to "warm up".
Though I never saw it myself, one Rediffusion customer still had a BBC-only TV that was still going strong in the mid-1970s. He'd had it since before ITV went on the air in my area (which, by then, was East Anglia - so 1959). Like your parents, I seem to remember the guy was very reluctant to upgrade.
Because Ceefax was "stored" in the top few scan lines of each TV picture frame, it gave us TV engineers a fine old time running around people's houses in the early 1970s as older TVs started to display the "funny moving dots" at the top of the screen. We had to either adjust the height* but some sets with iffy flyback also required some of the internal vertical alignment settings poking around with as well.
* for those customers incapable** of doing it for themselves.
** there were plenty of those - though they weren't as bad as the ones that took the backs of their rented TVs and played with the controls themselves. We even had one guy who had a habit of swapping valves around and then phoning up to complain that his set had stopped working!
...instead of having it burn up during reentry, they could include a small container of hibernating woodworm* that will be released at the appropriate time and eat the entire thing up.
* and, possibly, metalworm** for the non-wooden parts.
** ah, wait, I think I can see a slight flaw in my idea...
Back when I was an apprentice TV engineer whenever we had a lot of work on we'd call in a retired engineer to help out. The guy was in his late 60s and, having worked in the trade for donkeys years, he seemed to be completely immune to electric shocks. I once saw him check to see if a ceiling light bulb socket was live by deliberately sticking his fingers in it. "Yep," he said, a few seconds later - so we replaced the bulb.
Not IT related but I've got a couple here:
1) Back when I was a teenager my second job was an apprentice TV engineer. Poking around in the high voltage areas of a TV with a screwdriver and not a lot of teenage wisdom would occasionally result in accidentally earthing part of said screwdriver's shaft to the chassis while the tip was in contact with something very much NOT at earth potential. The resulting spark would often temporarily spot weld the screwdriver to the chassis! Good job this was back in the valve days as those things were far more resilient to weird voltages being thrown around than the transistorised replacements that had started coming along around the same time.
2) A few years ago I had a guy out to do the regular yearly service on my gas combi boiler. He'd cleaned everything up and partly re-assembled it and was testing how well the water was heating up before putting the main case back on. At the same time he was looking around for a screwdriver that he'd misplaced. Then he noticed a "slight" irregularity through the small window that gave a view into the burner - he'd found his screwdriver! A hasty disassembly and the screwdriver, whose plastic handle was by now slightly melted, was recovered! The following year he was still proudly using the same screwdriver...
And that's why I am sticking with my secondhand office chair which is probably pushing at least 30 years old by now.
The unadjustable but detachable arms were removed very early on as they were giving me shoulder ache. The seat was recovered back around 2005 after the offspring of a deceased next door neighbour skipped her old furniture in the house clearout - my good old Stanley knife (1960s vintage and previously owned by my father) liberated the as-good-as-new back velvet material from the otherwise well-worn-out sofa which is why the seat is red and the back support is the original brown. The air cylinder packed up a couple of years ago so a bit of unused plastic waste pipe now keeps the seat at the appropriate height.
I've tried other chairs but this one is still the most comfortable - I think I will alter my will to make sure it gets cremated with me when I shuffle off my mortal coil!
Well, it's Microsoft* where security has always been an afterthought (if it's ever "thought" in the first place).
* Actually, you can probably substitute almost any computer software company here. It seems to me that security is something that's always patched in later but is NEVER part of the mix of original ingredients.
Before realising it was a date, my first thought on seeing that number was, "Blimey, he's talking about the first disk drive I ever owned."
I've been running dual monitors on both my PCs for years until a couple of weeks ago when one of my cats managed to jump on top of one monitor and kick it over so that its face hit the mouse. On first inspection there didn't even appear to be a scratch on the monitor's screen surface. Then I turned it on and discovered that, beneath the surface, the LED part of the screen had shattered!
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