* Posts by sazoo

19 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2007

British Ruby conference cancelled after diversity row

sazoo
Thumb Up

Re: Back when I was female

As a female senior developer, who knows a female PHD maths coder, I can tell you we do exist... but yes, sadly, so minor a percentage we don't actually SEE another one all that often!

Foldable NFC keyboard could tempt Android users

sazoo

Re: Security?

I think that might be why NFC has an advantage here... only has an active distance of a few centimetres....(think oyster card activation distance and how you still have to virtually touch the contact plate to get let through the barriers at rush hour).. Can't recall exact distance but it isn't far.

Boffins demo passwords even users don’t know

sazoo

If necessary people can remember/reconstruct complex patterns...

A la...

123456214365124635216453261435624153621435264153624513265431256413524631256431524613542631456213546123451632456123541632514623156432516342153624156342

AKA one lead of CS6 - which will mean a lot to some people, and nothing to others, but hundreds of people around the country could recreate that from the description of "1 lead of CS6"

Phone 7: Another Vista or another XP?

sazoo

@Anon 16

Android with a keyboard... on it's way - HTC Desire Z = Z hinge for fold-out qwerty... Details available on their website... Just waiting for my carrier to get stock, then I'm there!

Cinema chain bans laptops, tablets

sazoo

How will this work for "Orange Wednesdays"?

Not that I go to the cinema very often, but if I do, we like to use an Orange Wednesday voucher to get the 2for1 ticket deal... this REQUIRES that you bring your Orange mobile phone to the cinema in order to get the offer!

So on one hand we'll need to take the phone, but on the other, we're being advised to leave it at home...!?!?

I second the point about going out after work... Quite often people meet after work for a meal/movie - and there's always some poor soul who doesn't finish until later, or who has a nasty commute, so comes straight from work to the social event... And EVERY company policy requires you to not leave your laptop in your car boot - EVERY! There have been too many incidents of theft...

Lockers will be the only way. I'd never leave my mobile with the idiots in charge of trying to sell popcorn.

BOFH: Little ups and downs

sazoo

a title

Oh I do like this idea...:-) now if only our 3 story ancient building had lifts...:-(

For sale: Dr No's Scottish bunker complex

sazoo
Black Helicopters

Hmmmm

The "want" factor is high...

Yank slams El Reg 'zio-fruitcake' Playmobil 'crap'

sazoo

@AC from 10:35

"Does it come... with sprinklings and a cherry on top? :)"

I want sprinkles!!

http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2008/10/sorry-you-cant-have-any.html

Society bible lectures students on etiquette

sazoo
Coffee/keyboard

@Billy 8

"Do Apple make watches now too? ;-)"

! Love it - when can I expect my new keyboard?!?

DVLA issues double tax discs

sazoo

I got one too - here's what to do...

I was on the ball this year, so rather than leaving it until the 29th to buy my disc, I bought it on the 8th... I've had my new tax disc for a few weeks now, then this week, an extra disc in the post. I was initially concerned that I might have been billed twice. But having checked the various details I haven't.

Therefore straight after work before the government department had a chance to close I found a number on-line and rang up.... only to be encountered with a "technical hitch with their phone system" message!! However I tried again a few minutes later and it worked ok, and the first thing they did was play me a recorded message about the whole duplicate tax disc thing - obviously a lot of people were calling up about it. I suspect the addition of that message *was* the "technical hitch"

Basically I think they ran a system process again that they shouldn't have on old data.

The FIRST disc you received is the valid one. The SECOND is apparently the one they have cancelled (I guess this is easier as they will have the whole batch printing job details to clear down). They advise destroying the second disc, that it has been cancelled, and that we haven't been charged twice.

So my first disc is in the car.... but just in case I'm hanging on to my second disc in the house... you never know! So it'll live in the cupboard with the MOT and insurance paperwork, in case of a government IT fiasco.

Norway mobilizes against IE 6

sazoo

Re: IE6 rendering engine in latest IE Mobile

Dear God I'd forgotten about that hideous application. First thing I did when getting my latest win mobile (couple years ago now) phone was buy (for something daft like £8) a copy of Opera Mobile. Heaven! Someone I know downloaded a trial of the LATEST version the other day - VERY nice look and feel. And much more thumb compatible (I think I'm seeing iPhone influence here).

And I can see the flames coming regarding why I'm using a winmobile phone.... Synchronization mostly. I have experimented with trying to get contact lists on a Samsung that supposedly supported such things to backup/sync with desktops before... yee gods what a mess that was to sort out. Even trying it without using Outlook. MS may do several things badly, but in our house we have a 2PC+2Phone 3 way ActiveSync going on that has survived for years, through 4 PC upgrades and probably similar phone changes, at one point we had a 3rd PC in the mix too. That's why I like the winmobile phone. Other PDA phones are also good. Other email clients are often better. But for the simplicity of keeping it all going, Outlook and ActiveSync are (in this case) my chosen option.

Microsoft's IE 8 beta adds 'special' list

sazoo
Thumb Up

I'm with Peter!

I have to confess.. having recently had a Lynx marathon to have a thorough test of a website to prove the expected accessibility compliance - you've got to love it. I mean, if you really want to have fast loading pages and no JS security holes / dodgy JPGs / annoying flash getting in the way!

Just trying to work out how soon I'll have to upgrade my primary test machine to IE8 though... Since it is currently less than 2% of my site traffic and only just coming out of dodgy-beta-probably-broken stage. Firefox and IE6 are battling it out for second place at the moment (according to my site statistics), IE7 annoyingly still used by just under 80% of my visitors. So probably a little while yet before I have to go down that route. Have been unexpectedly impressed with Chrome for general browsing purposes, but still my browser of choice is Firefox.

"Thumbs up" (no hands up icon available) who gets bored after having tested the same things again and again in IE6, IE7, Firefox 3.x, Firefox 2.x, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Lynx, Firefox in "handheld" mode.... (and soon IE8).

Ohio prof develops CCTV people-tracker 'ware

sazoo
Stop

ROTM!!

Do these people not *watch* TV, this is how Skynet starts... Doh!

UK will save its 48-hour opt-out, says employment lawyer

sazoo

48hrs per week AVERAGE over 17 weeks, Maximum (not min!)

QUOTE:

And that it why I do not want to be governed from Europe.

48 hours is a long time to be in work.

:END QUOTE

And someone got the wrong end of the stick. the EU wants us to GO HOME, the UK is fighting for the right to keep us in the office!!

It works like this. comparisons are made on any 17 week period. If a typical person is contracted 8hrs per day, 5 days per week. then working 48 hours per week is the equivalent of working Saturday. Even following the EU rules, you can still be required to work every Saturday for 17 weeks without breaking it!

I've been presented with the "opt out" waiver-my-rights form at most of the companies I've worked for, and I have *never signed it*. On pointing out that by asking me to sign it they are saying I'm likely to need to work MORE than every Saturday for over 4 months in a row and suggesting that this would be a sign of management not doing their job properly rather than me, the managers all do a double take and say, "Oh yeah, never thought of it like that, most people just sign it anyway". Then go away quite happy. Even in crazy months of regular late nights and weekends the 17 week average is just fine! as long as crazy is interjected with normal for a couple weeks!

Boffins conclude machines still not quite people

sazoo

What I want to know is...

So there were machines pretending to be humans and humans pretending to be humans, and testers asking them questions, and trying to correctly identify which were machines...

They give that stats for machines being correctly identified, but how many of the human control group were incorrectly identified as machines?? That would be an interesting statistic! And is back to the point about the human in the conversation perhaps not actually thinking!!

I'm very sorry, says gay health warning clergyman

sazoo

@Stone him

"Two points, ah, two flats, and a packet of gravel"

How many dinari does that go for these days?

(nice reference btw!)

Microsoft's IE 8 puts giant web hole on notice

sazoo
Happy

@Tim the Opera user

I guess that only leaves 4 others to identify!

If I use it for testing does that count?

Another Web Dev here, fav browser = Firefox, though I will admit Opera is pleasant enough, the Web Dev tools in Firefox make it much more useful for the first 90% of the development! Quick check in Opera to ensure standards compliance, then the horrible task of checking in IE6 & 7 to see how naffed it decides to render margins/paddings and a lot of fiddling later it looks virtually the same in all of them. Last check in Safari to check I don't upset the fanboys an away we go!

Windows Vista update 'kills' USB devices

sazoo

Vista and "3rd Class hardware providers"

QUOTE

p.p.s. Many of the problems with Vista are down to hardware and software from 3rd class manufacturers who couldn't design their way out of a wet paper bag!

END QUOTE

Nice to hear you think that of Xerox. Since "upgrading" to Vista I have had no luck what so ever getting my scanner to work. No sign of new drivers 1 year on either.

I've been a contented MS user for many years, but one of the first things I did having installed Vista was download Ubuntu (7.4 I think it was), and get on the forums to work out how to make it Dual Boot. Have to say as a complete Linux noobie I'm loving Ubuntu, and it is my OS of choice on boot up these days. I have since upgraded to U7.10.

Unfortunately, there are no Linux drivers for my scanner either....! So It's looking like I may have to rearrange some data and put on another partition to put a tri-boot option of XP back on it!

Vista provokes user synaptic collapse

sazoo
Happy

@Jonathon Green

> Anybody else here remember the old classic PC POST message...

> "Keyboard error: press F1 to continue."?

I had that just this week, and had a moment of nostalgia when I recalled the days when all PCs required a keyboard to boot! (Was booting up an ancient P2 from pre-2000 to see what was on it before it gets consigned to the bin)