jadavies

Beware trying to make linguistic jokes in another language. It's "popty-ping" which is slang for a microwave oven.

Seriously? I have to provide my personal details before I can find out what it costs to subscribe? WTF.

Looks good. However the sign up process takes far too many clicks to eventually get to "Select your subscription level" then I get:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Field 'tblUsers.UName' cannot be a zero-length string.

/-/db/registration.asp, line 136

Oh well I'll come back later

Oddly enough I was just thinking the same thing. From what I can remember every ( Android) app that I've ever installed has come from a recommendation from somewhere else. I can't see how you'd ever get any traction if you mainly relied on the app store search results.

There are apparently a couple of rail gauges changes necessary at the moment - https://www.railfreight.com/beltandroad/2020/01/30/four-ways...

I suggest that you don't read up on how penicillin was discovered then!

The BBC is reporting that both UK and Italian governments say that the doses were destined for Belgium. I haven't got a direct link, it's in the BBC's rolling updates.

That's an excellent channel for train ride videos. Mind you I would love it even more if they did one with a 360 degree camera at the front of the train!

> You cannot sell GPL licensed software

Wrong

A desktop tool to assist with planning a piece of writing using the book architecture method ( https://thefriendlyeditor.com/tag/the-book-architecture-meth... ) Uses GTK and is released under a GPL licence - https://github.com/john-davies/mapter

Problems / improvements are

* Improved Editor with features like search/replace and undo. At the moment the GTKSourceView component looks a likely candidate.

* A method of moving or swapping the contents of cells without a lot of cutting & pasting ( drag & drop? )

* There's also an annoying bug with the tree control drag & drop that I need to fix

I'm currently using it to try and write a novel. I'm about 35% of the way through and it works surprisingly well.

This absolutely.The good stuff is still out there but it's been diluted to homeopathic levels by the infestation of the "look at me" marketing crud.

... and that Mr Assange is how you skip bail with style.

Agreed although there are probably easier ways to achieve stable temperatures, e.g. a cellar.

The rest is definitely marketing hype. For remuage the sparkling wine bottles are slowly tipped from horizontal to vertical so that the sediment gathers at the cork end. The sediment can then be removed and the bottle recorked. There should be very little or no sediment in wine that's for sale.

Depending on your use cases OpenStreetMap may be suitable. For commercial use you probably need to set up your own servers but that can work to your advantage in that you're better insulated from random price hikes.

He's not detained and he's perfectly free to leave the embassy. When he does he'll be charged with jumping bail, something the UK court system takes a dim view of. After that who knows.

You make a good point about the ego thing. We had several enquiries from customers who would prefer custom development rather than make small changes to their business processes so as to be able to use off the shelf products.

+1 for the Lilypond documentation. It's very informative.

I use Frescobaldi ( http://frescobaldi.org ) for my Lilypond editing and find it pretty good.

Also FTA ... "We should note that BMW still leads if you include SUV sales"

Agree 100% and that was my philosophy as well. They key phrase in your comment is "when it doesn't appear to be necessary" In my experience long hours are rarely necessary and certainly not on a continuous basis. Simply measuring hours worked just degenerates into a pissing contest which benefits nobody.

Life imitating art once again - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clochemerle

( The BBC adaptation, available on DVD, is also excellent IMHO )

FTA: "I work on Chrome, on Windows, focused on performance. Investigating this hang was actually my job."

+1 for text only information. I investigated this a few years ago with the intention of auto-generating a news podcast for my train commute. The audio part never happened but I auto-created a text document and synced that to my phone every morning and read it on the train.

I used RSS and a simple home brew page scraper to fetch the data and compile the document. However this was a pain to update and I found that news sites didn't always manage their feeds very well.

I wouldn't mind resurrecting this project so are there any recommendations for open source web scraping software that I could try, rather than rolling my own?

It was, as well as the Automatic Train Protection (ATP) and Automatic Train Operation (ATO) systems. I worked on part of the track to train comms system of the subsequent Victoria Line upgrade which was also written in Ada.

I forget which compiler was used, all I remember is that it cost an arm and a leg!

Agreed, if I needed an alternative to Google Maps then OpenStreetMap would be my first stop even if it meant some work setting up my own server. That way you largely insulate yourself from random price hikes like this.

My recent experience in various parts of the UK and one trip to northern Finland is that the OSM is superior to Google maps anyway. And with something like OSMAnd it's trivially easy to use offline.

All good points. I would also comment that hobbies can be seasonal. My musical / coding hobbies tend to get more attention during the winter months when the weather is not so good. In the summer outdoor activities like gardening take more of my time.

We haven't had a hosepipe ban around here yet so it's not a proper heatwave :)

    >> - To provide mentorship to junior staff.
    > There's this thing called documentation ;)

Mentoring is somewhat more than telling someone to RTFM. A smart engineer who's willing to teach less experienced team members is extremely valuable. The people who are really good at it never see it as a bother, just part of the job. My experience is that it's not as effective with remote teams.

See also the story about the Zimmermann Telegram for more cable tapping shenanigans. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram )

If you're looking for FOSS then I've had some success with a combination of openMVG ( http://imagine.enpc.fr/~moulonp/openMVG/ ) and MVE ( https://www.gcc.tu-darmstadt.de/home/proj/mve/ ). In the future I also want to try openMVS ( https://github.com/cdcseacave/openMVS ) as an alternative to MVE.

I've written a few blog posts on this subject - https://theretiredengineer.wordpress.com/category/photogramm....

There's also a much more in-depth investigation here - https://pfalkingham.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/free-photogramm... - but not all the software being reviewed is fully FOSS.

I suspect that some people here have had to take software written by academics and convert it to production quality code. From experience it's a pretty thankless task :)