Posts by tiggity

Re: Why, in the name all that's holy..

@MachDiamond

maybe that particular security system had a special wanker detector causing it to misbehave?

@Roland6

"I’m also a little surprised Mark, given his CV claims doesn’t have the source code to any of the tools he developed. In the context of the evaluation, this code, which almost certainly would not be on any public repository, hence enabling it to be used for code comparison."

I do not have any of the source code for stuff I have written for employers - (fairly standard UK IT employment contracts will always give employer rights to the code you produce for them - some try & claim rights to stuff you produce at home doing hobby stuff too, but they can FO on that aspect). A competent employer (half decent security measure / auditing) will ensure you cannot take source code away with you. *

There is some of code in open source projects (ironically, not committed by me, all based on stuff I helpfully submitted on mailing lists to solve problems people had** & people on those lists thought it good enough to add to the repo, giving me a credit when pushing the commit.

* Yes, there are always further loopholes, even when the obvious email, FTP loopholes etc. are closed (port closed central) & all bar a few websites / IP addresses blocked e.g. unless you work somewhere properly secure, then mobile phones are ubiquitous in the workplace, so nothing to stop you taking surreptitious photos of code on screen, but how many people CBA to do that for code they wrote at work?

** Even more irony, most of those code snippets are in languages that are not in my true core competencies, I just often have a good knack for problem solving (& for "non core" languages the far harder part is implementing that solution in the required language!)

Re: Statement of Vulnerability

Makes me think of the Pussycat Dolls

Re: Solicitors...

Though, given it was a solicitors, it could have been a 10 minute typing job, stretched out to 8 chargeable hours

@John Brown (no body)

I remember that when it came out in the 70's - makes me feel really old!

I'm not a sales person in any way - but if you are trying to sell to people with the IQ of a mouldy carrot and who love flattery & bulging brown envelopes*, then I reckon even I could manage it.

Got on well with top sales person at a company I worked with ages ago. The company was fully above board so no showering potential customers with "hospitality", backhanders etc. Sales person hated his job as he lost so many contracts (despite having best & cheapest solution) due to lack of greasing the appropriate palms.

Re: " You point the mouse at the menu, and click and your app opens"

@kmorwath

You must have some very unusual app requirements if you cannot find a Linux substitute.

"Office software", browsers, email clients, graphics tools, compilers & dev environments, databases, video & music players, accountancy software etc, etc are all easy to find.

... and lots of very niche software available as plenty of enthusiasts / hobbyists create open source stuff for Linux.

A surprising amount of Windows apps work in WINE.

About my only Linux bugbear is that no real equivalent of MS Visual Studio Enterprise* (& it will not work fully under WINE) - I use that on my work Windows machine for the day job coding & would be nice to use it** for "hobby coding" on my personal Linux machine.

* as opposed to the smaller & more lightweight MS VS Code, which is fine on Linux

** Mainly for the excellent debug tools, which are far & away the key reason to use it.

Re: No worries.

Treat them as far more dangerous than Chinese govt.

As a UK person of no importance, China does not give a toss about me & no "jurisdiction over me" or reason to hassle me.

The UK government, however does have "jurisdiction over me" & lots of opportunity to screw me over (especially as I have been critical of UK government policy, be they Red Tory or Blue Tory over the last few decades)).

Re: One dot login

email address as the unique key - FFS

Do these people live in some weird imaginary universe where people never change email address or just a unique email address for different actions?

Only a non technical and intellectually challenged person could have designed / specced a system as poor as that

Re: Murder, she wrote

@herman

Really depends on the drugs people are dealing.

And lots of mass murders hold high political office...

.. and let us not get into alcohol, cigarette related deaths

At least 3 (Rod, Jane* & Freddy)

* interesting personal life with Rod & Freddy!

Re: System manages to already be broken before implementation starts

It was a total pain for my partner who had to do it as a company director* (who ended up completing the process at the Post Office)

* nothing exciting, we are in the sticks & our cul de sac uses septic tank, has an unadopted road so 1 member of each household is director of a company for the cul de sac that each household contributes to & the company then pays for maintenance tasks such as road repairs, septic tank emptying

Re: I am the Little Red Rooster

.. and ironically, if you are a non veggie making a "meat" soup at home, then you will generally have thrown bones into the the stock base (bones which will be removed after the stock base has gained flavour from them* and is strained).

A good home made (meat flavour) soup will have included bones in the preparation (but you do not want the bones ending up in someone's bowl))

* and, if you ensure stock base slightly acid, can dissolve additional Calcium from the bones (not for flavour, just as a useful trace element we need in our diet)

I'm guessing the FCC interpretation of "extremely vulgar track" differs from a lot of UK people.

Mentioning the Macc Lads makes me feel old, remember first seeing them in the late 80's

Re: Human traits then, eh?

I know Dilbert is very much cancelled these days.

However

https://devhumor.com/media/dilbert-s-team-writes-a-minivan

Re: Sleeping on the job

A fair chunk of development time is spent "thinking" (well, it is in my case) - so periods of no mouse / keyboard action, then a flurry of intense activity, etc. .. Although the general "overview plan" of what you are going to do is planned well ahead, you do, still needs plenty of pauses to think in depth about the detailed implementation each component before you write the tests and then code it.

Re: Reading between the lines ...

.. and with proper practices used that troublesome commit would never have occurred as would first have needed code review* with multiple people (of appropriate roles) approving and then it would finally get committed.

* which *should* catch that sort of thing, though confused why any creds in code base as normally appropriate creds for that pipeline are injected in the test instance and (separate creds / system for this) then the deployment instance & never in the code base.

A lot of these "AI" tools are sometimes OK at tasks involving languages such as python, JavaScript etc. ... as they will have been trained on a lot of it. - if a "request" matches well to something in its training data then should expect "AI" to be ale to produce something - which will often be the case for some straightforward / common tasks. An "AI" vibe coding solution, just like all LLM actions, will generally be a numbers game.

How well an "AI" will manage with a more obscure language & given a more unique task outside of any examples it has ingested is a different matter entirely.

Re: In general, do not run unknown code on your computers

@JLV

I use JS on very few sites (& various extensions to limit what JS is used even further. It is off by default on ) - as my web usage is mainly for information (not "entertainment" or "shopping") & thankfully a lot of those sorts of sites are fine with that approach to JS e.g. Wikipedia.

Obviously, mine is not a typical use case.

Re: Keep dreaming

@Carnotaurus

Consistency?

MS products and MS OSes UIs keep changing (& often quite significantly).

e.g. on Win11 I now have to do an extra click via right click menu (compared to W10) to get at a lot of functionality that was previously avaialble on the "main" right click menu (as stated on a previous comment, work machine, no admin access so I cannot do reg hacks to workaround it)

Not to mention continual alterations to start menu..

MS products - the ribbon is the most famous mega change that totally broke what people were used to.

I have to use Outlook & Teams a lot, they keep getting irritating UI changes.

@JLV

.. well, JLV, it's a tad difficult for a new band to compete with e.g. Led Zep as each was superb in their role: Though I thought your list was odd, as covered quite a lot of genres (Yes would definitely be prog in their classic days (readers opinions will vary from not giving a toss, to reckoning 90125 was a good album to thinking that 90125 was when Yes ceased to be worth listening to) )

.. And there are many "tribute" / cover bands that perform "classic" rock tracks so new "rock" bands have to compete with that not a recommendation just noting they exist . Quite likely many a rock fan person with limited budget & free time would go the "no risk" route of a covers band rather than some "unknown" new band they may dislike... In an ideal world, people would research "new" bands playing near them (be it on bandcamp* or wherever) & decide if worth a gamble on seeing them live, but most people CBA so a playing safe option is likely.

As with everything in music a lot of luck also needed, over the years, seen friends (& later kids of friends / relatives) form bands that were good but never had any commercial success (though ait can be argued that a lot of big successful names in music are not very good, so quite likely a failed / unknown band will be musically better than a "success" but will never be a "success")

* bandcamp definitely worth a go for investigating bands who you see are gigging near you (e.g. I often check out bands playing at Rock City (& other Nottm venues) on bandcamp if I am unfamiliar with their music to see if worth a ticket)

Re: Pelican is wilfully missing the point...

.. and would you necessarily trust the other countries?

A neighbour of mine has a Tesla, he gets quite a few OTA updates. I'm sure there are some people that would not necessarily trust updates from a company Musk is in control of!

But pointing fingers at China, Russia, whoever is always a good distraction tool - I'm more worried about what my government will do to screw things up* rather than imaginary attacks from other countries.

e.g. I have not noticed China, Russia, North Korea etc trying to interfere with UK energy policy,

the US however..

* They do plenty of damage just by being totally incompetent

@AC

"What is it with people doffing their hat to the clothes-less emperor?"

.. bribes of some sort probably - often not as unsubtle as brown envelopes full of cash these days*, but future lucrative excessively well remunerated directorships, lecture tours, consultancies etc

* Though UK king likes plastic bags full of cash (for his charities - cough!) rather than envelopes ... Qatar

Re: while addressing greedy stooges

Exactly. those at the "top" in businesses flit around from job to job for the next big payday & golden hello, short termism led bonus / salary rise cultures usually operate - spending money & resources on improving security is at odds with C suite financial interests (let's face it, that is usually their top priority not the business they are currently working at).

Obviously a few C suite people will care about the business, but they will be in the minority as you do not tend to get those C suite roles if you are a decent human being (you will have long since been backstabbed by the sociopaths)

Re: Gone

@elsergiovolador

Ironically, last night I updated a sports club website results & league tables pages by updating the files using FTP.

It does the jobs for small organisations with basic (information only) web sites quite happily, where there is no sensitive data* involved (everything on the site is publicly accessible).

*There are a few names / contact emails, but those people have consented to them in terms of visibility / approachability.. and all the contact emails are to email addresses I control, and run code to weed out spam & other junk, before forwarding any valid mail to relevant peoples "proper" email addresses

Re: Avoid them

@FuzzyTheBear

People are fine to choose not to visit the US & that choice is fine.

But to say "They have nothing worth visiting" is inaccurate - plenty of great scenery & wildlife (main focus of my holidays anywhere but also many great museums, galleries, historic sites, interesting buildings etc. , etc.)