Posts by Matt Collins

Inner Tube

It's beginning to sound like the inner tube that has so many patches it's actually all patches. Where does it stop?

What it would actually look like

Open Excel, add some numbers to a column

Switch to ERP, fiddle with some stuff

*take phone call from customer*

Write email to senior colleague about the call, *get a phone call back from them*

Start a thread on IM with peers on the matter

Thread drifts into unrepeatable nonsense

*phone customer back explaining it'll be a chargeable feature*

Go back to the Excel spreadsheet, continue adding numbers

Write an email to your mum

Browse the Register

Browse the news

Start researching the latest VM offerings of cloud provider

...

I could go on (and no, this isn't like my day) but you get the picture - a lot of noise and missing context

Meh

Solution looking for a problem?

It might be fixed now...

I get the following. Verbatim copy, unedited:

"Certainly, but for brevity, I'll provide a shortened representation:

Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly... (repeated many times) ...endlessly.

Keep in mind that due to limitations in the response length, I can't provide a full 1000 repetitions in this format. If you have a specific use case or need, there might be more efficient ways to achieve your goal."

Autonomous machines in general

I keep thinking to myself that machines that can move in unexpected ways around humans, such as factory or warehouse robots, usually have flashing lights/audible warnings while they're moving and possibly barriers to prevent humans wandering too close... or be in a cage with safety interlocks. In my local Wickes, if the human-driven forklift is out they close off half the shop and make continual announcements - it has beepers and flashing lights all over it too. The roads do not provide anywhere near these levels of protection, none at all, in fact.

Hang on a mo...

I may be out of touch with working practices at Google, but don't they have a 'work on your own thing one day per week' policy? If that's still a thing, there's the solution right there.

I Want My Life Back

Perhaps I'm lucky that I have a work phone I can install it on. If using this app is a prerequisite for getting out and about again, I will install it - but only for as long as necessary to take advantage of freedoms it may enable. Then it's toast. It's never going on my personal phone. On the other hand, if there's nothing in it for me, I won't install it at all.

Withnail will do it

Withnail:

Right you fucker - I'm going to do the washing up!

I:

No no you can't. It's impossible I swear it. I've looked into it.

Listen to me, listen to me. There are things in there, there's a

tea-bag growing. You haven't slept in sixty hours you're in no state

to tackle it. Wait 'till the morning we'll go in together.

Withnail:

This is the morning. Stand aside!

Bittersweet story

This otherwise joyous news serves to remind me of how much we miss Lester and his work. I like to think he'd have pipped them to this particular post if only one of us had thought of it and put it to the SPB.

Silly idea, don't do it

How is anyone in the house going to a) print to our household printers, b) access our WiFi NAS? Right now, these things work seamlessly even for our phones because they 'prefer' the WiFi.

Meh

Let's see it pick up a cup of tea by the saucer.

Their logo is a house... just sayin'

Bloodbath?

Really? You could have chosen a different word on a day like today.

Never can quite get it right, can they?

So, all the open source touchy-feely community bollocks they're spouting at the moment isn't worth a bean if there's no transparency. I can get over the forced patches because that's the only way most of humanity is ever going to stay up to date... but please let those of us that have to support others get the information we need. Luckily, I worked out the ipconfig /renew fix almost straight away, but i imagine there are many people phoning their ISP's, getting nowhere - or worse, taking their machines to shops to be charged good money for no reason.

If I could wave a wand, I might even consider putting the old Microsoft back in place.. it was at least able to tell us what it was patching, even if it was a year or more overdue.

Really?

Why does it seem like there have been more holes patched in Flash than in Windows? Was it written by monkeys?

I only wanted two!

AWS Frankfurt turned me down for 2 x m4.xlarge instances today citing insufficent capacity:

StartTime: 2015-11-18T17:22:39.011Z

EndTime: 2015-11-18T17:22:39.000Z

StatusCode: Failed

StatusMessage: We currently do not have sufficient m4.xlarge capacity in the Availability Zone you requested (eu-central-1a). Our system will be working on provisioning additional capacity. You can currently get m4.xlarge capacity by not specifying an Availability Zone in your request or choosing eu-central-1b. Launching EC2 instance failed.

Not Potent

"ability to determine your most-used apps is not potent"...

Sounds just like the Windows add/remove programs control panel, which reckons a program I use every day (Visual Studio) is used rarely and yet a simple DVD ISO mount utility I downloaded several years ago and used only once is "frequent".

Dogfood

Would the (any?) government use this 'breakable non-breakable' encryption itself?

Hmm... thought not.

Environmental Impact

So 30% of all Windows desktops run XP according to my reading of the posts here. These machines work perfectly well and/or the software/OS/browser is locked in - which is why they are still in use - but we are supposed to just dump them? It's insane.

Imagine if car manufacturers behaved this way. Oh, sorry sir we can't be arsed to make the parts for your model any more, even though 30% of our customers drive them. Go and sling it in the dump and then have a look around the showroom.

I've got my popcorn ready for the MASSIVE botnet offensive that Microsoft will create. It will cause misery for everyone who upgraded as well as those that didn't.