sutton050

Having a basic knowledge of Commodore Basic v2.0 I took to my A-Levels in 1994 and started to learn Pascal, both "Turbo Pascal" on DOS and "Personal Pascal" on my Atari ST. One of the first things I did, as most kids do is start to write a game, it was a 2D grid style war-game, 28x28 tiles to a map and maps stitched together, it was very roughly based on a table top game I had which itself was a dice & splice of the Guadalcanal Campaign of World War 2... Anyway, I had jungle, and grass, Desert and beaches, water and the tanks, and troop counters moved around, you could air-drop paratroopers into spots when you had earned enough points, and I last worked on it in around 1995 when I started to add Sound Blaster driven 16bit effects into it. But, I also needed tools, I was working on DOS, with no Windows - I didn't get Windows 3.1 until later that year - and at college the compiler only ran in DOS, to stop the compiler and loads Windows, then execute a GUI tool...

I came to make my sandwiches the other morning, and pulling open the brand new loaf immediately saw this odd shape on all the slices, which collapsed to an air pocket towards the bottom of the stack. It's a hard, dough smelling thing, quite unpalatable. I of course asked my colleague the former GBBO contestant Jordon Cox quite what he thought it might be... "Ewwwww" was his reply. The manufacturer of this particular loaf is yet to reply to my query, as it wasn't a cheap loaf I'll tell you that much.

Most of us are well aware of how much heat electronic equipment puts out, what can be less intuitive and harder to balance is the problem of heat from hard drives. Good organised machine operation, with clearly defined device usages, easy control of units across machines, sites or different customers is the key, therefore enter stage left a nice fat label to hold all the details of the unit. Except, this label acts as a heat blocker, reducing the surface area of the metallic or foil labelled drive as delivered, reducing the area across which the heat from the unit can dissipate, and even causing uneven heating, or heat wearing over time. The net result... For my project, a high mechanical drive mortality rate, which I simply could not explain, nor model or explain in the man lab. Only a trip to see how these machines were being employed sufficed to show the problem, label after label applied and reapplied, a drive on within a machine was untouchable it got so hot.  My solution, put...

You know that moment when you see this... And the mage rolls need.... Yeah, that's the kind of day I've had. More World of Warcraft topics to follow...

When you interact with someone, say face to face, you get to gauge who they are, what they're thinking, the subtle and many clues from body language, posture, intonation and even just where they're looking tell you an awful lot about how that person works, how they think, whether you agree with them. However, when you're communicating digitally, via e-mail or text, you loose this personal grip. One has to therefore rely on the face value of the information presented, is it spelt correctly, is the grammar correct, have they thought out the reply and addressed all your requirements from anything you sent them? In my case I am often asked things like... "What do you do to better yourself?"... "Or have you done anything of note recently"... And I'm asked by people who have read my blog, or CV, or just know me... And I often say "Have you read my book?... Have you read my Blog?" This kind of interaction puts me on a huge downer, why should I bot...

"Rather than get away from the concept of the password required completely, the password is hard coded as 'password'"... I literally just heard this statement, from a senior software engineer ten feet from my desk to another engineer as they consulted with one another about the system they are working on.  And I simply can't let it go... So here I am to have a moan.... The problem with this kind of thinking really annoys me, they could make passwords optional with configuration, meaning the option is present and supported.  They could remove the passwords altogether, as 'password' as a password is not a password at all, it only leverages an attacker to want to rip the soul from your data and scatter it to the four winds. But more than that, remove the password if it's useless code, don't complicate the system, don't exacerbate the effort to maintain the code. There are so many faults in the way this engineer is thinking I'm quite pleased I ...

Top tip... If you run a business... And print people invoices... Learn to count... Tip ends. This story is to be continued....

When I were a lad, I were taught to use flow chart stencils.... I was shown how to write data dictionaries, to thought-cloud through the possible data members for these dictionaries, to define the mutable and non-mutable points and abstract away the common elements between these definitions in order to design the code to be written. All pretty much on paper, before you sat before the computer. The reason being?  Paper was cheaper than electricity, and it took a long time to compile and recompile, and then even longer to debug, a program.  Bugs got hidden and only appeared when testing took place. And if a bug ended up in test, which could obviously have been caught on paper, long before it reached the coding phase, then you got egg on your face.  In a nice way, you all knew you had to do more than cut code. Unfortunately Moores law exists, a blessing, and a curse.  As I feel it's made the quality of software design fall, as people can afford to code and compile and t...