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Verity Stob's Big Fat Geek Yuletide Quiz of the Year Part 2
Note: Ms Stob claims to have sent in her only copy of Part 1 of her Quiz of the Year (The Questions) many weeks ago. However, nothing ever arrived here. But we do at least have the answers, so we thought we might as well make the best of a bad situation.
1. InstallShield Update Manager, which was yet again the winner of this …
Replicating DNA
Stob "Fans of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy are likely to react strongly to the announcement that Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer has been given the green light to write a sixth book in the series" - El Reg
"It's Marilyn, isn't it? You're the new assistant? Come on in and sit yourself down."
The religious affairs …
Verity's further education
Stob The story so far: I stumped up nearly £1000 for an OU computer course (M885 Analysis and design of enterprise systems: an object-oriented approach) and was surprised when the second piece of homework was based on a paper by Madanmohan and De' comprising, in part, plagiarised gibberish. I drew this to the attention of my OU tutor …
Stob latest: IEEE flags dodgy paper
For the past few weeks I've been trying to piece together an explanation for Verity Stob's extraordinary adventure in academia, published here on Monday. Why did the Open University set as a marked assessment for postgraduate students a plagiarized piece of garbage, then admit they hadn't really read it? Why had a prestigious …
Educating Verity
Stob It's my own fault. If you've told me once, you've told me a hundred times to ignore them. You know the sort of thing:
Bacheelor, MasteerMBA, and Doctoraate diplomas available in the field of your choice that's right, you can even become a Doctor and receive all the benefits that comes with it!
Last year, I fell victim to a …
How to be an instant Web me-2.0 developer
Stob Are you a Web 1.0 duhveloper in a rut? Is rich web codery passing you by in Internet time? Do you nibble on the ASCII Alphabetti Spaghetti of server-side processing, while younger, feck- (careful) and talent-less colleagues slurp the UTF-Eightti Vermicelli of client-side coquetry?
You do? I knew it. But don't let it get you down …
A reading from the second book of Codh
Stob And it had come to pass that the Sons of Kahn were, to make no bones about it, being flogged off.
For the Borland Leadership Team had looked upon the works of the Sons of Kahn, and had posed a question unto them.
And the question of the Borland Leadership Team was this: In what respect does your input enhance the four phase …
The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons
Stob It is time to wake up and smell the elephant in the room. Vista is struggling to achieve escape velocity. Microsoft finds itself the butt of an international joke, but does not seem able to get a grip. The issue of choice of platform is once more up for grabs.
Of course there is an alternative; a popular computing platform …
Doctor Who and the moody Dane
Stob Perhaps motivated by the desire to avoid type-casting, David Tennant is to take time off from television, to lead the RSC's forthcoming production of Hamlet. Your correspondent sneaked into early rehearsals.
Episode I. Elsinore. The guard-platform of the Castle. Enter HAMLET, HORATIO and MARCELLUS.
Hamlet The air bites …
Her Light Materials, Volume I
Stob 'So that's how I came to be mysteriously orphaned and, on my ninth birthday, just three years ago today, sent to work as a junior grader at the Ah-Poo! Toilet Tissue reclamation factory at Fort Wirth', explained Jo, our heroine, a feisty, scruffy and independently-minded young tomboy whose more mature, more feminine side we won' …
The art of software murder
Stob Only the guilty need be afraid
Did you ever try Paint Shop Pro? It is the most splendid of programs, a faithful collie dog of a program. Whistle for it and it bounces up off your hard disk, and licks your face, and gambols around all eager and excited and ready to play.
Design industry pros may swear by Photoshop, but that …
Programming with Marigold gloves on
Stob We were quite awestruck and overcome with jealousy when Wired magazine managed to get in that guru of the grated nutmeg, high priestess of the investment handbag, and archdeaconess of the artichoke salad to host its annual 'How to' issue.
Wired came straight out and asked Martha, who is photographed putting the finishing …
An unsatisfactory meal in County Antrim
Stob I say, "I could try ringing again."
R, my boss, wipes the raindrops off his specs to look at me impatiently, and starts jabbing at his mobile phone. I sit down on our pile of laptops and computer gear.
The Warm Welcome Hotel and Guest House, Ballylolly (seven bedrooms, three diamonds, three stars, and a lucky clover) is …
Hey Mr Policeman - this car is stolen!
I’m sure you’ve heard that old joke which contrasts the development of the car with the astonishing rate of progress in digital electronics. The story goes that if automobile technology had advanced at the same pace as desktop computers in the last couple of decades, we’d all be driving cars that can circle the globe on a …
In the beginning, there was the flowchart...
Stob Those who can, do. Those who can't, make those who can draw a picture
My first effort in instructing computers, about 30 years ago, was drawing a flowchart. Here it is as I remember it, albeit without the smears and crossings-out with which my 14-year-old self doubtless decorated the original.
A simple flowchart describing …
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Stob 'What if,' said a friend down the pub the other day, when the conversation was circling uneasily for take off at that tricky third round mark, 'what if those old Greek philosophers - you know, the ones that used to sit around all day gassing - what if they had had the benefit of modern social website software, like Facebook? …
Beyond the valley of the drolls
Stob There's another of those lists of supposedly amusing/sage/cute adages going around, bouncing from blog to email, accumulating fresh contributions and occasional edits and doing all the meme-ish things that memes do. This one differs from all the others that you have deleted irritably from your email inbox in that it includes a …
More fables for our time
Stob Fewer people than I would expect seem to be aware of the American humorist James Thurber's fine self-illustrated reworking of Aesop's fables entitled Fables for Our Time.
Thurber's stories, being written in 1939, lack coverage of the digital age. I therefore humbly offer three new fables as tribute to the master, and as a …
Absolutely SFW
Stob Before I start, please take a moment or two to identify your exits, in the unlikely event of the alarm sounding during this article. These are clearly marked with a blue underline like this (nb this is not an actual exit, but just a demonstration of what an exit would look like if this were an exit.
Do not click on this), and …
Unhelpful Microsoft help denies helpless millions help
Stob Here is a little contest, to which all fellow Windows programmers are invited. What is the API function LockWindowUpdate for? How might you use it? You are definitely allowed, nay encouraged, to use the official Microsoft documentation.
Here is the function description on MSDN, and here is the same documentation on the upgraded …
When Mercury went down
Stob Last month, Kiwi programmer David Harris officially threw in the towel. After 17 years, he announced he was ceasing development of Pegasus Mail, the famous, free-as-in-beer, email program.
(That Mr Harris subsequently retrieved the towel, now damp in patches and covered in other people's hairs, I will get around to in a moment …
Was that the 2007 that was?
Two article formats inevitably get rolled out at this time of year: the list of predictions for the next twelve months, and the answers to the seasonal topical quiz (which was printed in late December as a filler in the absence of any news and to enable us journalists to spend a few precious Yuletide days in the environs of the …
Yuletide Weblog roundup
Stob Ah, Christmas! When pubs fill up with inexperienced drinkers to the disapproval of regular sots, when lunchtime turkey sarnies get a blob of cranberry jam and are relaunched as 'Christmas dinner flavour' for a 40p premium, and when the moneyed middle-classes are not ashamed to be seen shopping at Woolworth's.
Ah, Christmas! …
Under Torch Wood
Stob FIRST VOICE No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own;
SECOND VOICE Ahem. Hold on there, Richard. Wrong script.
FIRST VOICE I do beg your pardon. My mistake. I thought you were Jeff …
Oh my Word
Stob Microsoft Office Word is a candidate for the world's favourite program, provided you accept BA's use of "favourite" as a synonym for "ubiquitous" (me neither).
One app may bind them all, but its users come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Here is the Reg's kut-out-and-keep guide.
Antiquary
The Antiquary refuses to …
Poetry in slow motion
Stob Thanks to the Beeb's correctly extensive celebrations of Sir John Betjeman's centenary, Betjmania is once more abroad and has conquered everywhere. (Everywhere? Well, as they say in the Asterix books, everywhere except one tiny village...)
In recent days, hooded teenagers have abandoned their accustomed role as shopping arcade …
Out of the (C++) loop
Stob Hi Verity, are we up for some more frolics and fun?
Nope. It's a spot test today. Using your neatest handwriting, write out a standard C++ loop on the nursery blackboard. No copying. This will count towards your final grade.
Joy. What brought this on? Oh, ok – gimme the chalk, let's get it over with:
for (int i = 0; i < …
House style
Stob I'm not usually a great one for American TV comedy, the cartoons excepted. But recently I came upon a wonderful thing called House, featuring Hugh Laurie as the eponymous hero, a consultant at a New Jersey hospital. Laurie is an effective counter to that arch-enemy of all American hospdrams, Doctor Mawk.
The first pleasure to …
Hexadecimal coinages
Stob All top computing publications should occasionally put out a glossary of new and with-it computing jargon, together with clarifications of expressions that have evolved with the new technology. Here is ours.
Architect: Any programmer who has specified a database, or a File menu, or even just the keys in a section of an INI file …
C++/CLI: a paradigm too far
Stob Microsoft has been firing off some big guns in support of something called 'C++/CLI'.
The Softies would really like to lure C++ users into the suburban programming world of .NET - the .NETscape if you wish. But their previous attempt in this direction, a system called 'Managed Extensions to C++' that was composed mostly of …
Skunkworks roundup
Stob Natch, the Reg is your first port of call for the low-down on all the big product announcements.
But today we're taking it one step further. As a special treat, we have a preview of some hot stuff that even the CTO doesn't know about yet.
++SatNav == SatNag
SatNav has certainly come a long way since the days when we watched …
Borland's Delphi goodbye
Stob And it came to pass that the Sons of Kahn, who dwelt in the valley of the Scotts, fell yet again upon interesting times. And their fortune did wax and wane, only with not so much of the wax.
And they did bring forth a version of Delphi called '2005'. But the users of Delphi looked upon it with scorn, for it was a stinker. And …
The unbearable not-rightness of Bitesize
Stob Letters We received a shed load of emails in response to our jibes at the BBC's Bitesize website for GCSE sufferers.
Many came forward to explain the site's use of the term 'ICT' instead of the more usual 'IT'. Andrew Field, Head of ICT at a secondary school in Cambridgeshire, writes
We do have to call the subject ICT at …
Good enough for kids
Stob Sitting watching telly, a BBC trailer for its Bitesize GCSE revision programme caught my eye. This is an adjunct to the BBC website, a sort of punishment block, where young shavers are encouraged to swot up for their oncoming exams. What, I wondered idly, were our youngsters being taught about our own, dear trade? How had things …
Catch as catch can
Stob Exception handling is a comparative newcomer to the programmer’s toolset.
The mighty for loop, the enigmatic if statement and the cheeky little counter increment have been with us since the first automatic languages bubbled to the surface of the primordial programming bog at Manchester, more than half a century ago. But, …
Candid Dalek shares thesp titbits
Stob Do you remember, earlier in the year, there was an episode of Doctor Who where the Dalek stuck its sink plunger through a computer screen and downloaded the entire internet? And then went on to commit suicide?
(The Doctor, who inclines towards complex and indeed Lamarckian explanations, diagnosed its depression as being caused …
Data transfer without tears
Stob Ms Stob claims that old comedy sketches, written in the pre-PC era, need to be ported to a safe, modern and familiar environment in order properly to be enjoyed by safe, modern and familiar IT staff. She offers this classic example…
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Thanks for that, Peter. Excellent. An excellent meeting. I look forward to pushing forward …
Stob: Dylan Beard is not weird
Stob There was a rare opportunity to meet Dylan Beard in person today when, flanked by a brace of spear-carriers, he brought his campaign to reimplement the 'Wron number to London.
For all its supposed iconoclastic nature, the Free Number Association was rather conventional in its approach to publicity. We met at the traditional …
Stob: Pirated 'Wron number yours for free
Stob It's been a bad week for beleaguered, bedraggled and be-loathed Softwron chief Rock McDosh. On Monday it was admitted that the 'Wron number had been let loose on the Internet; today comes the news that Dylan Beard of the Free Number Association has already made an imitation of the nefariously nicked number and plans to give it …
Stob: Number patents Euro-endorsed
Stob Strasbourg. Jean-Paul Le Cliché, Euro commissioner for regulation and commerce, has announced - as predicted in The Reg - that the new US extension of patents to integers will be incorporated into EC law.
"This change will come as an element from a greater unit from measurements from reform from patent than we have now at …
Stob: McDosh hires Titbits
Stob Stob Dateline: Two hours 37 minutes ago. US software and litigation giant Softwron Inc, has upped the stakes in the battle of its patented 'Wron number, recently stolen and released onto the 'Net.
Before a packed press conference of cynical reporters who giggled and took bets on how many times he would say "going forward", much …
Stob: Softwron number stolen
Stob Pioneering patentee and litigator Softwron Inc admitted today that its infamous so-called 'Wron number (see El Reg passim) has been stolen and made available on the Internet, "where just anybody can download it and use it".
The theft was discovered late last night, when the employee assigned to look after the number found the …
