Author Topic: A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own (Read 299304 times)

Biggsy · « **Reply #500 on:** 19 April, 2016, 04:19:54 pm »

For future/other use, there's an aggressive little utility called Unlocker that can nuke almost any file on a Windows PC.

Kim · « **Reply #501 on:** 19 April, 2016, 04:27:09 pm »

Quote from: Mr Larrington on 19 April, 2016, 01:59:08 am

Any guesses as to how to nuke the damn' thing? It's on a NAS if that makes any difference.

Probably a case of waiting for the phantom network connection to time out. Or killing the relevant process on the NAS (perhaps by restarting Samba, or indeed the whole NAS).

simonp · « **Reply #502 on:** 22 April, 2016, 06:17:04 pm »

We're finally getting fibre optic broadband early next month. Woo!

Which is nice since I designed and wrote significant parts of the firmware that runs on the line card in the kerbside box that makes it possible... 6 years ago!

hellymedic · « **Reply #503 on:** 23 April, 2016, 09:55:04 pm »

I seem to be getting many 0 byte files downloading from Twitter.
This has just started today.

woollypigs · « **Reply #504 on:** 25 April, 2016, 08:59:11 am »

How does linux(debian) boot? What I get to see before I get to the login screen, is totally random.

Sometimes the font is nice and readable other times it is a basic font large or small, which changes while it boots. Sometimes I get the run down of all the things it loads with a little ok next to them when they are. Sometimes I get to see the NVIDIA logo most times I don't get to. The GRUB menu is often very basic and big letters, other times it is very neatly laid out. I do get GRUB, disk check, login screen every time. Though how they look and what happens in between these steps is utterly random.

It is like a manager have just thrown a list at the staff, with stuff to be done before the end of the day, and said when this is done you can clock off down to the pub, first round is on me. Nothing like a run down order with a check list like for TimC before he heads over to the US again.

Kim · « **Reply #505 on:** 25 April, 2016, 12:06:55 pm »

Quote from: woollypigs on 25 April, 2016, 08:59:11 am

How does linux(debian) boot? What I get to see before I get to the login screen, is totally random.

Quickly and with as much going on in parallel as possible. So the exact order in which things happen is subject to a sort of butterfly effect as one process gets dibs on the disk IO (or whatever) first and causes another (and its dependencies) to block for slightly longer.

Quote

It is like a manager have just thrown a list at the staff, with stuff to be done before the end of the day, and said when this is done you can clock off down to the pub, first round is on me. Nothing like a run down order with a check list like for TimC before he heads over to the US again.

Exactly. It gets you to the ~~pub~~ usable system faster.

ian · « **Reply #506 on:** 25 April, 2016, 03:45:22 pm »

My Airbus had to reboot the other week. Panasonic Avonics runs Redhat apparently. I presume that was just the entertainment system. I never trusted Redhat, back in the day it was a home of dependency hell, hopefully it has got better. Could be worse, I could have found out that Airbus A380s run Windows CE.

Wombat · « **Reply #507 on:** 25 April, 2016, 09:32:08 pm »

Air New Zealand Boing 777s, do indeed run Windows CE! And of course the entertainment system needed rebooting several times before we could get going...

Sadly my car's entertainment system also runs Windows CE, and its crap.

Kim · « **Reply #508 on:** 26 April, 2016, 12:26:58 am »

A surprising number of embedded systems run Windows CE. It's cheap and (mostly) works.

jsabine · « **Reply #509 on:** 26 April, 2016, 01:29:31 am »

Quote from: Kim on 26 April, 2016, 12:26:58 am

A surprising number of embedded systems run Windows CE. It's cheap and (mostly) works.

Aye. For values of 'mostly' that trend down in inverse proportion to the urgency of the task at hand.

Feanor · « **Reply #510 on:** 26 April, 2016, 04:10:12 pm »

Quote from: ian on 25 April, 2016, 03:45:22 pm

My Airbus had to reboot the other week. Panasonic Avonics runs Redhat apparently. I presume that was just the entertainment system. I never trusted Redhat, back in the day it was a home of dependency hell, hopefully it has got better. Could be worse, I could have found out that Airbus A380s run Windows CE.

I can hardly remember a single flight where the VoD system worked flawlessly.

Lock-ups and eternal re-booting seems to be the order of the day with them.

Chris S · « **Reply #511 on:** 28 April, 2016, 09:55:11 am »

(Ex) colleague of mine.

This code of yours you wrote has cost me HOURS that I'll never get back.

double version = double.Parse(doc.Root.Attribute("Version").Value);
if (version == 7.0)
../..

Works until we sell that product to a French company where the float conversion fails because there, the conversion needs "7,0" not "7.0". What was wrong with a simple string comparison?

Kim · « **Reply #512 on:** 28 April, 2016, 01:01:00 pm »

Doing an == comparison on a float gives me the creeps, too.

Morat · « **Reply #513 on:** 28 April, 2016, 06:26:02 pm »

Nothing so dramatic as avionics, but our stock scanners and table ordering "pads" run on WinCE. I hate them with a passion. I'm waging a campaign to get it all redone for Android so we can buy some devices that don't cost £750 each and will fit into a pocket/apron.

simonp · « **Reply #514 on:** 28 April, 2016, 09:20:14 pm »

I particularly hate if (version==blah) type constructs for other reasons.

What happens in 7.1 or 8.0? Do you have an ever growing cascade of if..else constructs?

As for the appropriateness of treating it as a numeric value, how do you treat 7.10 or 7.28.1 as a double?

Feanor · « **Reply #515 on:** 28 April, 2016, 09:27:06 pm »

Quote from: Kim on 28 April, 2016, 01:01:00 pm

Doing an == comparison on a float gives me the creeps, too.

Quite right.
2 numbers that are nominally equal may not be in the LSBit.

I have had to de-bug shitty code that used floats as a loop index, and where float values were added inside the loop.
And the loop was defined to end when the index == n.
It was a random chance that the loop would exit correctly, if ever.

When comparing floats, I'd only ever use > or < operators.

Anyone using anything other than integers as a loop index is going to have a bunch of extra pain when I'm in charge of Hell.

Chris S · « **Reply #516 on:** 28 April, 2016, 09:37:24 pm »

I've re-written it.

There there... all better now.

Feanor · « **Reply #517 on:** 28 April, 2016, 09:39:08 pm »

Thanks.

<breathes out, and back in>

TheLurker · « **Reply #518 on:** 30 April, 2016, 07:48:28 pm »

I've been knifed by this sort of thing before only with greater than / less than string comparisons rather than equality so I wouldn't give you the time of day for string based dotted version numbers.

The only safe solution I've found is to deal with version numbers as two or more integer fields rather than as a string. Yes; you do have to write code to compare the fields in the correct order, but you only need to write the one library function to do so and you can do whatever the hell you like when displaying the version in app. info. popups.

Summat like: <Version Major="7" Minor="0" Revision="0" Build="1287" />

As it happens I have a noddy class that does this sort of thing rather than a simple function so I can instantiate VersionNumber types and do equality / greater / less comparisons with (relative) impunity and the ToString() override splats out a "pretty" version for user consumption. It got written because I was sick to death of fixing broken version comparisons in our major application. Such things are manifold when dealing with a product well into its second decade where complex business rules regarding backwards compatability exist.

PeteB99 · « **Reply #519 on:** 01 May, 2016, 10:15:00 am »

Not sure if it's a bug or a feature but yesterday I renewed my cars VED via the GOV.CO.UK website. Just looked at the confirmation email and it's actually confirming 2 renewals, this years and last years.

Wombat · « **Reply #520 on:** 02 May, 2016, 02:09:10 pm »

Its a feature. However, if you really did it via a gov.co.uk domain, then you've been had

ITYM gov.uk....

TheLurker · « **Reply #521 on:** 04 May, 2016, 09:07:22 pm »

*Possible* compromise of a number of webmail services; username/password combinations published. If you do use one of the allegedly affected webmail services you might want to change your password just to be safe.

A bit more, but not much more, info here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36204531

Be warned, the article contains examples of appalling business jargon. See the quote from Yahoo.

simonp · « **Reply #522 on:** 04 May, 2016, 11:35:03 pm »

We're getting 35Mbps after the FTTC upgrade yesterday - guess my code works then.

mrcharly-YHT · « **Reply #523 on:** 05 May, 2016, 08:12:06 am »

Quote from: TheLurker on 04 May, 2016, 09:07:22 pm

*Possible* compromise of a number of webmail services; username/password combinations published. If you do use one of the allegedly affected webmail services you might want to change your password just to be safe.

A bit more, but not much more, info here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36204531

Be warned, the article contains examples of appalling business jargon. See the quote from Yahoo.

Note: your email *may* have been compromised *only* if you used insecure websites and signed up with a password identical to the one you use for your email account.

Dibdib · « **Reply #524 on:** 05 May, 2016, 08:29:02 am »

(PSA: Google offers two-factor authentication, and if you don't use it I'd strongly recommend considering it: https://www.google.com/landing/2step/ )

Author Topic: A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own (Read 299304 times)

simonp

ian

Chris S

simonp

Chris S

simonp