Posts by jake

Re: Alternatives are good.

More Words Of Wisdom from my Grandfather: Cast iron cookware is ALWAYS hot!

Re: chewed wires

"To this day I wonder how it did it."

To the bunny we're all maroons. Ultra maroons, in some cases.

Re: Alternatives are good.

"Stupidity would be doing it a second time."

Tell me that after stepping in front of a moving train for the first time.

Re: Alternatives are good.

There is a reason that crap is almost universally known as Sudden Discomfort ...

Re: Alternatives are good.

The urine of human males doesn't work with common or garden house cats, not even the ferals. They've been around people for far too long.

It does, however, work for mountain lions, bobcats & the like. Bears, too ... at least here in North America.

Re: Alternatives are good.

No need for the IPA, save money and use white vinegar ... Capsaicin isn't soluble in water, but if you give it a good shake before using it all the good bits will stay in suspension long enough to spray onto whatever it needs spraying on. May I recommend eggs?

As a side note, do not ever use this as a defensive weapon in Blighty! That would be illegal.

Is Tabasco brand pepper sauce a critter repellent, a force multiplier, a threat deterrent or a delightful condiment? How about Dave's Insanity?

Re: Alternatives are good.

"Pull waistband - pffft - AAAARRGGH!"

Stupidity SHOULD hurt!

Re: Alternatives are good.

We grow a lot of chili cultivars here, ranging from mild to extremely hot. One thing we've discovered over the years is to pick them before watering. When they are freshly watered, they can become so turgid that cutting into them can cause squirting. Take it from me, you really know you're alive after you've maced yourself cutting into a Carolina Reaper while prepping lunch ...

Re: Alternatives are good.

He picked the chilis off the pizza? Why on Earth was he still there long enough to demonstrate his navigation skills? You never struck me as being particularly forgiving in the face of such obvious uncivilized behavio(u)r ...

Re: Alternatives are good.

Cockatoos? Maybe as bookends, if they were stuffed, but lintels, and still living? Got a pic of that? You hear something new every day ...

Re: Alternatives are good.

Dogs pretty much ignore mustard, horseradish and wasabi. That's why I use chilis. Mammals in general shy away from capsaicin ... except us stupid humans, of course.

Re: Alternatives are good.

You would forget you treated a cable or cables with hot sauce?

Wow. On the bright side, you'd only forget once ...

Re: Squirrel!

Not a proper shotgun, rather what they used to call a "garden gun". This is a smooth bore .22, designed specifically to fire shot shells in an enclosed environment. They were (are?) built to dispatch rodents/varmints without blowing holes in the roof, feed bins, livestock or cow-orkers. I have two, one inherited from each of my grandfathers. They are used a couple times per week, and are quite effective over distances of (maybe!) 12 yards or so. Much better tool than shooting ratshot/snakeshot with a handgun.

Just before hitting send, I DDGed "garden gun" and discovered this. I'm going to call 'em on Monday and see if I can get a demo unit for a couple weeks ... it's kinda spendy to just purchase on a whim, but if it works nicely (Henry makes good kit) I'll buy a couple & retire the antiques.

Re: no chance that the $#@&$ Registry will be replaced

I thought it was because a couple of the guys Cutler brought over from DEC's UNIX side took one look at it and said "That 'orrible thing gives me hives ... please tell me you're joking!" ...

Re: Inquiring minds want to know...

Windows doesn't actually move the "deleted" file to the bin, rather it links to the deleted data from the bin. The bin isn't a single physical location, it's a virtual space that stores links. With that said, there used to be a utility that allows you to do what you suggest. I can't remember its name, and I have no idea if Win10 would even allow such a thing ... Keep in mind that physically moving the data from disk to disk on deletion will increase filesystem overhead tremendously.

But you are onto something. Proper use of disk spindles and partitions. When I setup my one remaining Windows box back in 2000 (yes, twenty years ago), I did it like this:

OS on controller1, spindle1, partition1 (with a bootable backup on partition2) ... Registry on controller1, spindle2, partition1 (with a rolling, usable backup on partition2) ... Swapfile and tempfiles on controller2, spindle1, partitions 1 and 2 (WinSwap can also be used as a Linux swapfile, but that's another story) ... and last but not least, user data on controller 2, spindle 2, partition1 (odd day backups to partitions on the other three spindles, external backups on even days, off-site backup on Sunday).

The OS isn't slowed down by the second drive (spindle) being accessed or written to for registry contents, and the swapfile and temp files are rarely called for by the OS at the same time. User data being on its own spindle just makes sense. The whole kludge separates the cluster-fuck that Windows insists on for its filesystem into four completely separate drives.

It's ugly, but it works. My old installation of Win2K has never once crashed, lost data, or otherwise given me any file-system headaches in 20 years of near daily operation. (I've physically lost drives, but that's a hardware issue not a file system logic error ... and I've always been able to recover quickly with the above setup.)

The old girl is airgapped, so fuhgeddaboudit.

I started saving a copy of the MBR back in '83 with the release of DOS2.0, just for this reason. Even in the days of sub-5 Meg HDDs, the 512 byte file was cheap insurance (and could easily be deleted if I needed the space). Was easy to archive/restore on DOS, even with primitive tools such as debug on a bootable floppy. I still save the MBR (or equivalent), where it seems logical. Saves my happy ass/arse once or twice a year. Recommended.

Re: Ooops!

I guess I should go full Luddite and eschew all technology completely, then ... I actually have verified functional near-line off-site backups. And my just in case things really go TITSUP[0], I have crossing copies of a weekly full system data backup in the post ... I snail mail the tapes to my sister on anther continent, and she returns them the day after receiving them, along with her own backups. Yes, it's all encrypted.

Over-kill for a home system? Probably. But as part of a research platform, it's (mostly) tax deductible.

[0] The Idiot Thing Seems Uncommunicative ... PANIC!

Re: Ah, good old WinForms

Hands up everyone who initially parsed that as "lock up" and then nodded sagely ...

Re: Programming by Pictures - been a dream for a long, long time

"I think we can coin a new term "Garbage In, Garbage Out""

If anybody cares, that term is probably older than I am, first appearing in print in November of 1957. See the eighth paragraph, just under the second ellipses. No doubt it had been in the common vernacular of the techie set for quite some time before the Press noticed it.

But the concept goes back much, much further:

"On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." —Charles Babbage

I have heard through the grapevine that Slackware's ARM port will support the new Apple hardware sooner rather than later. Why anyone would want it is anyone's guess, given that Slack runs so well on cheap, generic hardware ... I guess lusting after expensive "look at me!" haberdashery is a plague that infects all groups of humans equally.

Re: "...banishes native Windows support ..."

Presumably, Mr. Smith, you are furiously looking for a new job before your current one evaporates due to over-spending by the owners.

Re: Did I miss something?

His "kids" were actually his two cousins, who he was supposedly fostering. Except they were being taken care of by his mother, and by all accounts he had no interaction with them. However, he was collecting their welfare check, which was his only source of income. The "threat" was that the Feds would make his mother the actual (as opposed to de facto) custodian of the kids, and he would lose the income. At no point did the kid's lives get further disrupted during the kerfuffle. Not by the Feds, anyway.

So yes, you did miss something. Several somethings, apparently.

But don't let that stop you from putting the stupid skiddie on a pedestal.

Re: I think all these FB kids turned programmers

... and slackware.com would probably kill them.

Re: Qui bono?

It;s not odd at all. That's the whole point of DevOps ... keep the managers happily employed, constantly making changes to code. It has absolutely nothing to do with helping actual developers deliver stable, usable code that is friendly to end users.

Re: Qui bono?

Exactly. Software development done by management and marketing is doomed to bloat and user unfriendlyness.

Re: Better alternative, skip MS

There are vi-alikes that run on the Redmond OS, too. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, try vim.org first. Recommended.

Re: Better alternative, skip MS

ZZ

Rock on.

(And now none of you can forget how to exit vi without rebooting ... )

Re: We have our own US-based All-American 5G Conspiracy Theory!

Didn't the Vogons say "Resistance is useless!"?

I remember "resistance is futile" from Dr. Who in the mid 1970s, and Space 1999 a trifle later. The phrase was stolen borrowed by the Star Trek franchise in '89.

Re: We have our own US-based All-American 5G Conspiracy Theory!

To be fair, 5G doesn't exist on many of the towers set on fire in Blighty, either ... Since when do facts get in the way of action when it comes to the hard of thinking?

The whole chinese spy nonsense is just one of many attempts at deflecting the public's attention away from the fact that the current idiot in chief is in fact just that, an idiot. Thankfully it no longer seems to be working. The babbling from the Oval Office is getting shriller ...

(That's not to say the Chinese aren't spying on all and sundry. Of course they are. So is the US, and the UK, and Russia, and Germany, and the Israelis, and Japan, and North and South Korea, and ... )