British Programmer living in Andorra

Don't let Bezos find out.  Someone there will be for the high-jump!

I wonder if Yahoo mail ( http://mail.yahoo.com ) have noticed a lack of signups from Andorra?  No.. I didn't think so. We have real short numbers here in Andorra.  The one you see below, is perfectly valid.

It's human nature to feel proud or have some sense of ownership of something that you have created and this is certainly true in the computing world where programmers will feel a sense of pride and ownership about some code that they've designed, coding that they've implemented and deployed. It's important for Managers to be aware of this and let the right people do the right job and at the right time. In other words, the Managers may have some form of technical knowledge but this almost certainly won't be as good as, or certainly respected, by the programmers themselves. So my suggestion is; Managers pose the topic or the problem in question and allow the programmers to "own" the problem space, to devise the solutions and then be responsible for them. In converse the wrong way to do it, is for the Manager to make some "pseudo implementation" with limited technical skills, which are then followed through by the programmers who will feel

I should be working but go sidetrackked by the demo on: https://embed-dot-more-than-a-map.appspot.com/demos/visualization/puzzle Did them all (on easy), except this one! Anyone know? Anyone there? :)

[18:05:46] Karl O'Meara: andreas.. u there [18:11:29] Andreas Klahr: Hi Karl, on the mobile [18:12:23] Karl O'Meara: if you can can you go into internet settings and tell me the APN for STA? [18:12:55] Karl O'Meara: you would have thought thats on their website... but no [18:14:17] Andreas Klahr: Internetand [18:14:25] Karl O'Meara: thats the fucker... thanks Update July 2016 Outside Andorra that didn't work.  Checking STA site today it mentions APN of just INTERNET.  So maybe that is worth a try now it is just 0,05c a Mb. https://www.andorratelecom.ad/web/guest/som-telefonia-mobil/cobertura-en-itinerancia

The investment business world is dominated by the transactions of equities in small, medium and large enterprises. These take place is stock markets and broking-houses all over the world.  This is a multi-trillion dollar business. It is vital for global business that this market is operating and healthy. With the rise of crypto-currencies and the technology and ideas behind them: I also see an alternative to traditional equity purchases and holdings - "the Bitshare". Just as exciting as Bitcoin and friends:  The Bitshare is even more persuasive.  Whereas with Bitcoin you need to convince the holder of the coin that it has some value.  With Bitshares - there is value:  It is the proportion of the companies' stock that it represents. Stock markets and broking houses cream off a small but very significant percentage off each transaction.  This has made stock brokers the world over, extremely wealthy.  And hence, like Banks, make themselves targets of the crypto-cu

http://uk.flightaware.com/account/join/ Come on guys.  I’d expect better than this!

Following on from my post about BitCoin Banks I suggest some developers with banking security-level experience start a project to develop software whereby Banks can build systems to handle BitCoin.   Maybe a donation from one of the many publicly-owned banks of the base source code could be made to ensure the demise of banks as we know them today, as a little thank you and payback for comprehensively ruining the world economy. An Open Source project such as this would be very profitable for its developers as premium services can features are usually part of the project such as this.  It would be run very similarly to the Open SSL project. So this would be an open source project to provide the storage, transmission and manipulation, control of Bitcoin by any institution e.g. a bank, or one of the new generation of BitCoin banks that I envisage will be starting up. It will have  routines to perform the process above which would be Open Source and will be edited by whoever

For the purposes of this post I will refer to Bitcoin as an example of all crypto-currencies as Bitcoin was the original, but the following applies to all derivatives of it. I have just been reading about the failed bitcoin exchange  Mt. Gox   and a bank called  Flexicoin  Bank, it was robbed and has gone bust and it occurred to me that it would be interesting for a large commercial bank to start a Bitcoin operation, probably as a separate entity. My reasoning is thus:  Since Mt. Gox and Flexicoin simply didn’t have the resources to secure their systems in a manner sufficiently effectively to prevent the hacking, only people in Bank or similar companies that have track records for this kind of work can reasonably attempt it. They would be able to deploy the highest levels security, as their security team as part of their development team, which would be familiar with attempted hacks into the accounts and systems and would have the technical know-how to have a reasonable

We moved to Andorra in the summer of 2011.  I'd bought a 1 year old Land Rover Discovery 3 car with left hand-drive the summer before, with the prior knowledge that I could import it into Andorra when we gained residency as it would be less than 3 years old (or certainly less than 5 which is a special exemption that they give to car owners that are changing their residency, even if things did drag on a bit...). I had the V5 Registration document, and the invoice from the dealer that I bought it from.  What could possibly go wrong? The car was 2nd hand, so there was no VAT to consider or claim back.  The price I got from the dealer was a good one, and I didn't want to buy new, as you can generally get a excellent car for a serious discount if you are prepared to have one with a couple of tens of thousands of kilometres on the clock. If you are bringing in a new car you should look at this blog  [update:JAN-17 now deleted but available via wayback machine; information may

Today’s post is a theoretical method of a way to reduce spam in email. An extension to the SMTP mail protocol that will allow transfer of a very small amount of Bitcoin in the message transmission process which would alleviate spam. Part 1: The Problem. To break this process down: 1)    We have email, which is transmitted “under-the-hood” by the SMTP protocol which is a transmission protocol, language if you like, communication standard between computers on the internet. 2)    We have spam, which is unsolicited email. We’re all familiar with this, various mail use drugs or millionaires from Nigeria who wish to send us millions of dollars, there’s various permutations, and it’s very annoying. You didn’t ask for it and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it. 3)    Then we have Bitcoin which is a new crypto-currency which came out in 2009 and it’s a digital means of transmission of monetary funds. Again, it’s a fiat currency. Like all currencies really, th

Sent from my Windows Phone

Oh the Joy of .net and object orientation in general:   Compare the old asp way.   Just functions with single return values:                                                  if rules("isafirstname",firstname) = true and rules("isasurname",wholename(0)) = true then      transmute =("L-CAPNAMEINIT{_}"&propercase(firstname)& " " & propercase(wholename(0))) elseif rules("isafirstname",firstname) = true then      transmute =("L-CAPFIRSTNAMEINIT{_}"&propercase(firstname)) end if   So I would wind up stuffing a load of data into the return string and then reassembling it in the calling function.   First go on Tuples today.  Seems to me a sort-of “quick fire” multi-return type where you don’t want to go the whole hog of returning a struct.   Dim foundRows = boysnames.Select( "name = '" & Replace(username, "'" , "''" ) & "'" )   If foundRows.Length &

Can be that much better with sambal so cover it with film. Thanks to dave and rosie for that tip. Sent from my Windows Phone

    So everybody bar Tanya uses my account to watch videos.  We use it on the main television too.  Only thing missing from this was a Shark Tank episode but I could not get one to appear pressing F5.   Pinks are definitely Isabel.  Blues are Henry and Green is me.

  Very porr show here from http://developer.mapquest.com/   It deletes my password and captch on failing to recognize the apostrophe.      

I was wondering the other day, why, that from the beginning of the industrial revolution until maybe 1970 there was a terrific amount of invention; trains, planes, atom bombs, lighting,  space travel, medical discoveries, radio, cars etc.   But since then, things seem to have slowed down on that front:  a railway station looks the same as in 1970, yet it looked very different in 1930,  compare an airport today, to 1970 and then to 1930.  Think about what New York city looked like in 1930 and then 1970 and today in 2014… See what I mean?   There could be lots of reasons;  things could be getting fine-tuned more: You can bet the aircraft will be a lot more efficient, and quiet etc.,  or maybe we reaching the peak of physical changes?    I want to through an idea in the air -  one of the reasons could be that a lot of the “smart brains” are now not developing cars, or planes today.  But are working in computers:  look at the thousands of PhDs etc. that work for Google, Microsoft and Apple