bens_dad

The government have launched a survey on their cost of living support payments but they're making it difficult to actually respond. We only have a few days to get heard. If enough of us respond to this survey, we can hand in our collective response before the Sunday deadline. Can you take 2 mins to share your experiences on cost of living support payments? Here’s the first question for you:

HAVE YOU RECEIVED COST OF LIVING SUPPORT PAYMENTS?

The cost of living crisis has affected so many of us, with rocketing energy bills and other everyday essentials.

The government have an inquiry which we can submit evidence to within the next month but the "simple" survey for people to respond to has been buried on their website and the deadline is Sunday. Let's make sure thousands of us respond here’s the first question for you:

https://the.organise.network/surveys/cost-of-living-support-payments-inquiry

Unix time is measured from Midnight 1 Jan 1970 Greenwich Mean Time.
But what time was that in the UK ?

The answer appears to be 1 AM !

From March 1968 to Oct 1971 there was an experiment to stay on British Summer Time all winter.
I vaguely remember it being about making it lighter, and thus easier, for Scottish children walking home from school, so I had thought it might only have been a Scottish experiment. Does anyone know whether English and Scottish clocks showed different times those winters ?

Having stood in my kitchen watching the sun break the horizon at 09:00, I am not keen to have the clock go forward in the winter (and that was Aberdeen; the sun is 22 minutes later in the Western Isles).

The Truss government and the Bank of England spent billions propping up gilts to safeguard many of our pensions.

Someone (I guess hedge funds) must have gained this money, presumably by winning a bet on gilt prices.
Should we have a windfall tax on this "profit" - it is not easy to see how it was "earned" or "deserved" ?

The next weekly meeting of the PM and Monarch will be interesting; neither Liz Truss nor Charles have done it before.

Elizabeth had Winston Churchill to guide her in how it was done.

I arrived back from posting a letter to hear that, despite rumours that he would not, the prime minister has resigned. Typical really, the letter was:

Her Majesty The Queen
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA

Dear Madam

In the light of the resignation of many of your ministers, I would
like to assure Your Majesty that should she wish for a new Prime
Minister, I would have no objection.

If you were to agreed to a request for a general election, suggested
to the PM the he should resign, asked him to resign, told him to
resign, or asked another senior MP to form a government, I would see
no constitutional threat to the Monarchy.

I have the honour to be, Madam, Your Majesty's humble and obedient servant

This seems an odd thing to have done, but I have sent Microsoft a patch (https://www.aitchison.me.uk/keydata.20220531.patch) to fix a bug in their packaging for the Edge browser on Ubuntu Linux.


To: EdgeLinuxDev@microsoft.com
Subject: Patch for MS edge linux cron script

I have recently installed microsoft-edge-stable version 102.0.1245.30-1
on my Ubuntu 22.04/jammy machine.
Each morning since then I have received the following report.

/etc/cron.daily/microsoft-edge:
base64: invalid input

I have attached a patch - keydata.20220531.patch -
which stops the report and appears to do the right thing.

I also note that lines 30-39 are the same as lines 19-28.


If Microsoft are prepared to make the software available on Linux, I am happy to make it play more nicely.

Of course email to the address (EdgeLinuxDev@microsoft.com) given in the package (apt show microsoft-edge-stable) was rejected - because I am not on their "allowed senders list" - so I have tried other routes to report the patch ...

A recent update means that all my browser window icons are a quarter-screen tall, and some are wider than my nice big new monitor - the biggest is 2058x276 pixels !

I have had this problem before; at one level the problem is that I use an ancient window manager - twm.
I had a solution - https://support.mozilla.org/questions/950850#answer-428414 - overriding the default association between WM_CLASS and icon in my ~/.tmwrc but now the icons have lost their WM_CLASS.

Turns out my association for firefox was case-incorrect and something has stopped doing caseless matches. My first thoughts are recent security updates to libxml and expat. Anyway, spelling firefox in lower case has returned the icons to my sensible size.

In 2018 the government banned neonicotinoid pesticides to protect bees, but last year under pressure from the sugar-beet industry they declared an exception against the advice of government scientific advice, and now they are doing it again.
Please sign this Greenpeace petition
https://action.greenpeace.org.uk/e/854853/3vcTclL/xbxqy/543877094?h=xPtMXRW0GNWk0nU2bAgfF55or2YUtzS0OXOPA7XsOVI
to show that you do not want these chemicals used on our threatened bees.

Looking through my spam folder I see one from
unveracitybuzzardlike@allevebiotics.com

So they claim, though not in so many words, to be lying vultures ?

The product of two integers is longer than either of them (except when one of them is not much bigger than 1).

Unfortunately computer languages like C and C++ don't really understand or care about this ... which makes it easy to write bugs in these languages ... so there are tools which look at your programs and warn you when this matters.

You use "int" to declare a "standard-sized" integer variable and "long" to declare a bigger one*. So

long product(int a, int b) {
   long c = a * b;
   return c;
}

always makes c a variable big enough to contain the product, without overflowing ... but it notes that a and b are "int" and makes the product an "int" as well. So if a*b is big enough, the first few (and hence most important) digits are thrown away - unless you are explicit that you want to keep them:

long product(int a, int b) {
   long c = (long)(a * b);
   return c;
}

I have a C++ program which I think has some of these bugs in it. Fortunately there are tools which look at your programs and warn you when this happens. But unless I tell them I know about each multiplication, they will complain about every multiplication. If the language had done the right thing, then

long c = a * b;

would have always worked, and the tools and I would only need to be picky about lines like

int d = a * b;

which *will* overflow for some values.

Bah.

* I have ignored the fact that, on computers like mine,
a "long" is the same size as an "int", so you need to use something like "long long" instead.

Oh, and sometimes the value I want to represent cannot be negative, so should I use an "unsigned int"
or perhaps an "unsigned long" aka "long unsigned".