I was actually surprised much of the material still exists - though the links don't work. Microsoft performs so much needless self-vandalism and I know some things I care about are gone.
Which just reminded that yeah, all the links I'd made to Raymond Chen's "The poor man's way of identifying memory leaks" no longer work. The Rust implementation is less than four years old, but its link (which worked) now does not. -sigh-
Tempting to go reconstruct that performance improvement "fight" in Rust too. Maybe another day.
It's not surprising that due to massive advertising that VPN companies do that people such as MPs think that VPNs are a necessity for general web browsing etc. I think more people need to be aware that, (unless they are wanting to access US Netflix from UK/BBC iPlayer from the US, etc) VPNs in 2025 are completely unnecessary and arguably worse for your privacy.
Feeling very nostalgic about getting interested in XML and XSLT circa 2000-2001 and all that Semantic Web stuff. Amazed to see that people were still taking it seriously nearly 10 years later https://www.flickr.com/groups/xmlsummerschool2010 and that they're still going! I hope they have a lovely time!
What is amazing is the engineers the Fujitsu employed would testify in court against some of the subpostmasters saying "there were no faults" where in unearthed evidence of their support logs they could be clearly acknowledging bugs that could create false accounts, manually updating records and audit logs to balance it out (and also sometimes screwing that up).
> [Anne] Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”.
> The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster.
> When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.”
...
> Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.”
> No evidence. [Sir Wyn] Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied:
> “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”
I’m really surprised the post office didn’t do more of a job to frame it as the “Fujitsu Scandal”. They could have made the public think it was a foreign Japanese issue
In her late 60s so I expect she's retired but has the threat of impending prosecution hanging over her head along with other colleagues
https://archive.ph/YH9GO
The thing here is that the Post Office as the "victim" could also act as its own investigator and prosecutor, due to historical reasons going back to the 17th century when it effectively functioned as part of the state and as such, had the authority to investigate and prosecute crimes related to its operations (like mail theft or fraud).
It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023.
So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
The threads are different in their direction per side so that the rotation during forward pedaling further tightens the pedal.
Another related interesting fact is that on a unicycle, especially one used by someone who can ride backwards, needs to be checked often to ensure the pedals don't back themselves out due to pedal rotation in the opposite (loosening) direction.
