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Staff at BBC Studios Events Productions, who organise coverage of State events, such as the Queen's funeral, are being axed to save cash.

Every doctor will know the moment. The appointment is drawing to a close, the patient is gathering their things, and then they pause. They clear their throat. 'While I'm here, Doctor...' they say.

Tope Olawoyin shared a series of social media messages claiming the arson attack in Golders Green, north London , was 'done by a fellow Jew'.

Keir Starmer is meeting bosses from the energy, shipping and financial services sectors amid mounting alarm at the fallout for Brits.

Aston Martin's new road-legal Valhalla 217mph hyper car has arrived - and it will set deep-pocketed buyers back £1million. Ray Massey reviews it on and off track.

Rachel Reeves last week ruled out blanket measures to help families cope with the energy emergency triggered by the war in Iran.

Apple's 50th anniversary is this week — and Fast Company's Harry McCracken just published an 11,000-word oral history with some fun stories from Apple's earliest days and the long and winding road to its very first home computers: Steve Wozniak, cofounder, Apple: I told my dad when I was in high school, "I'm going to own a computer someday." My dad said, "It costs as much as a house." And I sat there at the table — I remember right where we were sitting — and I said, "I'll live in an apartment." I was going to have a computer if it was ever possible. I didn't need a house. Woz even remembers trying to build a home computer early on with a teenaged Steve Jobs and Bill Fernandez from rejected parts procured from local electronics companies. Woz designed it — "not from anybody else's design or from a manual. And Fernandez was one of those kids that could use a soldering iron." Bill Fernandez: The computer was very basic. It was working, and we were starting to talk about how we could hook a teletype up to it. Mrs. Wozniak called a reporter from the San Jose Mercury, and he came over with a photographer. We set up the computer on the floor of Steve Wozniak's bedroom. Well, the core integrated circuit that ran the power supply that I built was an old reject part. We turned on the computer, and the power supply smoked and burnt out the circuitry. So we didn't get our photos in the paper with an article about the boy geniuses. But within a few years Jobs and Wozniak both wound up with jobs at local tech companies. Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell remembers that Steve Jobs "wasn't a good engineer, but he was a great technician. He was pristine in his ability to solder, which was actually important in those days." Meanwhile Allen Baum had shared Wozniak's high school interest in computers, and later got Woz a job working at Hewlett-Packard — where employees were allowed to use stockroom parts for private projects. ("When he needed some parts, even if we didn't have them, I could order them.") Baum helped with the Apple I and II, and joined Apple a decade later. Wozniak remembers being inspired to build that first Apple I by the local Homebrew Computing Club, people "talking about great things that would happen to society, that we would be able to communicate like we never did [before] and educate in new ways. And being a geek would be important and have value." And once he'd built his first computer, "I wanted these people to help create the revolution. And so I passed out my designs with no copyright notices — public domain, open source, everything. A couple of other people in the club did build it." But Woz and Jobs had even tried pitching the computer as a Hewlett-Packard product, Woz remembers: Steve Wozniak: I showed them what it would cost and how it would work and what it could do with my little demos. They had all the engineering people and the marketing people, and they turned me down. That was the first of five turndowns from Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and I had to go into business on our own. In the end, Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 6 remembers witnessing Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne the signing of Apple's founding contract, "which is pretty funny, because I was 15 at the time." And it was Allen Baum's father who gave Wozniak and Jobs the bridge loan to buy the parts they'd need for their first 500 computers. After all the memories, the article concludes that "Trying to connect every dot between Apple, the tiny, dirt-poor 1970s startup, and Apple, the $3.7 trillion 21st-century global colossus, is impossible." But this much is clear: The company has always been at its best when its original quirky humanity and willingness to be an outlier shine through. Mark Johnson, Apple employee No. 13: I was in Cupertino just yesterday. It's totally different. They own Cupertino now. Jonathan Rotenberg, who cofounded the Boston Computer Society in 1977 at age 13: People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive... Mike Markkula, the early retiree from Intel whose guidance and money turned the garage startup into a company: The culture mattered. People were there for the right reasons — to build something transformative — not just to make money. That alignment produced extraordinary results... Steve Wozniak: Everything you do in life should have some element of joy in it. Even your work should have an element of joy... When you're about to die, you have certain memories. And for me, it's not going to be Apple going public or Apple being huge and all that. It's really going to be stories from the period when humble people spotted something that was interesting and followed it I'll be thinking of that when I die, along with a lot of pranks I played. The important things.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Angela's team hired someone who was "good" at SQL. When this person started, the team had some regular jobs which ran in the mornings. The jobs were fairly time consuming, and did a lot of database IO. When their current database person left for another job, they hired someone who had a "good grasp" on SQL. We'll call him Barry.

Barry started out by checking the morning jobs every day. And over time, the morning jobs started getting slower and slower. That was a concern, but Barry swore he had it under control. Barry did not share that a handful of slow queries- queries which took three or so minutes to run- had suddenly started taking 75+ minutes to run. Barry didn't think about the fact that a little time with the query planner and some indexes could have probably gotten performance back to where it should have been. Barry saw this problem and decided: "I'll write a Python script".

import time from datetime import datetime, timedelta import pytz # for time zone current_date = datetime.now() day_number = current_date.weekday() # integer value: 0 is Monday hub_1_ready = False hub_2_ready = False hub_1_results = [] hub_2_results = [] job_ran_later = False # If this job is manually run later in the day, avoid sending a "both hubs failed" email # Monday (day_number 0) runs later than the other 6 days if day_number == 0: end_time = datetime.strptime("08:30", "%H:%M") end_time = end_time.time() # get just the time portion else: end_time = datetime.strptime("07:30", "%H:%M") end_time = end_time.time() # get just the time portion # If this job is run later in the day than the normaolly scheduled time if datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Central')).time() > end_time: job_ran_later = True # Starting when Morning jobs are scheduled to kick off, check for completion of both hubs every 3 minutes until end_time. If both hubs are not a Success by end_time, an email is sent while datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Central')).time() < end_time: h1 = session.sql("SELECT LOG_STATUS FROM PROD_CTRL.CTRL.DRB_EXECUTION_LOG WHERE LOG_PROJECT = 'SRC_PROD_1' AND date(log_start_date) = current_date AND date(LOG_END_DATE) = current_date").take(1) hub_1_results = [] hub_1_results.append(h1) if str(hub_1_results[0]) == "[Row(LOG_STATUS='SUCCESS')]": hub_1_ready = True h2 = session.sql("SELECT LOG_STATUS FROM PROD_CTRL.CTRL.SRC_EXECUTION_LOG WHERE LOG_PROJECT = 'SRC_PROD_2' AND date(log_start_date) = current_date AND date(LOG_END_DATE) = current_date").take(1) hub_2_results = [] hub_2_results.append(h2) if str(hub_2_results[0]) == "[Row(LOG_STATUS='SUCCESS')]": hub_2_ready = True # If both hubs are Success, then break out of while loop, even if it's not end_time yet if hub_1_ready == True and hub_2_ready == True: break time.sleep(180) # Sleep for 3 minutes before trying again if not hub_1_ready and not hub_2_ready and job_ran_later == False: message = "Neither Hub_1 nor Hub_2 finished in time for Morning jobs." context.updateVariable('METL_MESSAGE', message) raise ValueError("send email: "+message) elif hub_1_ready == False and hub_2_ready == True: message = "Hub_1 did not finish in time for Morning jobs." context.updateVariable('METL_MESSAGE', message) raise ValueError("send email: "+message) elif hub_1_ready == True and hub_2_ready == False: message = "Hub_2 did not finish in time for Morning jobs" context.updateVariable('METL_MESSAGE', message) raise ValueError("send email: "+message) elif job_ran_later == True: message = "This job was run manually later in the day. Check that both Source hubs have completed. If you did not run this job, you can probably ignore this email." context.updateVariable('METL_MESSAGE', message) raise ValueError("send email: "+message)

I don't particularly like any of this. Some of it is just little ugliness, like the fact that job_ran_later and the closing if statements could be written to be much more clear. Or the way that, after our main while loop, which we'll come back to, we compare boolean variables against boolean literals.

The core of it is the while loop, which checks the current time, and while it's before the target end time, it runs a pair of queries. For each query it runs, it empties an array, then append the results (which we know is only one value, because they take(1)) to the array. Then they check the first element of the array against an expected string.

Why the arrays? Who knows. Perhaps at one point they thought they'd keep the results from multiple iterations, then decided against it. Why do the check against the string in the Python code and not the query? No idea, but maybe I don't have a "good grasp" of SQL. That said, with my bad grasp, I'm pretty sure I could figure out how to do all that in one single query and not two that are almost identical.

In any case, if we don't see what we want in the database, we sleep for three minutes, then try again.

At the end of the process, we check what happened and output messages and raise exceptions based on what we did see in the database.

It's also worth noting that Angela's team used a pretty reasonable job management system. All of their other scripts doing similar jobs didn't include retry logic inside themselves- they just failed. That let the job runner decide whether or not to retry, and that allowed all sorts of valuable configuration options that are more fine grained than "sleep for 3 minutes".

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When it comes to generating a high and growing income, investment trusts have a couple of superpowers.

Dante Valentín Bermudes Rumi was rushed to hospital after being found struggling to breathe. He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival despite desperate efforts by medics to save him.

Public policy professor says it will make America less secure but hits Netgear’s lobbying goals

The United States’ ban on foreign-made SOHO routers won’t improve security, and only makes sense as “industrial policy disguised as cybersecurity,” according to Milton Mueller, Professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Public Policy and founder of its Internet Governance Project.…