We get older, get real lives, more responsibilities. Sigh.
Actually, I'm much more of a fan now than I was then. Don't get me wrong - I used to really enjoy it. It's just that I don't think I was old enough to really understand some of it.
I started watching the reruns on UK Gold and, courtesy of Tivo, I watched from the beginning of the Pertwee era right through to the (merciful) end. Changed my views too - as a kid I remember Tom Baker being the best, but I personally prefer Pertwee and Davison now.
Oh, and real life definitely caught up with me. I'm now working, married, have one kid and expecting another any day now, mortgage, two hungry cars to feed...all we need is a dog and we'd be the perfect TV advert family. I'm pretty hopeful about this - recent TV sci-fi has been very same'ish, and I'm looking forward to the different direction that Doctor Who took.
...or Sean Pertwee (Jon Pertwee's, the third Doctor, son) to get the title role.
Sean Pertwee already ruled himself out a few months ago. He said he simply couldn't do it - he said he had very definite ideas about how the Doctor should be, the interviewer asked "You mean he was your dad?", and Sean just said "Yes".
All in The Metro, a London freebie paper picked up my a fair number of commuters including myself.
I think the point he was trying to make is that, while for every other encoding format under the sun
True, but the point I was trying to make is that Quicktime isn't a codec. You can't 'just download the codec', because Quicktime isn't one. It's an API framework.
I don't like Quicktime because the codec was never released as a DirectX codec on Window...
Quicktime isn't a codec, it's an API which encompasses a number of codecs. It can't be 'released for DirectX' because it's a coding framework, not a video file format.
...causing it to be played pretty much only on their player which lacks functionality
Fix up your workspace because company's coming!...this is really the time to get down to the business of cleaning up your own personal act and taking care of those loose ends that keep you up nights.
Hmm. So how did it know that my second kid is due any day now, and that the first one is still keeping me awake by howling to the rooftops at night?
I'm convinced. No really, I am. Honest.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Tattoos and other forms of fan appreciation
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 1
Oh, it's just in good fun.
Yep, understood. Hope you understood that my post was too.
From my perspective, it's much more fun to date a rocking, cute, artsy girl (with eccentricities) than someone who's into pop music, raving, or saving manatees.
Totally agree. The mainstream can be pretty dull. I dated a girl with such eccentricities and what happened? She's now my wife and we're expecting our second kid any day now..
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Tattoos and other forms of fan appreciation
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...when you signed my girlfriend's lower back...she went to a tattoo parlor right afterward to have the moment made permanent...How do you deal with this kind of...fan appreciation?
The question is...how do you deal with this kind of fan appreciation?
Cheers,
Ian
Terry Pratchett
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Neil:
I enjoyed Good Omens tremendously. Is there any possibility of the two of you working on another book?
Sure, key it...but make one an AT connection (keyboard) and one a ps/2. Yeesh. Not really idiot-proof otherwise.
Better still, design it so that either device would work in either port. Similar to the USB or firewire ports - it doesn't matter which USB port you plug the keyboard into and which the mouse, either will work.
C'mon, Jerry! Go mow a few lawns or something. Break that tie!
Reminds of a sketch on an old UK comedy series, The Two Ronnies. They had a regular sketch where a couple of tramps would muse about the world in general. Probably the best remember is:
First tramp: "If I were Rockefeller, I'd be richer than Rockefeller" Second tramp: "How's that then? How do you reckon that?" First tramp: "Well, I'd do a spot of window cleaning on the side..."
Yes, strangely enough those who dedicate their lives to network adminning and writing BIND in the first place came up with a better patch than I managed to in the ten seconds it took to reply to a Slashdot post.
You'll forgive me if I don't exactly hang my head in shame.
I assume the patch will filter requests, which resolve to the site-finder IP...
I'd say that's quite an assumption. Were I coding this patch, for example, the IPs for which to return NXDOMAIN would be specified in a config. That config would be able to take single IPs and also ranges.
...so what's to stop VeriSign simply changing IPs every so often?
I wouldn't write this off as ineffective yet. We need to see what methodolgy is being chosen before we can comment on its technical effectiveness.
This complaint is regarding Verisign's recent decision to claim all non-registered.com and.net domain names for itself. It has done this by inserting a wildcard into the DNS registers, meaning an IP of 64.94.110.11 is returned for any domain name that has not yet been registered. That page is an advert for Verisign's domin registration services
This is unfair competition with existing registrars - there is no means for myself, for example, to gain a similar foothold without actually purchasing each and every currently unregistered.com/.net name. It is also a technical breach of trust - the internet is not merely the web, and unknown domains should return errors rather than constantly try to contact Versign advert servers. Non web-based applications, such as ftp clients etc., will now incorrectly log that they have contacted the host you asked for when in fact they should have returned an error 'hostname unknown'. The same for traceroute, ping...any of these will not behave in a manner expected.
I would be grateful if you could investigate this matter.
Yours,
Ian McCall
Scattered all over the article. Bottom line: expect to pay 6% to 10% on . Bottom line: expect to pay 20% extra on .
No back up. No studies. Nothing. These numbers appear to have just been dreamt up. If they weren't - if there's some serious data behind it, then why not just present the data?
Cringely still feels the betrayal deeply...because they accused him of trademark infringement for continuing to use the name that he had done so much to build.
Has he ever thought about a career in piracy? He'd make an excellent Dread Pirate Roberts.
Xerox/scan all your bank cards, credit cards, drivers license, etc front and back. Write down all the contact info and make sure you keep a copy in a safe place. NOT YOUR WALLET! If anything is lost or stolen call immediately!
If you're prepared to rely on electronics, then Quicken has a decent feature called Emergency Records for this. It allows you to record all your insurance details, your accounts and credit cards will already have the account numbers...a good place to centralise information.
Of course, on the other hand this also makes it a good place to steal information from. I've never seen an analysis of Quicken's encryption and password routines - might be interesting.
Yes. It is a pretty stable medium, but it's not perfect.
I have a pack of cassettes recorded with old stuff I wrote for a C64, 20-odd years ago, and even ten years ago they were already unreadable.
True, but what quality of tape? Standard C60/C90 stuff? The DV tape and format is a bit more robust than that. Also, you specifically mention the C64 - not using a D2CN are you (or was it DC2N?). They were pretty poor even with brand new tapes at a time when C64s were current.
As I say, it's not perfect - better would be the proper archival Exabyte stuff. It's better than nothing however.
But magnetic tapes do not strike me as particularly stable. Hard disks may be more stable than tapes.
I would have agreed with you about three or four years ago. However, I'm increasingly nervous of these the quality on these new high speed big disks, and you can see the warranty period dropping through the floor. Perhaps I'm being a luddite, but I don't trust them for long-term storage.
A tangential point is that you're always tempted to start using a hard drive for something else. "I'll just repartion and throw a distro on there". "Hmm...nowhere to put the data files from this app, I'll use the big disk"...that kind of thing. For archiving (as opposed to merely backup), the harder it is to modify the media the happier I am.
...if you wanted to give someone a digital present (say a bunch of their baby photos) for 18 years hence, how would you go about it?
Tape. Back it up onto tape. Useless as an everyday access medium, great at archiving. Also, try to keep multiple redundant copies.
... the whole "what can I give a gurgling baby" thing is not really stuff that interests geeks.
Well, it interests me for similar reasons. The site you're looking at there contains photos and some smallish video. They are backed up in a copy of the site at home, backed up in a copy of the individual media files on a seperate machine, backed up to DV tape (not the best, but better than nothing) and also backed up by my co-lo ISP nightly.
So...make at least three copies (live, on-site, offsite) and try to get at least one of those copies onto stable removable media, such as tape.
One last thing - make sure you keep the hardware and software around to read it. About twelve years ago I was involved in a rushed-job project to read some tapes and format the data. The reason? My employer at the time had brilliantly decided that they didn't need those old tape-reading machines that didn't connect to anything, and threw them away. Of course, when the contract came in for processing that tape format, as it did year after year, they suddenly found themselves unable to do a thing with it.
Well, there's my terrible spelling to contend with... However, tried the corrected spelling of remembrance, but still got no hits.
It's fairly marginal whether the web actually existed at this time. Can't recall the dates, but I know System 7 was just coming out as I attended University (1992 I think), and I remember playing with the first incarnation of Mosaic later on. Not sure which came first. I'd have expected some Usenet hits though but I can't come up with anything quickly.
At the first job I had, the technical department had a number of issues with the management there, not least of these was salary.
Eventually, management's answer was presented to us in a meeting. They explained that, after surveying the market, they were paying us correctly. The said that the reason we could see the higher figures elsewhere was because everyone else in the world was paying too highly...
Oh, and they also claimed that we couldn't actually get these figures we read. My response was "empirical studies suggest otherwise", which got a bit of a look. I resigned within two weeks, and another guy I was at the meeting with resigned the next day.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Still major usability issues...
on
Gnome 2.4 Release(d)
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
2) Taskbar doesn't reflect order that programs were started in. It inserts new buttons at random positions.
Disclaimer: Haven't used pure Gnome in quite a while, perhaps some of the points below have been handled by now.
I hate the fact that the Windows taskbar reflects the order in which the apps are launched and then cannot be changed. If you're going to have a taskbar interface, then fair enough chronological order seems a sensible default. However once launched, I really want to be able to drag that indication to whatever position I want in the taskbar.
For example, at work on my NT4 box I have a standard set of apps open most times. They are Notes (ugh), two Firebird windows, Putty and a Remote desktop connection. Apps after that can come and go, but I want those apps always in the same place so I don't have to hunt for them later.
I'm also an OS X user, and although I'm aware of criticism of the dock there's certainly one thing to be said for it - your most frequenctly used applications always appear in the same place, both for launching and for bringing to the front.
As a quick aside - anyone else remember the Apple Human Interface Guidlines circa System 7-era, incorporating the Principle of Muscular Remembrance? The idea is that important stuff is always in the same place, every time, so that the user doesn't even have to conciously think about where to find things. It's the reason Macs have a single menu bar, at the top of the screen. It seems to me to also be a key thought behind the dock.
Vaguely seem to recall someone on this board mentioning that this wasn't implemented on the Mac due to a Sun/Apple spat.
That's a shame - I really could be doing with that library working under OS X. Does anyone know of any plans?
Cheers,
Ian
Ian Somerville
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Meanwhile we also give them a decent introduction to software engineering (using Ian Sommerville's book, which is quite comprehensive)
I was taught by Ian Somerville - he's an interesting and very realistic person. One of the things he said to us was that in his class, he would tell us why the things we learnt in almost every other class were bad...
This was an exaggeration of course, but his basic point was right. Tightly coupled systems, even techniques such as recursion...not so much a HOWTO as a WHYTO avoid in reality much of what theory states is the most elegant solution.
I didn't take it in at the time, of course. I thought I knew better - that he was only saying things because people weren't good enough to use all these latest techniques that I, in my god-like genius, had mastered completely. Now, ten years later, I remember that attitude when reading code written by the latest graduate intake, someone who's read the Design Patterns book one too many times, or someone who proclaims we should dump all code in language X because language Y is obviously superior.
As your post suggests, Software engineering isn't about coding. It's about technique, and pragmatic technique at that.
If the independents can't compete on the consoles or the PC, then they could move to places where they can compete.
For example, there's a huge boom in Symbian and J2ME devices with the new mobile phones at present. Could code for that - that can't produce the effects which take up all the time on a big-hardware gmae, but it can sill be extremely playable. Sort of back to the late 8-bit/early 16-bit stages.
The Gameboy Advance can use homebrew cartridges - why not have a crack at writing something for that? It's about up to the standards of the old SNES (I think it's identical except for sound channels, though I'm prepared to be corrected on that), and the old SNES had some truly brilliant games.
I'd suggest that if the cost of developing for one platform starts heading for the stratosphere, then look around for platforms that don't have that problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm much more of a fan now than I was then. Don't get me wrong - I used to really enjoy it. It's just that I don't think I was old enough to really understand some of it.
I started watching the reruns on UK Gold and, courtesy of Tivo, I watched from the beginning of the Pertwee era right through to the (merciful) end. Changed my views too - as a kid I remember Tom Baker being the best, but I personally prefer Pertwee and Davison now.
Oh, and real life definitely caught up with me. I'm now working, married, have one kid and expecting another any day now, mortgage, two hungry cars to feed...all we need is a dog and we'd be the perfect TV advert family. I'm pretty hopeful about this - recent TV sci-fi has been very same'ish, and I'm looking forward to the different direction that Doctor Who took.
Cheers,
Ian
Sean Pertwee already ruled himself out a few months ago. He said he simply couldn't do it - he said he had very definite ideas about how the Doctor should be, the interviewer asked "You mean he was your dad?", and Sean just said "Yes".
All in The Metro, a London freebie paper picked up my a fair number of commuters including myself.
Cheers
Ian
True, but the point I was trying to make is that Quicktime isn't a codec. You can't 'just download the codec', because Quicktime isn't one. It's an API framework.
Cheers,
Ian
Quicktime isn't a codec, it's an API which encompasses a number of codecs. It can't be 'released for DirectX' because it's a coding framework, not a video file format.
Because Quicktime is an API, not a file format, it is easy to write a movie player. There are plenty of people who dislike Apple's player and have written their own - a Google search on "alternative quitime player windows" reveals a few.
Cheers,
Ian
Hmm. So how did it know that my second kid is due any day now, and that the first one is still keeping me awake by howling to the rooftops at night?
I'm convinced. No really, I am. Honest.
Cheers,
Ian
Yep, understood. Hope you understood that my post was too.
From my perspective, it's much more fun to date a rocking, cute, artsy girl (with eccentricities) than someone who's into pop music, raving, or saving manatees.
Totally agree. The mainstream can be pretty dull. I dated a girl with such eccentricities and what happened? She's now my wife and we're expecting our second kid any day now..
Cheers,
Ian
The question is...how do you deal with this kind of fan appreciation?
Cheers,
Ian
I enjoyed Good Omens tremendously. Is there any possibility of the two of you working on another book?
Cheers,
Ian
Better still, design it so that either device would work in either port. Similar to the USB or firewire ports - it doesn't matter which USB port you plug the keyboard into and which the mouse, either will work.
Cheers,
Ian
Fortunately, I am covered on three accounts - I use OS X on the client, I use Linux as a mailserver, and I run SpamAssassin on that server.
Bloody irritating though.
Cheers,
Ian
Reminds of a sketch on an old UK comedy series, The Two Ronnies. They had a regular sketch where a couple of tramps would muse about the world in general. Probably the best remember is:
First tramp: "If I were Rockefeller, I'd be richer than Rockefeller"
Second tramp: "How's that then? How do you reckon that?"
First tramp: "Well, I'd do a spot of window cleaning on the side..."
Cheers,
Ian
You'll forgive me if I don't exactly hang my head in shame.
Cheers,
Ian
I'd say that's quite an assumption. Were I coding this patch, for example, the IPs for which to return NXDOMAIN would be specified in a config. That config would be able to take single IPs and also ranges.
I wouldn't write this off as ineffective yet. We need to see what methodolgy is being chosen before we can comment on its technical effectiveness.
Cheers,
Ian
This complaint is regarding Verisign's recent decision to claim all non-registered .com and .net domain names for itself. It has done this by inserting a wildcard into the DNS registers, meaning an IP of 64.94.110.11 is returned for any domain name that has not yet been registered. That page is an advert for Verisign's domin registration services
This is unfair competition with existing registrars - there is no means for myself, for example, to gain a similar foothold without actually purchasing each and every currently unregistered .com/.net name. It is also a technical breach of trust - the internet is not merely the web, and unknown domains should return errors rather than constantly try to contact Versign advert servers. Non web-based applications, such as ftp clients etc., will now incorrectly log that they have contacted the host you asked for when in fact they should have returned an error 'hostname unknown'. The same for traceroute, ping...any of these will not behave in a manner expected.
I would be grateful if you could investigate this matter.
Yours,
Ian McCall
No back up. No studies. Nothing. These numbers appear to have just been dreamt up. If they weren't - if there's some serious data behind it, then why not just present the data?
Cheers,
Ian
Has he ever thought about a career in piracy? He'd make an excellent Dread Pirate Roberts.
Cheers,
Ian
If you're prepared to rely on electronics, then Quicken has a decent feature called Emergency Records for this. It allows you to record all your insurance details, your accounts and credit cards will already have the account numbers...a good place to centralise information.
Of course, on the other hand this also makes it a good place to steal information from. I've never seen an analysis of Quicken's encryption and password routines - might be interesting.
Cheers,
Ian
Yes. It is a pretty stable medium, but it's not perfect.
I have a pack of cassettes recorded with old stuff I wrote for a C64, 20-odd years ago, and even ten years ago they were already unreadable.
True, but what quality of tape? Standard C60/C90 stuff? The DV tape and format is a bit more robust than that. Also, you specifically mention the C64 - not using a D2CN are you (or was it DC2N?). They were pretty poor even with brand new tapes at a time when C64s were current.
As I say, it's not perfect - better would be the proper archival Exabyte stuff. It's better than nothing however.
But magnetic tapes do not strike me as particularly stable. Hard disks may be more stable than tapes.
I would have agreed with you about three or four years ago. However, I'm increasingly nervous of these the quality on these new high speed big disks, and you can see the warranty period dropping through the floor. Perhaps I'm being a luddite, but I don't trust them for long-term storage.
A tangential point is that you're always tempted to start using a hard drive for something else. "I'll just repartion and throw a distro on there". "Hmm...nowhere to put the data files from this app, I'll use the big disk"...that kind of thing. For archiving (as opposed to merely backup), the harder it is to modify the media the happier I am.
Cheers,
Ian
Tape. Back it up onto tape. Useless as an everyday access medium, great at archiving. Also, try to keep multiple redundant copies.
Well, it interests me for similar reasons. The site you're looking at there contains photos and some smallish video. They are backed up in a copy of the site at home, backed up in a copy of the individual media files on a seperate machine, backed up to DV tape (not the best, but better than nothing) and also backed up by my co-lo ISP nightly.
So...make at least three copies (live, on-site, offsite) and try to get at least one of those copies onto stable removable media, such as tape.
One last thing - make sure you keep the hardware and software around to read it. About twelve years ago I was involved in a rushed-job project to read some tapes and format the data. The reason? My employer at the time had brilliantly decided that they didn't need those old tape-reading machines that didn't connect to anything, and threw them away. Of course, when the contract came in for processing that tape format, as it did year after year, they suddenly found themselves unable to do a thing with it.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, there's my terrible spelling to contend with... However, tried the corrected spelling of remembrance, but still got no hits.
It's fairly marginal whether the web actually existed at this time. Can't recall the dates, but I know System 7 was just coming out as I attended University (1992 I think), and I remember playing with the first incarnation of Mosaic later on. Not sure which came first. I'd have expected some Usenet hits though but I can't come up with anything quickly.
Cheers,
Ian
Eventually, management's answer was presented to us in a meeting. They explained that, after surveying the market, they were paying us correctly. The said that the reason we could see the higher figures elsewhere was because everyone else in the world was paying too highly...
Oh, and they also claimed that we couldn't actually get these figures we read. My response was "empirical studies suggest otherwise", which got a bit of a look. I resigned within two weeks, and another guy I was at the meeting with resigned the next day.
Cheers,
Ian
Disclaimer: Haven't used pure Gnome in quite a while, perhaps some of the points below have been handled by now.
I hate the fact that the Windows taskbar reflects the order in which the apps are launched and then cannot be changed. If you're going to have a taskbar interface, then fair enough chronological order seems a sensible default. However once launched, I really want to be able to drag that indication to whatever position I want in the taskbar.
For example, at work on my NT4 box I have a standard set of apps open most times. They are Notes (ugh), two Firebird windows, Putty and a Remote desktop connection. Apps after that can come and go, but I want those apps always in the same place so I don't have to hunt for them later.
I'm also an OS X user, and although I'm aware of criticism of the dock there's certainly one thing to be said for it - your most frequenctly used applications always appear in the same place, both for launching and for bringing to the front.
As a quick aside - anyone else remember the Apple Human Interface Guidlines circa System 7-era, incorporating the Principle of Muscular Remembrance? The idea is that important stuff is always in the same place, every time, so that the user doesn't even have to conciously think about where to find things. It's the reason Macs have a single menu bar, at the top of the screen. It seems to me to also be a key thought behind the dock.
Cheers,
Ian
That's a shame - I really could be doing with that library working under OS X. Does anyone know of any plans?
Cheers,
Ian
I was taught by Ian Somerville - he's an interesting and very realistic person. One of the things he said to us was that in his class, he would tell us why the things we learnt in almost every other class were bad...
This was an exaggeration of course, but his basic point was right. Tightly coupled systems, even techniques such as recursion...not so much a HOWTO as a WHYTO avoid in reality much of what theory states is the most elegant solution.
I didn't take it in at the time, of course. I thought I knew better - that he was only saying things because people weren't good enough to use all these latest techniques that I, in my god-like genius, had mastered completely. Now, ten years later, I remember that attitude when reading code written by the latest graduate intake, someone who's read the Design Patterns book one too many times, or someone who proclaims we should dump all code in language X because language Y is obviously superior.
As your post suggests, Software engineering isn't about coding. It's about technique, and pragmatic technique at that.
Cheers,
Ian
For example, there's a huge boom in Symbian and J2ME devices with the new mobile phones at present. Could code for that - that can't produce the effects which take up all the time on a big-hardware gmae, but it can sill be extremely playable. Sort of back to the late 8-bit/early 16-bit stages.
The Gameboy Advance can use homebrew cartridges - why not have a crack at writing something for that? It's about up to the standards of the old SNES (I think it's identical except for sound channels, though I'm prepared to be corrected on that), and the old SNES had some truly brilliant games.
I'd suggest that if the cost of developing for one platform starts heading for the stratosphere, then look around for platforms that don't have that problem.
Cheers,
Ian