YEP!!!! I'm also working on a project that includes a large number of French folks, and damn I've been sat twiddling my thumbs for most of the last 2 weeks, and probably the next 4 too. 😂😂😂😂😂😂

on holiday apparently. :-) (I've just been told in the last couple of hours)

Funny enough, I find myself asking this EXACT same question this morning. I checked in on a start-up project I'm part of, and noted an eMail from the "Cellular Modem" developer we have working out the AT commands required to talk to MS-Azure. Over the course of the past 3 weeks, I personally have built and put in place a modem framework in our IoT application code base. I have provided EVERYTHING needed from turning certificates into byte arrays, and providing methods to load, unload them, I have provided a comprehensive framework that allows AT strings to be sent to and the answers received back from the modem easily. I have EVEN compiled that code into a PC/X86 library and with the aid of a console mode program running under visual studio, it can be used to send and receive AT commands, work with certificates and everything else needed, using exactly the same API on a PC, with the modem connected via a USB to serial cable. The "Modem Developer" has spent all day last Friday, making his OWN serial cable for the modem board, writing a Python library to drive that serial cable using his own Python based "development tools", and he has made a new python test suite that allows him to send string to the modem, get the answers back, and hit a button to make the python code generate new C code that interfaces with my API. When asked why... "Beacuse I find it easier", came his answer... :-S So it was easier for him to build an entirely new Python layer on top of the work I'd already done, instead of just typing in AT strings into a console mode app in V-Studio and hitting Ctrl+Alt+B to compile it, then F5 to run it??? I really, really, really just don't get it either. If I was starting from scratch on a PC, and doing this testing then yes, maybe... but I'd still use the standard serial access libs, and an already provided USB to Serial cable (Which we provided to him in the box with the modem board), I wouldn't take an FT232H write my own user mode WinUSB driver for it, invent my own protocol, wire it up to a MAX232 so I could connect to a normal RS232 9PIN connector, then write my own framework around it, then write a code generator to generate C code on top of that!! That's just plain madness. So yes, sigh.... I find myself asking the same question.

And this hear in is the very reason WHY I will not buy in to the subscription economy!! I got caught out once by Amazon AWS (Well the startup I was part of at the time did...) and Amazon happily took $19,000 of the start-up's money (That later turned out to be something that was their fault) and we had a hell of a time getting it back. I simply do not trust companies that want to have a "tap" connected to your funds before you can even trial anything, because it's all just insidious attempts to take money from you as and when they feel like it. It's quite basically, legalised robbery. "But what happens if you use more of a thing than you've paid for, how will we ever recoup our monies then?" Um, no that's really very simple. YOU OWN THE RESOURCE. when my credit runs out, you turn that resource off until I give you some more money. pretty simple concept, web hosting companies have been doing it for years. When my credit runs out on my linode server, it gets deactivated, the few things I do have turned on (Like my excessive bandwidth charge), they send me an invoice for if it goes over.... and take me to court if I don't pay it. Why should cloud services be any different? From a recent discussion I had with a plugin provider for SketchUp that I use: ME: "Hi, I'd like to upgrade to the latest version please, I have V1 and I see that V2 is released" THEM: "yea sure, what's your account login name?" ME: "Account? I don't have one, I paid for this about 4 years ago, gave you my pay-pal, you took payment and sent me the plug-in electronically" THEM: "oh I see... yea we don't do that any more, you have to have an account with us." ME: "Why? SketchUp is not an online thing, well at least not the pro desktop version I use anyway, I'd like to just buy the upgrade and then go install it on my offline laptop" THEM: "sorry, the machine you use it on has to be online!" ME: "Why?" THEM: "because that's how we do things now." ME: "that's silly, the SketchUp pro app is still desktop based, works without being online, and I like it that way because I often have to take my laptop and go out in the field to use it." THEM: "we wrote the new version so that it always checks if it's licensed when you start the app up, it won't work if your not online" ME: "ok, I guess I understand that, what if I create an account, buy my plugin, register it then close my account." THEM: "that won't work the

Yea, I seem to recall at the time. Can't remember what I wrote though, and my own archives don't appear to have anything in them. :-) Definitely very familiar though.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Give them time.

Was ASPAliance ever a big thing? I ask because I'm sure I've written paid articles for that site in the past. Just rings a bell with me somewhere.

Yup, our local store had many of those positions available when the new store first opened in the town where I live. Another common name was also advertising at the time for coffee related artistry and technical based positions... I wonder how long it's going to be before we see adverts for "Burger & Fries Engineers..."

It happened a LOT in the UK in the late 80's to mid 90's but back then it wasn't "engineer" that was the thing it was "technician". I was a Computer Kid of the 1980's UK, Grew up with home computers that where primitive by todays standards, Sinclair ZX80/81, Commodore C16+4, Vic 20 and eventually onto the Acorn Machines, BBC B et al. Since the age of 7 I've had an aptitude for this kind of stuff, and by the time I got to the later years in my Secondary School, I was effectively teaching the teachers on what the computers they had in the classrooms could do, so they could in turn be better informed what they where "reading from textbooks" to teach others. As the 90's approached, the MS-DOS PC started to appear in UK homes, and it was a natural fit for me to want to become a "Computer Technician" at the time. I left school and did my various BTEC's etc before spending a few years in the UK military doing communications stuff. When I left the forces in late 1993, I came back to a world where EVERYONE was obsessed by being a "Technician" of some kind, this was bizarre to me as the very word "Technician" implies something that is "Technical" or "Technologically Related". My CV included "Technician" several times as during my BTEC years I had worked part time for a few different companies as a trainee, and companies where salivating over the word in much the same way they salivate over "AI" and such like today. Looking for a job was insane, trying to filter job listings by subjects I knew and including words like "Technician" was a thankless task, I regularly saw things like: "Wanted: local pub requires cleanliness technician to maintain pub facilities" (Basically a pub cleaner) or "Immediate Start: TV Rental's technical customer sales advisement technician" (Basically a sales person who can talk tech) It was the same then as it is now, Out of control marketing idiots allowed to get away with devaluing any word or topic they feel like, in order to push more sales. We've seen a few other terminologies come and go over the years, but now that being an "engineer" of some kind is popular, we are seeing the same thing happen to the word "engineer" and "engineering" as a disciplined profession. Don't even get me started on the HR and recruitment's use of the terminology!!!

I frequently use the tools in Microsoft's OWN sysinternals toolset for performing various operations on my network, and every time I usually have to hit the notification that pops up and "allow" the program before defender squirrels it away to it's vault of the damned never to be seen again. However!!! sysinternals is a walk in the park compared to "NirSoft" NirSoft (https://www.nirsoft.net/) make some absolutely amazing tools, tools that should be in every I.T. engineers bag of tricks when dealing with those folks that forget their passwords and/or routinely screw things up on their windows system, windows defender treats just about every single program in the tool set as malicious. Not only that, but once over it would list all the offending programs in one go, until folks started clicking on "Allow all", so it now lists every one singly and in such rapid succession that you just do not get time to click on the alert, hoist to admin, select "allow" and save, before that entry is "automatically processed" and your moved on to the next alert. It appears also that "Allowing" a file now only stays in place for a limited length of time, so after a while the allowance is lifted and you start the dance all over again. In order for Windows to not destroy my tools collection, I've now started keeping it all on a Linux based SMB share where EVERYTHING is set to read only. Defender goes absolutely nut's when I open that folder now.

And on the IBM AS400 Series. I remember as a young "tech" , working for a company that made rubber gaskets for the auto industry. They used to exchange orders with their European partners every night, it used to take 9 hours to exchange all these massive EDI documents, which then took another 3 to 4 hours in a complex COBOL driven process to turn the data into a human readable format. We'd set the transfer going at 5pm when everyone left the office for the night, and it would be just finishing at about 9am the next morning as everyone started to filter in for the day.

Quote:

Technically, if you needed fake DB data that would be a fixture. But, a unit test shouldn't call a live resource. You can't do gated check-ins that way as it would take too long to run thousands of tests.

This is why I always, always, always advocate a dev/stage/prod setup, esp for web applications. Dev has the "same server software", but may have data quality issues, maybe the odd broken dependency here and there, but usually nothing that the development team in general can't fix. It irritates the hell out of me, when corp/internal I.T. and the business, mandate that the same "I.T. security policy's" regarding admin access should be applied to developer only instances, as if they where prod. Staging, should always be a "clean" dev copy. Software should be as close to prod as possible, deployments should ONLY be to staging after seniors on the dev teams have verified that the code is sound, working and potentially ready for prod. Prod, well I don't need to state anything about this one :-) My point here is that, it should be perfectly acceptable to use "Live" resources, if you have a proper dev/stage/prod set-up. If data quality is a necessity, then there are ways to easy mirror a live DB to the dev & stage environments, while maintaining PII security, such as redacting information with stars as it's copied across, that way the data "format" is preserved well enough to work in testing. In many of the projects I work, I go in, and build the dev team myself, usually a very tight knit bunch who've all worked together before, and who bounce off each other very well. If it's not a large project, or a simple desktop app that one dev can handle, I'll run the entire project myself, so I don't often find myself in a situation where I have a very large team to co-ordinate with. The last time I found myself in that environment was back when I worked FT for a single corp, and as a corp I had to follow corp policy's, if they mandated TDD down to the bone, then it was TDD down to the bone. These days I much prefer the consultancy life style, where I go in, advise, build, test after it's built then move on to the next exciting project :-)

I Test, but I don't "TDD Unit Test". While I develop a piece of functionality, I repeatedly exercise the code I'm working on, as I write it. If at any point, it fails to compile, or shows signs of not "processing" some inputs correctly, I'll stop and fully debug everything, until it is working correctly once again. My testing can take many forms, but often, if it's a runnable app, then I'll just make sure that "the app" is runnable at all times. If it's a stand alone library, or isolated bit of functionality, then I'll often build a small command line program along side of it, that I can use to "test run" the code, allowing me to do things in my regular debug loop way. Once I'm happy the code is good, I then move up to building some test code, that integrates the system with the larger project (Should that be required), or set up some kind of testing harness (If it's a stand alone system) that exercises it using real test inputs and data. I do not, mock out things like databases, external API's and all that jazz. If I have to connect to an external API, then I connect to an external API, and if that API is not yet available, then that bit of work simply does not get started until it is. I simply will not write test code that "pretends" to be something it is not. My final step is usually one of setting up, large scale integration testing if required, or some smaller integration style unit test if code has to be independently testable. The key here, is I will create these unit tests only AFTER I'm satisfied I have done everything possible in other ways to produce good code that does the job required of it. I'll then use the integration testing, to A) ensure that the code stays working as it should with it's dependents & B) ensure that data & input changes don't screw anything up.

full length one still unavailable using that process, only the preview link :-(

VLC can convert direct to disk, using the "media->convert/save" option directly from the app menu. Problem here however is one of automation. That said, VLC does have an automation interface (I can't remember exactly how, it's been years since I did anything with it) but I remember once a very long time ago writing a .NET front end (Winforms app) which when put on a server could be used to save the currently playing iFrame under an ASP.NET web page to disk. VLC does also have a stand alone library file of all it's main functions, it's documented on the VLC site I think, and there are certainly a few .NET libs on NuGet to interface to it. If you just want an app that can rip anything your currently looking at/listening too on your desktop, then OBS Studio will do the job easily and quickly. I have my OBS set up with a number of different scenes, one of which is full screen desktop + desktop audio, so all I need to do is start OBS, click a single line of text then press record. failing that, if your ok with batch scripting and have a txt file with all the URL's in, then you can use the command line to itterate through the text file, and pass each URL in turn to a tool like yt-dlp. This will work on windows, linux and mac, and if you use the '-f' or '-F' flag (Can't remember which) it will list all the available formats for the mentioned URL for you, you can then use the other '-f/F' with the format number and yt-dlp will ONLY pull down that format EG: audio. By using the -F/f flags you won't need to do any post conversion on the file, you can simply just for loop over a text file, yt-dlp each url with the appropriate format and end up with a nice clean folder of MP3's/Wavs etc.

It can be made to "kind of" work. If you choose the right station/area from the choose station, it appears to believe you no matter what you select. If you then save your cookies out to a text file for that page, and use 'yt-dlp --cookies "txt file here" "page link here"' You can then save a copy of the video to watch offline. SOME areas only allow you to have the preview video, some allow you to have the full video. I'm currently trying a few different ones, but if the original poster could tell us what "station" he/she selected, then maybe we'd get the full video. :-)

6502 was (Still is) one of my favourite ever CPU's, in fact I have such a deep love for it that I have modelled various elements of it using "Digital" the successor to "Logisim" written by H.Neehman and available on Github. [GitHub - hneemann/Digital: A digital logic designer and circuit simulator.](https://github.com/hneemann/Digital) My First CPU was actually a Z80 back in around 1979, but I rapidly got bored with that, and within a couple of years had moved on to the Acorn Electron, then eventually the BBC Micro Model B (I'm in the UK btw) I loved the 6502, it was a joy to program. Memory Mapped I/O was the way to go, none of this taking control of the bus nonsense that the Z80 had, it was what would be classed now as a RISC processor, unlike the 6809 which had a register and instruction for every purpose. The 6502 was light enough that you didn't get overwhelmed, but powerful enough that it could do some fantastic tricks. Many of my friends followed the route of just using computers to pay games, so they went the Z80 route and stayed with the Sinclair computers, many of them eventually moving on to the 16 bit 68000 CPU's via the Atari ST and Amiga 500 platforms. Myself I stayed with the 6502 on a physical machine right up to the early 90's, and even though I had a PC by that point in time, and had been doing some work with them due to college/uni etc I never forgot my BBC Model B micro. Eventually I managed to afford an Acorn Archimedes A5000 with it's 25Mhz ARM3 CPU, a CPU which I felt was the true spiritual successor to the 6502, it had a very similar programming model, just the right number of registers and functionality, and the combined instruction layout (IE: being able to branch and loop without using separate branch & loop instructions) just felt right. People worship the ARM CPU Architecture today, it's everywhere and inside everything, it would never have happened if it wasn't for the 6502. Consider too, that the 6502 is an old 8-bit CPU that is still manufactured today. The western design corp, still manufactures brand new 6502 silicon, that can clock up to 32Mhz (Faster than my original ARM3 successor to it) and hobbyists are STILL making their own NEW home computers. If you look on places like PCB Way and JLC you can find NEW board designs enabling you to build a modern BBC Model B micro, and all of the silicon and parts required to do so are still available should you wish to do so. Myself, over the years I've released a lot of my old 6502 machine code on places

I wouldn't dare try these days :-) My NAS on it's own would toast a couple of cases of media. It holds about 12tb of storage, if which about 8 is used. Then there's the server with about 50 ish 30th BUs running ..... Scares me just thinking about it.

WOO HOO finally I can do a backup of my entire home network on a single disk!!!! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

it's not just MS. ALL of them are just as bad in some way or another. About 5 years ago now, my Brother in Law passed suddenly. As I was the only one in the immediate family with any tech skills I was given the task of getting all of his various social media stuff shut down. NOTE: I said shut down, not even accessed, just closed... gone... no longer needed. At the time, (Hard to believe now) MS was actually the easiest. Didn't need to get in, but I did, got into One drive backed everything up, requested the account be closed. Job done. Apple, hard initially, but after a trip to the local Apple store and physical production of the Death Certificate, followed by a call to the support team in Dublin, everything was done for me. They backed up the account, sent us a link to download the backups then closed the accounts. Google was easy, no involvement needed, it turns out I was easily able to guess the security questions etc, and the back up email was his MS one which I still had access too. so all good... Facebook..... Holy Heck, was that one something else. Staff consistently unhelpful, Automated bot processes that didn't work properly, Accusations posted in email directly at myself and the family actively accusing us of attempted fraud. 5 years on, his account is still active, routinely get's flagged by spam bots and everything else, and every time I try to even get in touch with a human operator, I get the exact same message. "This account has been flagged, you can only make requests to this account via a human operator, before we will assign anyone to the case, you must send us a copy of your death certificate and current ID to prove you have died, we will ONLY discuss matters on this account with the named account holder, including requests to close the account" Straight up... they are asking my brother to provide his own ID, and his death certificate to prove he died. We have tried several times over the past years to point out to them "he's dead" what part of "him presenting his own death certificate, doesn't make sense to you", but it just falls on deaf ears. That and the amount of email his google accounts still receive from social & shopping sites that where told 5 years ago he'd passed and where asked to remove his details, but never did. I understand wanting to protect folks social media accounts against hackers, but some of the policy's and the ways things are done is just beyond belief. All we want is the account closed and removed from the internet, his mo