Posts by ChrisCoderChap

Re: NMNMN

There are deeper levels of devilry available along those lines, back in the mid-80's I was working for ICL, VME Comms department, we were implementing x.400 for VME on the shiny new 3900 mainframe using even shinier new DRS300 terminals.

Great little thin client/office setup, pretty cutting edge at the time, I imagine we were essentially beta-testing them. They were semi-dumb terminals running off a box per team which were mainly just used as terminal hosts to get at the mainframes (with.... tada!!! - multiple terminal sessions on one screen... up to 4 I think, amazing, more than one terminal per box, woohoo!), but we managed to get some games going.

One feature of the new DRS setup, apart from not looking like a robotic version of ET's head, was you could change the fonts, and even edit them. The traditional trick for newcomers to our team was to do the N/M physical key switch but with added vim, editing the N and M and n and m characters in the typeface to swap those too.

This meant when you pressed N (which was actually where the M key should be) it displayed N, when you pressed M it displayed M but under the covers of course they were swapped.

So your lovely S3 code would look perfect, but say BEGIN or THEN, would be interpreted as BEGIM and THEM, the compiler would barf out and you'd be told BEGIN and THEN weren't valid S3 - in those days printing out code was still a thing (god, dot matrix printers grinding away, there are some things one doesn't miss !), and there it'd give away the trick but unless you compared with the keyboard at the next desk it was pretty proof against discovery.

Re: @ChrisCoderChap -- OK, hands up ..

Cheers, here in Bali I'd kill for a proper beer which looked like that...

Now, if somebody can tell me how to persuade my code to get at the bloody Azure key vault when it's actually running on Azure that'd all be great, got my dev code using it fine but can't get the system test install to work, so it can't even open the database never mind process a transaction, it's one of those 'switch to branch, fight with it for half an hour, give up, do something less annoying for a while' problems !!

Re: Varieties of rodent

Just for ah, research purposes, you don't happen to have have any images of those 'nipple controllers' you mention do you ?

While the mice were all the same, back in the '90s I used to support a large office of admin staff processing complaints and refunds etc for a big credit card company. Close to 100 staff on a massive open plan floor with the French section here, German team there, Dutch round the corner etc. etc. - all with their own national keyboard layouts. Trying to sort out local issues, especially typing into the command prompt and the like to rejig lan connections and printers etc. was a bleedin' nightmare !!

The printer setup in particular was horrific, each team connected to different printers that had different languaged headed paper loaded, with different sub-flavours of headers in each tray depending on what level of customer the letter was for; gold card, platinum etc all had differently embossed paper.

Some folk handled customers in multiple languages, not just their native ones, each PC having a little set of paper badges at the top with the flags of the languages the staff member could be useful in, so they needed mapping to multiple sets of printers and have multiple keyboard setups in Windows, all configured manually on a machine by machine basis.

With a big staff turnover requiring a lot of reassigning of machines to new staff, general user tinkering, machine replacements etc - keeping that lot going even vaguely smoothly was akin to painting a suspension bridge with water-soluble paint - the social life was great though !

Re: What a shit hole

He should at least be OK visa-wise for the time being, thankfully they're giving all foreigners that are still here free emergency visa extensions 'until further notice' without any need to apply or go to immigration etc. but obviously it's worth them checking the imigrasi web site/social media and/or keeping in touch with a visa agent for updates.

The lack of a major death count on Bali itself is most odd. As you say, Jakarta is bad for it though given the staggering population density and horrific conditions in many spots outside the shiny parts, it's amazing it's not a lot worse.

Bali population 680,000+ yet 'official' figures are 314 infections, 4 deaths (at least according to https://www.baliplus.com/2020/05/13/breaking-news-bali-hopes-to-be-the-1st-province-clear-of-covid-19-in-indonesia) but as mentioned above, my partner is a journo here and hasn't seen any evidence this is an understatement despite having recently been hired to discover otherwise by an Aussie rag.

I forgot to mention in my OP that there used to be dozens of direct flights a day from China to Bali, including from Wuhan itself, tens of thousands of Chinese holidaymakers are usually here year-round, Bali is a fave spot for Chinese tourists and there's a whole chunk of the island pretty much devoted to that sector of tourism (Nusa Dua in the vestigial-looking bit dangling off the bottom of Bali).

If you'd tried to design an environment specifically to be most vulnerable to this outbreak, you'd not have gone far wrong to create something that looks very much like Bali but we seem to be sidestepping the worst of it rather well, lord knows why, for sure it's not the social distancing and excellent general public health. Maybe my 'spiritually enthusiastic' long-term ex-pat guru-lady is right, this is the result of Ganesha holding Shiva at bay so we'd better keep doing the chanting and meditation and burn more incense.

The local economy on the other hand... will pretty much tank unless we get some kind of high season this summer, happily my income isn't directly related to folk arriving on aircraft but most locals and ex-pats I know are very much depending on it on one level or another. Many of my closest mates own or manage scuba dive outfits, restos, bars etc. and most are are just about hanging on to their employees for the moment can't do so for long with practically zero dollars coming in through the doors.

Lots of cars and scooters for sale on social media, restaurants selling the contents of their freezers etc. Now is typically a low-income time of year and people are stocked up with cash to some extent with last summer and Christmas not having been too bad (despite the quake the previous year, people really needed this summer to be a profitable one !) but it's not looking good, apart from good local supplies of rice, fish and a shitload of fruit, Bali essentially relies on tourism to stay afloat.