Reva G-Wiz may be one of the worst vehicles ever made
What abaht the Reliant Robin and various bubble cars of the 50s/60s?
Posts by rafff
248 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2020
You can power a G-Wiz EV with 500 vapes, and this YouTuber proved it
Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign
HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations
Thursday 8th January 2026 09:06 GMT
Re: Don't Use Apps
"I ... walked away from a free London Museum that insisted I had to provide my personal details before walking in."
Give false info. My name is John Smith, my DoB is 1/1/1950, my postcode is W1A 1AA (or BS8 2LR or SW1A 0AA or ... ), my phone number is 07123 456789. Enjoy.
If they insist on an email, have a spare Gmail that you never look at, or a rubbish address - it does not have to actually exist. For those websites that want to send you a verification code I use a temp email provider e.g. https://temp-mail.org/en/
'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour
Wednesday 28th January 2026 08:35 GMT
Re: Source code...?
"it seems.to.me that figuring put exactly what you want.something to do os a far more useful input/career than just being able to speak C++ natively."
Figuring out what the problem really is and how to solve it are part of the development loop. One never really knows what the specs are until the job is finished. But if afterwards an AI can quickly and cheaply generate a *better* solution that a load of meatbags fighting their way though the development fog ....
As for cloning the functionality of existing software .... bring on the IP lawyers
Iran’s internet goes dark amid mass protests, reports of violent government response
Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint
BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct
Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin
Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight
Saturday 15th November 2025 12:28 GMT
Re: Your goolies were, indeed, dropped
@AC
That I made a couple of typos I put down to bad eyesight and shaky hands. A penalty of getting old.
The [lack of] punctuation that you complain of I make no apology for. Those clauses are adverbial, not parenthetical, and so do not require a comma after them. OTOH if I were writing something to be read aloud, e.g. a play, then I might punctuate on breathing points rather than on structure. But I do not mix structural and oratorical punctuation; they are different. Horses for courses.
Friday 14th November 2025 13:29 GMT
Re: At least there was a clear hierarchy
@blu3b3rry
<pedant mode>
Judging by the spelling and grammar of your comment I would hate to use your documentation.
"Myself and my bench desktop PC": two errors. First, "Myself is a reflexive pronoun, not a subject pronoun; "Me and my bench desktop PC" would be equally wrong as "me" is an object pronoun. The correct pronoun is "I". Second, as I was taught at the age of about five, in a compound noun phrase involving oneself, the I/me/myself goes at the end. This sentence should begin "My bench desktop PC and I ..."
"six or seven year olds vocabulary" missing apostrophe on "old's": it is a possessive. But to your credit you wrote "SOPs" with no apostrophe: it is a plural, not a possessive.
"over who's job it was": "whose" not "who's". "Who's" == "who is", "whose" = "belonging to whom".
</pedant mode>
P.S. In ticking off another commentard I hope I have not dropped any goolies of my own. My eyesight is becoming very poor.
Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate
Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys
UK government on the lookout for bargain-priced CTO
Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings
Friday 10th October 2025 07:31 GMT
Re: Fairly Minor but...
Many small companies survive entirely on bank loans for the first few years. They have to bu/rent premises, fit out [work-]shops, pay staff, taxes etc. All up-front costs before a penny comes in through the door. And as the OP says "could probably have been defended the bank lost confidence and pulled the plug".
Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers
Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel
Friday 19th September 2025 09:52 GMT
Re: Excel
"I did work with a guy - a manager who had been on all the IT courses, who didn't trust excel, so he typed in all the numbers, then got out his calculator to do any calculations."
I once had a VAT inspector like that. He would not believe my computerised accounting (QuickBooks), and insisted on cross checking invoices against register entries etc.
Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates
I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA
One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave
Wednesday 27th August 2025 07:37 GMT 
Proust got there first
At 599 words, a passage from the opening section of Swann’s Way:
But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold — or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam — or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.
Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL
Tuesday 19th August 2025 06:01 GMT
Re: Easy Solution
Comments!? I've never yet seen any.
For context, in the 70s and 80s I spent about 10 years [automatically] converting Cobol programs between dialects [1]. In the millions of lines that we processed only one program had any comments, and the customer complained that we rotted up the formatting.
[1] In theory there are some 186000 *standard conforming* Cobol dialects, not counting implementor defined features.
Friday 15th August 2025 12:31 GMT
Re: Easy Solution
The easy solution is to train more Cobol programmers.
As has been said, Cobol is ugly and clunky, but it does what it does very well. It was designed specifically for commercial tasks, unlike many of its successors which may be more elegant mathematically, but are pants at handling business tasks.
I speak as one who has suffered the ravages of Cobol, but even more from trying to code business tasks (invoicing, stock control, ...) in C(++) or Java.
No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers
Saturday 16th August 2025 16:50 GMT 
Real world analogy
This decision is similar to saying that if I rip up a newspaper or fill in all the Os and Qs in a book then I am breaching copyright.
I have acquired the material legitimately, if I then choose to mutilate it that is up to me. I am not re-publishing th e mutilated material, just keeping it for my own use.
Marc Andreessen wades into the UK's Online Safety Act furor
Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft
Monday 11th August 2025 22:33 GMT
Re: Being sensible for a moment
"Are the "security fixes" fixing flaws in the original product or are they adapting to newly invented threats ?"
Software is different from hardware in that there is no wear and tear. If the software is susceptible to an attack now, then the flaw was there from day 1. In other words, you were sold a defective item. It makes no difference if the attack was known on day 1; the flaw was there.
Whether in UK law you can sue for consequent losses or only for the amount you paid for the software, I dunno. IANAL.
I have in the past used this absolutist position to get updates for a buggy compiler. For home users the magic words are "Sale of Good Act" and Merchantable quality".
Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?
Friday 8th August 2025 07:17 GMT
Re: Have worked on several "bespoke" satellite ground control and on-board systems
"some other very "interesting" software languages and libraries (anyone know about Jovial)?"
When I worked in this area the DoD had over 300 different languages, all called Jovial. This was in the days when Ada was not yet a thing, more a good intention.
Lethal Cambodia-Thailand border clash linked to cyber-scam slave camps
Devs are frustrated with AI coding tools that deliver nearly-right solutions
Wednesday 30th July 2025 08:15 GMT
Re: Code vs Codebase
"Because you have to understand the code, or the intentions behind it, before you can write good unit tests."
In my experience* good unit tests depend on understanding the intent and the interface, not the code. The tests should be blind to the code; change the code and the tests should still be valid.
* About 60 years of it.
The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i
Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS
Monday 21st July 2025 15:11 GMT
100 car manufacturers with say 25 models each, give or take. That makes 2500 models
But they all have the steering wheel, accelerator, brake and gear lever in the same place. And they all have the doors in the same place - mind you, the locking mechanisms can get a bit esoteric.
Minor controls and "infotainment" are another matter.
German team warns ChatGPT is changing how you talk
Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time
British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network
Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits
Monday 30th June 2025 15:48 GMT
Our fast trains are not very fast
How fast it is economic to have a train run depends on the distance you expect it to travel. Britain is small compared to France or Germany; Switzerland is even smaller, and distinctly knobbly.
The design of the HS2 was predicated on the longest possible domestic run being from London to Glasgow or Edinburgh. Once you are in Scotland speeds are necessarily lower. What killed the HS2 was that BR expected to run it through the Channel Tunnel, but no-one told RTZ, who were building(?) the tunnel. The shock waves of a 400kmph train entering and running though a tunnel would shatter the passengers' ear drums; once the train had to slow down to around 120kmph the whole thing became uneconomic.
BTW I was present when the mismatch of expectations came to light. It was at a Sunday afternoon tea, not a formal review meeting.
Your browser has ad tech's fingerprints all over it, but there's a clean-up squad in town
What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency
Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area
Friday 27th June 2025 10:23 GMT
" drawn from user experiences, plus predictive data from the UK's mobile operators themselves."
For about 10 years I worked on this "predictive" mapping, starting from when it was just Cellnet (remember them?) until it was the whole world.
The important point to note is that his data is *computed*, not surveyed. Depending on the radio planning tool in use, and what the signal level the operator calls "good" coverage (anything from -90dB to -120dB) the output is at least partially fiction.
In Switzerland they used to use (25 years ago, dunno about today) a radio planning tool that did not take account of terrain. Go figure.
French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools
Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown
Monday 23rd June 2025 21:39 GMT
Re: I'm ancient enough
"And when it comes down to it, switching between Fahrenheit and Celsius (which was called centigrade in those aforementioned BBC weather reports) is a trivial mental trick if you don't need to-a-fraction-of-a-degree accuracy."
For the range of temperatures used in domestic ovens F = 2*C is good enough. The difference between fan and non-fan ovens is greater than the conversion error.
Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload
Friday 13th June 2025 14:40 GMT
Re: The first English to Russian translating machine
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" => "The Vodka is good, but the meat is poor"
"Out of sight out of mind" => "invisible idiot"
Neither of these is real; they were made up by a journalist poking fun at early efforts at machine translation. Machine translation still does not really work; machine *assisted* translation is useful, and is used by professionals.
User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died
Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress
Even a humble keyboard is now political in Taiwan
Monday 26th May 2025 10:10 GMT
Re: Smuggling
"Wouldn't it be funny if the drug smuggling routes are used to smuggle stuff pass tariffs?"
Don't forget that that the Boston Tea Party was caused by the **abolition** of tariffs on tea, thereby putting the tea smugglers out of business. And possession of a keyboard is not an indictable offence, unlike possession of a kilo of heroin.
Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support
Wednesday 7th May 2025 22:17 GMT
Re: Hubble Telescope.......
"In 2018 these nutters got modern (Gentoo) Linux running on a 486. It took 11 minutes to boot to CLI."
At some point I had a batch of diskless 386/25 machines. I managed, eventually, to get them to network boot to a GUI. I don't now remember dates or the Linux flavour; possibly Gentoo, and it would have been at least 25 years ago.
Obviously I did not build the kernel on a 386/25; I had IIRC a 486DX2 dual processor for that. Working out which part of their filesystems could be common and what had to be private to each processor was entertaining.
BTW my shrink says that I am now fully recovered.
PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished
Sunday 13th April 2025 15:02 GMT
Re: Amazon Halo Rise
"The bigger reality is that the average consumer doesn't have the time nor money to pursue these sorts of things. Just to consult with a blood sucking lawyer for an hour can be a week's pay. "
If the retailer does not respond satisfactorily, just copy your correspondence[*] to Trading Standards; they wield a big stick. Alternatively, Small Claims Court: costs time but no lawyers.
[*] You did do everything in writing, didn't you?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
