A downside to coding
Phil Byrom joins our 'pessimism versus optimism in programming' debate.
'Surely John Hamling has it wrong?' he says. 'If he coded expecting valid values, it implies that he assumed anything else would be in error - which is a pretty pessimistic view to take. Conversely, he now codes for a discrete set of invalid values, assuming that anything other is all right - a much more happy-go-lucky approach to the situation.'
Phil's contention that John has become more optimistic by coding for all types of user-related silliness has at least caused an argument inside his own head.
'If one wished to be perverse, one might suggest that his interpretation of his increase in optimism as being the exact opposite is itself indicative of an underlying pessimism… but that would just confuse the issue.' Is he always like this?
Making a hash of things
The column on 'Contributions to the English language made by the Open Source movement' is yet to be written, with good reason. Anthony Kirby, at Sharp, provides this elegantly phrased message given to him by Mozilla.
In case anyone wants to write a patch, or whatever it is you do at a time like this, it popped up when he was asked to open a scalable vector graphics file: 'Opening #1,' it told him. 'The file "#3" is of type #2 (#1), and #4 does not know how to handle this file type.' So, what could be clearer. Usually this is referred to as #5, but he was dressed as a tea lady, and #s 6 to 10 were rewriting Beatles lyrics.
Hanging on the telephone
Digital hospitals are safe in our hands. 'Whenever I call my doctor for an appointment, I give my name which enables them to call up a screen to confirm my name and address,' says an indignant Mike Fleming.
What are you indignant about, Mike?
'Without fail, they then ask for my phone number. I asked them why they do not have my phone number stored. The answer: the number is stored on a separate screen. This system is installed in the majority of GP practices in the UK.'
We prescribe a course of common sense, but we don't know if you can get that on the NHS.
When it comes to a winner, we can work it out
'The contest is over, I give you the winner,' says Chris Pritchard, at Flexible Lamps. He refers, of course, to our Beatles lyrics competition. Of course, it will be up to you when we pick our shortlist, but here's the version of Here Comes The Sun that prompted this show of confidence: 'What's that strange hum? Sounds like our Sun/And I say, it's not right/Little later, an engineer is called for/Little progress, it feels like years that he's been here/He'll make it run, he comes from Sun/And I say, it's all right/Sun, sun, sun, up it comes/Sun, sun, sun, up it comes'.
It's good, but so is Alastair Muirhead at SDL International's Norwegian Wood: 'I once used Excel, or should I say, it once used me/It added so well, isn't it swell, pivots as well?/The Office assistant appeared and soon made me despair/It wanted to help me do things for which I didn't care/I sat on my chair, typing away, clicking OK/Then Paperclip said, you're in a mess, my way is best/It told me I wanted VLOOKUP and started to spin/I told it I didn't and clicked to put it in the bin/And when I pressed Tools, I was alone, Clippit had flown/So I saved my cells, isn't it swell, MS Excel?'
Sing along now. More next week.
Blink once for yes, and two for no
The machines are trying to communicate, they just haven't learned to speak yet.
'I just had one of my users contact me with a printer problem,' says Jeremy Vernon, whose user's Oki B4100 had stopped printing. Here's the weird thing: when he opened the lid and then closed it, a page was printed. After another open-and-close it printed the rest of the document. Jeremy couldn't find any problem that would explain this, so he called Oki tech support.
'Replace the toner,' said the Oki guy.
'Whatever happened to a warning message or even a simple LED to tell me to do this?' asks Jeremy. What other plaintive messages are Oki printers trying wordlessly to pass on to us?
Shifting times for keyboards
We have received so much mail concerning keyboards, we're getting behind with it. 'Why do we even have one Windows key, never mind two?' asks Martin Williams, at Powys County Council. On the other hand he has positive things to say about Shift Locks.
'Consider the Shift Lock key on the excellent BBC Micro. Pressing this key had the effect of holding down Shift until such time as Shift Lock was pressed again. The point? A 1982 example of what we now call accessibility: if you have only one hand, or have no arms and are activating the keyboard with a head poker, as many Thalidomide victims did for example, the whole concept of normal Shift use is a non-starter.'
Wrapped around your finger
We were foolish enough to make fun of the idea of a five-key keyboard, which it seems did exist. Andy Vaughan, at Albany Software, explains: 'Rather than one character per key, you pressed the keys in "chords" – that's "combinations" to you and me – to obtain the desired character. The idea was that it could be operated with one hand.'
He adds a link which preserves for posterity the chords, which were designed to be intuitive: 'How could anyone forget the key combination for "U" (little finger) after seeing the graphic of a hand holding a cup of tea with its little finger raised politely?' he adds. That's what the UK was like in 1982. See for yourself at www.nifty.demon.co.uk/odd/mw.
'One device I came across with this type of keyboard was the AgendA personal organiser,' recalls David Cartwright, at Korana. 'It was rumoured in the early 1990s that Mike Salmon, one of my colleagues in academia, used to write pub reviews on one of these things. He'd allegedly sit in a pub with a pint in one hand and his other hand in his pocket, typing away on the AgendA.'
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the IT man to come
Some of you have attempted to rewrite the lyrics of later Beatles songs, which have the advantage that they don't always rhyme, so you don't get stuck rhyming 'C Compiler'. On the other hand, they are more difficult to hum while you work.
One of the more successful entries comes from Laurence Mee, at Atkins Transport Systems, who has attempted I Am The Walrus: 'I use C as you use C but not VB and we compile together/See how they link takes more than a wink, see how they make, it's trying/Starting the debugger, waiting for the app to run/Errors are appearing/ throwing an exception/ Man, you been a naughty boy your code is going wrong/ I should have used CASE, they are on my case, I need more coffee/goo goo g'joob.' Phew.
Meanwhile Phil Smith, at that well-known centre of footballing excellence Total Network Solutions, attempts Helter Skelter: 'Well we start at the bottom and work up to the top of the stack/Then we stop and we search for that well-published hack/Then we find you're not patched… buffer overflow! Oh No!/Do you, don't you want us to crack you?/Coming down fast your systems around you/I'll tell you, tell you, tell you the answer: you should have done that patching 'stead of taking the chance, huh?/Servers falling... Network crawling... users calling... Ooooo!'
We note that the tendency of Beatles lyrics to finish with a hoot, scream, cry, etc, presents its problems. More next week! Keep them coming.
Out of Ctrl
A serious error in a Backbytes story comes to light. 'In Backbytes on 29 September John Ley said that a one-handed user could use the Alt-Gr key to perform the three-finger salute,' says Malcolm Buckingham. 'Has anyone actually managed to do this?'
We've been trying for about 10 minutes now, which is 10 minutes longer than we ever thought we would, and Malcolm has a point. 'I can just manage the span to get my thumb on the Alt-Gr and my little finger on the Del; there is no way that any of my other fingers can then press the Ctrl key,' he says. 'Is it my hands that are a funny shape?' See, you're trying it now.
Tea ladies and naughty knickers
Mark Anderson, at The College of North East London, tried to read his electronic copy of Computing last week, but instead got this message from his administrator: 'The site you requested is blocked under the college's filtering policy. It fits into the following filtering category(ies): glamour and intimate apparel.' Is it one of our tea ladies that has upset the filtering policy?
'Is the move to including "glamour and intimate apparel" in the magazine to increase the number of females in IT?' he asks, resigning himself to reading the paper version. 'Will you now be issuing plain brown covers so that I don't have to be seen in public reading it?' People have been doing that for years, Mark.
More mystery keys
Few of you are rushing to the defence of the Pause/Break and Scroll lock keys. The most commonly stated reason for keeping either would seem to be that they would leave a hole in the keyboard if we didn't have them.
Steven Oakley has a suggestion for Pause/Break. 'It can be very useful in halting the booting of a PC, to read those troublesome error messages that are sometimes key to a diagnosis,' he says.
Jonathan Allport, at CML Group, is horrified: 'Scroll Lock is used in the Unix world, where it will prevent unwanted screen updates while you're trying to look at something important.' We've missed the big story, he says. 'The real question is: what does SysRq do?'
We demand that the powers that be tell us.
Down down, deeper and down
We asked if your programming had become more pessimistic. Early results suggest the answer is ‘yes’.
‘Of late, I have been inserting error traps in my code that I know will never be taken,’ says Dave Jakeman, at Atos Origin. ‘They would only execute in the event of some preceding logic becoming impossibly befuddled. How’s that for pessimism? Is this something that happens with age?’ he asks, reflecting the attitudes of several readers.
We think it happens with experience. However, it’s not all gloom.
‘Cobol uses a very efficient test mechanism called Condition-name Conditionals (level-88s),’ says Malcolm Kayser, explaining how they get rid of all the stupid stuff by accompanying an IF statement with a NOT before the ELSE. ‘The last thing of which you could accuse Cobol programmers was being a pessimistic bunch.’
Indeed, an inexplicable optimism seems to be a condition of the job. More opinions, please.
More tea trolley dollies
‘We would like to celebrate our wonderful tea ladies who brighten the day,’ says Vipul Patel, at Fenland Council. So here are Kim, Mary, Sue and Maureen, proof that these lovely old traditions persist in this corner of England.
Keep sending in your tea ladies. Well, their pictures, anyway.
Another hard day’s byte
More Beatles lyrics. Terry Booth, at Leeds City Council, tries Penny Lane: On my San the users save a lot of documents/And other files of which I do not know the use/Then they give me grief and abuse/When they delete the same. Very strange/On my San the files only seem to take up space/They’re not scanned or read and never modified/But when I say they are for the bin/I am vilified. Then I sigh/Data pain. It is my life from 9 to 5…
This week’s favourite, though, and frankly a very strong contender for the whole competition, comes from Gordon Thackray. You can almost hear Cherie Blair singing it: When I get older, losing my mind/Will I still know how/O O one one O O one, explicit sign/Twenty five is Hex O one nine/If I’d been out till Octal two three/Would I still be sure/Binary one double O double O O/O is sixty-four.’
More entries please. Eight lines, Beatles song, your lyrics. What could be simpler?
You can’t kill off the trolleybus
The final final word on trolleybuses: ‘Anyone who wonders what all the fuss is about, and would actually like to see one and even ride on one, should visit the Black Country Living Museum just off Junction 10 of the M6,’ says Dave Pettitt.
‘They have a trolleybus in service to shuttle visitors from the main entrance to the actual exhibits. They also run a tram, so you can then see the differences.’
If you do, please, please don’t tell us.
Getting your fingers in a twist
The twilight world of the Alt-Gr key continues to inspire your fertile imaginations.
‘I am surprised that more people have not noticed that, in the world of the IBM PC, random keys of no obvious function are added to the keyboard at the rate of about one a year,’ says Peter Slegg.
‘Does anyone have a use for “scroll lock”, “Pause|Break” and “Num Lock”? Even with Windows they managed to add extra keys, completely forgetting what the point was. The latest keyboards are so packed with useless keys that they have started messing about with the layout and adding keys to the mouse.’
Peter also recalls the other extreme. ‘Does anyone remember that strange five-key keyboard that was once featured on Tomorrow’s World?’ he asks.
‘Which five letters?’ we reply, with an inkling as to why this invention didn’t catch on.
We Dig It, but not Eight Days A Week
We have loads of Beatles lyrics to get through. It would perhaps have been wiser to ask you to rewrite songs from a band that hadn’t written quite so many of them, but that’s our problem.
This week’s two: Gary Bartram rewrote Hey Jude as Hey spool:
Hey spool/Don’t tape it bad/Do a back-up/And make it clearer/Remember to archive it to your drive/Then you can strive/To make it safer.
And Neil Haughton contributes his lyrics to In My Life:
There are programs I’ll remember/All my life though some have changed/Some forever not for better/Some have gone and some remain/All these lines of code had their moments/With testers and friends I still can recall/Some still work and some are wobbly/On my screen I’ve debugged them all.
Both of which had us welling up with tears. Can you do better? Eight lines maximum, Beatles song, IT lyrics.
‘Is it just my impression, or did The Beatles suddenly become more creative when they moved to Apple?’ says Franco, at John Liscombe. Stop. We don’t want to get in the middle of that argument.
Stan reminisces about being on the busesv
The joy of trolleybuses, episode four.
‘I thoroughly enjoyed travelling on the trolleybuses. They were much quieter and more comfortable than trams, with less pollution than buses, and did not use precious oil (invaluable in wartime). In fact, they caused no pollution in towns – any pollution being caused by the increased production of electricity at the power stations,’ says Stan Higgins, who rode the buses between 1942 and 1947 when he was in Portsmouth. He reports that the wheel configuration was two in the front and four at the… why are we telling you this?
Others have suggestions for those interested in trolleybuses. Some are even printable. ‘I recommend a recuperation holiday in Latvia where this popular form of transport is widely available. Riga has enough colours and numbers to keep the most avid
trolley-spotter happy for days,’ says a reader signing himself only ‘Alun’, presumably in case his wife finds out the real reason for their romantic weekend away was to look at buses.
Meanwhile: ‘Isn’t asking people why they are interested in trolleybuses a bit like asking an alien why they have sex the way they do?’ asks Paul Warren.
A treat for the heart
We continue our tribute to that endangered species, the tea lady, with Claire Penn’s nomination of June, the tea lady at Heidelberg UK, here pictured with Lucas from tech support, who has done nothing to merit being pictured in Backbytes.
‘Not only do we get four cuppas a day, but we also have egg, bacon and sausage rolls in the morning and a selection of sweets and cakes in the afternoon,’ says Claire. This was taken last Christmas: Lucas now weighs 26 stone.
The wheel of fortune?
It has been a busy few weeks, so we apologise for missing one of the most important stories of the summer – that of Peter Ash, of Lawford in Somerset, whose GCSE science project was to make his hamster wheel into a mobile phone charger after his sister complained that Elvis (the hamster) was keeping her awake by spending all night on his wheel.
If you could find a way to use your co-workers in a similar fashion, perhaps you would be prepared to share your intellectual property with us?
Meanwhile, Peter was awarded a grade C for the project, and grade D overall for the course.
Upside down, boy you turn me
Here at Backbytes we like to think we’re at the cutting edge of technology, but frankly we can’t compete with PC World.
As Mike Robson, at Cleveland Cable Company, discovered, PC World sells some pretty advanced kit.
‘While browsing the PC World business web site for a 17in TFT monitor I came across this wondrous device,’ he says, directing our attention to the L1780U monitor as made by LG. Among the monitor’s features: ‘Image will automatically rotate with the screen, without additional software.’
