Aggregator

The Essex Wedding Awards have revealed the county’s favourite wedding venues of the year, from historic houses to barns and boutique hotels.

Cast your mind back to last year's general election . Do you remember Rishi Sunak telling anyone who would listen that Labour was planning big tax rises?

Britney Spears has slammed ex-husband Kevin Federline over his upcoming memoir, accusing him of 'gaslighting' her, and lashed out at their sons in a scathing new post.

Former No 10 aide Dominic Cummings said on Wednesday that the communist superpower stole 'vast amounts' of material, including some with the highest security classification.

Windows 10 is the least of some people's problems

Windows 10's free support has shuffled off this mortal coil for most customers – but that's merely the headline act in Microsoft's October support massacre. Older versions of Office and Windows Server have also been shown the door.…

Researchers at Queen Mary University London have revealed seven ways to tell if your headaches, tiredness and forgetfulness are signs of a brain tumour.

Once common choices are slipping in popularity

CCTV footage shows Axel Schwan courageously giving chase to a thief who brazenly stole the luxe piece from the businessman on New Bond Street in Mayfair.

Scientists from Spain and China have successfully repaired the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer's-model mice, enabling the brain to naturally clear amyloid-beta plaques and reverse cognitive decline. "After just three drug injections, mice with certain genes that mimic Alzheimer's showed a reversal of several key pathological features," adds ScienceAlert. From the report: Within hours of the first injection, the animal brains showed a nearly 45 percent reduction in clumps of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The mice had previously shown signs of cognitive decline, but after all three doses, the animals performed on par with their healthy peers in spatial learning and memory tasks. The benefits lasted at least six months. These preclinical results don't guarantee success in humans, but they're an encouraging start, which the authors say "heralds a new era" in drug research. "The therapeutic implications are profound," claim the international team of researchers, co-led by scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the West China Hospital Sichuan University (WCHSU). The findings have been published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Diane Keaton's cause of death has been revealed just days after her passing at the age of 79 on October 11.

Sir Keir was accused of piggybacking on the breakthrough after he headed to Egypt for a signing ceremony on Monday.

These four giant sumo wrestlers recreated the iconic image of the Beatles on Wednesday as they took in the sights of London before competing at the Royal Albert Hall.

The group said the memorial plaque would "commemorate the lives lost"

A pile of logs next to a log burner caught alight last night at a flat fire in a town high street.

We all know the perils of bad date handling, and Claus was handed an annoying down bug in some date handling.

The end users of Claus's application do a lot of work in January. It's the busiest time of the year for them. Late last year, one of the veteran users raised a warning: "Things stop working right in January, and it creates a lot of problems."

Unfortunately, that was hardly a bug report. "Things stop working?" What does that even mean. Claus's team made a note of it, but no one thought too much about it, until January. That's when a flood of tickets came in, all relating to setting a date.

Now, this particular date picker didn't default to having dates, but let the users pick values like "Start of last month", or "Same day last year", or "Same day next month". And the trick to the whole thing was that sometimes setting dates worked just fine, sometimes it blew up, and it seemed to vary based on when you were setting the dates and what dates you were setting.

And let's take a look at one example of how this was implemented, which highlights why January was such a problem:

startDate = startDateString == "Start of last month" ? new DateTime(today.Year, today.Month-1, 1) : startDate;

They construct a new date out of the current date, by subtracting one from the Month of the current date. Which would never work for January.

And this pattern was used for all of their date handling. So "Same Day Next Month" worked fine- unless the current date was near the end of January, since they just added one to the month. Of course, "Same day next year" blows up on February 29th. And "Same day next/last week" works by adding or subtracting 7 from the day, which does not play nicely with month boundaries.

The fix was obvious: rewrite all of the code to do proper date arithmetic. The nuisance to the whole thing was that there were just a lot of "default" date arrangements that the software supported, so it was a surprising amount of effort to fix. And, given the axiom that "every change breaks somebody's workflow", there were definitely a few users who objected to the fixes- they were using the broken behavior as part of their workflow (and perhaps an excuse for why certain scheduling arrangements were "forbidden").

As a bonus complaint, I will say, I don't love the use of string literals to represent the different kinds of operations. It's certainly not the WTF here, but I am going to complain about it anyway.

[Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

Many of Hollywood's most elite failed to impress with their bizarre outfit choices for the fashion event.

Lots of people have shown an interest in the red ribbon design

Sensitive information on MPs, China-related government policies and the 'inner workings of the British political system' were allegedly passed on by parliamentary researcher Chris Cash.

There were long delays

Here is what I saw when Sir Keir Starmer, MP, KC, PM, rose to his hind legs to try to ambush Kemi Badenoch on the Jonathan Powell-'China spying' affair.