Posts by Martin an gof

The BBC has been reporting - at the bottom of the article, but there since this morning - that "similar failures" have happened with that aircraft and engine twice recently. Quite what they mean by that I don't know, and engine failures are not entirely uncommon, especially if you count bird strikes, but if by "similar" they mean that fan blades have previously failed in the way suspected of happening here (and it seemed to be narrowed down to a fan blade very quickly) then that's more than a little concerning.

BBC News article

M.

Re: Probably insignificant when offset against the days they are working optimally

but you need the grid power to the gas network's pumps to keep going as well

Do you? I was once told by someone who used to work on the gas pipes that the two new pumping stations near where I lived at the time were self-powered. That is, that they used some of the gas in the pipes to power a small gas turbine which both pumped the gas and (could) generate power for the control systems. Sort of makes sense, though of course it may not be the same for all pumping stations. They don't half make a racket.

As for running the central heating, two points.

First, do not try running a boiler on a cheap UPS. At least, not one which has a "normal" circulating pump and fan. They really don't like the "modified sine wave" or "stepped square wave" outputs. I have found that newer heating pumps - the sort that are speed-controlled either internally or externally - seem to work, though I have yet to try one for more than a minute or two. The speed control is basically a switch-mode power supply so is better able to cope with odd inputs. We get more than our fair share of power cuts around here.

Secondly, a few winters ago we had a "gas cut", not because the pumps had stopped but because the local regulators had frozen. Gas only came to the village in the 1960s when a chemical plant opened up nearby. The regulators for the village were put in (or near) the gatehouse of the chemical plant. When the plant closed those regulators were not moved. The site was cleared except for the gatehouse which is, of course, now derelict. The "incidental heating" the regulators used to get no longer happens.

M.

Re: Modernism

the longer the Architect has been in practice the less the public liked them

It can go both ways. It has to be said that Richard Rogers designed a very practical and economical building for the Senedd in Cardiff bay, and had been in practice for many decades at that point. According to Wikipedia many of the cost overruns were directly attributable to additional anti-terrorist security measures added-on to the design after work was started. What many people don't realise is that while the "flagship" building is very obvious, it essentially only holds public spaces and the debating chamber with the government offices mostly being housed in a bog standard office block that was already there.

The original designs for what became the Wales Millennium Centre next door to the Senedd by Zaha Hadid - who had been in practice for (I believe) less than a decade at that point - were too radical either for the public, or for the government. Even the National Lottery refused funding. In hindsight the building would have been very pretty but rather expensive and probably impractical.

The commission was given to another architect - Jonathan Adams - who had been in practice for just a few years more than Zaha but came up with an immensely practical building that was a little odd on the outside (people call it the Armadillo) but works very well on the inside.

As for Fallingwater. I remember the first time I saw pictures of it thinking how "clever" it was, but then realising after a while that it was probably dark and damp and all those concrete cantilevers were going to be trouble in later years...

M.

Re: Someone with access to an MRI machine has misunderstood machine learning again...

Rob Newman is one of the guys from the Mary Whitehouse Experience

You might have been better pointing out that the Mary Whitehouse Experience was Rob Newman, David Baddiel, Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt. The other three have all had higher profile subsequent careers while Rob Newman seemed to drop off the scene for a while until a recent series on Radio 4, which I found rather good. All fourl are alumni of Cambridge colleges.

Newman and Baddiel are notable as an early "rockstar" comedy duo whose gigs famously filled Wembley stadium.

M.

Re: Thanks for the .spam update

Yeah, don't I know it? I have a personal .cymru and a .wales address, and the number of email filters which reject them is silly. Not only do I occasionally get emails bounced, but I also often come across "contact us" forms which won't let you enter any email address with more than four (sometimes more than three) letters in the TLD!

M.

Rugrat Angelica

Or for those of us over a certain age, Lucy offering to hold Charlie Brown's football...

M.

Re: Waste and saftey

Indeed. This is what a directional MW transmitter looks like! (Google Maps link). I believe this was 1152kHz?

M.

Re: Paid for virtual tours?

The obvious answer is to sell 'tickets', either through an online shop if they have such a thing, or through a third party such as Eventbrite. Email the access code for the meeting - all the main platforms support this I think. Even the very smallest museums could set that up.

M.

Re: Why am I not surprised?

But Starlink will always have a fixed capacity and require specific hardware. In the case of an earthquake or a flood which takes out all the communications in a small area, Starlink will get there first only if there is hardware on the ground to take advantage and only be useful until there is so much equipment on the ground that it becomes saturated. I believe Loon was also capable of hoisting radios which could talk to "normal" 3G and 4G devices, which will already be there, and for capacity you just inflate a few more balloons and maybe set up another downlink groundstation.

Or maybe it was one of the rabid dreams I seem to be having recently...

M.

(taking a slightly Devil's Advocate stance here...)

We must not make it acceptable or justifiable for illiterate by choice Joe Public to say "I won't do it because it isn't easy".

Sorry, but we're already there. For most people under 30, and many older ones these days their personal computing device is a smartphone. Not a tablet, not even a laptop and certainly not a desktop. Some people don't even bother with a fixed line internet connection (unless they want to use Netflix on their TV or get it as a bundle with Sky or Virgin), which is a double-win because if you have a mobile phone, why would you want a landline?

Why do you think laptops have been in short supply these last 10 months? Because people didn't already have one, or had an old laptop that couldn't cope with Zoom, Google Classroom or Teams. Or maybe they had just one "family" iPad, but two school age children. One of the biggest selling categories (anecdotally)? Chromebooks. Schools' biggest headaches? Online lessons really don't work very well on a smartphone and "live" online lessons eat data allowances like Billy Bunter asked to guard the headmaster's birthday cake by a trusting cook, so vast numbers of laptops - mainly Chromebooks - and large numbers of 4G modems have been handed out because many pupils only have access to a smartphone, and some only have access to the internet via that phone. Up until now it hasn't been a problem.

I digress. Current WfH requirements aside, for the vast majority of what Jo Public wants or needs to do "online", a smartphone is sufficient and a Chromebook is luxury. Web mail is sufficient for setting up shopping accounts, receiving password changes or communications from school and is very convenient because it can be accessed anywhere with nothing more than a username and password. You might read your Gmail in a client on your phone because it all gets set up for you when you switch the thing on, and that's brilliant because it means you don't miss the important message from the Amazon delivery driver if you are not actually sat at the computer.

[Further digression: Who needs a camera or a way of storing digital photos and videos locally when they have a smartphone with instant upload to some cloud service or other. One person I know ditched her PC, where she had been keeping her photos, because she decided an iPad was sufficient. If she takes a good photo she'll send it to Vistaprint or Moonpig or whoever and stick it in an album, old-style! If the digital versions go missing somehow, she doesn't really care, but I have been on the wrong end of calls from acquaintances of "all my family photos from the last year are on this SD card which I accidentally formatted", so perhaps there's something to be said for cloud services.]

Ever wondered why you never receive properly-formatted, well-reasoned, gramatically correct and interesting emails from your friends these days? It's because they are writing them on their smartphones using those useless onscreen keyboards which are more suited to quick-fire instant messages. They are only emailling you because you don't use TwitFaceWotzaGram.

Instant messaging is taken care of with any one (or all) of the (probably pre-installed) usual suspects, and for everything else you use the pre-installed web browser, i.e. Chrome or Safari.

It's only the likes of us who persist with "proper" email clients, who would rather run our own "clouds", who are willing to spend the time and effort to choose the best software for the task rather than simply accept what you are given because "it just works" and who get really cross when flippin' work email sends Javascript from about two dozen different domains*, all of which actually belong to Microsoft, and Teams takes an age to load because it has to be responsive and look pretty, rather than just downloading a few k of text-based emails. I think my point about XMPP has been ably demonstrated above - everyone has a favourite client, and running a server isn't a trivial task.

Hurumph.

M.

*through experimentation I have found that not all the JS is necessary. For example, once you have got to the login page (I think it's three domains before that, depending on whether you have dialled up office.net, office365.com, any of several other Microsoft domains or come in via your organisation's redirection page) there are two further domains trying to run JS, they're called something like msauth.net and msftauth.com, but only one (either one) is actually necessary to get you logged in. In Teams, if you only want to read email, there's no need to allow JS to run from the two (I think) Sharepoint domains, which are where the calendar lives, and so on.

Re: 5G is fine with the plebs

But there's a difference between throughput per user and total throughput for a cell. 5G, like all radio technologies, is essentially a shared medium, so for a fixed total bandwidth more users inevitably equals less bandwidth per user.

Now, 5G might be better at adapting and sharing that bandwidth out on an as-needs basis, but as we found with previous technologies, real life may not quite match up to the marketing hype and for the vast majority of users, 1Gbps at your phone is not only unnecessary but probably wasteful - drop to lower speeds and improve battery life. Who cares if the front page of El Reg loads in one second or a tenth of a second anyway?

M.

Re: Fluorescents...

We have a 'Philips' 1080p 24" telly in the kitchen. Takes about an hour to start up for some unfathomable reason. Not really a Philips I think...

...but I also have a 17" CRT computer monitor by Philips, the old 'Acorn AKF85". Probably the best monitor I've owned, though my first Iiyama at work comes close. My second - and more expensive - Iiyama at work is very much a disappointment with an awfully inconsistent backlight leading to very noticeable darker and lighter parts of the screen.

The AKF85 is a beast. Recently reminded of this as it has just reappeared from the attic in preparation for a house move. Shame I don't have the desk space to see how it compares with my current crop of LCDs.

M.

Re: B, H

R and Q are not the official symbols though, they are just convenient conventions used in certain circumstances, Resistance is the Ohm - Ω while charge is the Coulomb - C. The former is often used as a substitute for Ω, but not in official documents unless there is no ambiguity.

Both Q and R seem to me mostly to be used in calculations as "variables":

R_t = R₁ + R₂

R_t = 1000kΩ + 470Ω

You might type 1000kR but only because your typewriter doesn't have an Ω key or 7-bit ASCII doesn't support it, and only in an unambiguous context. I don't think I've ever seen charge written as "100Q" rather than "100C".

M.

Re: New Lanark

Great day out now - the museum is rather good, plenty to do and see.

Erm... When it reopens.

M.

Re: Meccano vs Lego for large tasks

It is often said that Konrad Zuse built his first computers using Meccano in the 1930s. Not quite true, but still they were marvellous efforts!

M.

Re: I grew up with PAL

I do not have a "monitor" that reports 50Hz to the computer. They all report 60Hz whether connected via DVI (where that's sort of expected), HDMI or DisplayPort. My TV, on the other hand, no problem and I can set a 50Hz mode in KDE quite easily (or 24 or 25 or 30 or 60...). Likewise the projectors at work where I can force the Raspberry Pis to connect at 50Hz. Is there some kind of "try it anyway" option in KDE, even if the ability isn't advertised by the monitor?

M.

Re: To be fair

Cash machines in Wales usually have a Welsh language option for the interface and I have found that it is often a much more pleasurable experience than the English norm.

Cash machines outside shops often fill the screen with unneccessary distractions - adverts and the like - but in most cases once you choose 'Welsh', these are entirely absent.

The downside is that I have yet to find a cash machine which gets the various Welsh words for 'yes' and 'no' correct.

You will often see a menu such as

"Oes eisiau gwasanaeth arall arnoch?"

With options

"Oes" and "nac ydw"

This is the equivalent in English of asking

"Is there a need for another service with you?"

and having

"There is" and "I do not"

as possible replies.

Worth it for the simpler interface though.

M.

Re: Not Free

Or my Cisco IOS 12.3 (IIRC) switches which moan if you are not using Explorer 4.

In a simiar vein, bit surprised that El Reg hasn't picked up this story yet:

Brexit deal mentions Netscape browser and Mozilla Mail (BBC News)

M.

Re: Pacific Quay?

Then there are whole towns which seem to be confused.

If it weren't for the utter lack of a beach and being one of the points in the UK furthest from the sea in any direction you could be forgiven for thinking Matlock Bath is a typcal touristy seaside town, complete with chip shops, penny arcades, a 'promenade' and gangs of bikers turning up regularly, in the manner of Weston or Skeggy or Barry Island.

Somewhat amuses my children whenever we drive through!

M.

Re: When seat belts are mandatory, the number of car crashes goes up.

5th Gear (IIRC) in the UK did the same test, an offset head-to-head pitting a second-hand Volvo estate - as bought by middle-class parents because it is 'built like a tank' - against a slightly newer Renault Modus. Somewhat ironically, given Volvo's track record of leadership in safety features, the Modus was a very clear winner.

As for seatbelts, they do make a difference to mortality and life-changing injuries, even if the car has other safety features too. Airbags in the US, for example, tend to be bigger and therefore more violent because of lack of universal seatbelt regulations. US airbags trigger more opportunistically then those from countries with mandatory seatbelt wearing, and can themselves cause injury (burns, hearing damage) but they still save lives over having no airbags at all.

Similarly facemasks. 'Consumer' facemasks do not protect greatly against breathing droplets or aerosols in, but they do have a small effect. They protect somewhat more against projection, certainly to the front. They will have some effect on virus spread but back in March and April there were not enough facecoverings of any type to go around, and priorities had to be set. It's just a shame the Great British Panic-Buying Public couldn't be trusted to act sensibly when told the truth. Flour & bogroll anyone?

M.

I get the feeling a lot of awards are like this. My first full realisation of this was when Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham won the RIBA Stirling prize architecture award in 2001 ahead of the Eden project in Cornwall.

I was working at Magna at the time and while the building was visually spectacular (the Eden project was just as spectacular) it completely failed as a workable building on so many other levels that most of us couldn't even believe it was shortlisted. It was horribly energy-inefficient, the "visitor flow" was poor (people kept getting lost), the building systems simply didn't work half the time (I've previously recounted horror stories about the drains) and while the fit-out didn't really count towards the prize there were stupidly foreseeable problems with the building, such as the main lifts which failed every time a neighbouring steelworks powered up and put a spike on the mains, or the pair of smoke sensors placed "downwind" of the "Big Melt" show, which meant that in certain weather conditions the alarm system would enter "first knock" every time the show ran, and if you weren't quick enough, or were unlucky enough, the second sensor would force a section evacuation.

If you are going to offer a prize for architecture it needs to do more than send a panel of judges on a dunner jolly and a 90 minute guided tour. It needs to investigate the whole thing, not just the headlines.

Once you realise that most industry prizes are awarded in the same way - i.e. on a superficial inspection only - everything begins to fall into place. Where did the judges get the best dinner?

M.

Thanks for those thoughts. It has to be said that one of my main concerns for the backup service was cost considering this thing will - under normal circumstances - sit in a USB port completely unused, and at a base cost of £5pcm, Smarty was the best I could find at the time.

However, I also use a Draytek 28-series router and already have a couple of L2L VPN's set up, so maybe I could peer with one of those and use that IP as a backup. Will have to work out how to make this happen as a failover though.

And it still doesn't solve the Teams problem..

Things to play with after sorting all the house-related stuff which is probably more important right now.

M.

Re: Early WiFi ? (LOL)

The Sonifex broadcast "cart" machines I have languishing in the garage have mu-metal cans over their motors, and one of the sets of loudspeakers I have (probably the Wharfedales) has the driver magnets shielded in the same way to allow their use close to CRT televisions or monitors.

I seem to remember it was quite expensive stuff though, so not really suited to manufacturing a whole computer case :-)

M.

Re: No UK

We have our own in Wales too - Estyn.

Not certain they've done a fantasic job themselves, but at least they don't seem to have been quite as disorganised as Ofqual.

M.

Re: Fix it yourself

Been using CPC for somewhere around 25 years now. Yes, you do have to be careful not to assume their prices are always the best (and remember that the website defaults to ex-VAT), but the same is true of any other company. In general they're pretty good, though they have had a few dreadful stock problems this year exemplified from my point of view by a mis-delivery of some lights (code AB12345 ordered, code AB12354 delivered). Because there were only four in stock when I ordered, and I ordered three, their computer systems insisted that there was only one left in stock, even when the bloke on the phone had (apparently) been down to the warehouse to check the shelves personally.

They took the three wrong lights back and delivered one of the correct ones within a week, but it took another ten weeks (IIRC) for the remaining two to arrive, and then only after they'd had another shipment!

Good lights though, very bright, choice of colour temperatures, similar in look to traditional fluorescents, much better quality and easier to fit than the nearest equivalent product at Screwfix at a similar cost.

M.

Re: Ruby

the daily "people with coronavirus" stats are fairly quantifiable. You take the test which you either pass or fail, and we can then apply a bit of a fudge factor to account for "false positives/negatives".

I don't think that's right. The number you get from that is "people who presented for a test and were found to be positive". The "people who have coronavirus" is a lot more nebulous and relies on randomised testing of large numbers of people and extrapolating those results to the population as a whole.

We're currently measuring deaths based on whether they occurred within 28 days of being diagnosed with C19. As far as I'm aware, we don't then apply any further filtering based on whether C19 was the primary factor, or just a secondary one - or whether it wasn't actually a contributing factor.

So, intuitively, you would think this would overestimate the actual deaths directly attributable to C19.

Alternatively, you can look at total excess deaths - we're currently about running at about 70,000 deaths more than we would have expected.

And this figure is always higher than the 28 days figure, so intuitively seems an even larger overestimate...

But even then, this probably underplays the total deaths by a measurable margin.

Hmmm... so the first two methods are underestimates after all?

I think I agree with your general point - that we are never going to have completely accurate figures for deaths due directly or indirectly to this new virus. I'm not sure an error of 5% or even 10% will matter in a few years' time - it never seems to have in the past.

The key points are probably "lots of people died" and "mistakes were made by all - governments, scientists and general public - which meant that more people died of CoViD 19 than should have done". After that it becomes a blame game and however much we despise <name a politician>'s policies, putting them on trial for crimes against humanity is likely a hiding to nothing, and would waste an awful lot of public money.

M.