Re: I'm not sure about the key stuck to the phone at the end?
When I did this stuff for work, if we wanted something a bit more energetic, we used hydrazine diperchlorate…
Posts by Tim99
1843 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
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BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves
Saturday 29th January 2022 04:48 GMT 
Re: I'm not sure about the key stuck to the phone at the end?
In theory ammonium nitrate is an oxidizing agent and not an explosive in its own right, although very large quantities (many tons) can detonate. Oxidising agents are typically mixed with fuels to create explosive mixtures. Potassium nitrate is the oxidizer in black powder (gunpowder), the fuel is charcoal and sulfur (note correct IUPAC spelling). Other fuels can be, and are, used.
UK Home Secretary Priti Patel green-lights Mike Lynch's extradition to US to face Autonomy fraud charges
How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers
Thursday 27th January 2022 02:06 GMT
Top-Down system?
Almost always specced by bosses and people outside the department. When I did this, the punter often finished up with two joined systems - One to keep the bosses happy, and the other for the peons who actually used it. Typically, I called the first a "Management System" with a pretty screen and lots of reports; and most importantly, snazzy "Export to Excel" facilities. The other often had several streamlined CRUD screens with a simple main data entry screen, and only a few reports. The most important people (Boss's secretaries) got both...
Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'
Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them
'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government
UK, Australia, to build 'network of liberty that will deter cyber attacks before they happen'
Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee on privacy, data sharing, and the web's future
Friday 21st January 2022 01:07 GMT
Re: Pods......and other attractive possibilities.......
"....two local backups (one offsite) seems a better proposition!"
Hmm, a bare minimum I would have thought. After doing this stuff for >50 years, I now have 2 Time Machine backups; 2 full disk bootable backups (1 off site for each); and an encrypted internet backup - With incipient old age/forgetfulness I'm wondering if that is adequate...
Bug in WebKit's IndexedDB implementation makes Safari 15 leak Google account info... and more
Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds
Insurance giant Lloyd's hires DXC to migrate org off legacy mainframes to AWS cloud
Another day, another ERP project behind schedule: This time it's Norfolk County Council and an Oracle system
Wednesday 12th January 2022 12:06 GMT
NFN (Normal for Norfolk)
Sorry to rain on your meme, but…
My father was the Treasurer of a Norfolk Council when documents were still hand written or typed. He was responsible for the installation of one of the first local authority systems (in the mid/late 1960s, Burroughs?). It’s main job was to look after the rates, and pay bills and salaries - It worked. I was just getting into science/technology then, and was allowed to go and see it working in its own room. The manufacturer was sufficiently pleased that it was used as a reference site, and for some reason "gave" them an ANITA calculator to "check everything was OK" - I think that cost about £400. He took early retirement when local authorities were reorganised in 1973 (Redcliffe-Maud). He predicted that the new large authorities would become an inefficient bureaucratic mess, so he grabbed the pension and left. When he left he was allowed to buy the ANITA for £5 and was still using it in 1991.
Microsoft tweaks Teams and Viva to help bridge gap between frontline workers and their managers, among other things
Nvidia promises British authorities it won’t strong Arm rivals after proposed merger
UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE
Tuesday 11th January 2022 02:45 GMT
Re: Depends on what you want
Before retiring I worked in the Civil and Public Services, ran companies for a banker, and then my own technical consultancy. Here is an outline proposal for somebody to create a "top line" system:-
Scoping the problem: 2 leads, 3 person-months total £100,000; 4 juniors, 6 person-months £150,000. Overheads: leases, accomodation, travel & expenses £250,000.
System: 4 basic servers running BSD with hot swappable drives (R350s? should be overkill at ~£2,000 each) i.e. a web server; one Running Python and SQLite; the other 2 as cold backup servers; cabling, etc. £2,000 - £10,000. Software cost ~£0.
"Consultancy" fees, etc.: £9,500,000 (Bolly isn't cheap). Total spend £10,010,000.
Looking at it again, I might have over-specced the hardware...
The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel
Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours
Friday 7th January 2022 11:53 GMT
Re: Angel Delight
I don’t remember being particularly fond of it when I lived in the UK, but we found the butterscotch flavour in the "ethnic aisle" of our local Oz supermarket. I made a dessert for our friends from a gingersnap basket filled with Angel Delight and topped with fresh raspberries. We all liked it, and I had to make more. Mrs Tim99 and I now eat the butterscotch variety perhaps once a month - I will admit that the pink one is unpleasant, and the chocolate one is worse.
Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault
Friday 7th January 2022 11:21 GMT 
Normal operation
About 35 years ago I worked in a laboratory that had a lot of expensive, sensitive kit. Each item drew kWs of power, but they normally weren’t turned off as we could almost guarantee that at least one wouldn’t come back up. The exception was Christmas, when staff were normally expected to take a couple of days off and the lab was closed for at least a week. As expected, one important instrument didn’t restart. The reliable and competent operator called the service department, ran through the standard check list, but the kit refused to work. A service engineer was sent, who was charged out at "only" £95/hr including travelling time. After 3 hours on the road, he arrived and we made him a cup of tea - While it was mashing he walked around to the back of the equipment and turned the power supply relay switch on. The equipment restarted. The operator was almost in tears, "I always turn it off at the front panel, the back is hard to reach" she said - Nobody else admitted responsibility. To avoid unpleasant repercussions (it may have been her boss), the engineer wrote it up as a dirty switch contact (Well, we had given him biscuits too).
You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now
Saturday 1st January 2022 03:47 GMT
Re: IBM ATs are "liquid" proof
I developed a way of carrying IBM XTs within a large office block without having to disconnect the cabling. I balanced the keyboard on top of the monitor and lifted the whole system up, wedging the keyboard in place under my chin. Obviously I wasnt entirely stupid, if it was more than 2 flights of stairs in an 8 story building I took the lift. I must have been fairly fit then - It may well have contributed to my back now being stuffed though.
Roll forwards 20+ years, I was installing some of our software on a database server for a government department. I met the department's IT bod in the car-park as we had agreed he would sign me in. He opened the boot of his car, struggled to lift out a cumbersome foldable trolly (weight >>5kg?), and unfolded it. He then reached in and removed a Toshiba notebook in its shoulder-bag (weight <2kg) and placed it on the trolly. He explained that it was "the rules" and that a number of colleagues had reported back injuries before the rule came in. Some months before, an older colleague had taken time off after hurting themselves lifting the trolly - They were still awaiting the outcome of the incident analysis to see if the rules needed modification...
The Filth Filter is part of the chipset, honest. Goes between the TPM and SEP. No, really
Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it
Saturday 18th December 2021 03:41 GMT
Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?
...to replace my trusty, now ageing, Pixma TS6150. Which does all I need...Good luck with that. I've been trying to replace an MX516, which was a distress purchase after my previous 10 year old Canon failed three days before I was moving house nearly 10 years ago. It seems to be almost impossible to avoid buying a multifunction that doesn't want you to install hundreds of MBs of software and "help you" print over the internet.
I'm retired, so I am wondering if I can manage without one when this one packs up. I thought that my main use would be to scan the occasional document, but I have discovered that my iPhone makes a reasonable job except for the paper not being flat (laying a sheet of glass over it fixes that). For the 4 pages or so that I print every couple of months, a USB stick and the local library and will probably do...
Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-
Monday 13th December 2021 16:16 GMT
Re: Netware? Less than 20 years ago? Where was he working - Jurassic Park?
About that time ago (2002), I was installing some of our systems for government owned hospitals - Windows 95 clients on NetWare 4 networks. Our customers required "advanced audio" and plug and play. I received formal written permission from their head of IT to install Windows 98 on 9 PCs (3 sites each with 3). The staff were told to "not tell anyone", otherwise other users would expect Windows 98 too…
MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer
Thursday 9th December 2021 02:25 GMT
Re: Nuts to them all. MongoDB is web scale.
I've not used jdbc. With C, or even Python, it's a bit messy but doable for a few 10s of concurrent users on a LAN server. The good news is that it is extremely easy to port up to PostgreSQL if the application does grow.
For most web applications the db talks to a single user, the web server. The post indicating hundreds of SQL statements per second on the SQLite site was made in 2015, I would imagine that it would have gone up since.
Tuesday 7th December 2021 10:17 GMT
The run time version of Access as a front end to SQL Server might not be too bad. We made a few shrink-wrap apps each with ~50 concurrent CRUD users with tens of tables and a few millions of rows - The heavy lifting was done with transactions, stored procedures, and server-side views. BUT, the learning curve was steep and long - Once mastered it was a very quick and quite powerful toolkit to put useful Windows client-server systems into production.
Tuesday 7th December 2021 10:02 GMT
Re: Nuts to them all. MongoDB is web scale.
I’m old, so I used SQLite with bash, C, and Python. I found it particularly useful when "tidying up" CSV data that I generated from luser Excel "databases". A dirty secret is that most (95+%?) of the data driven websites out there could probably use it (sqlite.org):-
Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic.The SQLite website (https://www.sqlite.org/) uses SQLite itself, of course, and as of this writing (2015) it handles about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below 0.1 most of the time.
This House believes: A unified, agnostic software environment can be achieved
Tuesday 7th December 2021 05:24 GMT
Re: One software
I think you'll find UNIX and C before that - Until AT&T realized that they "owned it" (well except for all of the bits done by Berkley, other universities, other business, and users). Then we had the "UNIX Wars"
Welcome to Microsoft with there sound business idea that "Just" good enough is good enough - Some of us remember that Microsoft licenced more copies of UNIX (Xenix) than anyone else, and paid AT&T for the privilege. You might well think that that was a good reason for MS to employ Dave Cutler to produce Windows NT.
What if it could be SysAdmin Day, every day? Would anyone actually notice?
Tuesday 7th December 2021 05:05 GMT 
Hmm...
The skills level within many companies has been reduced over all, Stremlau continues. And fewer techies at entry level mean even fewer skilled techies moving up the organisation over time. "We've lost a lot of people that still understand those little lines of code, DOS scripts, and scripting capabilities."This leaves companies looking for help with even the most mundane tasks. That help is even harder to find as a result of Covid. And harder to deliver when the end user workforce is largely at home.
Theory tells us that supply and demand should tend to set the price of labour in the market - So, techies have had a massive pay-rise?
The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day
Tuesday 7th December 2021 02:45 GMT
Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...
Several points: People like gold because it's pretty; it is malleable and ductile; hence jewellery and ornaments; it is near permanent (except for aqua regia); heavy, so you can't easily shift large amounts, but sufficiently "'valuable" that an amount that you can carry in a purse can be traded for worthwhile things. Other than gold reserves and jewellery, its main use is electrical circuits/electronics; smaller amounts are used for dentistry and medicine.
Piss did, and can, have a value. Until modern times it was collected and sold to make gunpowder; and large amounts were used for cleaning, textiles, and dyeing. It is used as a raw material for many valuable pharmaceuticals (particularly from human females) and is still used in much of the world as fertilizer.
Microsoft: What's that? A patch for make-me-admin vuln? Sorry – can't hear you. Have a new jumper instead
Microsoft's Teams Essential tier seems designed to coax people on to Business Basic
You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?
Apple sues 'amoral 21st century mercenaries' NSO for infecting iPhones with Pegasus spyware
Wednesday 24th November 2021 00:39 GMT
Re: Seriously?
Alternatively, there may be two posters who use a similar style? I am old and went to a school that had "illusions" of grandeur - I was taught to use Oxford spelling and commas; longer, adequately punctuated, sentences; and the excessive use of subordinate clauses. I now try to use shorter sentences.
A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal
Tuesday 23rd November 2021 02:10 GMT
Re: What was I thinking?
I was the General Manager of a business, but for marketing reasons called myself "The Principal Chemist". When we advertised a technical job we typically got 200-400 replies. A harsh, but necessary, filter was that anyone who addressed their application to the Principle Chemist was not considered - The jobs involved writing legally enforceable technical reports - It probably removed 20%.
The ideal sat-nav is one that stops the car, winds down the window, and asks directions
Saturday 20th November 2021 08:44 GMT
Re: My experience
One reason why I bought a near “poverty pack” Golf was to avoid the built-in SatNav - The extras pack that I did buy had everything I wanted, side and rear detection (my neck is stuffed) radar cruise control with traffic assist (useful, if you do actually monitor what the car is actually doing. I connect my phondlephone to CarPlay, and Apple Maps has improved to do pretty much what I want. The paid Sygic app is worth the money to me, as it has downloaded maps and still shows you where you are without needing a reliable phone signal (it can be pretty patchy here, and even Telstra only works well where people live).
As the roads seem to have changed a lot since I lived in the UK I paid Sygic for the UK maps just before COVID expecting to travel there, but our State has a tight lockdown, and travelling abroad is a no-no. In a population of 2.8 million we have 7 active cases, and have had 9 deaths in total. Currently there are almost no restrictions, other than travel, and masks are not required by the general population, but we expect that to change when we open up next year (90% of 16+ population inoculated?).
Riverbed Technologies files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following pandemic 'headwinds'
Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux
Thursday 18th November 2021 00:51 GMT 
OK
You know how we all hate a smartarse who says "I told you so"?:-
Link 1 a conspiracy by Canonical (2015); Link 2 Canonical to distribute a "premium" commercial product (like Red Hat) that will tend to limit user and developer choice (2015); Link 3 How can we make money? (2018 - Satire?).
Well, I told you so.
What do you mean, 'Microsoft doesn't care about Windows on Arm'? Here's a cheap, underpowered test rig
Tuesday 16th November 2021 10:24 GMT
Re: Seems like an afterthought
After the crap publicity, in February, Apple upped the credit note to $500 redeemable on any Apple product purchased before the end of the year MacRumors Link.
Tuesday 16th November 2021 03:15 GMT
Re: Seems like an afterthought
Mini computer suppliers did the same thing. In the early 90s I was offered a microVAX by DEC at ~10% of list, to do some Oracle development - Sun offered me a Solaris workstation at ~70% of list; which probably reflected how they were doing in the market at the time. DEC wanted about A$3,000, Sun wanted about A$20,000 (so both listed at about A$30,000). I bought a 486 and went with R:Base/MS Access and Sybase, switching to SQL Server when it came out on NT. Later we went with PostgreSQL for *NIX stuff, but the market was pretty much all MS by then. What happened to Sun and DEC? I suspect that other first-line developers also noted the price differential, particularly after the bubble burst.
A local joke at the time was "What's an optimist?" - "An Oracle developer who puts on two clean business shirts in a week"... (Its pretty hot here).
FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what
Monday 15th November 2021 14:35 GMT
Re: ??
Probably because I've been around this stuff for ~50 years and like the Unix Philosophy - Systemd is the opposite of that. I posted this here 6 years ago:-
1. It breaks one of the main strengths of UNIX - That every component stands by itself and can be managed separately.
2. The use of interrelated dependencies of systems that should be kept separate encourages "standard" distributions and, I suspect, will allow organizations like, say, Canonical to distribute a "premium" commercial product (like Red Hat) that will tend to limit user and developer choice; and encourages loading unnecessary insecure cruft.
A satirical(?) post I wrote in May 2018 as to why I thought it was/is a bad idea is here: How can we make money?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
