* Posts by Graham Bartlett

1643 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2007

Elon Musk's SpaceX to build 'Grasshopper' hover-rocket

Graham Bartlett

Why not parachutes?

I still don't get this. Parachutes are in daily use by armies for delivering troops and vehicles, and by skydivers all over the place, with a failure rate as close to zero as makes no difference. Parachute design is massively mature. When it comes to space, again parachutes are the tool of choice for dropping payloads onto planets with atmosphere, and they've generally worked pretty well, given that this kit has been completely out of contact with Earth and working on its own, and these atmospheres have been either corrosive (Venus) or unhelpfully thin (Mars).

So what's the technical problem with putting a parachute on a lower-stage booster rocket which is <1s comms from anywhere on Earth so any problems can easily be overridden remotely, the atmosphere is nice and dense so there's something to push against, and it doesn't actually have to get all the way out of the gravity well so extra weight isn't quite so much of an issue? It's a complete "does not compute" for me.

British warming to NUKES after Fukushima meltdown

Graham Bartlett

How many people got the subtitle?

MOLESWORTH SEE ME chiz

Google brings out new programming language

Graham Bartlett

Just what the world needs

Like there aren't enough half-assed programming languages around already...

Swedish cops free boozy moose from tree

Graham Bartlett
Coat

Did it get in a round of karaoke whilst drunk?

Caribou-an queen

Ant(ler) music

Stuck in the middle with doe

Saturday night's alright for rutting

Sun rises over .xxx smut domain

Graham Bartlett

Resolving conflicts

"When two or more applications are made for resolving .xxx domains, the applicants will have to fight it out at auction."

Surely there's more appropriate ways of doing it. Naked wrestling, perhaps? Or just have each company make up a "Top Trumps" set from their stars characteristics, and play two out of three for it.

McAfee: Cyber thugs will turn your car into Christine

Graham Bartlett

Tin-foil hats at the ready!

"Researchers have demonstrated that critical safety components of an automobile can be hacked, given physical access to the vehicle’s electronic components."

Well duh! Guess what, if I can get at your engine then I can give you a pretty good denial-of-service with a pair of wirecutters. Or I can nail the throttle half-closed and stop you getting any decent power, or I can nail it fully open and make you fail emissions regs.

Feckwits.

Memo to kid coders: Enterprise software exists

Graham Bartlett

Management problem

I'm currently contracting at the same place I got most of my skillz. For the record, I'm 37.

We started with something hacked together in Access. It sucked. But people knew how to drive it, and it could be maintained.

Then we got Visual Intercept, over the objections of every single engineer involved in the selection process. It might work now (dunno), but at the time it was chock full of bugs. Still, the desktop version was customisable, and various engineers did useful stuff to make it work how we needed it to.

Then management decided we needed to use the web version, not the desktop version. Trouble was that the VI web version was effectively just a beta. (Yes they sold it to you. Why did you believe them, and not everyone who'd actually used it?) So basically it didn't work, it *couldn't* work, and all the customisation effort had gone. It was theoretically possible to tinker with the web interface, but it wasn't something your average engineer could get access to.

And then the company got taken over. And in the worst possible scenario, we now have a change request system which has been grafted on the side of a timesheet system. It is less useful in many, many ways than the Access database from back in 1999. It has some advantages for managers, sure, but for engineers wanting to do their job it's a PITA.

Bottom line, the enterprise software you see will almost always be rubbish. Not because of the coders, but because of the managers - both at the enterprise software company, and at your company when the particular configuration of that enterprise software is locked down.

Painters wrap Forth Bridge job after 121 years

Graham Bartlett

@HP Cynic

"Wet Pain"? Are you accidentally typing your NSFW website URLs again?

Graham Bartlett

@Headley_Grange

Except that brass monkeys has nothing to do with cannonballs...

'Poems are the original text messages,' says Laureate

Graham Bartlett

@Aaron Em

Nah, we're all equal opportunities for windbagging these days.

Graham Bartlett

Units error

Whoops, confused pints with litres when converting to bottles. 2 bottles of sherry a day, not 4. Still a fair bit of sherry though

Graham Bartlett

Pretty good boozers back then

126 gallons = 1008 pints. That makes 2.76 pints of sherry a day, which is near as dammit 4 bottles (allowing for the occasional spillage). Even allowing for having your mates round on a regular basis, and having servants quaffing the odd cupful here and there, that's still a hell of a lot of sherry to get through.

Sweden rolls out invisible infrared tank

Graham Bartlett
Mushroom

Monty Python: How not to be seen

This is Mr Nesbitt of Harlow New Town. Mr Nesbit would you stand up please.

<pause>

Mr Nesbitt has learnt the value of not being seen. However he has chosen a very obvious piece of cover.

<bang>

ARRRGGH!

US judge tells Levi's to take its Euro problems to Europe

Graham Bartlett

@AC, "frustration"

"If some ner-do-well oik comes along - be it you, me, Tesco or the current bulk seller - and undercuts the MRRP then Levi's don't make the planned sales and planned profit but, just as importantly, the perceived brand value is diminished at no benefit to Levi's."

Oh dear, it looks like you failed to turn your brain on this morning.

1) Shop buys jeans from Levis at price A, and sells these jeans at price B. Levis make a profit that they're happy with, and the shop makes a profit B-A that they're happy with.

2) Shop buys jeans from Levis at price A, and sells these jeans at price C. Levis make a profit that they're happy with, and the shop makes a profit C-A that they're happy with. But C < B, so Levis sue the shop, in spite of Levis making *PRECISELY* the same profit, and in spite of the "brand dilution" claim being complete rubbish because the issue is not where the jeans are sold (check out all the other places selling Levis at RRP) but the price tag attached.

Got the message yet?

Ohio man cuffed for shagging inflatable pool raft

Graham Bartlett
Gimp

Error in comprehension

Inflating an airbed does not count as a "blowjob".

(Gotta be the gimp mask for this one!)

Sid Meier's Civilization

Graham Bartlett

@Red Bren

Hey, I got a degree in the 90s! It was Doom that nearly stopped me, though. (That and playing guitar.)

Graham Bartlett

Missed it first time around

Then got seriously hooked on C-Evo in about 2000-2001. Spun up FreeCiv last year for fun, and quickly realised why C-Evo took the ruleset in different directions! That said, I do wish C-Evo had kept the ability to reclaim sea tiles - seems a fairly basic thing to have left out. (C-Evo FAQ says that this is unrealistic, to which I can only say "Holland!")

DARPA software to trawl Bin Laden laptops, thumb drives

Graham Bartlett

SAS/SBS

One suspects the SAS/SBS might dispute being considered "Tier 2"...

Graphene photocells could mean hyper-speed internet

Graham Bartlett

@AC "recyclable"

It's pure carbon. Take a guess... (Jeez, are some people anonymous just because they're embarrassed at their ignorance?)

What vegetables are best for growing in Spaaace?

Graham Bartlett

Hmm, OK

Sounds OK for flavour. Stash a few steaks as treats for special occasions, and that'd work.

Trouble is, how does it square with human dietary requirements? It's all very well to say "these grow OK with not much room", but there's plenty of other plants manage that.

There's also a problem of processing. (I'd say "cooking", but I've no idea whether what would happen up there would look like a kitchen.) For veggies, getting significant amounts of nutrients out of them typically needs the application of heat/pressure to break down cells, otherwise it mostly goes through you unprocessed. So your solar-panel power budget for the ship doesn't just need to include life support, it also needs to factor in a few kW for cooking. (Probably a microwave, I guess.) And then life support needs to be uprated by another few kW to cool the living area.

So this all needs space and power. 6 people's grub to/from Mars weighs in at 18 tonnes, according to these boffins. That's the same weight as the Zvezda module. Check the size of Zvezda - it's unlike that module would be big enough for a working hydroponic farm to feed 6 people. So for Mars at least, you're better going up there with a stash of food.

One other problem avoided by the Stash'o'Food idea is the possibility that stuff doesn't grow, or that you've accidentally brought some contaminant onboard which affects/infects your plants. "The insect tapes" (Michael Scott Rohan, Google says) is a neat little short story on that theme. More prosaicly, one of the reasons Mir was ditched was that a fungus was steadily eating its way through steel, plastic, electrical insulation and the rest.

NHS digital pens: The 'Total Solution'

Graham Bartlett
Pirate

Tuesday morning eyes

Must be the reason I originally read that as Soylent Supplies Team...

(Those aren't swords, they're steak knives.)

Nokia accidentally unveils OS it should have had in 2009

Graham Bartlett

E72? Bad luck

I got one myself. Still got a year or so to go on my plan from Virgin Mobile.

It could be worse, I guess. But it could be a *whole* lot better. Never mind Ovi and cruddy apps - how's about an email app that can check itself whether I've got email, instead of me needing to do a manual refresh each time? or when you're at home, having your phone use your wireless network for everything instead of 3G? Jeez.

UK could have flooded world with iPods - Sir Humphrey

Graham Bartlett

@Ralph 5 - no investment

Too right. Look at all the people going on Dragon's Den. Sure you get some right muppets on there. But you also get some who have businesses that are already turning over plenty of money, have employees, have more orders than they can handle, etc.. All of them, with *NO* exceptions, have previously been to their banks to ask for loans to expand their businesses. And all of them have been told to piss off. Hence they've ended up on Dragon's Den, being forced to sell off shares in their business in order to fund this expansion.

Banks in Britain have long since forgotten what it means to be a bank. They're so busy playing big-money Monopoly with their savers' cash that they've forgotten the *REAL* income should be as a result of interest on loans. Sure you can play arbitrage games for a few hundredths of a percent, but why not make loans and get 5% interest back on it? Sure some of those loans will be bad, but you don't have to be too choosy to avoid that. They've always been happy to loan to individuals with security in the form of houses, but they've never wanted to loan to companies with security in the form of an established, successful business. It's tempting to blame this on the current recession, but it's actually been happening for a long, long time.

Moaning Scots told 'cheer up FFS' on broadband cash

Graham Bartlett

@AC, Scottish taxes

"Scotland can't determine their own taxes"

Yet. Later this year they will be able to. As soon as MSPs decided to fund different priorities from Westminster and at higher rates, it became inevitable.

Graham Bartlett

Scots need to grow a pair

You really care about this? Then pay for it, you whinging bunch of bastards. You're devolved precisely so that you can make independent funding decisions about things which particularly affect Scotland. You've already decided to throw a ton of money at unis, which is a reasonable decision. But don't whine when there's no more to go round. Why should the English subsidise you?

Suppose you took money from somewhere else instead? There's £8m a year subsidising Scottish ferry companies. There's £6.4m of European Regional Development Fund money going into Scotland too, which is particularly intended for infrastructure projects. £3m on Scottish Opera. £2.3m on Scottish National Ballet. £5.9m for a public sector Oracle license. (?!?!) £8.9m went to CapGemini for unspecified "project support services". Then there's the NHS National Services Scotland, whose only responsibility is blood donations and collating best-practise advice (they don't even do research themselves), with a staff of 3600 people, who got £225m.

Figures courtesy of http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/923/0100321.pdf as of June 2010.

Docs and devs: Health secretary wants healthcare apps

Graham Bartlett

@Neil Barnes

Too right.

I remember last year when MRSA particularly hit the headlines and hospitals got extra money for doing a "deep clean". What didn't get enough publicity was that if food production companies were using the same cleaning methods as hospitals (dirty water in a dirty bucket with a dirty mop), those food production companies would have been shut down. Hygiene is a solved problem - but it's a solved problem that requires a certain level of professionalism, training and equipment.

I don't want much. I don't mind paying extra for optional treatments like plastic surgery. I don't mind paying extra for a private room if I happen to want one. Hell, I wouldn't even mind paying extra for having a high-risk lifestyle (as an ex-hang-glider and ex-rock-climber). People seem to forget that the NHS isn't there to do *everything* for you treatment-wise, only to guarantee a decent minimum level of care. But we *do* want a decent minimum level of care. And we do *not* want to come out of hospital in a worse state than we went in as a result of failures by the hospital staff.

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

Graham Bartlett

@Herby

Not quite all - no Python, for instance. (Or Occam2, after the recent article about Transputers). But it's rather difficult to do white-space-significant code on a forum which removes leading whitespace from lines...

Graham Bartlett

@John Gamble

Maybe ADA works for you. For me, I'm throwing null pointer exceptions all the time, frequently caught by watchdog timeouts from my wife, but other times resulting in further failures up the fault tree. No way am I an ADA program!

Graham Bartlett

I know C, C++ and C# best

extern void graham(char& worms);

The worms go in, the worms go out. I'll be cremated. When I'm done, I won't be returning from the afterlife (if one exists) with any information for you. And if you know me, you can fill in the details of what I got up to.

Although

Body graham = gcnew Body;

has a certain ring to it. Someone else set my body up for me. And when I'm finished with it, someone else is going to have to free its resources, bcos I'll be done processing.

Graham Bartlett

Oh, another one

for(;soldiers->game();this->bugger());

Marriage makes women get fat, divorce does same to men

Graham Bartlett

@Pete 2

Too right - and not just women. With my 9-month-old, I've not exercised at all since he was born. Total lack of sleep reduces energy levels. And even if I had the energy, I look after him in the morning before I go to work and in the evening when I get home, and I'm "on call" until midnight to deal with crying, so there isn't any time I can actually get out for a run.

But even if we forget about kids, there's the simple fact that if you're married (or in a long-term relationship), you'll have other things to do in the evening. (Not necessarily just that, you dirty sods!) Going to a movie, or vegging out at home, or whatever, just spending time together. If you're single then you have no such claims on your time, so you can spend five nights a week at the gym without someone complaining that they never see you.

And then there's age. If you're married, chances are pretty good that you're older. And as you get older, it becomes a damn sight harder to keep the pounds off - it's just the way the body works.

Of course, if you're married to someone who does a lot of exercise, then chances are you're both going to keep each other working out. But if not, you're probably going to lose that toned look.

Detective on phone-hacking probe team is arrested

Graham Bartlett

@zedee

Suggest you find a dictionary. FFS.

'proactive' = opposite of 'reactive'

So instead of waiting for the information to come to you, you go digging. Given the way this works, a typical way to find a leak would be to monitor who has access to what information and check what leaks made it out. Or more subtly, to slightly doctor the documents that each team member gets, and if/when a leak happens, check whose version of the documents it was.

Ten... outdoor gadgets

Graham Bartlett

Other useful stuff

Aqueous Nikwax. Regular wax assumes your boots are already dry. If you're needing to reproof your boots mid-trip, chances are they probably aren't. Paint on some aqueous Nikwax, and job done.

Compeed plasters. Don't buy anything else. Sure they're expensive, but you can put one on and still have it protecting your blister/cut after 3-4 days, without the blister/cut going manky.

Assuming you're tenting and not bivvying, a Vaude tent. Biggest problem with tents is getting them waterproof quickly. Anything which pitches inner first is a dead loss in Britain or anywhere else with significant rainfall. From taking the tent out of the bag, my Vaude will have the ridge up (and hence be waterproof) in under a minute. Another couple of minutes after that, and the tent is fully pitched.

LOHAN will return to Earth by flying (open) sourcer

Graham Bartlett

@MobiFan

Only if they catch you. :)

Thing is, think about where there could be problems. Going up, the weather balloon gets you past the flight envelope of every plane in existence (even including the U2 and SR71). So what's LOHAN going to hit when it separates from the balloon? No safety worries there.

Then there's the coming down phase. Is it more dangerous to have LOHAN gliding under electronic control than to have it simply falling like a brick (as PARIS did) or gliding in a random direction with an inherently-stable aircraft (as PARIS was supposed to but didn't)? Simple answer: not really.

And if you're launching a weather balloon, there's already going to be a NOTAM saying "don't go near this place today, otherwise you might hit something". So people will know to stay away. The problem with UAVs is when they stooge around in a crowded airspace - as happened with the army around Salisbury plain.

Graham Bartlett

Nifty

That OpenPilot stuff looks way cool.

And just remembered that I've got a cheapy Maplins microlight model sat in a box somewhere, which I never used much bcos it only had binary (on/off) controls for power and turn. Always meant to do something with that to make it properly controllable, but never quite got round to it.

Ridley Scott confirmed for Blade Runner pre/sequel

Graham Bartlett

@LuMan

Probably you are. The original isn't bad, exactly, but the voiceover is way too cheesy. You can just hear the studio chairpolisher saying "It's police, yeah? Let's put a Mike Hammer kind of voiceover on it. Kids love that." And the ending - WTF?! "Suddenly it was all wonderful and they all lived happily ever after"?! Ye gods.

Who the hell cares about five nines anymore?

Graham Bartlett

Just a way to measure

What we *really* want is for it to not fail ever. In reality, sometimes shit happens, but in that case you want things back online as soon as poss. But "as soon as poss" doesn't work for contracts. And an outage on one server needs to be averaged over a whole warehouseful of servers.

So you say "overall our servers will be online for 99.999% of the time as measured over the year". And then you and your customers can check (via tracker stats) whether you've met the contract.

David May, parallel processing pioneer

Graham Bartlett

I remember Transputers

Worked at GEC Alsthom Transmission and Distribution Power Electronic Systems, which is now some division of Alstom. These guys built the high-voltage DC link that electrically connect the UK to France, plus many more like it around the world. I wrote the control software (from other people's designs) for one of them.

Wonderful system, and great to use. We ran out of processing power at one stage, and with any other hardware we would have been totally stuffed. With Transputers we just put another T8 processor on there, repartitioned the control software and moved on. Analogue and digital I/O cards had a low-spec T2 processor on each card which passed data around without the control software needing to know about the I/O details.

But yeah, once they were sold to ST, they were basically dead. We were promised the new generation of chip, but they never got it working. Then they swung the axe, and suddenly our place realised there were never going to be any more chips, so they had to buy pretty much the entire world stock of Transputers to get them through their current projects and service contracts, whilst they rushed to get a new platform up and working.

Gerard Depardieu takes piss on plane, gets tossed off

Graham Bartlett

@Sir Barry

I can only assume you used Babelfish or something similar, because that's the wrong translation of "like". You've just written "Gerard not similar to golden showers"...

Range Rover Evoque Si4

Graham Bartlett

@stucs201

Too right. "Oh there's a little bit of dirt on the wheels and grass underfoot, it must be offroad..." My arse.

As an ex-hang-glider pilot, I took my old Montego and Cavalier up and down things it really wasn't designed for. Only got stuck once, and that was me being a prat and not only picking a bit of slippery uphill grass but then trying to turn whilst reversing down. Have once or twice got lifts on some *proper* offroad to take-off, and those came with a warning from the organisers that if you didn't have a low-range box, limited-slip diff and proper shocks, don't even think about it.

Europe's PC mountain barely dented in price slash bloodbath

Graham Bartlett

@ravenviz

If you want portability then great, get a netbook. If you don't need portability, you don't need it. Spend the same money and get something distinctly more capable instead.

Most netbooks and most laptops have awful keyboards. Very little travel and horrible feel for most of them. Sure there are good ones, but they're rare. And the screens are all far too small for any real work.

Graham Bartlett

Hardly surprising

iPad is great for playing, surfing and portability. Not as useful for *real* work though. You know, actually writing stuff. It's also no more powerful than your average netbook.

So if you need a proper keyboard, it's not the tool for the job. If you need a proper screen, it's not the tool for the job. If you don't need portability, it's not the tool for the job. If you need a cheap PC, it's not the tool for the job. If you need any significant number-crunching power, it's not the tool for the job. If you need compatibility with a wide range of Windows-only software, including MS Office, it's not the tool for the job. (Yes I'm aware of LibreOffice - I use it myself at home. Don't tell me it's 100% MS-compatible until MS Office macros work on LibreOffice.) Oh, and if you might want to see (or write) a Flash website, it's not the tool for the job.

Netbooks at least are running Windows. But for the price of a grotesquely underpowered netbook with a crappy small screen and horrible keyboard, you can get a perfectly decent desktop with an OK screen and keyboard. So again, cost-effectiveness ain't their strong point.

US robochopper cargo skyhook gets another $47m

Graham Bartlett

Wings-on-the-chest crowd

Dunno - I suspect they'd be quite happy about it. A lot of helicopter trips are routine resupply missions, and they only use helicopters bcos trucks get ambushed and drivers get killed. Automate the routine stuff and use the highly-skilled pilots for serious stuff that needs humans in the loop (like close air support, or getting people into/out of places where the situation can change rapidly). Then pilots get *more* opportunity for medals.

FLASH: The Disruptening

Graham Bartlett

Disruptive? Not really

So they've re-invented caching. Well done chaps.

Disk storage hasn't really "bifurcated". Disk storage remains the same - you have a hard disk with a disk controller. So you have the basic disks themselves, for when you want something to sit inside a PC. And then you have an interface that can sit on the disk controller for external drives plugging into a PC, or you have a small server managing drives plugging into a network and being accessed over the network. This technology has all existed for decades. The only thing that's changed is the names of the interfaces, the price tags, and the size of the boxes.

Police kill mobile phone service to squelch protest

Graham Bartlett

Protest *for* someone drawing a knife on a police officer?!

WTF?! Draw a knife on an armed cop, what do you expect? Zero sympathy. Cops do have Tasers, but it's *their* call whether to use them in a self-defence situation.

And to all those protesters: Charles Hill was a drunk homeless guy. How much would you have cared about him in life? You'd have stepped over him and looked the other way. Fucking hypocrites.

Pacific island mints Star Wars coinage

Graham Bartlett

@Stratman

Talk nicely to the Stormtrooper, and he might be happy for you to try on his helmet if he's that way inclined...

DARPA drops another HTV-2

Graham Bartlett

@Ian Emery

So your sister has two deep probes in her basement space, does she? And what were you doing down there anyway?

A hammer drill is just showing off, though.

Lossless music goes High Street

Graham Bartlett

Dance music in FLAC

Why bother? You're never going to notice the difference on dance music. I mean, you start with something electronic, process the shit out of it (or *into* it...), and that's your product. MP3 encoding is not going to massively affect things.

The *real* tell on lossless vs MP3 is cymbals. Tons of rapidly-varying high frequencies will play hell with any lossy compression system. So rock and metal can actually be a good place to spot this. Pendulum's mash-up of metal and rave is particularly nasty through MP3.

Phone hacking arrest: Police cuff 61-year-old man

Graham Bartlett

Operation what?

WTF is "Weeting"? Quick Google says it's an obscure minor town in Norfolk. Could they really not find a better name?

Watchdog washes hands of Lush hack

Graham Bartlett

WFT?!

"But the ICO is happy to have got Lush to sign a letter promising to obey the law in future"

So it's not just chavvy looters who think the law doesn't apply to them, then.