* Posts by disgruntled yank

2028 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Oracle files $7m copyright claim against NEC's US limb over 'unreported royalties' from database distribution

disgruntled yank

Apropos

https://goomics.net/62/

Salesforce's Patterson blazes a trail for humble-braggers everywhere

disgruntled yank

Question

Do British Olympians compete on a Team GB? I'd have guessed it to be a UK team.

When Mr. P departs, can Salesforce say goodbye with the old South Pacific song, "I'm Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair?"

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

disgruntled yank

Where's my villa?

Over 60 here, still working, still waiting for the deed to the villa to show up in the mail. I should say that I get by with experience and common sense, seldom with anything that would pass for magic.

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

disgruntled yank

Keys

Just wish to recommend https://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/ .

At the time I got married, I had a manual typewriter. My wife had an IBM Selectric back then, so I think my old Royal or whatever it was went out to the curb. By now I don't remember typing ells for ones, but I guess I must have. (As you can tell by the reference to the Selectric, we have been married a while.)

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

disgruntled yank

Briefly wanted one

A radioactive terror pig sounded like just the think to patrol our yard and keep out cats, rabbits, and squirrels. But bringing in a pig to keep squirrels from digging holes in the lawn would be self-defeating.

New Yorkers react to strikingly indifferent statue of Elon Musk with cheerful hostility

disgruntled yank

Kind of generic

It looks a little like Bruce Willis, or maybe a little like Benjamin Bradlee, for many years the executive editor of The Washington Post.

Russia spoofed AIS data to fake British warship's course days before Crimea guns showdown

disgruntled yank

age-old?

GPS has been use for right around 30 years, spoofing I suppose for a little less.

Hungover Brits declare full English breakfast the solution to all their ills

disgruntled yank

Home remedies

In certain Hispanic pockets of America, menudo, a tripe soup, is regarded as sovereign. Or so I've heard: I've never actually consumed menudo, hungover or not.

The cure that always worked for me was a hard run of four to six miles.

Stob treks back across the decades to review the greatest TV sci-fi in the light of recent experience

disgruntled yank

Outstanding

That's all.

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

disgruntled yank

Also

In African-American slang in the southeastern US, "cock" refers or referred to a portion of the female anatomy. Whether this usage is still current, how far it made it beyond ethnic and regional bounds, I can't say.

Prez Biden narrowly escapes cicada assassination attempt, hunkers down in Cornwall

disgruntled yank

What the Secret Service needs

Is cicada-killer wasps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKBYUoNP_dA

And actually birds eat quite a few--they just may be sated at this point.

Snakes on a Plane meets The Simpsons as airline creates ‘whacker’ to scare reptiles away from parked A380s

disgruntled yank

Love the southwest

Many years ago, my father flew out to southern Arizona for an interview with a mining company. There had recently been a case in the national news of a boy bitten by a brown recluse spider: I think the Air Force may have flown the antivenom from wherever it was to the kid's city. Anyway, poisonous spiders were on my father's mind, and he asked whether this town had problems with brown recluses or black widows. Nah, said the company guy, the scorpions eat them all.

Be careful, 007. It’s just had a new coat of paint: Today is D-day for would-be Qs to apply to MI6

disgruntled yank

Cover

In the early 1950s, my father said, CIA employees were easily spotted among one's acquaintances in Washington, DC. Asked what they did, they would get a slightly embarrassed look and say that they worked "for the government."

Oops, says Manchester City Council after thousands of number plates exposed in parking ticket spreadsheet

disgruntled yank

Lookups

There has been an abandoned car parked on my street, no tags, no inspection stickers, nothing but a sticker from what I take to be a New York parking garage. I was interested to find that for $1 one can get the history of a car, given only its vehicle identification number (VIN). I didn't invest, but I did ascertain that the car was not stolen.

Perl changes dev's permaban for 'unacceptable' behaviour to a year-long lockout after community response

disgruntled yank

Re: Very.Big.Sigh

I assume that "Excel" == "CSV". (Not that I haven't fiddled with Excel through Python--but not on BSD.) Most of this sounds quite doable in Perl, though I haven't written much Perl since JSON became a thing. Certainly Perl easily handles web-scraping, XML parsing, and database stuff.

Michael Collins, once the world's 'loneliest man,' is dead. If that name means little or nothing to you, read this

disgruntled yank

USMA

Collins graduated from the United States Military Academy--its official title. Heaven knows there are other military academies in the US, but "top US military academy" just doesn't look right.

University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired

disgruntled yank

Re: Place your bets...

Money, hell. How about a brush, a bucket, and task to maintain the bathrooms of the kernel maintainers.

Adobe co-founder and PostScript co-creator Charles Geschke dies, aged 81

disgruntled yank

Re: Colophon

There is a book somewhere on my shelves from Colophon Press. Should we blame it on Geschke's training in the classics? (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aalphabetic+letter%3D*k%3Aentry+group%3D143%3Aentry%3Dkolofw%2Fn)

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

disgruntled yank

Missed this the first time

"This inherent resistance to decomposition of logic into bite-sized pieces is what leads into the contrived, lengthy queries, the copy-pasted chunks of code and, eventually, unmaintainable, unstructured (note the irony) SQL codebases"

I should have said what leads into contrived, lengthy queries is the real-world complexity that one has to model. If you can stick to C.J. Date's parts-suppliers or parts-suppliers-warehouses tables in Introduction to Database Systems, the queries will be only so long.

disgruntled yank

Simplifications

Maybe someday someone will invent views to encapsulate complicated query logic. Or am I dreaming?

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

disgruntled yank

Re: Skodas and Ladas

Many years ago, in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, we had an old beater--it might have been the ten-year old Chevy sedan, with a piece of steel plate on the floor to keep passengers' feet off the road. One of our neighbors was an engineer for GM, and of course drove a spiffy new car. Then there came an unusually cold day, and the spiffy new car would not start, but the old beater did. My father gave the engineer a ride to work. The engineer explained that an engine with higher compress is harder to start in cold weather. My father listened politely, and may even have held off smirking until he dropped the guy off.

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

disgruntled yank

Re: late nineties

@evandos nibor:

In the late nineties, I was on the other side of the US from the office, when the phone rang at quite an early hour PST. The expensive technical consultant (ETC) needed to push some data from the HR/Payroll side of Peoplesoft to the AP side, and it was not working. It has escaped the ETC's notice that one field of PS_PERSONAL_DATA was four characters on the HR side and two characters on the AP side. I plugged in the PC, dialed in to work, and got the data pushed. (Substr is your friend.) I doubt I got back to sleep.

When I returned to the office, one of the managers state proudly that the call was his doing. They knew at which hotel I was staying, but the desk knew of nobody by my name. The manager then looked up my wife's name in the files and called back.

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86

disgruntled yank

Re: Readable? Concise?

Readable, perhaps. Concise I can't see.

Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave

disgruntled yank

Re: Can anyone help me see the point

I infer the author did this to test the Ubuntu window management.

Mullet over: Aussie boys' school tells kids 'business in the front, party in the back' hairstyle is 'not acceptable'

disgruntled yank

Re: posh, etc.

Presumably it was the Columbus School for Girls, then: thanks for the correction. It has been quite a few years since college.

disgruntled yank

posh, etc.

A college friend had attended the Ohio School for Girls, in Columbus, Ohio. I would never known, never heard of the school, but it was across the street from Larry Flint's house (q.v.). The public prints always included "posh" in mentioning the school, and they always mentioned the school if they mentioned his house. This made my friend, who attended OSG on scholarship, roll her eyes.

My own high school (all boys) went in for strict regulation of hair: off the collar in back, not long enough to pull past the bridge of the nose in front. Many years, I happened to see the senior class pictures from the same years at my son's high school (also all boys): the operative principal seemed to be "whatever". My son's was a far better school.

And the Turing Award for best compilation goes to... Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho

disgruntled yank

Re: '67 ?

I am not a historian of compiler theory, but I should say that they summarized and synthesized a lot of what was out there. The bibliography in my copy of the Dragon Book runs to 28 pages. From the bibliography and notes, I see that Hopper and COBOL do not get a mention, though Backus and Fortran do. I suppose this may have been a matter of perceived influence on compiler development, but I leave it for the qualified to say.

disgruntled yank

Books by their covers

With John Hopcroft, Ullman wrote another book of sufficient standing to be known by its cover, namely Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, the "Cinderella Book".

Global tat supply line clogged as Suez Canal authorities come to aid of wedged 18-brontosaurus container ship

disgruntled yank

Re: Another one to propose

I find that I was way off--the meridian I had in mind was about 99 West.

You weren't put off Australia by the killer koalas?

disgruntled yank

Re: Another one to propose

Actually, Washington's longitude is one of the very few I know, and it's about 77 W. But Eratosthenes would be proud of you for thinking this one up.

(One of very few: that and Greenwich, and I can kind of SWAG western Kansas at about 115 W.)

disgruntled yank

Another one to propose

A caption in this morning's Washington Post says that "The vessel, at more than 1,300 feet long, is one of the largest in the world and more than twice the height of the Washington Monument." This seems to mean "twice as long as the Washington Monument is high". So perhaps we could use either Washington Monument as a measure either of angle or strictly of rotation: "the sum of the angles in a triangle is two Washington Monuments." or "My car idles at about 6000 Washington Posts per minute."

While Reg readers know the difference between a true hacker and cyber-crook, for everyone else, hacking means illegal activity

disgruntled yank

Ah, well

The usage that sets me to grinding my teeth is the back-formation "mentee". Were I a hacker/cracker/malicious person, I would loose on the world a bit of code to turn every occurrence of "mentee" to "manatee".

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

disgruntled yank

I sympathize

But usage eventually wears everyone down and wins. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1483/ .

IT contractor caught charging Uncle Sam expert rates for newbies, agrees to pay back $6m in settlement

disgruntled yank

Guilty as charged, your honor!

When I worked for a government contractor (US civil agency), on a couple of occasions we had to write up the people we proposed to put on the contract. I followed the job descriptions, and wrote up people who were pretty good at clearing paper jams as if they were the greatest thing since Donald Knuth. (Well, OK, implied that they possessed technical skills they had never manifested.) In at least one case, the contracting office knew exactly who we were offering and made no objection.

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

disgruntled yank

Re: The Weekly Cultural Moment

I would not be in the least surprised to learn that the word turns up in an American spelling bee. Oh, for the days of The Hoosier Schoolmaster, when "theodolite" was as esoteric as it got.

UK Test and Trace chief Dido Harding tries to convince MPs that £14m for canned mobile app was money well spent

disgruntled yank

Plenty of money, but

14 million wasted is a lot, but on scale of a 15 billion project it looks smaller.

As for the consultants, I think that the firm that set up our Peoplesoft system ca. 1998 billed at least $125/hour for the project manager. Now, I doubt he billed many 8-hour days, but any such day would have been $1000 or more then. The question ought to be whether one gets value for the money. I did have my doubts about one or two of the expensive consultants from that firm.

Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain

disgruntled yank

Re: I loved Perl so much...

Back in the day (30+ years ago), I heard someone's quip that any programming language would let you hang yourself, given enough rope, but C would go down to the hardware store and buy the rope for you. Perl is sort of that way. I have seen really good, very well documented Perl. I have seen (and committed) the other kind.

Over the last years, I have written more in Python, largely because that is what the young coders know. But I still like Perl, even if these days it takes me a few minutes to remember to use semicolons, etc.

disgruntled yank

Re: I remember when "whitehouse.com" was nicely changed to a pr0n site

If memory serves, whitehouse.gov was the official domain, and some smarties bought up the .com. A friend who then worked in an elementary school library was showing her charges how to use the internet (this would have been 1999 or so) when she discovered the TLD confusion.

disgruntled yank

The punishment is obvious, once they catch the perp

Make him maintain old Perl code.

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

disgruntled yank

Re: Reading the Runes in Between the Lines ... Karma Sucks Big Time

Given that Godiva is closing all of its US stores, I'm not sure how well we are fixed for Belgian chocolates. Popcorn we may have.

What's a COVID-19 outbreak? Amazon gets all Trumpy over Alabama warehouse workers' mail-in vote to form a union

disgruntled yank

Re: so each ends up being just as corrupt as the other.

Ahem.

The Office of Labor-Management Standards of the the US Department of Labor has reports on the payments made to every employee or officer of every union in the United States. These are searchable on-line and freely downloadable as zipped, pipe-delimited files going back quite a few years. I have just done a quick search on a couple of union officers: Robert Martinez, president of the IAMAW (Machinists), made $371 thousand in 2019; Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO (for Brits, this is an umbrella group of most of the larger unions in the US), made $292 thousand. (For those who wish to fool with this sort of thing, https://olmsapps.dol.gov/olpdr/?_ga=2.237567109.481222231.1611665233-1694302402.1610122379#Union%20Reports/Yearly%20Data%20Download/ has the pipe-delimited files.)

Now, I wouldn't mind either salary, and to be fair one must add that their benefits are very good. But in comparison to CEO or senior executive salary, they are pretty small potatoes.

disgruntled yank

Re: NFL Union since 1956

Rich, whining idiots? The ones who pick up their franchises and move them across the country when a city won't build them a new stadium?

The average length of an NFL career is quite short, exceptions such as Tom Brady's notwithstanding. The injuries inflicted in the course of that career stick with a man for good. Over the last few years, I have been reading the obituaries of men who played on the undefeated Miami Dolphins team of 1972. Generally I found "had struggled with dementia for several years", though I'm not sure that this was the case for Jake Scott.

Do they whine? I don't think so. If they complain, they have matters to complain of.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

disgruntled yank

Re: Misquote

Indeed, glass break detectors can be quite sensitive. I discovered this our first winter with one when a pot fell off the drying rack, and landed on the kitchen floor about three feet down. I noticed also the next or a later summer when I forgot to turn off the security system before I tapped down the lid on a paint can, and woke the household.

You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously

disgruntled yank

Re: Foot pedal

Americans of a certain age will remember Rosemary Woods, a secretary in the Nixon White House, whose work on the foot pedal made the newspapers during Watergate.

Vatican absolved of one financial sin after revelation of data discrepancies

disgruntled yank

Storage?

How is this listed under "storage"? Does the Vatican ship funds on thumb drives full of bitcoin?

It's been a day or so and nope, we still can't wrap our head around why GitHub would fire someone for saying Nazis were storming the US Capitol

disgruntled yank

Re: The problem

I checked yesterday, and it takes about 30 seconds to find Hillary Clinton's concession speech of November 9, 2016. YouTube has it in full.

In about the same length of time, one can find a full recording, also on YouTube, of the telephone call of January 2, 2021, in which President Trump, attempted to bully the Georgia Secretary of State, into reversing Biden's victory there.

Nobody that I remember tried to impeach the incumbent because of the 2016 election. The Democrats did not have a majority in the House of Representatives until 2018. The House did impeach the president because of his attempt to barter with the Ukrainian government--dirt on Biden in return for (approved and appropriated) aid.

So, no, we (at least for "we" defined as codejunky and disgrunted yank) cannot agree.

disgruntled yank

Re: The word

Whiskey should be and is widely used. But as a staple of one's diet, it has its drawbacks.

Yes, absolutely, invade the Capitol in a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt, "Nazi" is precisely the term, unless you want to tack a "neo-" on in front. The kid at GitHub deserves a thumbs-up, not disciplinary action. But if we're going to bring the 1960s and 1970s back, and use the term indiscriminately, well, that will not be an improvement.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

disgruntled yank

Re: Proof reader

Hmm. Should we have a movie about the adventures of proofreaders, Trans Spotting? Anyone here speak Glaswegian?

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

disgruntled yank

But Graham Greene isn't out of copyright, is he

This seems like a rip-off of Our Man in Havana.

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

disgruntled yank

Perot

In 1992, I was working for a government contractor, and it astonished me to hear co-workers speak enthusiastically about Perot. Our own employer had recently cut our benefits, after getting us to sign on to win a renewal of the contract. And I think our tech writer had learned the hard way about EDS.