Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: "there was no specific policy in place directly for WhatsApp"

"Oh wait, did they even have work phones ?"

Yes.

Over the last few months we've spent too much time in the local hospitals. The nursing staff all seem to be equipped with phones. I hope it's a secure app they're using but they regularly use them for recording blood pressure readings.

If you sequester some of the carbon from the CO2 emitted during production you could use it as the dopant. It's not going to amount to much, however.

But what do they mean by cement? My understanding of cement is Portland cement - the calcined mix of clay and lime. Mortar - the stuff that holds the bricks together contains mostly of sand with some cement. Concrete, the stuff your foundation are made of, consists mostly of aggregate, sand and cement. The amount of cement is an order of magnitude less than the volume of the foundations.

Re: Astronomy picture of the day website

Your Netscape Navigator lives on as Seamonkey.

Re: Auto-correcting antenna aiming! Amazing!

It depends on how wide the beam is.

Re: Off topic

Their namesakes are still going - point of the article.

Re: Variation

A whole can? Not a single can cut in half?

Re: Off topic

"Local terminals were attached to the computer using RS-232 running at 9600bps."

You were spoiled with a glass tty. If your terminal was a real teletype it communicated at max 10 characters per second, local or not.

Kids today...

Re: Not clear cut

Thanks, a link to a very useful article I may need to read it again and follow up the references. The lest bit - on whether models had developed the ability to reason and that it might not be possible to decide left me wondering about the reasoning of those doing the tests. Did none of them additionally ask the model to explain how it reached its conclusions?

I get the impression that some people have been brainwashed by the low resolution of digital cameras and don't realise what photography can actually do with a large format. The information in a large negative would be hard to match in digital although Leica did,as I recall, try setting what was essentially a scanner mechanism on the focal plane of a large format camera. The time needed to set up a shot on a large format means that the result reflects a degree of thought denied to that of a point and click.

"the only way to test the output of a change is to actually deploy it in production."

One program in the system I looked after had been written by a programmer who, thankfully, had left long ago. It always annoyed me because of her odd programming style. It largely consisted of much the same code repeated multiple times. It was ripe for refactoring as we say now but maybe not at the time.

Late one afternoon I decided to tackle it.

One block of code was repeated several times. Copy that into a function and replace all the repetitions with a function call. Very straightforward. This must have shrunk the LoC to about half.

The remainder of the repetition consisted of two similar but not quite identical blocks of code each repeated several times. Not quite so straightforward. Copy one version into a new function adding a switch parameter then add the different sections of the version using the switch parameter to decide which t call.

Replace the repetitions with function calls taking care to use the correct value of the switch.

We now have a much simpler program, a fraction of its original size. It ought to be easier to understand what it's supposed to do which was one of the objectives of the change. But the remainder is still a bit of a tangled mess. Sorting through it to work out just what data would be need to test all the alternative paths would still take ages.

Well it was really all very much a mechanical replacement - the same code is being run, just from one of the two new functions instead of inline. Of course it must still work exactly the same as before.

It was now early evening. Why not put it live?

So I put it live.

Of course it worked exactly the same as before - what did you expect?

" stop bath, rinse, leave them to dry"

No fixer?

Re: Web devs forget to check access perms :o

Web applications are missing a lot of the "systemness" we expect from traditional computing environments

It depends on what you consider a traditional computing environment. In my working world that was a multi-user database system. If there were access levels for different categories of user it may well have been down to the application designer to build in safeguards.

If Buildings Maintenance was to be prevented from seeing tenant financial data that might be an administrative matter to ensure that Buildings Maintenance didn't have access to the screens for financial data. If, on the other hand, Crawly Buildings Maintenance shouldn't see data on Coventry buildings and vice versa but Estates Management could see data for both then it would have to be handled by something a bit more complex in the application itself.

What web applications are missing is a lot of statefulness and shoving responsibility for that onto the client.

Re: Web devs forget to check access perms :o

"This is critical for anything IoT related..."

All true but this isn't an IoT related article. A specific example given is Teams.

Re: Actually probably a good call....

Add the date and time to your note - both the date and time of the request and of the note.

Best to have a procedure in place that instructions have to be written "for the log" so that asking for written instructions for something dodgy can't become confrontational quite so easily.

Re: Actually probably a good call....

"I guess Trump has a gift for recognizing corruptibility"

His minions are probably a self-selecting crowd, slow to disabuse themselves of the reality of what's in front of them. They were probably last of their age group to realise there was no Santa Clause.

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Being above the law doesn't mean not being convicted regardless, it means not being above challenge in the courts, inluding the criminal courts if appropriate.

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Claws-up.

Re: 100m goes a long way

"that clause seems american"

Which clause?