Google Maps Madness November 28, 2006
Posted by Drew in : Technology , add a commentGoogle Maps as I’m sure everyone knows is a web based mapping service. It also has an API that allows anyone who wishes to create applications based on the mapping data. There are too many of these apps to mention. So I’m now going to mention the one that I think may be the most useless one that I have seen. At the same time it also answers a question that deep down I have always wanted to answer.
The aptly named If I dig a very deep whole, where I go to stop (sic) does what it implies!
I’ve always found that trying to judge the relative positions of various places can be quite tricky as we tend to see the world presented in two dimensions (commonly the Mercator projection) which gives a rough sense of where everything is but isn’t particularly accurate. Now I know!
Office 2007 “kill switch” - where’s the problem? November 22, 2006
Posted by Drew in : Technology , add a commentThere have been articles and blog posts over the last few days, some saying that Microsoft have put a mechanism into Office 2007 that prevents it working if it is pirated, others saying that such a mechanism doesn’t exist.
Now this has been coming for a long time. Product activation has been here in several Microsoft products for some years. Now we have the Genuine Advantage programme which started with Windows and has now been extended to Office 2007, one can only assume that this will be present for all products in the Vista era.
I have been using software that requires product activation for a fair while with no problem whatsoever*. The key, excuse the pun, is that I have valid licenses for the software I am using. I know that some people have philosophical issues with paying for software but I don’t. I’ve tried OpenOffice but to be honest it doesn’t do what I need. I’m not saying that it’s not a good product because it is. It just doesn’t do all the things that I want it to do.
So now we’re into the meat of the issue. All that Microsoft have done, or not depending on whose story we’re reading, is ensure that if someone uses the software and doesn’t enter a valid license code within 25 uses then the software becomes pretty much just a reader for documents. Cool. If I was selling software for a living I’d do this as well. If I don’t want to be bound by this then I can go and download OpenOffice or one of the other free alternatives, or I could buy another package.
The fact is, like or not, Office has been the package to beat for many years. Office 2007 is, in my opinion, a huge step forward. I use a Mac as my main personal machine but when I need to do spreadsheet work, or extensive word processing I go back to my PC and use Office. At work I use Outlook for my email because it integrates with Exchange which is what the company uses, at home I use Mail.app as it has what I need (in fact all my mail is routed via Gmail - I just prefer using a mail client to read and compose mail). I make choices. So can everyone else.
*OK so when I say no problems I’m not being entirely accurate. I admit at this point that this may be entirely one of those YMMV scenarios but for me I have grown to dislike WGA in Windows. If I try and download something from microsoft.com nowadays I usually at some point get to the genuine advantage page where, because I use Firefox, I am asked to download an add on. The problem I have is that I arrive at this page every single time I try and download something. I have downloaded and installed the add on at least a dozen times but it clearly doesn’t work for me. To make matters worse, knowing that the Firefox add on route isn’t going to work, I downloaded the Windows application that did the same task. This worked fine for a while, albeit needing a copy and paste operation to get the code from the app to the web page but it worked. Until last week. I now get into bizzaro land. Entering the code into the microsoft.com website leads me to another page informing me that I am not connected to the Internet. Quite how the person who wrote this page expected it to be delivered to anyone is beyond me but clearly I have to be connected to see the message telling me I’m not connected! Irony isn’t a strong suit for these people. Luckily I have IETab installed in Firefox which allows me to render sites in IE if I so desire and oddly, this solves the problem. You’d almost think it was happening on purpose :-).
And you thought your parents were embarrassing. November 14, 2006
Posted by Drew in : Funny , add a commentSo things aren’t going your way. You’ve got a plumb job heading up one of the largest IT projects ever but it isn’t going well. You’re behind schedule and as for budgets, you keep them locked away so as not to scare yourself. You’re taking flak from all sides and questions are being asked in the House.
Could it get any worse?
Well yes, your Mother could go public and tell everyone how you nearly failed your degree and that she isn’t in the slightest bit surprised you’ve a made a jolly old mess of things!
Guess he won’t be putting her down as a reference for his next job.
An urban legend unplugged. November 7, 2006
Posted by Drew in : Miscellany , add a commentI came across a posting today relating to server gaggery. It reminded me and inevitably brought up the oft told tale of the server being turned off when the cleaner unplugs it in order to give the room a good clean.
Now this is usually drags up a fair amount of comment about this being an urban myth. However I can tell you that it isn’t. It happened to me. Although as with most things there is a mitigating factor that makes it slightly more understandable.
The tale begins nine years ago when I took the job of transforming an outdated IT shop into something a bit more modern. At the time of my arrival their back end systems consisted of three Novel 3 “servers” and 1 NT box. I use the quote marks because in reality all of these units were glorified PCs. The NT box had been installed by a consultancy firm at great expense and needless to say didn’t work and broke just about every rule in the book (but don’t get me started down that track).
After settling in I decided that NT was the future and that to do the job properly we needed to start using proper servers. One was duly procured and things started to get on track. Now at this point a matter of geography. The existing servers all resided in a room that doubled as an office. Not what you’d call data centre! The new server though didn’t fit as it was much larger as it had fancy things such as more than one hard drive! Next door to the original room was a nearly empty space that was ideal for a server room, especially for what I had in mind going forward with racks. So in it went.
All was well with the world, things improved. At this time I lived close by and used to come in quite early. I noticed a couple of times that the new server was at the NT login screen rather than the locked screen. This was odd but there were no errors in the log, clearly the machine had restarted but with no error. Then one day I wasn’t in and the phone went mad. Clearly we had a problem. So we started diagnostics. We came in at the weekend and tried everything we knew. The unit worked fine. Of course, long story short, we eventually came in and found the plug dangling from the wall, luckily, if that is the word, the cleaner forgot to replug the unit in which gave us our answer.
This clears up the urban myth. It isn’t one. However it also shows that in reality this shouldn’t happen. Clearly the set of circumstances required for this to occur should be unusual. I say should as I suspect they are far more common that we think. For this to happen first and foremost the server had to be plugged directly into a mains socket. This is a bad thing. The reason for it in this case was that it was a brand new, small scale development and we hadn’t yet got over the need to invest in things like UPSs. Come on, real servers were a big step. Now several years later we have fully rackmount infrastructure with UPSs, air con, fire suppression etc and in getting from point A to point B the chances of this happening has decreased massively. Actually, it’s decreased to zero as we haven’t allowed cleaners into our server spaces since :-).
So as with most things, the devil is in the detail. Plus this gives me a chance to link to another of my favourite urban myths.
As a footnote, we left the site mentioned last year and as we cleared out the remains of the server room we came across a box of power leads that still had the “Do not turn off or unplug under any circumstances.” stickers on them!
First post! November 6, 2006
Posted by blog in : Miscellany , add a commentWell for the first post I suppose I’d have to comment on WordPress.
I’ve happened across it on many occasions and wondered about it but have only now gotten around to installing it anywhere. When you download the readme file gives you install in 5 minutes instructions. Now call me cynical but I’ve seen so many of these and three hours later you’re still struggling over some arcane commands. In the case of WordPress though the only thing I could say is that if anything the 5 minutes is overstating matters! Seriously, the instructions worked first time with my GoDaddy hosted site. It is undoubtedly the simplest install of a web application I’ve ever seen.
The detailed customisation is also really simple. I still have some tidying up to do but mostly I am impressed. No doubt I’ll post again if I find anything further.