“Customers are required to take no action.”

For some reason, this arrant nonsense is permitted in English (cf. “All that is gold does not glitter”). It should clearly be “customers are not required to take any action” or “customers need not take any action”.

Also man fühlt sich ja schon irgendwie zumindest semiprofessionell, wenn man ein Problem mit einer (teilweise selbstgebauten) RS232 hat, der Vermutung unterliegt, sie beim teilweisen Selbstbauen gänzlich demoliert zu haben, und anstatt lange herumzuprobieren gleich das Oszilloskop aus dem Schrank holt.

Note to self: Muß das mit den Nullmodemkabeln irgendwann mal lernen.

Q: Why didn’t John Williams win the 1993 Academy Award for Best Original Score for “Jurassic Park”?

A: Because he won it for “Schindler’s List”.

“West Midlands Trains informed RAIB on 23 April 2018 that London Midland had, in addition to the above actions arising from the urgent safety advice, taken the following actions in response to the recommendation:

[…]

• enhanced the consideration of passenger behaviour in its risk assessment”

Enhanced the degree to which they consider their passengers stupid and borderline suicidal, that is.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safety-digest-072018-bushey/passenger-trapped-in-train-doors-and-dragged-at-bushey-station-26-march-2018

My new genuine 'strayan imitation GoT doorstop.

#bobcatinabox

Der bayerische Verwaltungsgerichtshof hat schon vor einiger Zeit die Staatsregierung dazu verurteilt, in München für die Einhaltung der Schadstoffgrenzwerte zu sorgen. Die tut aber nix.

In der Zwischenzeit hat der VGH auch mal ein paar vernachlässigbar geringe Zwangsgelder festgesetzt, die die Regierung dann auch gezahlt hat (effektiv an sich selbst!), ohne sich ansonsten feststellbar beeindrucken zu lassen.

Jetzt ist dem VGH offenbar ein wenig der Kragen eng, und er trägt sich mit dem Gedanken, beim EuGH anzufragen, ob man denn gegebenenfalls auch Politiker und höhere Verwaltungschargen ein bißchen hinter Gitter schicken könnte, um sie zu mehr, äh, Compliance mit Gerichtsentscheidungen zu ermuntern.

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/scheiss-seo-immer,R1rFm7W

Windows 10, Enterprise no less, has started advertising at me on the lock screen. Rather than tell me where the nice picture is from, as it used to do, it now desires to inform me where “the hottest games can be found”.

I am not entertained.

He, she, or it came to visit today. Your friendly neighborhood Styracosaurus (I think), although it may actually be a Styroposaurus.

Installed some Linux or other on a newish notebook. Tried setting up WLAN access.

wpa_supplicant keeps complaining about a bad passphrase. The thing is, I’ve been having the same problem on another, less newish notebook, and never found a fix – until the Wifi hardware on that one stopped working entirely.

Fix: Whatever default auth protocol wpa_supplicant uses, it isn’t WPA-PSK.

wpa_supplicant.conf:

network = {
    ssid="..."
--> proto=WPA2
--> key-mgmt=WPA-PSK
    psk="..."
}

Fixed.

To add UI controls to the host application in an Office COM add-in, you implement a callback function that returns an XML document describing your modifications. You can add tabs, groups, controls, remove existing ones, etc.

Writing this ribbon XML can be a bit difficult because the existing documentation is useless. It is spread over multiple (many!) MSDN and Docs pages, as well as MSDN blogs, few of which are consistent with each other. Additionally, most of them describe the Office 2007 situation, but it has changed since.

Luckily, there is one reliable reference for what is allowed, and where: The Office Fluent User Interface XML Schema. You can validate your XML against this schema, and if that works, there is a good chance that the Office applications will accept your extensions.

Except that Microsoft somehow managed to make the schema itself invalid. No idea how they produced such an astounding result; it must have cost extra effort to get it just slightly wrong.

The problem is “attribute multiple inheritance”, where an element’s type gets attribute declarations through multiple extension paths, such as one direct declaration and one in an <attributeGroup> it uses. It is a bit unfortunate that this is not allowed – IMO it should be possible to have multiple identical declarations of the same attribute (or child element, etc.).

It is possible, of course, that whatever Microsoft used to validate the schema does not implement the restriction on multiple inheritance of attributes. Anyway, removing one instance of the problematic attribute declarations makes the schema valid without – I think – causing validation errors in too many existing ribbon extensions.