penguin42 @penguin42@mastodon.org.uk

Heck I love pigz(1) - it just keeps going faster

Good; we're (#manchester) still in Tier 3 after the current lockdown finishes; hopefully that'll keep the downward trend going - it's still a mess. I think only @wyliecoyoteuk gets to party.

I give thanks for most of my meetings being cancelled today.

Ah lunch time,. on first day back after a week off; inbox down to only 930 mails.

ricotta seems to work OK as a cheese-ish for cheese cakes; it's a lot lower fat than many other soft cheeses; but there again you can feel that loss of the fat though, it's not quite as good - but about half the calories of somehting like philly - meaning you can eat twice as much.

microarchitecture bugs still claiming some #security scalps (and this one is Power not x86): https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/11/20/3

#libreoffice's DocX export code goes through loads of units; 'twips' - there's 20 of them to the pt; then in other places 100th of mm's; and obviously converting between them. Then there's the places where it just redefines the coordinate systems as a window on the space of the layer above. This is all the VML subpart of docx, not the newer DrawingML that I've not looked at yet.

Today's skill: Replacing a drier belt; eSpares & DPD with next-day-saturday delivery on the belt and it wasn't hard to fit; the only tricky bit is you've got to make a gap to thread the new one around the drum; there's youtube videos but finding one for your model is tricky. Loosening stuff off creates a gap between the drum and front; threading on the motor/wheel is different on every model; if your old one snapped you need to find the video showing you how it is supposed to run.

Blech, last day of a week off and the tumble-drier belt goes and spent a couple of hours figuring out how to take it to bits to replace it; I guess we've got a couple of hours tomorrow trying to fit a new one. Sigh.

Having just spent days crawled through a seriously deep pile of code, ECMA protocol docs etc etc - I've found a trivial string bug.
One down....

I see C++ errors aren't getting smaller; a single typo in a std::cerr << line and I get 538 lines/55k of erros !

'Each shipper contains a GPS-enabled thermal sensor to track the location and temperature of each vaccine shipment across their pre-set routes leveraging Pfizer’s broad distribution network' wow - a potentially useful IoT

THe only problem with not having a Twitter account is that I can't berate the numskulls at #Sainsburys who sent a text to our landline number at 7am and who don't accept this is a bad idea when I try and explain it to their customer support people.

Hmm, maybe https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2020/09/14/leading-the-digital-data-and-technology-ddat-response-to-coronavirus/

I wonder if any one has thought about the IT needs for large scale double dose vaccination yet...I mean you're going to have to make sure that people get 2 doses of the same brand of vaccine, spaced appropriately; make sure they don't end up getting one of the other brands as well etc

Murphy's law example again:
'The immediate analysis concluded that it was a matter of cables being inverted'
Remember: If you can assemble something wrongly, someone someday will assemble it wrongly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54979753