No, no... Techosaurus Rex has not become extinct. My apologies for being so quiet lately.
With the holidays and my habit of getting submerged in things I've been fairly dormant, but let's catch up! The first big sticking point for me has been Battlefield 2 - I just love that game - then they HAD to go and release Battlefield 2142 - which is quite awesome. Then I've got this weird little love affair going on with MS Flight Sim X.
Santa was VERY nice to the Techosaurus family this Christmas! The whole brood got shiny new PC's under the tree. The little ones even got 15" flat panel monitors so they can share a table.
I bought a pile of refurbs from Dell. I know, I know, why would *I* REX TECHOSAURUS builder of mighty computers for nearly two decades buy off the shelf Dell boxes? Simplicity for one thing. I still would recommend most people build a custom PC - you will always get more for your money. However the Techosaurus clan is getting preparing for a mighty adventure in remote locations where the need to swap pieces between systems outweighs the need of tweaking each individuals system for just their needs. More on this adventure later.
I have been fairly impressed with the Dell machines we bought. I got a good deal on a lot of 4 from eBay. I did have some difficulty finding the half-height dual head 256MB video adapters I wanted for me and Mrs. Techosaurus (once you move to two monitors there is no going back) but managed to find some good deals for them on eBay as well, tricky to find, tricky to find. I will be going back to the trough to expand RAM on the grown-ups machines.
I did frankenputer a little bit - pulling my 400GB SATA drive from my PC and installing it in my new Dell box. I had a little talk with the hard drive fairy recently so Mrs. Techosaurus may be getting an increase as well.
I'm in geekasaur heaven with the 4 replaced computers sitting there calling me softly to tear into them and the other machines around the house to spread the computer goodness as far as I can. The new dell boxes also came with onboard gigabit LAN - so of course I had to go out and buy a couple of netgear gigabit switches. A 5 port for upstairs where Mrs and Jr Techosaurs plug in plus a 16 port rackmountable for the cave.
While I was at it I also hooked myself up with a couple of 19" rackmount shelves. I have 2 5U APC UPS's in the rack currently - that I'm not using and whose batteries have certainly expired. But they are quite useful as shelves, even though they do take up 5U's in the rack and weigh close to 80 pounds each...
I'll be taking my old P4 and building it into one of my rackmount cases to run as a bit torrent/burner machine with gobs of storage. The little small form factor Dell cases just can't handle multiple DVD drives.
I did buy an external USB 2.0 5 1/4 drive case for my burner but am disappointed with the speed. I'll keep my current DVD burner in there and give it the Mrs. to use and I've ordered one of the swanky new Dual Layer DVD burners with Lightscribe along with some Lightscribe and dual layer media.
The DL/Lightscribe drives are very inexpensive but the media are expensive compared to regular DVD+/-R media though not horribly priced and fairly reasonable.
I gave up on little slivers of plastic to store data a long time ago and only really burn disks for special occasions, like pictures for grandparents or long term data backups. The additional cost is well worth it. I'm not burning every piece of software, document or data to disk - that's what RAID is for, it would be unreasonable to use Lightscribe or DL media for that, though the drive I got will handle the vanilla formats as well.
All in all a pretty busy few months in the geek-lair of the mighty Techosaurus Rex - busy, busy, busy! Here's my geek to-do list:
1) Rebuild Mrs T's old machine to replace the squeky P3-400 that's been running the scanner and color printer back in her office.
2) Rebuild Mr T's old machine to be the new burner/torrent box.
3) Scavange remaining bits n' pieces from those machines with the boys old machines and see what I can come up with...
4) Rebuild the rack with new shelves replacing old UPS's and install the new gbit switch.
5) Recruit some teenagers with strong backs and little sense to help clean out the basement. Entice them with promises of free computers (See #3 above).
See, it's time to clean out the basement...and the garage...and the bedroom...and the attic (Do we have an attic? Is there anything in it?) and the living room and everything else. Like any good tech guru dinosaur I've got more than a decades worth of little bits and pieces of computers, and other crap piled up in all corners of my house (creating new corners and thus new places to store more crap). Why this sudden desire to dig out of my comfortable den after all these years?
Am I moving? Yes, probably, most likely. But that's not why. I'd just box it up and take it with me if that were the case. Mrs Techosaurus and I have undertaken a plan. A plan that requires us to jetison the majority of worldly possesions through friends and family, eBay, yardsale, freecycle and landfill. We've decided to punch the time clock and drop out of the rat race. We're pretty serious about a plan to move to the South Pacific.
Why should folks in India be the only ones to benefit so strongly from the new Global Economy? Hell, all I need to make a fairly decent living is a good internet connection and a PC. Not enough income working that way to stay here in the states with gargantuan infrastructure and other overhead costs.
So we're heading for greener pastures, okay, jungles. We've realized that even though we are lower-middle class here in the states we're still in the top 1-2% globally. Let's take our equity and our income potentials somewhere that will stretch it the furthest. Some place warm, friendly and wonderful? Sure, it comes with some challenges but I love a good challenge.
When my brother was in his mid 30's he up and joined the Navy to everyone's surprise. He had a couple degrees already and he told me once "the biggest adventure I have on any given day is deciding whether I should get out of bed and go to work or not." He's a lot more like me than I think sometimes.
ADVENTURE! It's out there! We're going for it! So now does it make sense why I went out and bought a bunch of homogenized computers? I'll still have fast internet access and can buy whatever I want on eBay or NewEgg or ZipZoomFly - but the freight will be a bitch!
Stay tuned...
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
The Bastard...
It has recently come to my attention that there are a number of highly skilled and very talented systems administrators out there that have NO idea who the Bastard Operator From Hell is.
My mind balks at the concept of living the life of a sysadmin without the teachings of The Bastard to use as a compass for making decisions...
"It's backup day today so I'm pissed off. Being the BOFH, however, does have it's advantages. I reassign null to be the tape device — it's so much more economical on my time as I don't have to keep getting up to change tapes every 5 minutes. And it speeds up backups too, so it can't be all bad can it? Of course not."
"Oh dear. There are three things wrong here: one, a user knows my extension number, which means: two, the helpdesk has been talking to the operator again; but more importantly: three, the operator is giving out my extension number to people."
"The boss is concerned about the amount of network traffic you consume and asks you to come and explain it. You'd take with you:
All hail the bastard!
My mind balks at the concept of living the life of a sysadmin without the teachings of The Bastard to use as a compass for making decisions...
"It's backup day today so I'm pissed off. Being the BOFH, however, does have it's advantages. I reassign null to be the tape device — it's so much more economical on my time as I don't have to keep getting up to change tapes every 5 minutes. And it speeds up backups too, so it can't be all bad can it? Of course not."
"Oh dear. There are three things wrong here: one, a user knows my extension number, which means: two, the helpdesk has been talking to the operator again; but more importantly: three, the operator is giving out my extension number to people."
"The boss is concerned about the amount of network traffic you consume and asks you to come and explain it. You'd take with you:
A) Traffic logs showing it was mostly Windows security updates
B) Falsified traffic logs showing it was mostly Windows security updates
C) Your union representitive
D) An axe, a large roll of carpet and a large quantity of polythene, a bag of lime.."
All hail the bastard!
Monday, September 18, 2006
The aging gamer...
I've been playing games for a long time - from Space Invaders in the arcade to pong on the TV at home - through the years of DonkeyKong and Atari 2600. I spent countless hours on Civilization, Oregon Trail and many other early PC games. I was a beta tester for a couple of the first MMPOL games (Dark Age of Camelot and shit...what was that other one - the futuristic one...) Anyway. I've been around the block and played most any game that came along.
I have never been one to play a game to death - meaning I never really cared about beating the big boss at the end of wolfenstien 3D and I don't really care what % of secrets I found at the end of each level. I just...play... Which is why I guess I'm not into the WOW or Everquest - spending hours killing squirrels in the woods to buy the 3rd level bow just doesn't turn me on quite as much as a good hack and slash, a good strategic battle or well placed headshot from my campground in counterstrike.
Back in the days of coax networks I would host geek fests (lan parties) with 5-15 people playing Quake and Carmageddon...Good times...Good times...
I mainly play single player, seems like I'm getting old and serve as nothing but fodder when I join the internet games filled with kids that have no full time job and commit 40-50 hours a week perfecting their mojo in BattleField 2 or whatever release Unreal is in nowadays. I'm no longer considered 'leet' because I don't even have a microphone hooked up to my pc so I can't coordinate with my team mates.
But, I still love the games...It's the games that got me started (Mad props to Dave Wortendyke of Troop 78 in Boulder for getting me teletype VAX time and hundreds of feet of 24" tractor feed back in the stone age to play Adventure, Hunt The Wumpus and Hamurabi) and ya know, it's the games that keep me going. I can't keep up anymore, I can't play all the games that come out, I don't invest in the hardware to play the newest thing on the shelf.
My 4 year old is heavily into games now too, he's had his own PC a couple of years and now he flys around the pbskids and nick jr. web sites playing their little games like a pro. He isn't playing to get 100% of treasure on the level, or to beat the big boss at the end (though he does call me over to beat the giant chicken in Wow Wow Wubzy because he doesn't quite have the timing skills to get past it). My 2 year old frequently steals a chance at the keyboard and I've built him his own PC that we'll set up when we find the table space and sometimes they fight like cats and dogs...to play...Just play...
I wonder what my sons will think when they introduce their kids to the games of the next generation. I'm pretty sure they will look back at their days on a little P3 in the living room playing web based flash and java games, Blue's Clues kindergaten and smile remembering the times I spent with them. Then I hope they turn to their own games again and play...just to play.
I started this article thinking I'd write a list of the top 10 games of my life, what my favorites were and why I thought they were so good. But, I won't. I'll just say this.
To the coders and the writers - the developers and the administrators that got them where they were. To the brilliant individuals who contributed and those that supported them. To the folks that took us from ASCII graphics to vivid 3d environments. To the people that took us from the cartridge and the casette to the floppy and onto optical media then into broadband web. To the people that took us away from the single seat game and brought back the spirit of head to head and table top play. To these people my hat is off. From the Players of the world. Thank you, keep up the good work. We're still playing.
I have never been one to play a game to death - meaning I never really cared about beating the big boss at the end of wolfenstien 3D and I don't really care what % of secrets I found at the end of each level. I just...play... Which is why I guess I'm not into the WOW or Everquest - spending hours killing squirrels in the woods to buy the 3rd level bow just doesn't turn me on quite as much as a good hack and slash, a good strategic battle or well placed headshot from my campground in counterstrike.
Back in the days of coax networks I would host geek fests (lan parties) with 5-15 people playing Quake and Carmageddon...Good times...Good times...
I mainly play single player, seems like I'm getting old and serve as nothing but fodder when I join the internet games filled with kids that have no full time job and commit 40-50 hours a week perfecting their mojo in BattleField 2 or whatever release Unreal is in nowadays. I'm no longer considered 'leet' because I don't even have a microphone hooked up to my pc so I can't coordinate with my team mates.
But, I still love the games...It's the games that got me started (Mad props to Dave Wortendyke of Troop 78 in Boulder for getting me teletype VAX time and hundreds of feet of 24" tractor feed back in the stone age to play Adventure, Hunt The Wumpus and Hamurabi) and ya know, it's the games that keep me going. I can't keep up anymore, I can't play all the games that come out, I don't invest in the hardware to play the newest thing on the shelf.
My 4 year old is heavily into games now too, he's had his own PC a couple of years and now he flys around the pbskids and nick jr. web sites playing their little games like a pro. He isn't playing to get 100% of treasure on the level, or to beat the big boss at the end (though he does call me over to beat the giant chicken in Wow Wow Wubzy because he doesn't quite have the timing skills to get past it). My 2 year old frequently steals a chance at the keyboard and I've built him his own PC that we'll set up when we find the table space and sometimes they fight like cats and dogs...to play...Just play...
I wonder what my sons will think when they introduce their kids to the games of the next generation. I'm pretty sure they will look back at their days on a little P3 in the living room playing web based flash and java games, Blue's Clues kindergaten and smile remembering the times I spent with them. Then I hope they turn to their own games again and play...just to play.
I started this article thinking I'd write a list of the top 10 games of my life, what my favorites were and why I thought they were so good. But, I won't. I'll just say this.
To the coders and the writers - the developers and the administrators that got them where they were. To the brilliant individuals who contributed and those that supported them. To the folks that took us from ASCII graphics to vivid 3d environments. To the people that took us from the cartridge and the casette to the floppy and onto optical media then into broadband web. To the people that took us away from the single seat game and brought back the spirit of head to head and table top play. To these people my hat is off. From the Players of the world. Thank you, keep up the good work. We're still playing.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Urrgh... Gaaaah!
http://www.gegereka.com/
It's all out there somewhere...
I use google a lot for this sort of thing but this site really cuts through the crap. It's a file search engine. Pick a file - any file. *NICE*
It's all out there somewhere...
I use google a lot for this sort of thing but this site really cuts through the crap. It's a file search engine. Pick a file - any file. *NICE*
Friday, August 25, 2006
MacGyver Envy
http://www.peepculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/wenger-giant-swiss-army.jpg
Weighing in at 2 lbs 10 oz and 8.75" in length Wenger has finally introduced a pocket knife just as feature packed as Windows Vista! Of course Wenger uses it as a promotion and a gimmick as opposed to a flagship product...
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Robocopy
When Jer's motherboard bit the dust he saw an opportunity to rebuild his PC, but what to do with the 140GB of data on his SATA drive while he reinstalled the OS?
I have plenty of storage space and after his help lifting and hauling to get the rack rebuilt it was the least I could do. I'm always amazed at the complexity of other peoples hard drives - I'm always aware of where everything is and what it does, but I'm not your regular user.
Having a hard drive with applications, documents and utilities installed with a methodololgy akin to decorating a cake with a shotgun is pretty much par for the general user.
With windows' tangle of cumbersome permissions, ownership and security copying the contents of a drive typically requires a utility. Now I wasn't interested in making an image of the disk and forcing Jer to access it with a utility. I just wanted to move the contents of the entire volume from A to B. I could just Ctrl-A the root of the disk - right click and strip off the permissions (probably 1-2 hours) then copy the data, hoping I hadn't missed some files embedded deep in the system like a tumor and tossing my copy out the window, forcing me to restart.
The copy function built into windows, even from the command prompt doesn't really allow for a clean restart if there's a failure (say a funky ownership setting in the system volume info folder). So you spend a lot of time doing the same thing over and over. What a pain!
So I tapped a smart guy I know, John and asked if he had a recommendation. Like myself he appreciates a well written utility with no frills and no bullshit - and he had just the ticket. During a recent server migration he'd used a tool called RoboCopy from the win2k3 server resource kit and recommended I take a look at it. I snagged a copy off the internet and started fiddling.
What an app! Not that Robocopy has a broad application but what it does it does very, very well. It's like someone at microsoft dug up some crusty old dos coder and said "Hey, we need a new version of copy, kind of like XCopy - but better..." Then left him alone for a few weeks. No frills, no bullshit, just a lean mean utility with no market speak or fluff features.
So, proof that there are still people at microsoft writing good code. Thanks guys! Robocopy is a straight forward command line utility. It allows direct control and provides a certain amount of intelligence. It's kind of like XCOPY's mean big brother.
I have plenty of storage space and after his help lifting and hauling to get the rack rebuilt it was the least I could do. I'm always amazed at the complexity of other peoples hard drives - I'm always aware of where everything is and what it does, but I'm not your regular user.
Having a hard drive with applications, documents and utilities installed with a methodololgy akin to decorating a cake with a shotgun is pretty much par for the general user.
With windows' tangle of cumbersome permissions, ownership and security copying the contents of a drive typically requires a utility. Now I wasn't interested in making an image of the disk and forcing Jer to access it with a utility. I just wanted to move the contents of the entire volume from A to B. I could just Ctrl-A the root of the disk - right click and strip off the permissions (probably 1-2 hours) then copy the data, hoping I hadn't missed some files embedded deep in the system like a tumor and tossing my copy out the window, forcing me to restart.
The copy function built into windows, even from the command prompt doesn't really allow for a clean restart if there's a failure (say a funky ownership setting in the system volume info folder). So you spend a lot of time doing the same thing over and over. What a pain!
So I tapped a smart guy I know, John and asked if he had a recommendation. Like myself he appreciates a well written utility with no frills and no bullshit - and he had just the ticket. During a recent server migration he'd used a tool called RoboCopy from the win2k3 server resource kit and recommended I take a look at it. I snagged a copy off the internet and started fiddling.
What an app! Not that Robocopy has a broad application but what it does it does very, very well. It's like someone at microsoft dug up some crusty old dos coder and said "Hey, we need a new version of copy, kind of like XCopy - but better..." Then left him alone for a few weeks. No frills, no bullshit, just a lean mean utility with no market speak or fluff features.
So, proof that there are still people at microsoft writing good code. Thanks guys! Robocopy is a straight forward command line utility. It allows direct control and provides a certain amount of intelligence. It's kind of like XCOPY's mean big brother.
Monday, July 31, 2006
The Challenge!
Ladies and Gentleman! Boys and Girls! Gather round and hear about an incredible offer!
I've been a corporate whore for at least a decade now, pimping my skills in exchange for paychecks. Now it's your turn to use me like a disposable commodity! Cheap!
I will be happy to entertain any tech questions you may have. If I don't know the answer, it won't cost you a thing! Timely intelligent answers! Right here! From the kind of geek you typically need to navigate through three levels of coroporate beuracracy to talk to!
So, here's how this will work -
Click the link below to Paypal me some $$$. Whatever you think an answer to your question might be worth, $5 - $500 - whatever you like! Submit your question along with your paypal payment. I'll post your question and my response here on Techosaurus Rex and directly to you in email. If I refuse your question I'll return the funds and provide an explanation of why I can't or what I need to answer your question.
Here's a free one to get the ball rolling:
Q: I don't have paypal - but want to ask a question - how do I send you money?
A: Setup a paypal account - come on - it's the 21st century.
I've been a corporate whore for at least a decade now, pimping my skills in exchange for paychecks. Now it's your turn to use me like a disposable commodity! Cheap!
I will be happy to entertain any tech questions you may have. If I don't know the answer, it won't cost you a thing! Timely intelligent answers! Right here! From the kind of geek you typically need to navigate through three levels of coroporate beuracracy to talk to!
So, here's how this will work -
Click the link below to Paypal me some $$$. Whatever you think an answer to your question might be worth, $5 - $500 - whatever you like! Submit your question along with your paypal payment. I'll post your question and my response here on Techosaurus Rex and directly to you in email. If I refuse your question I'll return the funds and provide an explanation of why I can't or what I need to answer your question.
Here's a free one to get the ball rolling:
Q: I don't have paypal - but want to ask a question - how do I send you money?
A: Setup a paypal account - come on - it's the 21st century.
This weekend...
I managed to get a lot done this weekend...
The HP 6500 inkjet printer we've been using for about 2 years now has suprisingly started having fits - It's misfeeding, generating skewed images on the paper and sometimes taking too many sheets. Hopefully it just needs a cleanup.
This printer has hung on Lucy, a little PC sitting in my wifes office that also runs the flat bed scanner. I tried to remote into Lucy when this problem first occured, and also when I was rolling out the monowall and she wouldn't respond - seeing as lucy didn't have a monitor or keyboard plugged into her this required I pull the whole box.
I pulled her out and brought her down to the lab - managed to log in locally with no problem - only to find the FUCKING WINDOWS FIREWALL had been enabled on the LAN connection - I didn't do it, my wife didn't do it - fuck you microsoft!
Anyway - I was able to shut it down and remote in as usual with few modifications. I also blew out the hardware while I had it down just for good measure and configured all the new routing/IP stuff for the new network configuration.
I installed an HP 5500 printer I'd gotten from someone else and stuffed it all back into the corner of the office. Seems to be running great until MS decides how to configure their software on my machine again without telling me...sigh... Is it REALLY necessary to run a group policy to disable the firewall on my AD? I mean, c'mon!
While Lucy was purring away I saw an opportunity to get some more work done on the rack. I mounted the two new 8 switch/outlet power strips. It started getting confusing when I realized that Cricket plugged into LAN port 9, Power Switch 4 and KVM Port 1 - So I pretty much stripped the rack again - Now Cricket is on 1 - Magrathea on 2 and so on - they all match up and is much cleaner, I think, than my previous plan of printing out little labels for everything...lol.
I got the small hard drive swapped out of magrathea, grabbed a 4GB drive from the graveyard and got it up and running in short order - copied everything across. Got up the next morning and tried to connect to it - errors? Checked the application - apparently the Software RAID had failed. Could of happened for a couple of reasons:
1) I set the drives to power down after 30 minutes - I'm thinking they are slow to wake up and this caused a synch error.
2)The drives I'm using are just too slow and aren't capable of keeping up with the demands placed on them.
So, I wiped it...again... and reloaded FreeNAS - I set up the drives to be 'always on' I'll see how it works. If it doesn't work I'll have to make a decision...
Do I just add the individual 185GB drives and keep them as two seperate volumes in FreeNAS? This kind of defeats the purpose of being long term storage, without raid I'm prone to data loss. I don't want to cludge over any kind of disk mirroring, FreeNAS should be capable of that anyway, right?
I'm also thinking about picking up a cheap PCI IDE Raid controller of some sort, build the raid at the hardware level and just feed it to FreeNas as a single volume. This is the first software raid I've tried to configure in FreeNAS and it's a pain in my ass. Hardware raids have all worked flawlessly.
Anyway, I gotta get a fresh can of compressed air and find something that will soften up those rollers on the 6500 printer so we can get it back into service... I'm really getting tired of disposable printers. Of course having spent about 6 hours tearing down a HP 8500 laserjet at work on Friday to find a damaged sprocket on the developer feeder doesnt' make me too fond of HP at the moment either...
I also got called over to my in-laws house. A couple weeks back I helped Dave, my father-in-law, order a new DVD Burner and a bigger IDE HDD and they came in this week. I was pretty impressed, he had managed to get both drives installed and had windows formatting the new hard disk by the time I got there. He had a few questions about junk mail rules and address books in Thunderbird and some text size settings for Firefox. Quick and easy housecall.
The HP 6500 inkjet printer we've been using for about 2 years now has suprisingly started having fits - It's misfeeding, generating skewed images on the paper and sometimes taking too many sheets. Hopefully it just needs a cleanup.
This printer has hung on Lucy, a little PC sitting in my wifes office that also runs the flat bed scanner. I tried to remote into Lucy when this problem first occured, and also when I was rolling out the monowall and she wouldn't respond - seeing as lucy didn't have a monitor or keyboard plugged into her this required I pull the whole box.
I pulled her out and brought her down to the lab - managed to log in locally with no problem - only to find the FUCKING WINDOWS FIREWALL had been enabled on the LAN connection - I didn't do it, my wife didn't do it - fuck you microsoft!
Anyway - I was able to shut it down and remote in as usual with few modifications. I also blew out the hardware while I had it down just for good measure and configured all the new routing/IP stuff for the new network configuration.
I installed an HP 5500 printer I'd gotten from someone else and stuffed it all back into the corner of the office. Seems to be running great until MS decides how to configure their software on my machine again without telling me...sigh... Is it REALLY necessary to run a group policy to disable the firewall on my AD? I mean, c'mon!
While Lucy was purring away I saw an opportunity to get some more work done on the rack. I mounted the two new 8 switch/outlet power strips. It started getting confusing when I realized that Cricket plugged into LAN port 9, Power Switch 4 and KVM Port 1 - So I pretty much stripped the rack again - Now Cricket is on 1 - Magrathea on 2 and so on - they all match up and is much cleaner, I think, than my previous plan of printing out little labels for everything...lol.
I got the small hard drive swapped out of magrathea, grabbed a 4GB drive from the graveyard and got it up and running in short order - copied everything across. Got up the next morning and tried to connect to it - errors? Checked the application - apparently the Software RAID had failed. Could of happened for a couple of reasons:
1) I set the drives to power down after 30 minutes - I'm thinking they are slow to wake up and this caused a synch error.
2)The drives I'm using are just too slow and aren't capable of keeping up with the demands placed on them.
So, I wiped it...again... and reloaded FreeNAS - I set up the drives to be 'always on' I'll see how it works. If it doesn't work I'll have to make a decision...
Do I just add the individual 185GB drives and keep them as two seperate volumes in FreeNAS? This kind of defeats the purpose of being long term storage, without raid I'm prone to data loss. I don't want to cludge over any kind of disk mirroring, FreeNAS should be capable of that anyway, right?
I'm also thinking about picking up a cheap PCI IDE Raid controller of some sort, build the raid at the hardware level and just feed it to FreeNas as a single volume. This is the first software raid I've tried to configure in FreeNAS and it's a pain in my ass. Hardware raids have all worked flawlessly.
Anyway, I gotta get a fresh can of compressed air and find something that will soften up those rollers on the 6500 printer so we can get it back into service... I'm really getting tired of disposable printers. Of course having spent about 6 hours tearing down a HP 8500 laserjet at work on Friday to find a damaged sprocket on the developer feeder doesnt' make me too fond of HP at the moment either...
I also got called over to my in-laws house. A couple weeks back I helped Dave, my father-in-law, order a new DVD Burner and a bigger IDE HDD and they came in this week. I was pretty impressed, he had managed to get both drives installed and had windows formatting the new hard disk by the time I got there. He had a few questions about junk mail rules and address books in Thunderbird and some text size settings for Firefox. Quick and easy housecall.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Hosting...
I'm preparing to launch a hosting service where I will perform admin and technical services. Hoping y'all will look me up when the need arises. In the mean time might I recommend Hostgator.
I've been up and down the river of reseller and basic hosting packages and HostGator comes through on top. When I do start providing consulting and hosting services I will be using host gator for datacenter, hardware and OS management.
geek activisim?
Interesting list of ways to look at the world...
http://www.scienceaddiction.com/2006/07/23/95-theses-of-geek-activism/
And, if that's to deep for you - here is some classic python:
http://www.pelourinho.com/movies/GermanyGreece-1.swf
Wow, BBSPOT has been a very good link mine today - thanks guys!
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/07/10-reasons-you-should-never-get-a-job/
http://www.scienceaddiction.com/2006/07/23/95-theses-of-geek-activism/
And, if that's to deep for you - here is some classic python:
http://www.pelourinho.com/movies/GermanyGreece-1.swf
Wow, BBSPOT has been a very good link mine today - thanks guys!
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/07/10-reasons-you-should-never-get-a-job/
Monday, July 24, 2006
and again and again and again and again...
Have you ever spent too much time on a problem because you KNEW you had a hardware problem but you didn't want to admit it, causing great delay by trying every possible remedy?
Well, I spent quite a bit of time this weekend fighting with a FreeNAS install.
It's on the machine Magrathea - it has a 20GB Western Digital PM - a 52X CD PS and two 185GB Fujitsu drives as SM and SS.
The first problem was the CD-ROM drive. Of course I mounted it in the rack without installing the OS first...duh... so it sat up there a week or two until I finally got Mrs Rex to help me pull it down. Once down I quickly got the CDROM replaced and got FreeNAS installed, RAID configured and dumped the 105GB of files/apps down from Zarquon.
Fast forward a week - I get a bug up my but and decide I need to rename the share points and volumes - but I can't log into it. I forgot the frickin password! Whenever I build a system or a group of systems I keep a sheet of rott/admin userid's and passwords - but none of them worked... So I reset the pass and tried again - but I was obviously not using the right userid because even with the pass reset I couldn't get in.
So...I nuked it. And while reinstalling found the OTHER sheet of paper that showed where I had gone in and reset the u/p on the machine for the new password scheme I've been using. DOH!
But NOW it's giving me even more headaches. On the first pass it refused to see AD0 for the install - it comes up with a list of drives to instlal to - and it's not there. Okay, reboot and go in with BootIt-NG -(GREAT app) - wipe the boot sectors and exisiting partitions and try the install again. Great, now it sees all three drives.
Got it installed and configured - went to add the disks to the NAS - the WD20GB works great. But now it's giving me headaches putting the mount point on the software raid on the dual 185's.
And back and forth and back and forth...either I couldn't see AD0 or it gives me errors trying to build the software raid...sigh...anyway, I think at this point it's a problem with one of the 185's - started a slow diag last night - we'll see.
BootIT is a great little app - I don't use the boot loader - I always cancel the install when I run it - just the partition tools make this app worth while - instantly create, delete and format whatever partition types you might want. Rex gives it a thumbs up.
Well, I spent quite a bit of time this weekend fighting with a FreeNAS install.
It's on the machine Magrathea - it has a 20GB Western Digital PM - a 52X CD PS and two 185GB Fujitsu drives as SM and SS.
The first problem was the CD-ROM drive. Of course I mounted it in the rack without installing the OS first...duh... so it sat up there a week or two until I finally got Mrs Rex to help me pull it down. Once down I quickly got the CDROM replaced and got FreeNAS installed, RAID configured and dumped the 105GB of files/apps down from Zarquon.
Fast forward a week - I get a bug up my but and decide I need to rename the share points and volumes - but I can't log into it. I forgot the frickin password! Whenever I build a system or a group of systems I keep a sheet of rott/admin userid's and passwords - but none of them worked... So I reset the pass and tried again - but I was obviously not using the right userid because even with the pass reset I couldn't get in.
So...I nuked it. And while reinstalling found the OTHER sheet of paper that showed where I had gone in and reset the u/p on the machine for the new password scheme I've been using. DOH!
But NOW it's giving me even more headaches. On the first pass it refused to see AD0 for the install - it comes up with a list of drives to instlal to - and it's not there. Okay, reboot and go in with BootIt-NG -(GREAT app) - wipe the boot sectors and exisiting partitions and try the install again. Great, now it sees all three drives.
Got it installed and configured - went to add the disks to the NAS - the WD20GB works great. But now it's giving me headaches putting the mount point on the software raid on the dual 185's.
And back and forth and back and forth...either I couldn't see AD0 or it gives me errors trying to build the software raid...sigh...anyway, I think at this point it's a problem with one of the 185's - started a slow diag last night - we'll see.
BootIT is a great little app - I don't use the boot loader - I always cancel the install when I run it - just the partition tools make this app worth while - instantly create, delete and format whatever partition types you might want. Rex gives it a thumbs up.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
FoN HoM
So, I got my new Fon Social Router delivered yesterday.
http://en.fon.com/
It doesn't look like too bad a deal - for $13 you get a nice modified linksys 802.11G router.
You set it up and provide access to the internet over that router to Fon users that may have access to your hotspot. You can provide free service for Fon network members or Billable service where Fon gives you 50% of the revenue. If you setup the free service you then get free access to the thousands of Fon network hotspots around the world.
There's been a lot of hacking and mod talk about these devices. Apparently it's quite easy to setup a simple cron job to mimic the heartbeat signal the device sends to show Fon you're online (thus verifying you're actually providing access). It's also been stated that it's quite easy to flash the memory on the box back to factory defaults and just drop it into service.
This particular router is very popular with the hacking community because it's linux based.
Linksys WRT54GL
Which is probably why Fon picked it for their service in the first place. I'm not sure about the kit they deploy in europe.
I would recommend reading their use agreement before you sign up, and keep it in mind if you do decide to mod your router. They'll bill you something like $40 (the additional cost of the router I imagine) if you don't keep up your end of the deal. Keep up your end of the deal though, let's stop waiting around for governments to build wifi umbrellas for our communities.
Living way out in the boonies the way I do I have little or no concern about sharing my connection - security through obscurity. I don't know how useful free access to their service will be now, and I couldn't make any money off it (no customers). But, being the geek I am I just can't turn down a little blinky box that does interesting things for $13.00.
I think I'll put it out in the open as part of the network, but I'm fairly sure I'll be pinching the bandwidth it uses through my firewall and logging its activity to make sure it's not being used for p2p and the like.
http://en.fon.com/
It doesn't look like too bad a deal - for $13 you get a nice modified linksys 802.11G router.
You set it up and provide access to the internet over that router to Fon users that may have access to your hotspot. You can provide free service for Fon network members or Billable service where Fon gives you 50% of the revenue. If you setup the free service you then get free access to the thousands of Fon network hotspots around the world.
There's been a lot of hacking and mod talk about these devices. Apparently it's quite easy to setup a simple cron job to mimic the heartbeat signal the device sends to show Fon you're online (thus verifying you're actually providing access). It's also been stated that it's quite easy to flash the memory on the box back to factory defaults and just drop it into service.
This particular router is very popular with the hacking community because it's linux based.
Linksys WRT54GL
Which is probably why Fon picked it for their service in the first place. I'm not sure about the kit they deploy in europe.
I would recommend reading their use agreement before you sign up, and keep it in mind if you do decide to mod your router. They'll bill you something like $40 (the additional cost of the router I imagine) if you don't keep up your end of the deal. Keep up your end of the deal though, let's stop waiting around for governments to build wifi umbrellas for our communities.
Living way out in the boonies the way I do I have little or no concern about sharing my connection - security through obscurity. I don't know how useful free access to their service will be now, and I couldn't make any money off it (no customers). But, being the geek I am I just can't turn down a little blinky box that does interesting things for $13.00.
I think I'll put it out in the open as part of the network, but I'm fairly sure I'll be pinching the bandwidth it uses through my firewall and logging its activity to make sure it's not being used for p2p and the like.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
The care and feeding of geeks...
Top 10 Ways to Motivate Geeks
This is a good little article about managing, or as I call it "wrangling" geeks.
I'll manage your hardware, your software, your firmware and your middleware - but don't ask me to manage your meatware.
That's not really true - but I am most happy when I'm not responsible for blowing noses or wiping bums at work. Plenty of that at home!
If you're going to give me a team, then give me a team and let me manage them. Don't use my position as a way to protect yourself from the effects of your decisions. Several times in the past I've found my technical and trouble shooting abilities lifting me to the top of a team. This frequently comes with a title like "Team Lead" or "Senior Whatever".
In most cases it comes with nothing but headaches. Responsibility for the team with no real authority leads to everyone being unhappy. If you use team leads or senior techs in your group so you don't have to deal with the people you're actually responsible for managing you'll find they've carved out a special little corner of hell just for you!
I actually enjoy leading (notice I didn't say managing) a team or a group or an organization. Part of being a good leader is good managment. LOTS of people and organizations have this backwards - they think good leadership is part of being a good manager. If you don't understand the difference go read Ender's Game.
I have a very hands off approach to management. I don't like having the responsibility of moistening a chair for 40 hours a week and think it's a waste of any persons time. With professionals in any business measuring their performance by measuring how much time they spend sitting in their designated work compartment is a waste of time, but at least it fills in some of your own chair jockey hours. I set REAL goals for my team and the individuals in it.
As a manager I feel it's my responsibility to find the very best available individual to tackle a task alone or on a team. It's then my responsiblity to keep my team informed, equipped and prepared as well as acting as a liason between them and other organizations in the business. A good manager should be confident enough in the people on their team to do their job that beyond measuring their progress toward the teams goals there's no need to interfere with "how" someone does it. If you really hired a professional they already know "how".
I measure goals and progress toward them. If they are realistic and clearly defined and if you've selected the right people for the right tasks you will make them, but not if you're too busy demoralizing those individuals and groups by wasting their time and yours worrying about cookie-cutter standards.
Everyone uses the buzz words "Outside the Box" - how do you expect people to THINK outside the box if you don't let them OUT OF THE FUCKING BOX!?
This is a good little article about managing, or as I call it "wrangling" geeks.
I'll manage your hardware, your software, your firmware and your middleware - but don't ask me to manage your meatware.
That's not really true - but I am most happy when I'm not responsible for blowing noses or wiping bums at work. Plenty of that at home!
If you're going to give me a team, then give me a team and let me manage them. Don't use my position as a way to protect yourself from the effects of your decisions. Several times in the past I've found my technical and trouble shooting abilities lifting me to the top of a team. This frequently comes with a title like "Team Lead" or "Senior Whatever".
In most cases it comes with nothing but headaches. Responsibility for the team with no real authority leads to everyone being unhappy. If you use team leads or senior techs in your group so you don't have to deal with the people you're actually responsible for managing you'll find they've carved out a special little corner of hell just for you!
I actually enjoy leading (notice I didn't say managing) a team or a group or an organization. Part of being a good leader is good managment. LOTS of people and organizations have this backwards - they think good leadership is part of being a good manager. If you don't understand the difference go read Ender's Game.
I have a very hands off approach to management. I don't like having the responsibility of moistening a chair for 40 hours a week and think it's a waste of any persons time. With professionals in any business measuring their performance by measuring how much time they spend sitting in their designated work compartment is a waste of time, but at least it fills in some of your own chair jockey hours. I set REAL goals for my team and the individuals in it.
As a manager I feel it's my responsibility to find the very best available individual to tackle a task alone or on a team. It's then my responsiblity to keep my team informed, equipped and prepared as well as acting as a liason between them and other organizations in the business. A good manager should be confident enough in the people on their team to do their job that beyond measuring their progress toward the teams goals there's no need to interfere with "how" someone does it. If you really hired a professional they already know "how".
I measure goals and progress toward them. If they are realistic and clearly defined and if you've selected the right people for the right tasks you will make them, but not if you're too busy demoralizing those individuals and groups by wasting their time and yours worrying about cookie-cutter standards.
Everyone uses the buzz words "Outside the Box" - how do you expect people to THINK outside the box if you don't let them OUT OF THE FUCKING BOX!?
Over React(OS)ing...
So I got a chance to play with ReactOS a little bit over the last few days.
The size and efficiency of their install is amazing and only leads me to believe more stongly that MS is killing it self by staying mired in the bog of "features" they try to ship with their OS.
http://www.reactos.com
The ReactOS® project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.
At just over 15MB for the live or install CD you owe it to yourself to download a copy and play with it a bit yourself.
Sorry for the gap in updates, there's been a major shift in my life I'll be talking more about soon...
The size and efficiency of their install is amazing and only leads me to believe more stongly that MS is killing it self by staying mired in the bog of "features" they try to ship with their OS.
http://www.reactos.com
The ReactOS® project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.
At just over 15MB for the live or install CD you owe it to yourself to download a copy and play with it a bit yourself.
Sorry for the gap in updates, there's been a major shift in my life I'll be talking more about soon...
Friday, July 14, 2006
Wha?
-sigh-
I'm beside myself with fear - Why exactly is Ted Stevens sitting on the committee that controls e-commerce? Jon Stewart sums up my feelings much better than I do.
(Sorry, looks like DMCA pulled the video - just search YouTube for "Jon Stewart Ted Stevens")
Ya know, I don't get up in front of the world and make myself look like an ignorant ass about raping shareholders or the environment. Where does Stevens get off doing it about IT? At least I'm not in a position to actually change federal policy about raping shareholders and the environment...
I'm beside myself with fear - Why exactly is Ted Stevens sitting on the committee that controls e-commerce? Jon Stewart sums up my feelings much better than I do.
(Sorry, looks like DMCA pulled the video - just search YouTube for "Jon Stewart Ted Stevens")
Ya know, I don't get up in front of the world and make myself look like an ignorant ass about raping shareholders or the environment. Where does Stevens get off doing it about IT? At least I'm not in a position to actually change federal policy about raping shareholders and the environment...
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
When I'm right...
http://www.vmware.com/products/server/
Didn't I just get done talking about virtual servers managed on giant clusters? Then whaddya know - VMWare goes out and starts giving away their vmware server as....FLOSS!
Didn't I just get done talking about virtual servers managed on giant clusters? Then whaddya know - VMWare goes out and starts giving away their vmware server as....FLOSS!
Still way ahead of the curve...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983365,00.asp
Eweek has this interesting article - you probably saw it on http://slashdot.org
I like this little snippet:
"Based on our forays into user forums for many top open-source enterprise applications, there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source products on Windows servers--attracted, no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators. The results of our WAMP stack tests indicate that these folks might be on to something."
How three years ago - in my opinion... I've been through that phase, we'll probably see an article in a year or two talking about "Slim single mission open source servers with low overhead and startup costs replacing more complex and expensive full OS servers running in a managed server environment."
I loved working with WAMP and homebrewed conglomorations of FLOSS (Free License and Open Source Software) applications running on Windows OS platform servers for the reasons listed above. It gives the flexibility and low cost of FLOSS in application deployment, allowing me to gain strength in management and administration of Apache and MySQL without also having to conquer the learning curve of installing and maintaining the base OS's typically associated with them. It's a natural stepping stone.
FLOSS solutions on windows machines isn't just limited to server applications either. There are a lot of great FLOSS solutions for the desktop environment like PaintDotNet and OpenOffice. Why steal, or worse pay for Photoshop or MS Office when FLOSS provides programs that are great replacments for the vast majority of users? System utilities like CD/DVD Burners, file management, desktop management, browsers, email clients, FLOSS has a lot of good solutions.
As far as server stuff goes, I forsee the enterprise environment moving to servers like m0n0wall and FreeNAS on small virtual servers managed on gigantic windows and nix clusters. With installation as easy as pie, resource usage as sharp as a knife and management as simple as a tall cool glass of milk we'll all be asking for seconds.
Eweek has this interesting article - you probably saw it on http://slashdot.org
I like this little snippet:
"Based on our forays into user forums for many top open-source enterprise applications, there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source products on Windows servers--attracted, no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators. The results of our WAMP stack tests indicate that these folks might be on to something."
How three years ago - in my opinion... I've been through that phase, we'll probably see an article in a year or two talking about "Slim single mission open source servers with low overhead and startup costs replacing more complex and expensive full OS servers running in a managed server environment."
I loved working with WAMP and homebrewed conglomorations of FLOSS (Free License and Open Source Software) applications running on Windows OS platform servers for the reasons listed above. It gives the flexibility and low cost of FLOSS in application deployment, allowing me to gain strength in management and administration of Apache and MySQL without also having to conquer the learning curve of installing and maintaining the base OS's typically associated with them. It's a natural stepping stone.
FLOSS solutions on windows machines isn't just limited to server applications either. There are a lot of great FLOSS solutions for the desktop environment like PaintDotNet and OpenOffice. Why steal, or worse pay for Photoshop or MS Office when FLOSS provides programs that are great replacments for the vast majority of users? System utilities like CD/DVD Burners, file management, desktop management, browsers, email clients, FLOSS has a lot of good solutions.
As far as server stuff goes, I forsee the enterprise environment moving to servers like m0n0wall and FreeNAS on small virtual servers managed on gigantic windows and nix clusters. With installation as easy as pie, resource usage as sharp as a knife and management as simple as a tall cool glass of milk we'll all be asking for seconds.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Sorry to be so bitchy...
One of the first things I did when I started this blog was promise it wouldn't be an MS Bash fest or a bunch of whining. Looking at the last couple of posts I realize it's not working that way.
I promise to try and avoid microsoft bashing like this and talk about some of the other technologies I work with. I really am a strong proponent of the Windows OS and a number of MS tools, I'm just frustrated by the direction they seem to be taking with a lot of their products.
There is no better working environment desktop OS in my opinion. There may be a work environment here and there that is particularly suited to Linux or BSD desktops but I'll keep turning to the swiss army knife of OS's and install windows. So long as the knife is small enough to fit in my pocket, that is.
I promise to try and avoid microsoft bashing like this and talk about some of the other technologies I work with. I really am a strong proponent of the Windows OS and a number of MS tools, I'm just frustrated by the direction they seem to be taking with a lot of their products.
There is no better working environment desktop OS in my opinion. There may be a work environment here and there that is particularly suited to Linux or BSD desktops but I'll keep turning to the swiss army knife of OS's and install windows. So long as the knife is small enough to fit in my pocket, that is.
Vista...oh boy!
So a few weeks back I got my hands on a recent beta version of Windows Vista at work. We're pretty sure we're not going to be migrating our 500+ workstations anytime soon because none of the workstations, even the ones recently purchased, meet the hardware requirements. The big problem being video card compatibility. Vista is very picky about what cards it does and does not support.
I've installed windows thousands of times, from my time as a bench tech working in 3.1 to 9x, working for a major pc manufacturer as the lead windows OS test technician for a line of high end engineering workstations with NT, 2k and XP in 13 languagees. I've worked on major migrations for telecomms, transportation and financial institutions for Y2k migrations to windows NT building workstation images for thousands of users.
And I'm here to tell you why MS has raised the bar so high on video hardware required for Vista...
Because they have replaced the dos style blue background installation screens with very pretty and high resolution graphics akin to what you see after first boot.
You know the part where you work with partitions and load mass storage drivers? Where the system copies files for the first boot from the HDD? The part that the end user 99% of the time NEVER sees? Yes, that part! So, chuck those fairly new P3 and P4 pc's out the window because the new windows OS needs a video card with native proprietary graphics support so the installation will LOOK PRETTY.
Fear not minions! I was able to fairly easily get it to install on one of our old Optiplex 260's with a PCI Matrox video card. It wasn't "pretty" but once installed sure enough, I was able to go back in and turn off all the resource hogging "look and feel" "features" and get the desktop back to a clean, slick usable interface very reminiscent of Win2k.
I haven't had too much time to dig into the newer features of Vista but here is what I have found.
IT Technicians will need to grow a third arm with an eye in the palm of its hand to use the full disk encryption they've been promising. Talk about a messy path, it's horrible. I feel fairly confident I can do it machine to machine but it makes the process of mass replicating a system image to multiple workstations quite a nightmare.
One feature I do like is the clickable full path header in the explorer windows. One of the first things I do in XP is go into the folder view options and enable "show full path in the title bar" so I can actually tell where I'm browsing. In Vista it's default and each directory in the path is hot linked. Say you're in C:\documents and settings\rex\desktop\download\torrents\completed - up in the title bar of the explorer window I could click on "rex" in the display and it will navigate me there. A bit simpler than clicking "up,up,up,up" and more reliable than "back,back,back,back" which may not take you where you really think you're going.
I'm sure there are some other good features, and some really bad ones I'd imagine as well. I may be wrong about the video requirements but have had NO problem with an old spec video card once I struggled through the nearly unusable installation. I wonder how much longer the Vista install is because of all the graphics and shit that load during those initial boot from CD setup stages - and I wonder who at microsoft thought ANYBODY would want it.
Maybe they're just trying to make the Vista OS easier for end users to install by making it less cryptic. That's all well and good but takes me back to the loss of flexibility and performance that seems to be Microsoft's common practice. I'm tired of having to work around "usability" features installed for stupid people when 90% of windows installations are going to be handled by technical professionals. I think these features should be available for OEM's to include on their systems for when they ship em off to the end users.
Here's an idea - maybe someone at Microsoft will listen some day.
Instead of trying to pack every feature, every compatibility, every option into a single package you should sell windows as a clean, efficient stand alone OS. Provide those usability, compatibility and feature tools as downloads to people that purchase it. Don't ship us a resource hog that we have to strip to meet our needs. SIMPLIFY THE OS - it will do more to decrease install time, drive users to your website and spark innovation in your user base.
Instead of IT teams getting new windows PC's and spending time removing useless features that may or may not conflict with the utilities and applications we need to install for our business that are one step outside of the "microsoft experience" we should be able to put together a package of add on's downloaded from the site and install it manually or through group policy.
Clean, efficient, crapware free Windows - out of the box, with all the bells whistles and add-ons available from your site where you can control access (genuine advantage does it pretty well) and reduce piracy.
Someone is always going to find a way to pirate your OS, but at least you control access to add ons and features now. Stop trying to cram 50 pounds of crap into a 20 lb bag - give us the 20lb bag 10lbs full and a shovel. We'll take it from there.
I've installed windows thousands of times, from my time as a bench tech working in 3.1 to 9x, working for a major pc manufacturer as the lead windows OS test technician for a line of high end engineering workstations with NT, 2k and XP in 13 languagees. I've worked on major migrations for telecomms, transportation and financial institutions for Y2k migrations to windows NT building workstation images for thousands of users.
And I'm here to tell you why MS has raised the bar so high on video hardware required for Vista...
Because they have replaced the dos style blue background installation screens with very pretty and high resolution graphics akin to what you see after first boot.
You know the part where you work with partitions and load mass storage drivers? Where the system copies files for the first boot from the HDD? The part that the end user 99% of the time NEVER sees? Yes, that part! So, chuck those fairly new P3 and P4 pc's out the window because the new windows OS needs a video card with native proprietary graphics support so the installation will LOOK PRETTY.
Fear not minions! I was able to fairly easily get it to install on one of our old Optiplex 260's with a PCI Matrox video card. It wasn't "pretty" but once installed sure enough, I was able to go back in and turn off all the resource hogging "look and feel" "features" and get the desktop back to a clean, slick usable interface very reminiscent of Win2k.
I haven't had too much time to dig into the newer features of Vista but here is what I have found.
IT Technicians will need to grow a third arm with an eye in the palm of its hand to use the full disk encryption they've been promising. Talk about a messy path, it's horrible. I feel fairly confident I can do it machine to machine but it makes the process of mass replicating a system image to multiple workstations quite a nightmare.
One feature I do like is the clickable full path header in the explorer windows. One of the first things I do in XP is go into the folder view options and enable "show full path in the title bar" so I can actually tell where I'm browsing. In Vista it's default and each directory in the path is hot linked. Say you're in C:\documents and settings\rex\desktop\download\torrents\completed - up in the title bar of the explorer window I could click on "rex" in the display and it will navigate me there. A bit simpler than clicking "up,up,up,up" and more reliable than "back,back,back,back" which may not take you where you really think you're going.
I'm sure there are some other good features, and some really bad ones I'd imagine as well. I may be wrong about the video requirements but have had NO problem with an old spec video card once I struggled through the nearly unusable installation. I wonder how much longer the Vista install is because of all the graphics and shit that load during those initial boot from CD setup stages - and I wonder who at microsoft thought ANYBODY would want it.
Maybe they're just trying to make the Vista OS easier for end users to install by making it less cryptic. That's all well and good but takes me back to the loss of flexibility and performance that seems to be Microsoft's common practice. I'm tired of having to work around "usability" features installed for stupid people when 90% of windows installations are going to be handled by technical professionals. I think these features should be available for OEM's to include on their systems for when they ship em off to the end users.
Here's an idea - maybe someone at Microsoft will listen some day.
Instead of trying to pack every feature, every compatibility, every option into a single package you should sell windows as a clean, efficient stand alone OS. Provide those usability, compatibility and feature tools as downloads to people that purchase it. Don't ship us a resource hog that we have to strip to meet our needs. SIMPLIFY THE OS - it will do more to decrease install time, drive users to your website and spark innovation in your user base.
Instead of IT teams getting new windows PC's and spending time removing useless features that may or may not conflict with the utilities and applications we need to install for our business that are one step outside of the "microsoft experience" we should be able to put together a package of add on's downloaded from the site and install it manually or through group policy.
Clean, efficient, crapware free Windows - out of the box, with all the bells whistles and add-ons available from your site where you can control access (genuine advantage does it pretty well) and reduce piracy.
Someone is always going to find a way to pirate your OS, but at least you control access to add ons and features now. Stop trying to cram 50 pounds of crap into a 20 lb bag - give us the 20lb bag 10lbs full and a shovel. We'll take it from there.
One Care? Who Cares?
Okay, so I am trying OneCare. I installed it on Zarquon and Lintila. Microsoft is now responsible for virus and spyware detection on my pc - as well as giving me lots of annoying popups.
Amazing, isn't it? What's the best way to deal with pop-ups? By popping up frickin system messages! Give me a damn break. Microsoft could probably pay for the windows license if they sold advertising space on their firewall, backup, tuneup, desktopcleanup type messages.
Vista is just rife with annoying popups -built in-, but I'll talk about that later.
Here's my idea - I'm thinking about making a little potentiometer knob labeled one through ten that connects via USB to the computer. If I'm a dipshit and need MS to hold my hand through every little thing, or if I'm doing something REALLY tricky (like migrating SQL databases or migrating a mail storehouse from exchange 2000 to 2003) I turn the knob down to one. The computer prompts me with things like "You have chosen to delete this file, do you really want to delete it, like forever? Are you sure you don't just want me to stick it somewhere in case you decide you really do need it someday?"
Turn it all the way up to ten and you can make a little curlycue mouse gesture over the file and it just actually deletes it with no prompts, no recycle bin - you tell it what action to take and what file to take it on and it just does it.
One of my biggest beefs with MS is their usability. They bend over backwards to make sure anyone can walk up and use the PC - but this means time, valuable time, I have to spend configuring the machine. At least in Win9x and 2k you had SOME control over what features and applications were installed on you PC during windows setup, with XP it's set the time zone and tell me your name, but they are so wrapped up in "creating an experience" that they don't realize most of us just go in and reset the view defaults to 2000 standards!
Which brings me to my point about one care. I've put a lot of time effort and energy into protecting my home network and this workstation. I don't use the built in MS firewall for a reason - If the firewall is on the machine when someone attacks your firewall they are still attacking YOUR MACHINE... Spyware, virus, all kinds of things can poke holes in that. It's like using saran wrap for a condom - the logic is sound but the result is always messy.
Which brings me back to my point about One Care (again, sorry). If the ADMIN of the machine decides to disable an onboard service you need to be able to disable the alert from the multi function console. Because I have disabled the windows firewall my OneCare icon glows a steady RED - indicating a horrible problem, so long as I leave their, in my opinion, worthless firewall deactivated it will be red. Which means the system tray icon is USELESS because if one of the other features I AM depending on OneCare to provide should have a problem it does NOT change state and alert me to a problem.
Pretty simple, eh? But a perfect example of someone (usually marketing) directing developers to write code that works well if you're fully immersed in the microsoft "experience" but provides no flexibility for someone working 1 step outside their environment. I'm telling you guys, it's that mentality that will kill your product.
Remember all those single use banking and mainframe systems you were SOOOO happy to replace with flexible PC's? No, I'm guessing those guys are all retired. Okay, ditching the dinosaur and getting a pile of options in return is what MS did to get where it is? Who's providing that now?
I think MS would be much better served if they applied their resources to create applications that could be used on any PC without inter-dependency on other MS products. Developing to bring people back into your system and back into your system and back into your system instead of trying to co-exist with any other kind of system your user may be involved in does not WORK. Your consumers are paying big bucks for a twenty cent sliver of plastic and the potential of a tool set.
Give us a tool set the will work in any weather, any environment, any condition, not just in MicrosoftLand where the hills are rolling and green and the sky is blue and the taskbar and start menu are all bright happy colors. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it pours. Give me a tool I know I can turn to quickly and easily when I need it and I'll buy it and use it and make my users use it. Stop worrying about the "out of the box" experience and help us by building tools that are fantastic to use EVERY DAY.
Amazing, isn't it? What's the best way to deal with pop-ups? By popping up frickin system messages! Give me a damn break. Microsoft could probably pay for the windows license if they sold advertising space on their firewall, backup, tuneup, desktopcleanup type messages.
Vista is just rife with annoying popups -built in-, but I'll talk about that later.
Here's my idea - I'm thinking about making a little potentiometer knob labeled one through ten that connects via USB to the computer. If I'm a dipshit and need MS to hold my hand through every little thing, or if I'm doing something REALLY tricky (like migrating SQL databases or migrating a mail storehouse from exchange 2000 to 2003) I turn the knob down to one. The computer prompts me with things like "You have chosen to delete this file, do you really want to delete it, like forever? Are you sure you don't just want me to stick it somewhere in case you decide you really do need it someday?"
Turn it all the way up to ten and you can make a little curlycue mouse gesture over the file and it just actually deletes it with no prompts, no recycle bin - you tell it what action to take and what file to take it on and it just does it.
One of my biggest beefs with MS is their usability. They bend over backwards to make sure anyone can walk up and use the PC - but this means time, valuable time, I have to spend configuring the machine. At least in Win9x and 2k you had SOME control over what features and applications were installed on you PC during windows setup, with XP it's set the time zone and tell me your name, but they are so wrapped up in "creating an experience" that they don't realize most of us just go in and reset the view defaults to 2000 standards!
Which brings me to my point about one care. I've put a lot of time effort and energy into protecting my home network and this workstation. I don't use the built in MS firewall for a reason - If the firewall is on the machine when someone attacks your firewall they are still attacking YOUR MACHINE... Spyware, virus, all kinds of things can poke holes in that. It's like using saran wrap for a condom - the logic is sound but the result is always messy.
Which brings me back to my point about One Care (again, sorry). If the ADMIN of the machine decides to disable an onboard service you need to be able to disable the alert from the multi function console. Because I have disabled the windows firewall my OneCare icon glows a steady RED - indicating a horrible problem, so long as I leave their, in my opinion, worthless firewall deactivated it will be red. Which means the system tray icon is USELESS because if one of the other features I AM depending on OneCare to provide should have a problem it does NOT change state and alert me to a problem.
Pretty simple, eh? But a perfect example of someone (usually marketing) directing developers to write code that works well if you're fully immersed in the microsoft "experience" but provides no flexibility for someone working 1 step outside their environment. I'm telling you guys, it's that mentality that will kill your product.
Remember all those single use banking and mainframe systems you were SOOOO happy to replace with flexible PC's? No, I'm guessing those guys are all retired. Okay, ditching the dinosaur and getting a pile of options in return is what MS did to get where it is? Who's providing that now?
I think MS would be much better served if they applied their resources to create applications that could be used on any PC without inter-dependency on other MS products. Developing to bring people back into your system and back into your system and back into your system instead of trying to co-exist with any other kind of system your user may be involved in does not WORK. Your consumers are paying big bucks for a twenty cent sliver of plastic and the potential of a tool set.
Give us a tool set the will work in any weather, any environment, any condition, not just in MicrosoftLand where the hills are rolling and green and the sky is blue and the taskbar and start menu are all bright happy colors. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it pours. Give me a tool I know I can turn to quickly and easily when I need it and I'll buy it and use it and make my users use it. Stop worrying about the "out of the box" experience and help us by building tools that are fantastic to use EVERY DAY.
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