ttj - Tom Jones

 It is not possible to post comments using the Disqus comments service. This is a coincidence, because posting comments is one of the things that the service is supposed to do.  In Disqus's own respresentations about their service, they do not characterise the posting of comments as a periphal item.  Rather, posting comments is at the core of what they do.  The other thing is serving up comments.  Posting comments, and serving comments.  So posting comments is about half of what they do.  Or don't do. What happens when you try to post a comment?  This:   The background is a high-definition video. This is one of the richest, most multi-media, most engineered error pages in the history of things not working!  If they had put a fraction of the work they put into the error page, into actually being able to post comments, their wonderful high-def error page would not be necessary. It's wonderful to live in a world where the quality of things not working keeps improving like this

In the previous article [0] , Easyjet had forced a password reset, and the email hadn't arrived. [0] < https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/12/easyjet-fails.html > In an attempt to get a flight booked, I created a new account.  At this point, their web site forgot everything, so I had to start again, entering all the flight details and extras from scratch. After entering the payment details, their web site failed to sell tickets in a new way: they claimed I was a "screen scraper": There is a form, claiming I can complete it and they will whitelist my IP address. The layers of incompetence behind this process are impressive.  Having failed to authenticate their existing customer, forcing an account reset that doesn't work, the customer goes and tries creating a new account.  At this point, they incorrectly think this has something to do with IP addresses.  I can just picture the retard office in which this all "happens". If you treat 100% of new custome

 I remember around 15 years I had an Easyjet account, and it was pretty easy to use.  It wasn't perfect, but it worked.  You could log in, book a flight, stuff like that. Instead of being for logging in and booking flights, Easyjet have decided to make their 2021 web site be for showing obscure programmer error messages, and forcing account resets for no reason by switching a workflow from web to email half way through.   At least Easyjet had the decency to just say "You need to reset your password", instead of pretending I'd forgotten my password, like some other web sites. Previous instances of web sites forcing resets by email just for the sake of it include spammers Uber [0] and incompetents TAP Air Portugal [1]. [0] https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/12/uber-spammers-glitches-annoyances.html  [1] https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/11/tap-portugal-web-site-fails-differently.html   An hour later and the password reset still hasn't arrived.  So I'm un

 Since testing positive for Covid on 2021-12-14, I've been isolating in hotel Novotel London Bridge . I've tested positive with my LFTs 2021-12-14, 2021-12-18, and 2021-12-20. I have a view of the shard.  Despite being in central London, and being able to see a lot of space, there is hardly ever a person in my view.  This adds nicely to the apocalyptic atmosphere. At night there is a cheesy light-show by the top section of the Shard.  Are they still constructing the top 15 levels or so, or is it supposed to be like that?  It's just  a frame, a shell.  With scraggy edges. I moved the furniture around so I could do yoga. Overall I'm grateful to the hotel staff, but it's not the slickest service.  It's not a mega-cheap hotel.  If I was running it, I'd probably do a daily package, going each morning to isolating guests. I told them I was positive, and duly got a paper letter under my door, a standard guest covid letter. My initial stay was for 5 nights.  I exten

prev:  https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/12/garsingtons-dumped-cars-and-parking.html I've found out that enforcement for parking in Pettiwell recently passed from the police to a council, I think SODC.  I'm not sure if this is the same as it passing from criminal to civil law.  I thought that happened throughout the UK in the 80s.  But this apparently enabled things to get moving on the enforcement front.  So it's possible this problem is in the process of being fixed, despite its vintage. The issue does seem to be more than just a parking issue, but it's possible that the pollution and safety aspects can also be fixed by enforcing the parking rules.  In summary: there are 15 vehicles. All except one or two are on double yellows, but for much of the stretch these are not visible.  Several vehicles have notices attached by parking enforcement, and possibly other authorities.  One has notices by a private individual.  Two are on private land and blocking farmer access.

 Multi-choice.  You're an airline.  Should you (a) tell your customers, at every stage there is flight info, their booked flight details including airport and terminal, flight number, etc; or (b) just put vague details like the city, and be ever so squidgy about everything, because you heard about being cool and minimalist. You're a business.  Should you (a) put all relevant information on the confirmation page from the web site where the purchase was made; or (b) the "confirmation page" can just say you've sent them an email, which may or may not arrive, sooner or later, subject to the whims of email, a completely different medium from the medium of the "confirmation page". The first question is a trick question.  The question says you can maybe seem cool by not bothering with things like airports and terminals if you're an airline.  But the correct answer is (a). The second question is a specialisation of not switching from web to email half way th

 Cars, apparently associated with Greenwoods scrap yard (GREENWOODS OF GARSINGTON LIMITED; Company number 08684758; registered office address 5 Orchard Road, Cumnor, Oxford OX2 9BL) are parked along Pettiwell in Garsington.  From memory, this situation has persisted for over 5 years with little to no effective enforcement. I write this article from a position of relative ignorance, having observed the problems and lack of enforcement over the years.  I don't know the history of enforcement attempts. Today, there were around a dozen abandoned vehicles on Pettiwell.  Most are on double yellow lines.  One appears to be on a farmer's land.  Several have notices of various types and vintages attached.  Some are falling apart; some are jacked up.  In all cases, there is a basic lack of enforcement. According to an Oxford Mail article from over a year ago [1], some of the vehicles are abandoned without Greenwood's permission.  In such cases, each vehicle will have a r

 In my mission to make an all-in-one debian 11 ISO, I switched to using a full mirror.  The content of the ISO seems to depend on what content is present in the mirror, but implicitly.  So I decided to get something working, and then start to pare it back. The output of this attempt is currently at [0].  [0] http://diso.oxix.org/images/debian-11.1-amd64-CD-1.iso In QEMU/KVM on my laptop, this boots, but then fails as follows: The text is: "Load installer components from installation media. Failed to load installer component. Loading apt-cdrom-setup failed for unknown reasons.  Aborting." This happened after it had happily loaded a bunch of other things, eg  It's possible it's to do with the virtualisation, but more likely the issue would repeat trying the same image on bare metal (to test). I can't see any useful info on virtual consoles 1-4.  The Debian installer is on number 5. Not sure how to progress this.  I used a full mirror, and did not have unusual config

I used to work in a team managing an authentication infrastructure.  It was based on Kerberos.  We went with the default session length of 10 hours.  The idea behind this default was: it's long enough for a work day including breaks, plus a bit.  When stuff stops working because the user has been logged out, they are free to log in again if they really want, but maybe they also appreciate the reminder, that it's time to go home. The world of web site timeouts, for online banking, or anything finance related, is different.  It's a race to the bottom.  How quickly can you kick someone off the service, and still have them sometimes to achieve the thing they logged in to do?  Because it might not be them!  So better limit the time the not-them has to do stuff.  Or maybe the them lets a not-them take over their session part way through.  So better log them out just in case. This is all the wrong approach to authentication.  Authentication should give a strong guarantee between t

At the risk of saying something very general, the late Christopher Booker used to love generalising the dynamics of phenomena into general forms with identified phases. For archetypal stories, depending on which, this may include a dream stage, and a frustration stage, and so on, for example.  Groupthink instances (in a book finished by collaborator Richard North, also coauthor of the book reviewed here) also shared a structure, having similar phases to each other.   And scares, too, have their structure, with their phases. Scared To Death pulls together a bag of seemingly-unrelated episodes, and presents each one with the following commonalities: the authors, between them, are knowledgeable about it, and the episode had the dynamic of a scare, in the particular sense defined by the authors in the book. I never thought I would be interested to read about the food poisoning scandals of eighties Britain, but my attention was held by this and many other topics. It is over a decade since I

 The current period will come to be known as The Great Retardation.

 Just when life was starting to seem like a long series of unsatisfactory authentication attempts, I went to download this month's Jaja statement, and the login failed. Either my credential management has gone to pot, or many companies have decided not to bother persisting passwords any more, saying something like "well they can just do an account rescue via email" at the meeting where they decide whether to bother. In Jaja's case, they recently rebranded from Post Office to Jaja, and everything changed, including the web site.  So may as well forget all the passwords, and force resets.  There is probably an assumption underlying their decision, that people are so bad at managing their passwords, that they aren't going to know whether they forgot it or the service provider forgot it, and account rescues are so much the normal flow of things, no one's going to care.  This is wrong.  For a customer who manages their login details carefully, it's jarring and

 I'm isolating in a hotel due to covid, so I thought I'd try having some food delivered via Uber Eats. I previously noted how my Uber (spammers) account was "temporarily disabled", along with disastrous basic usability issues, but the app continued to work:  [0] https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/12/uber-spammers-account-temporarily.html This time, it failed to recognise my password at all, forcing a reset via SMS+email.  Instead of giving an accurate error message saying they were forcing a reset, they engaged in the increasingly common trick of pretending the mistake was at my end, and making me pretend I'd forgotten my password by clicking on a link "Forgot password?", instead of just admitting they are forcing a password reset. Several SMSs and emails later, I have set my password, again, to what it was before.  It is now restored to a state ready for Uber spammers to forget it again, and force another reset, in the near future. Now, was this abou

 I just heard something like the following on BBC 1 in my hotel: the cost of living hits its highest level in a decade, as inflation to November reaches 5% If we buy the fiction that some inflation index measures the cost of living, then the quantity under discussion is the rate of change of the cost of living, not the cost of living.  As long as debasement ("inflation") is positive, the cost of living in this sense is always hitting new highs.  Only with negative debasement ("inflation") according to the index, would the cost of living in this sense go down. It's like someone not caring about the difference between distance and speed.   That was the headline.  In the main piece, they talked about "cost of living has risen", so okay. The other major issue with the statement, of course, is that whatever "inflation" index does not measure the cost of living, it measures the value of money.  As currency units are debased, ultimately through prin

With USB Power Delivery, something can look like a USB-C outlet, but not deliver the right many volts the device wants. I've noticed later generations of X1 Carbons work with a wider range of USB PD power supplies, but I think they still require one of the higher voltages, perhaps 15V or 20V.  Basic 5V chargers with a USB-C-shaped outlet can not power an X1 Carbon, even recent ones. The British Library's desk USB-C outlets power an X1 Carbon 8th gen, albeit at low power.  Connecting it with a 2m apple USB-C cable resulted in gnome desktop's battery icon changing to "I'm charging" after a couple of seconds.  It reported "7:20 until full (94%)", implying it can only just supply a net positive amount while the X1 Carbon 8th gen is running a light workload with no accessories.  But then it changed to "0:17 (95%)", implying a higher surfeit.  At least one thing now works: this. I did find a glitch, tho.  Connecting a device to the adjacent USB-A

 Do things work for other people?  I mean, they don't work for me.  One account or another seems to get disabled every day.  Today it's Uber. In Brazil, I met someone whose phone was always on 1%, because he believed it was a big waste of energy to charge it overnight, and he used Uber to get everywhere, and it seemed to work great for him. I, on the other hand, have had around 2 Uber rides, with bizarre pricing / payment issues on both, got loads of notification spam from Uber, have uninstalled the app as a result several times, found a weird Uber bug to do with adding a payment card, and now my account is disabled. For my first Uber ride, I selected to pay in cash.  It was a 4 hour ride.  I'd missed the last train to another city, and wanted a ride.  I guessed the Uber would be around half the 500 EUR I was getting quoted by a taxi.  I don't know why, but the Uber app did not disclose the price to me or the driver until we arrived.  It then showed a price of 80 EUR br

 gimp is "overpowered" for everything, and convenient for nothing, unless you know how to do it.  It does not have a discoverable interface.   When annotating screenshots, there are two main basics: blanking things out by drawing filled rectangles, and drawing attention to things by drawing freehand circles round them in red and writing "WTF". blanking things out by drawing filled rectangles Choose rectangle select tool, can be coordinates (2,1) from top-left in toolbox thing. Draw rectangle.  Choose color by clicking the front square of the color-selection squares, and select color.  Drag from color square to the selected rectangle to fill. drawing thin red freehand lines and writing "WTF"  This is the tough one.  Often, one selects the pencil tool, draws, and nothing happens.  If something is selected, it might be on a different layer, leading to this total garbage UI artefact.  So choose rectangle select, click somewhere (don't drag), then choose pe

 In Gnome desktop, a full-screen screenshot is printscreen, and to snap the current window, it's alt-printscreen.  Gnome desktop has many annoyances, so I tend to use to use fvwm. So far, I've managed to get screenshots working under fvwm using a program called scrot(1) , a shell script wrapping it, and a little fvwm config. scrot is packaged by debian, so installing it is no problem. The invocation to capture the currently focussed window with window manager decorations (borders) is, for example: scrot -u $HOME/scr/%Y-%m-%d.%H.%M.%S.png -b but the directory must already exist, so I wrap it in a shell script I put in ~/bin/screenshot with contents: #!/bin/sh set -e   DIR=$HOME/scr   if ! [ -d "$DIR" ] ; then     mkdir $DIR fi   exec scrot -u $HOME/scr/%Y-%m-%d.%H.%M.%S.png -b      To bind this to alt-printscreen in fvwm, I have this config in .fvwm/config : Key Print A M Exec exec screenshot   The Print means the printscreen key.  The A means any context, which in f

 You're doing something on someone's web site, and it actually seems to be working for once.  Then, suddenly, it tells you to check your email to continue.  You are no longer doing something on someone's web site.  You are trying to switch, from web to email.  You have to access whatever email address it is this web site tried sending something to, to continue the process. The problem is: email can take a long time to arrive.  The user may access it in a completely different way: on a different device, a different computer, at a different location or time.  It may never arrive.  There are many glitches with email, as it's flawed by design.  Many messages just never get thru, and are filtered out at some indeterminate point on their journey.  Often, a message is misclassified as spam, and ends up in the wrong folder.  Various user-agent misconfigurations can result in a message not being seen. By switching from the web to email half way thru a process, the service provid

 For years, google search results have consisted of links not to the result pages, but to google-based redirects. This seems like a strange choice by google.  They break all kinds of things, including the user getting the URL of a linked page from their browser.  I want to do this all the time.  One workaround is to follow the link, and then copy it from the address bar instead. If they put the correct URL for the link target, and added a bit of javascript to notify them for tracking when followed, this would work in over 99% of cases.  What extra are they gaining, that justifies breaking the copy-link-location feature, that is a basic way of how the web works (or could work)? Instead, they seem to have added javascript to incorrectly and deceptively display the right URL in the user's status bar, despite the real link pointing at google's own servers. In this example, the status bar is spoofed to say something under www.heathrowmedical.com, but the real target of the link is 

 When I launch a browser application, I would like one window, with one "tab" if the browser has tabs, on my homepage. Firefox behaviour is a long way from this.  For years, it used to display a stupid error message every time it was launched, apologising for not being able to re-open all the pages that were open when it shut. Now, it seems to successfully try to re-open all pages, which is much worse.  Umpteen windows, with umpteen tabs each, any logged-in sessions of course do not work.  What if the reason for quitting was to have a fresh start?  Then you have to quit firefox, and launch it again.  Annoying. Based on a web page, I've tried setting browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash in about:config to false.