Viewing profile — bobince

> Countless time wasted because the anti-virus or some other part of Windows locked a file. And the whole edifice of “you need to reboot to update anything” is a knock-on effect of…

OVH are putting up prices in the same way, with the same reasoning. (I don't know about storage, but VPS stuff I'm using is going up ~20%.) Used to be every VPS refresh cycle you'd…

Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.

Yes, they're originated by PayPal, but collected by a different original recipient and from there sent on to the victim. The envelope-recipient is not part of the material signed b…

Script running on usercontent.github.com: - is allowed to set cookies scoped to *.github.com, interfering with cookie mechanisms on the parent domain and its other subdomains, pote…

Yeah it's a thin layer over MSI tables, so if you don't already know how Windows Installer works then it's not at all clear how to do many seemingly-basic installer tasks. And few …

Ugh, a friend bought some similar device due to a misleading description of what the HD was. He'd tried to change the partitioning without knowing it was there; turns out if you ha…

It's to avoid vertical margin collapsing. The rules for margin collapsing are complex, counter-intuitive, and often considered misconceived. ( https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes…

Yeah Win32_Product is a disaster, even by WMI standards. The proper way to enumerate the Windows Installer database should be MsiEnumProductsEx. Except. If someone has monkeyed wit…

ReportLab can render gradients, but it's poorly documented. See eg https://stackoverflow.com/questions/452074/creating-a-gradie... I use the method with `canvas.clipPath(path, stro…

The Netscape of the 90s wasn't interested in making features ‘safe’. They were about throwing out features as quickly as possible to see what would stick. The simplest possible syn…

> So 20.04 will likely be my last ubuntu-flavored distro. I'm hanging on with 22.04 using the mozillateam PPA to get a proper deb firefox and it's working fine for now. If they sto…

The prevalent milk in Germany (originally promoted as “hält länger frisch” et al) is Extended Shelf Life (ESL). It's treated hotter than traditional (HTST) pasteurisation of the ty…

Flexible is a double-edged sword. `querySelector` is bringing in the added complexity of selector syntax, which is more stuff to think about that isn't relevant to what you're tryi…

The reason I run desktop Linux isn't because it has a particular feature I want. It's to get away from all the Windows features I don't want — bloat, bundleware, ads, telemetry, fo…

In the UK we have cafonline.org which works nicely for this purpose. Nothing similar in the US?

It needn't have been this tall. With the internal combustion engine out, Ford could have designed a lower, more curved, less deadly front end. Instead, they kept the high nose and …

Oh it's older than that, even. IE was always fine without the space. It was for Netscape. So, sure, maybe there's a good reason to want XML-compatible syntax. But Netscape 4 users?…

They don't even necessarily care about Windows support. Upgrade to a new version that doesn't quite work the same with the hacks in their cobbled-together drivers, and you're quick…

> Did Java applets actually have a JS API? Sure. LiveConnect was commonly used as glue to invoke and interact with applets from JS. I wouldn't necessarily say that it enabled a vir…

If this unacceptable mess is "doing it well", perhaps the whole idea is doomed and should not be attempting to do it at all. > It comes down to an argument of trust - do you trust …

I'm guessing Eidos's Optima video editing system? That was the last of the major RISC OS users as I remember it.

Very this. My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think…

Another '76. There was nothing in the curriculum where I was. There were computers dotted around the place run by enthusiastic maths, physics and design teachers, which occasionall…

At least being online means they can fix it quickly. (Until the next marketing update that adds a vulnerable script, natch.) Back in the IE5 days they had similar bugs in res:// (D…