Aggregator

The Mail's Head of Travel Harriet Sime visits Lake Como in the off-season with her mother, and discovers why the starry lake region is best visited in the low season.

Scientists have identified potential sites for the UK's first 'direct air capture machine' (DAC) which would extract CO2 from the air and turn it to stone underground.

Olly Murs is a household name and has had an illustrious career in the music industry, but what do we know about his personal life? Here's everything you need to know

Brian Harpole - who was the lead on the fateful day in Utah when Kirk was killed by a single bullet - was asked by podcaster Shawn Ryan about the use of hand signals in the leadup to the shooting.

The President has touched down in 13 countries in the first ten months of his second term - a whirlwind international sprint that shows no sign of slowing.

Summers - who described the billionaire pedophile as his 'wingman' in emails released by the House Oversight Committee - will continue to teach economics at the Ivy League institution.

This is the heart-stopping moment a diver's camera was swallowed by a shark, giving viewers a rare perspective few will ever see.

The BBC have assigned watchdogs to monitor the Breakfast host, 50, after a formal investigation was launched into her behaviour, according to reports.

British brand expert Rebecca May has revealed the 27 passé lifestyle habits that indicate you're no longer ahead of the curve.

At the despatch box stood Shabana Mahmood, a small, penetrating bundle of consonants and tight vowels as she whacked out her plans for the immigration system.

A controversial new plan to reform the asylum system has been set out by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Here are its main points, and their chances of success...

The Kessler twins - a German entertainment duo who became famous both in the US and throughout Europe beginning in the 1950s - have died at 89 after choosing to end their lives together.

The 45-year-old FBI director's relationship with Wilkins has already come under scrutiny after it was revealed he used a government jet to watch her sing but now the FBI directly protects her.

The Government had previously set a target of clearing the backlog by the end of the year

UC Berkeley researchers working with Project CETI discovered that sperm whales produce vowel-like sounds embedded in their click codas, suggesting a far more complex communication system than previously understood. "It was striking just how structured the system was. I've never seen anything like that before with other animals," Begus, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor and the linguistics lead at Project CETI, told SFGATE. "We're showing the world that there's more than meets the eye in sperm whales and that, if one cares to look closely, they're not as alien. We're much more similar to each other than we used to think." SFGATE reports: With the help of a machine-learning model to identify patterns, Begus and his team combed through recordings collected from social units of sperm whales off the coast of the island of Dominica between 2005 and 2018. When they sped up the audio, removing the silences between clicks, they heard new patterns. They found acoustic properties that share similarities with two vowels -- a and i -- and several vowel combinations. "Before, people were looking just at the timing and the number of clicks exchanged between sperm whales, but now we have to look at the frequencies, too. A whole new set of patterns have appeared," Begus said. "Now, it's one of the most complex non-human communication systems we have observed." [...] Begus said the research only shows how much more we have to learn about whales' style of communicating. He is particularly interested in exploring how the system may differ for whales between regions and how whale babies learn to communicate in this way. Most importantly, he wants to understand the meaning behind the sounds, as a "window into whale thoughts and lives." The research was published in the journal Open Mind.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police and the press will be free to reveal more about suspects under proposed new contempt of court laws to prevent a repeat of the Southport riots.

The clue the fans think they spotted was in a photo from a recent post where the reality TV siren was wishing her rock star husband Travis Barker a happy 50th birthday.

One of the things that makes legacy code legacy is that code, over time, rots. Some of that rot comes from the gradual accumulation of fixes, hacks, and kruft. But much of the rot also comes from the tooling going unsupported or entirely out of support.

For example, many years ago, I worked in a Visual Basic 6 shop. The VB6 IDE went out of support in April, 2008, but we continued to use it well into the next decade. This made it challenging to support the existing software, as the IDE frequently broke in response to OS updates. Even when we started running it inside of a VM running an antique version of Windows 2000, we kept running into endless issues getting projects to compile and build.

A fun side effect of that: the VB6 runtime remains supported. So you can run VB6 software on modern Windows. You just can't modify that software.

Greta has inherited an even more antique tech stack. She writes, "I often wonder if I'm the last person on Earth encumbered with this particular stack." She adds, "The IDE is long-deprecated from a vendor that no longer exists- since 2002." Given the project started in the mid 2010s, it may have been a bad choice to use that tech-stack.

It's not as bad as it sounds- while the technology and tooling is crumbling ruins, the team culture is healthy and the C-suite has given Greta wide leeway to solve problems. But that doesn't mean that the tooling isn't a cause of anguish, and even worse than the tooling- the code itself.

"Some things," Greta writes, "are 'typical bad'" and some things "are 'delightfully unique' bad."

For example, the IDE has a concept of "designer" files, for the UI, and "code behind" files, for the logic powering the UI. The IDE frequently corrupts its own internal state, and loses the ability to properly update the designer files. When this happens, if you attempt to open, save, or close a designer file, the IDE pops up a modal dialog box complaining about the corruption, with a "Yes" and "No" option. If you click "No", the modal box goes away- and then reappears because you're seeing this message because you're on a broken designer file. If you click "Yes", the IDE "helpfully" deletes pretty much everything in your designer file.

Nothing about the error message indicates that this might happen.

The language used is a dialect of C++. I say "dialect" because the vendor-supplied compiler implements some cursed feature set between C++98 and C++11 standards, but doesn't fully conform to either. It's only capable of outputting 32-bit x86 code up to a Pentium Pro. Using certain C++ classes, like std::fstream, causes the resulting executable to throw a memory protection fault on exit.

Worse, the vendor supplied class library is C++ wrappers on top of an even more antique Pascal library. The "class" library is less an object-oriented wrapper and more a collection of macros and weird syntax hacks. No source for the Pascal library exists, so forget about ever updating that.

Because the last release of the IDE was circa 2002, running it on any vaguely modern environment is prone to failures, but it also doesn't play nicely inside of a VM. At this point, the IDE works for one session. If you exit it, reboot your computer, or try to close and re-open the project, it breaks. The only fix is to reinstall it. But the reinstall requires you to know which set of magic options actually lets the install proceed. If you make a mistake and accidentally install, say, CORBA support, attempting to open the project in the IDE leads to a cascade of modal error boxes, including one that simply says, "ABSTRACT ERROR" ("My favourite", writes Greta). And these errors don't limit themselves to the IDE; attempting to run the compiler directly also fails.

But, if anything, it's the code that makes the whole thing really challenging to work with. While the UI is made up of many forms, the "main" form is 18,000 lines of code, with absolutely no separation of concerns. Actually, the individual forms don't have a lot of separation of concerns; data is shared between forms via global variables declared in one master file, and then externed into other places. Even better, the various sub-forms are never destroyed, just hidden and shown, which means they remember their state whether you want that or not. And since much of the state is global, you have to be cautious about which parts of the state you reset.

Greta adds:

There are two files called main.cpp, a Station.cpp, and a Station1.cpp. If you were to guess which one owns the software's entry point, you would probably be wrong.

But, as stated, it's not all as bad as it sounds. Greta writes: "I'm genuinely happy to be here, which is perhaps odd given how terrible the software is." It's honestly not that odd; a good culture can go a long way to making wrangling a difficult tech stack happy work.

Finally, Greta has this to say:

We are actively working on a .NET replacement. A nostalgic, perhaps masochistic part of me will miss the old stack and its daily delights.

[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.

One part of the line will be closed for a full day this weekend

Researchers think SpaceX needs to revisit its resilience regime

Researchers have found Starlink’s efforts to mitigate the effects of solar storms can create degraded performance that persists for a day or more after geomagnetic conditions ease.…