Posts by Nick Ryan

Aggressively large varchar is not as bad as my current issue... a database where the clueless developers have used varchar(max) for almost every damn char based column. Gender recorded as a single char? Use a nvarchar(max)...

nvarchar(max) has its places, but using is for everything is ridiculous for performance reasons. Fetching a column that is nvarchar(max) takes about 7-8 times longer compared to where the data is stored inline. And this is for a database where the database server has been given enough RAM to load the entire database into memory.

Depends if he was an MBA or not.

What if it's your wife who's the vaccine refusenik?

Re: Is this fair?

The same goes for other professions too. For example, economist: Either believe in perpetual growth or don't become an economist. Definitely do not, ever, ever question the money-go-round of inflation and money creation (quantitive easing) and blindly state that because the numbers are higher the economy is doing well.

Re: Notepad++ is genius

Notepad++ has a much smarter file loading mechanism than most similar applications, however this approach does have some drawbacks.

Most applications just load the entire file into memory, parse it and then display. Notepad++ initially only loads the start of the file into memory and displays this. While this works really well for opening very large files but if one needs to search the entire file or the (entire) file needs to be parsed for formatting reasons then the entire file needs to be loaded. This is still done in a reasonably efficient manner though, but this parsing will be slower - on the other hand if it's not required, then it doesn't matter.

Re: You have my sympathies...

Yep... the change from TV remotes that had separate ON and OFF buttons to ones that had a single ON/OFF toggle button has been the bane of my life for far too long.

Plasma displays used to always have discrete ON and OFF remotes, when LEDs started to come along the manufacturers decided to cheap out and just use a power toggle. Which is fine when the device is behaving itself and will respond to the toggle instantly, crap where the device is slow to respond to either and therefore has a high chance of just toggling back again... or, the absolute balls, where there are multiple devices and the toggle completely unamusingly turns some off and some on and when pressed again toggles them all...

Re: Picture

Thanks, that makes a lot sense.

Re: Not my code

Also, throw out SQL and go within something No-SQL because complete data validation and integrity is for dinosaurs.

Not that No-SQL solutions don't have their place, and a hybrid SQL/No-SQL solution could work very well for some things, but pretending that columns and data structures are an unnecessary inconvenience is just reckless.

Re: Embarrassed for them.....

Oh no, I'd managed to block the absolute horror that was NSIS from my memory. Just... quite how whoever vomited up that thing considered any way that it worked to be useful I'll never know. It felt like the creator of it had heard of scripting and even basic logic structures and methods and had intentionally gone sideways instead.

Re: maybe sometimes even to promote peace in an area

There really should be a < sarcasm > tag... :)

Re: I predict excitement

Yep, but it makes them so much easier to find in the dark...

Re: Hey now

The standalone client just worked. It was easy and did the job.

The Flash client was an exercise in total an utter stupidity... using something that should only ever be used to enhance parts of a website to do anything more was... inexcusable. The fact that it was only marginally less insecure than ActiveX was no excuse. No server or management system should ever have Flash enabled on it.

Re: Opt out? Really???

...and this is why I always have a handy USB stick with the Windows installer on it. I can't remember the last time that I accepted the defaultly installed garbage configuration that any computer vendor has foisted on me.

For larger deployments there are better tools of course, but for just a few then the USB and nuke-whatever-the-hell-is-there and start again approach always works.

Re: Efficiency?? Ha ha ha ha….

The OS isn't going to unlock a file, however closing an application, for any reason, will remove a file lock.

%temp% is jus that - it's there for temporary files and the OS/developer notes make this clear. If you want to keep something for a reasonable amount of time, don't keep it in a file location for transitory use. Transitory use is, of course, dependent on "how long is transient" and previously this has been down to the application developer. A competent application developer will try to ensure that all temporary files created by their application are deleted either when existing the application or are deleted later. Usually when working with "deleted later" temporary files this means creating a sub-directory specific to the application and this makes management of them easier... i.e. just delete all the buggers, or all over a certain date.

Unfortunately not all applications are written by competent developers, or even developers who are aware that these files are not "automagically" deleted at some point later. As a result the number of temporary files tends to grow until the limit to the number of files in a single directory is hit (slowed down somewhat by using sub-directories) or the OS or some other application does a clean up on them.

There are clearly defined file paths for the storage of non-transitory data and the API to ask the OS where to store them has been around for at least the last couple of decades. Hardly new stuff...

Re: “I already know what you want!”

Superb.

I see that and raise you YMCA sung in Japanese... not quite the version that I was thinking of, but close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jResgYr5bvQ Seeing people recognise the tune and then hear lyrics in another language sung to it is just so funny... I had it as a ringtone at one point and often got asked for a copy..

Re: I’ll start digging the grave

That's not unknown and is all down to moron developers trying to pretend that a web browser was a modal system application and when they found that it wasn't behaving as one they insisted on going down the Internet Explorer only ActiveX route to try and bodge it further into being one. Still didn't do that, but they successfully and very idiotically tied what should have been just a web application/page to a specific web browser.

Re: wth is it with always dns?

I think by "it's always DNS" is that it's because DNS is so fundamental that if you screw it up, bad things often happen and these bad things often take a few hours to resolve due to caching.

If a service vendor such as Salesforce screws up one of their applications, it's crap, but it won't usually take out their entire service and the testing of such components should be readily possible to reduce the chance and quickly reversible when bad things happen. As a result even Salesforce don't screw up this kind of thing that often. However, DNS changes are considerably harder to test safely and, in particular, remotely and when something goes wrong are a PITA to fix.

However, having just put together a system with 4 x 4K (43") displays, I do appreciate having lots of screen space on large screens is quite nice, and wish my laptop could at times provide similar in a more portable form...

I think you've just proved the point!

Yes, when mobile with a laptop we can't expect multiple monitors and therefore we have to make do with just one. It's annoying though...

HTML for email was a bad idea. Creating dependencies between an email client and a word processor was a worse one. The colored pencil crowd loves HTML so we're stuck with it, though.

Kind of... my main issue with HTML for email is not specifically about using HTML for email, it's the utterly and absolutely broken way that it's been done and this is all down to Microsoft and Microsoft Outlook. It's the lowest common denominator of broken HTML rendering possible and causes no end of issues, for real HTML but also within Microsoft's editors themselves.

A restricted implementation of HTML would have been fine, with careful consideration given to remote resources and absolutely, definitely no ever scripting or auto-run of anything in any way. Instead Microsoft inflicted the shit-show horror that is Microsoft Word HTML into it all rather than using real HTML.

Other than that, why is (limited) HTML for an email OK? Because it gave us the opportunity to format in some way and through this give improve meaning and context to email messages. Not perfect, of course, but so much better than defining another standard and doing something different.

Re: Best just make a full size scalextric

I didn't say that it was easy, or thay exchangeable battery packs have anywhere near good enough energy density, but it's about the only way that such vehicles will be realistically feasible.

I'd love electric vehicles to be successful, but right now the technology is barely there (particularly electricy storage) but the power generation and infrastructure just does not exist and that kind of thing takes a very long time to build up.

Re: Dome?

I was thinking either the Science or Natural museum in London...

The the interactive exhibits at those used to have a habit of never working.

Re: The obligatory abbreviation (TOA)

My thought is that while in this example the term is only used once, if just the letters API were in the article then it may not be understood by some readers and therefore should be expanded. In this instance it's not about re-using the acronym later in the article, it's about using it once and ensuring that it's clear.

As someone who knows what an API is the article would have read a little strange to me if it just read "application programming interface" because I tend to expect the acronym API to be used instead. However, for someone who doesn't know what the term API is, including the expanded as well form aids those readers and doesn't detract from the article even if the acronym isn't used again later.

There's likely some good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) reasons for including it in both forms too.

Re: The illusion of absolute security

This is the same with data. The only secure data is data that you do not have. As soon as you have data then it will be insecure in some way.

Which does lead into some of the data experience that many people forget: only collect the data that you need and nothing else.

Re: One word:

A long time ago I worked for a company that installed hardware into (NHS) hospitals and so on.

We started with a PC supplied by us that worked as a basic server with a serial link to a PC sitting in the private network that we fitted. Reasonably safe until the PC supplied by us got hammered by whatever was lurking around the system and for supplier "reasons" applying security updates to any of the kit including the external PC were not permitted.

Later we switched to deploying an edge firewall with all of our PCs operating within the private network and no serial link. The firewall doesn't have to be expensive, or even with lots of features, all it needed to do was to only allow an incoming communication on the port(s) that we permitted and nothing else, there were no communications permitted outbound at all. We sold it as "protecting the NHS network" from whatever was in the private network however our main priority was the other way round of course...

It was almost an amusing day that I turned up on site with the local IT staff running around reimaging systems all around the department and they weren't happy when I told them that they were under no circumstances to be allowed near the systems that we supplied. Luckily for me even though I got there after they started they couldn't access the (locked in cabinets) PCs that we supplied so they didn't trash our systems. They weren't happy about not being able to reimage our PCs but eventually had to back down.

It was a somewhat less amusing day when I found that an engineer had introduced an auto-run virus to our systems because he'd used an infected USB storage stick. It was at that point I found that despite the morons at Microsoft introducing a policy and settings to "not auto-run" that the stupid OS "auto-ran" regardless. This "functionality" was only fixed by a later OS update/patch which, of course, the original vendor refused to be permitted to be installed as it might impact operation - although only if their code was crap. I had three visits to that site for this one reason before I got very grumpy with the situation and things changed...

Re: Conditional content

Not a difficult thing to do either. The level of nasty inventiveness is pretty damn high in some of the phishing systems.

Re: Marketing lies

No, definitely just "driver assist". Having a limited forward facing sensor that can detect something in the way (as long as it has a presence around road height) is useful but that's not "auto pilot".

"auto pilot" for a car is when the driver doesn't have to be there at all. The car can navigate from one location to another with no assistance whatsoever and to do this without having to be constrained to specific road types or simple road layouts. There are enough examples of junctions that are barely interpretable by humans, can it cope with them? No. Then not "auto pilot".

Re: Set a few machines up in Paris once

Had a customer with that, Southampton possibly so not a short drive, that experienced arbitrary serious server slow down issues on their NT4 server that our in house hardware sales team had configured and supplied. They'd gone and set one of the 3D screensavers with the name of the client and therefore whenever we turned up and looked at the performance everything was fine, we went to lunch and 20 minutes after we had left the server performance tanked again.

I was not impressed, and I deleted every 3D screensaver from the server. The problem never returned and the hardware team was given very strict instructions to do the same (and to go fix other sites that they had recently supplied)

These days servers have load balancing preventing a shell task from using 100% CPU but back then there was no such thing and Microsoft were too busy shouting about how wonderful their pre-emptive multitasking was while carefully glossing over the fact that it was in fact still cooperative multitasking rather than true multtasking.