Posts by Tanuki

Windows has detected new hardware.

Do you wish to configure "Airbus A400M" now [Y/N]?

Sir Oliver Lodge

Marconi was a pioneer, sure, but the widespread adoption of his discoveries also depended on the work of Sir Oliver Lodge - who invented the idea of tuning [he referred to it as 'syntony'] which allowed the RF energy from the transmitter to be radiated predominantly on one frequency, and for a receiver to be able to separate wanted and unwanted signals.

Without this, radio would have been just so much interference.

[I'm a great lobbyist for Lodge, if only because he went to the same school as I did]

Blended business and tech.

The big issue I've found (which AI etc is unlikely to ever address) when recruiting is to find people who know the techie stuff but also understand (and can explain in terms that management will understand) the impact of the technology on the business side of things.

Combine the two though and you've got it made - however old you are. Techies who don't understand the legal/audit/compliance implications of what they're doing, or auditors who don't understand the technology - well, I've had to deal with the rather-expensive aftermaths of both.

"Do it your way and we both go to jail; do it my way and only you go to jail. Guess what - we're going to do it my way" as I recently had to say to someone who was supposedly skilled in safety-critical systems design.

Some years back I was at ICAO:EGBP on business when one of the people I was working with discovered I was a licenced radio amateur and as a result I got invited for a flight in his Tiger Moth in the hope that I could help him track down the cause of intermittent catastrophic radio-interference on his "clip-it-to-the-instrument-panel" Icom air-band comms radio.

There's something slightly disconcerting about taking-off into the wind and realising you've just got airborne at barely above walking-pace.

I didn't get much 'proper' work done that afternoon but we did identify the problem with the magneto wiring.

I wonder how easy it would be to hack all the torque-vectoring/stability-control-program stuff so you could instead dial in some of that wonderful lift-off-oversteer effect that made the Peugeot 205 about the only decent handling FWD car of the last century?

How can you code until you've understood the objectives?

IMHO coding is one of the _last_ steps of a successful project.

(by "successful" I mean 'meeting the originally specified requirements' and "being maintainable in a cost-effective way for as long as the product is required in-service" and "providing for an ordered shutdown of the service/withdrawal of the product").

I've seen far too many projects run by superannuated geeks on the "We'll all start our coding in a variety of languages and platforms - meantime can someone go and find out what the client wants!" basis. Coupled with a client who doesn't really know what he/she wants and even if he/she did know he wouldn't be able to adequately express it - the result is chaos.

The other big issue I've had is when projects escape from development and slide into production without a proper clean demarcation between the two. ITIL, PRINCE, Agile etc are useful toolboxes but shouldn't be religions.

I'm suspecting that the Norks have foolishly decided to change broadband-provider in the run-up to Christmas.

Either that or they've already got TalkTalk as their broadband-provider.

Isn't this somewhat like the Doodson-Lege tidal-prediction engine?

http://www.ntslf.org/about-tides/doodson-machine

[I have seen this particular machine in action. All things considered, it's surprisingly silent!]

Vintage?

I don't really class any of them as ~Vintage~ they've all got LCD screens!

[My first cellular mobile-phone was a "BT Steel" with a big carrier/recharger frame which bolted to the car transmission-tunnel. Before that, we had Pye Westminsters on the old BT System-4 VHF mobile network. ]

Oh look! A squadron of pigs just flew by.....

I'll believe it when it happens. Rather than the ICO/DCMS pocketing the cash I think the fines levied should be distributed amongst the complainants - to me that's "restorative justice" and if people realised nuisance-calls could be converted into a steady stream of additional income it might cause more people to complain aggressively/take legal action against the nuisance callers.

Me? I have been known to reply to nuisance-callers by breathing heavily and asking them what colour bra and panties they are wearing today. This tends to shut them up quickly, specially the male ones.

DAB, whether in a phone or not, is intrinsically power-inefficient: to receive a single stream you still have to receive the entire MUX and decode the 1536 subcarriers [oh, all those lovely compute-intensive FFTs!] - only to then throw away the vast majority of the recovered bits because they're not part of the stream you want to listen to.

The continued obsession by the Beeb/Ofcom with forcing DAB upon an unwilling public is nothing short of criminal abuse-of-power.

Civilisation.

One of the benefits of living somewhere distinctly non-Inner-City is the ease-of-access to a rather conveniently civilised place calling itself 'Waitrose', and their free-coffee-for-regular-customers.

[Claims that their car-parking spaces are also larger than Lidl's/Aldi's - to better accomodate clients' Range-Rovers - are unsubstantiated].

Why bother?

At the beginning of this year I borrowed a set of energy-meters from a client for a weekend. Stuck them on pretty much every appliance in the house, gathered the data into a spreadsheet... and discovered that I was spending something like £3 a day on electricity. Part of which was a standing-charge.

Remember - this was in winter. In summer it's probably half that (though the dehumidifier occasionally gets intensive use).

Honestly, even if through the use of a 'smart' meter I cut my electricity utilisation to *zero* then the saving is well down in the noise - there's at least three times that amount of daily variance in the cost of my wine-consumption.

Fretting about whether your fridge is costing you 20p or 22p a day to run - well, get over it and get a life.

Forget this whole idea of a "TV" whether 'smart' or dumb - what I would love is a decently-priced mid-size (28-inch max) 4K *monitor* that I could then connect to the local content-source of my choice (which will rarely-if-ever include 'broadcast media').

Personally, I don't want big screens - they're obtrusive and take up space which some of us would rather have occupied by that rather-more-traditional viewing technology known as "windows" - through which I can watch the outdoor-wildlife in real-time without any cheesy soundtack or narration.

[Last night there were three fox-cubs playing who-dares-get-closest-to-the-hose].

Bet you could have made some serious chicken-nuggets out of that !

[I, for one, welcome our new feathery-lizard overlords.]

I'm continually narked by travel-companies who seem to want a whole slew of irrelevant data about you (name, address, date-of-birth, height, weight, brother's inside-leg measurement, pet's star-sign and the colour of the last car you bought) before they will even *try* to give you a price for a flight/ticket/holiday.

[I've taken to giving them the cat's name, age, inside-leg measurement and height/weight just to confuse them]

Double-strength Placebo™

Essentially, Paracetamol _is_ being used as a placebo in this case. Same goes for that other dish-it-out-to-get-the-patient-out-of-the-surgery-when-you-dont-know-whats-wrong-with-them offering, Ibuprofen.

Given the state of the pharmaceutical industry I wonder how long it will be before someone brings out "Placebo Extra™" - the proven power of Placebo™ you know and trust, now in a new double-strength formula. Available in easy-to-swallow caplets, suppositories*, or soluble formula.

*For all the good they'll do you you might as well shove them up your...

Placebo™ - so effective all other drugs are tested against it!