On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 06:37:29 +0100, harryagain wrote:

"Mike Barnes" wrote in message
...
harryagain wrote:
In a different life I used to repair electric cookers. The number of
times I was called to "Oven not working".
Just needed a button on the timer pressed.

Well, let's face it, those cooker timers are largely incomprehensible,
and so rarely used that few people ever gets grips with them.

These were the old mechanical clocks.
I don't know anyone ever used them.
Dunno why they are still fitted.
Must be some sort of tradition.

My father used to be a rep for Tricity/Bendix. We had loads of bits lying
around that came out of cookers (or were 'spares').

For years I had one of the mechanical clocks in a woodne box with a 13A
socket and flying lead with a 13A plug on the end. For a while I had it
connected to an old battery/mains radio as an alarm clock.

I also had another radio built from cooker 'spares':

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/tricity_melodie.html



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*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 9:14:22 AM UTC+1, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Now Emacs takes the original file adds a tilde to it an creates a new
one of the original name. Vi takes the old file and alters it.

Result is, if a process has the file open emacs doesn't actually change
the working file contents.

You haver to restart the whole daemon. Which he failed to do of course.

Don't you have to do that anyway, however you edit it?

No. You send the daemon a SIGHUP and it rereads. If it rereads by rewinding
the existing filehandle and rereading (rather than reopening the file name),
the filehandle will be a handle to the *old* file.

I have to say, keeping the config file open seems barking to me.

The daemon will
have read its config file in at startup. So if you change it you have
to restart it so it does that again. Or was this one which re-read it
from time to time?

On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 10:19:23 AM UTC+1, wrote:
On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 05:16:19 +0100, Bill Wright

wrote:







About twenty years ago I suffered a lot of righteous indignation coming

down the phone from a TV shop in Pentland, Edinburgh. The TV

distribution system we had installed JUST DIDN'T WORK! NONE



240 miles later I found that all the sets on that stand were Thompson

ones, and the default autotune was to find nothing but French signals.



It's that Auld Alliance thing between the Haggis and Snail eaters

kicking in again. I expect they are looking foward to restarting it

soon.



G.Harman

Many years ago we spent a fruitless afternoon trying to get a simple two computer wired network work under Windows 3. Tried everything, every which way. No Joy. Sat back and said lets start from the very beginning. IS computer A connected to computer B ? Bollix

On 30 Apr 2014 10:42:50 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:


My father used to be a rep for Tricity/Bendix. We had loads of bits lying
around that came out of cookers (or were 'spares').

For years I had one of the mechanical clocks in a woodne box with a 13A
socket and flying lead with a 13A plug on the end.

I also had another radio built from cooker 'spares':

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/tricity_melodie.html

Ideal for playing the Hot 100 .

G.Harman

On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 14:49:04 +0100, damduck-egg wrote:

On 30 Apr 2014 10:42:50 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:


My father used to be a rep for Tricity/Bendix. We had loads of bits
lying around that came out of cookers (or were 'spares').

For years I had one of the mechanical clocks in a woodne box with a 13A
socket and flying lead with a 13A plug on the end.

I also had another radio built from cooker 'spares':

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/tricity_melodie.html

Ideal for playing the Hot 100 .

We did actually have one of the cookers for a few years...


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Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
My posts (including this one) are my copyright and if @diy_forums on
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*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

In article , Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Martin Bonner wrote:
On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 9:14:22 AM UTC+1, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Now Emacs takes the original file adds a tilde to it an creates a new
one of the original name. Vi takes the old file and alters it.
Result is, if a process has the file open emacs doesn't actually change
the working file contents.

You haver to restart the whole daemon. Which he failed to do of course.

Don't you have to do that anyway, however you edit it?

No. You send the daemon a SIGHUP and it rereads. If it rereads by rewinding
the existing filehandle and rereading (rather than reopening the file name),
the filehandle will be a handle to the *old* file.

I have to say, keeping the config file open seems barking to me.

That *is* barking.

And that presupposes that there *is* a way to send a SIGHUP. On Win7 I
couldn't find a way to do that for apache. So no obvious way to rotate
apache's log files.

TNP did say _Unix_ configuration files, even if what he meant was
apparently configuration files for one specific daemon which had barking
config file handling. Obviously well behaved daemons don't care what
editor you use.

On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 17:41:47 +0100, Alan Braggins wrote:

In article , Tim Streater
wrote:
In article ,
Martin Bonner wrote:
On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 9:14:22 AM UTC+1, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Now Emacs takes the original file adds a tilde to it an creates a
new one of the original name. Vi takes the old file and alters it.
Result is, if a process has the file open emacs doesn't actually
change the working file contents.

You haver to restart the whole daemon. Which he failed to do of
course.

Don't you have to do that anyway, however you edit it?

No. You send the daemon a SIGHUP and it rereads. If it rereads by
rewinding the existing filehandle and rereading (rather than reopening
the file name), the filehandle will be a handle to the *old* file.

I have to say, keeping the config file open seems barking to me.

That *is* barking.

And that presupposes that there *is* a way to send a SIGHUP. On Win7 I
couldn't find a way to do that for apache. So no obvious way to rotate
apache's log files.

TNP did say _Unix_ configuration files, even if what he meant was
apparently configuration files for one specific daemon which had barking
config file handling. Obviously well behaved daemons don't care what
editor you use.

On my FreeBSD systems, I use an editor that writes a fresh file, and I've
never had any problems. Apart from the cron daemin, which reads the file
so frequently it's probably best to keep it open.




--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
My posts (including this one) are my copyright and if @diy_forums on
Twitter wish to tweet them they can pay me £30 a post
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

Jethro_uk wrote:
I've been in this flat one year and still haven't worked out where the
previous occupant plugged his fridge in.
Gas powered ?

It would have had to be bottle gas ... or maybe sewer gas from the unterminated pipes below the sink.

Owain

On 30/04/2014 21:33, wrote:
Jethro_uk wrote:
I've been in this flat one year and still haven't worked out where the
previous occupant plugged his fridge in.
Gas powered ?

It would have had to be bottle gas ... or maybe sewer gas from the unterminated pipes below the sink.

Owain


Extension lead connected to a street light?

On 29/04/2014 11:30 bm wrote:
Talking about "her indoors", We have a twin dimmer in the lounge

That's no way to talk about her...

--
F

replying to ARW, tahrey wrote:
Sounds about par for the course for a similar job I used to do. I rationalised
it as just not being the sort of thing the usual complainants were expert, or
even novice-level in, as their heads were full of all kinds of other academic
stuff, much of which was (from what I saw of their powerpoints) essentially
all greek to me in its turn. Didn't stop me occasionally cussing them under my
breath on busier days, or when the weather was bad and the most direct route
involved going outdoors ;-)

--
for full context, visit https://www.homeownershub.com/uk-diy...an-969785-.htm

replying to Bill, tahrey wrote:
...and that's the sort of thing that led to me taping over several isolator
switches to lock them in the "on" position, with a printed sticky label saying
"DO NOT TURN OFF EXCEPT IN EMERGENCIES", because the proportion of call-outs
caused by some over-eager energy saver or safety freak turning them off and
sabotaging the intent of following users (often coming along mere minutes
later) without sufficient secret knowledge to use the room started getting
ridiculous. Plus the energy saving was negligble (computer, projector etc on
standby used a couple of watts all up, paling in comparison vs the similar
proportion of users who didn't bother to shut down either machine at all, or
the ceiling lights that were routinely left lit even when the isolators were
turned off, and unlikely to compensate for the additional electrical stress of
the mains being applied and removed and any spiking from operation of the
manual switch, or indeed the eventual wearing-out of the switch itself, which
is technically only there to isolate machinery from the mains when someone
such as myself needed to remove covers to service it), and the safety benefits
absolutely non-existent (machinery just doesn't randomly catch on fire these
days, everything was fused and connected to RCDs, and it was probably a bigger
risk that the switch might wear out and not turn off properly when needed).

I was sore tempted to cover it over with a molly-guard type cover with a
laminated A4 card nailed on the front spelling all that out and telling them
to stop being so daft and wasting the time of the service staff, other
academics, and their students... but apparently that sort of thing is looked
on quite dimly.

--
for full context, visit https://www.homeownershub.com/uk-diy...an-969785-.htm

replying to Jethro_uk, tahrey wrote:
...and THAT sort of thing (plus the cereal packet vs isolator one) is why I
would always attend even the daftest sounding callout once a brief bit of over
the phone triage had been tried and failed. Because the end users don't always
know what you're talking about on the phone, and familiarity can be a killer
because you end up seeing what you expect to see, and it needs a fresh pair of
eyes... and it applies just as much to the techs like myself, there is no such
thing as "can't happen", and as soon as you start making assumptions you run
the risk of falling into such a trap yourself. Plus there's always the chance
that something *really weird* is going on, which doesn't trip the usual
warning signs or turn off obvious indicator lights etc... like that one time
one of my colleagues accidentally took down the entire network by connecting
both ends of a network cable into the wall (and two computers to each other,
though that wasn't as lethal), and it took several hours for an entire office
of techs to uncover the fault because there wasn't anything obvious from all
the usual checks... (in fact, it took someone going to disconnect one of the
most recently "connected" PCs in case they were spewing garbage out of their
network cards, tracing the cable back to the wall to make things neat, and
finding that the other end was another PC, whereupon the penny dropped)

--
for full context, visit https://www.homeownershub.com/uk-diy...an-969785-.htm

On 23/01/2019 03:14, tahrey wrote:
replying to ARW, tahrey wrote:
Sounds about par for the course for a similar job I used to do. I
rationalised
it as just not being the sort of thing the usual complainants were
expert, or
even novice-level in, as their heads were full of all kinds of other
academic
stuff, much of which was (from what I saw of their powerpoints) essentially
all greek to me in its turn. Didn't stop me occasionally cussing them
under my
breath on busier days, or when the weather was bad and the most direct
route
involved going outdoors ;-)



And five years later.

Most of those schoolgirls are now mums.

--
Adam

"ARW" wrote in message
...
On 23/01/2019 03:14, tahrey wrote:
replying to ARW, tahrey wrote:
Sounds about par for the course for a similar job I used to do. I
rationalised
it as just not being the sort of thing the usual complainants were
expert, or
even novice-level in, as their heads were full of all kinds of other
academic
stuff, much of which was (from what I saw of their powerpoints)
essentially
all greek to me in its turn. Didn't stop me occasionally cussing them
under my
breath on busier days, or when the weather was bad and the most direct
route
involved going outdoors ;-)



And five years later.

Most of those schoolgirls are now mums.

How many of the brats are yours ?