Wicked Fragments

Won't someone please think of the customer.

Here we find ourselves in an odd situation, where I am going to suggest to you that the customer, or at least what the customer is asking for, is not always the right way to go.

What's more, is that simply prattering around saying "Oh, you are a horrible person because you are not giving the customer what they are asking for," is absolutely retarded.

We have a situation where we have an extremely sensitive system that lacks certain functionality.  (well, tons of functionality, actually... the system really sucks)  We have limited staff and have all agreed (including the customer) that the primary focus will be investing time to get off the system... and all changes to the existing system will be shelved.

This is no small accomplishment, by the way... this is a ridiculously demanding customer with absolutely no sense of reality when it comes to staffing and priorities.  Fix it all, fix it now, damn the cost, damn the people...

So some developer pops up and says (in a room with everyone including the customer in it)  "Pfft!  That's easy to fix.  Here, let me whip up this code here..."

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Here's the first in my series of how to be a Technology Tard.

If you are sending an email, be sure to write up the email in Microsoft Word and attach that as a document file to a standard email with a one line sentence of some significant value such as "See attached document for information," and then distribute that.

After all, why send a tiny little 2KB message that can be quickly and easily read without the aid of external viewers and editors?  Why make it easy for people using cell phones and PDAs to read your email?  Why keep storage needs low?

You're a technological guru.  A master of the art.  You need to push that envelope.  Embed your message in a nice 27KB overhead Word document, attach that sucker and send!

Some other options you may consider for extra style points:

• Don't limit yourself to Word.  Consider Powerpoint or even Excel!
• Consider writing your note in applications that very few other people have and then get annoyed with them for not having the capability to look at your docs.
• Be sure to also put in several images.  Ideally, if you could make those images straight off a camera and then resized but not resampled so we can have all the full-res multi-meg goodness, that would be great.
• Consider linking to other documents that people will be unable to get to for security reasons, or perhaps just move the documents that the links refer to. 
• Be sure to send the email to people who have no interest in the content.
• When people complain, be sure to insist that your formatting, images and special mechanism for delivering content are a critical part of your job and that you must not vary from your path.
• As a minimalist alternative, consider making the text in word a simple one-line sentence.  That really shows your conviction to this new medium.

Good luck and enjoy!

Also known as "Whah!  The business won't tell me what they want to accomplish so I don't know what we, as I.T., should be doing!"

Get over it, whiners.

Let me fill you in on a little secret here.  This is seriously confidential stuff, so don't go running around letting anyone know I was the one that told you this, ok?  Seriously top-secret.  Ok?  You ready?

The thing that the business isn't telling you is this...

They want to:

1. Make as much money as possible.
2. Do it spending as little money as possible.

I know, I know... amazing stuff, right?  Are you ok?  You look a little pekid.  That was probably quite a shock to you, I'm sure.  Here, sit down and let's discuss how this affects you.

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Yes, I think this company is so amazing that I think it warrants an entry in my journal.

I've been in this business and buying things online and at computer shows for some 20+ years now, and never has a company maintained such a level of integrity and effective service for so long.

Typically, if I order something from them, it shows up at my house the next day, usually the shipping for that was/is free.

If I have a problem with an item, I can get an RMA from their web site in seconds.  If I need to, I can talk to someone on the phone and they will help me.  They are always extremely friendly and helpful.  A simple request for a free return label and I get issued a quick email which I can print and stick to the box.

Their prices are always good... sometimes not the absolute lowest, but I know I can always trust them and count on them to make things work out right, so I don't concern myself over a few bucks extra here and there.

Just flawless, really.  Best company to deal with when buying computer parts online, and has managed to maintain this capability for years.  (unlike some places such as Buy.com that has long ago fallen off the wagon).

About two weeks ago I went upstairs to my office and sat down in front of my primary game/work machine and started copying some files from my laptop up to our family server in the basement.

I got about 10 files in when the copy failed.  I wasn't entirely sure why, and was a bit concerned since these files were a critical thing I needed that I could not simply duplicate or recreate (they were photographic images taken on-site in Boston for a professional engagement).

I furrowed my brow, scratched my head, and tried again.  CTRL-A, CTRL-C, CTRL-V... bzzt.  Didn't work.  Weird.

So I tried opening the mapped network drive on the server to see if I had inadvertantly filled up the 80 gig drive I was copying them to.  Dimly, memories of when my server got hacked and was being used as an FTP site for a week flashed through my haunted memories.

"Hm," thought I, "the server appears to not be responding.  That's weird.  Maybe it just crashed mid-copy.  It doesn't happen often, but it's certainly possible.  I'll ping the box."

C:\>ping holstein

Pinging holstein [192.168.1.2] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.2:

    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

C:\> _

Yup, no response.  Server crashed... oh wait, does Google work?  Yup, so the network and internet are up, so the server must have died in some way.  Well, I better go down and have a look.

This is the part in the movie where the bad music starts to play.  The camera pans back a bit and you watch as our hero begins his descent into the deep chasms of dread that will consume him, or destroy him, or perhaps both.

Thus began the two week torture that would be the definition of my life, the reminder of why it is I became a manager in my professional career, and a barbed reminder that this hobby turned career turned hobby/utility, is and will always remain a ticking time bomb, a piper to be paid (repeatedly), and a curse to be suffered.

It is, however, pretty funny to see how the whole thing went, so I thought I would post it as not only a bit of an encapsulation of my life, but honestly an encapsulation of what it is very much like as a technical hands-on person in my industry.

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I just cracked this off in an email to some coworkers.  I thought it was actually pretty interesting, so I figured I would share.

---

The question is why does Apple only hold 3% of the commercial desktop market.  Answers were many, but one was left out...

Apple doesn't market to business. They market to being hip, trendy, "different" (and yet the same as everyone else who is being different the same way you are presently being, but most seem to miss that last part).

When I started in technology, I supported mostly Macintosh users with Novell Netware back-end infrastructure. Mac users were almost 100% graphic designers, artists, sound studio recording engineers, and the occasional administrative assistant who hated PCs.

They were invariably the oddballs in the infrastructures of larger companies that were otherwise permeated with PCs.

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Despite my irritation with Microsoft and their recent crappy products and horrid politics, I couldn't resist the temptation to install Vista and Office 2007 on my work machine.  I figure "It's work, it's soul-less... why the hell not?  Right?"

So I sat down to start putting Vista on my Dell 820 laptop.

The install was pretty seamless with no issues or driver problems.  That didn't entirely surprise me since Dell is a major vendor and Vista would have to have been tested with all the new platforms to ensure it would work.  Besides, XP pretty much had the seamless install thing down pat.  At the very least you could build a usable machine, even if the graphics weren't top-resolution and the network wasn't working, and then you could add the drivers for those later easily enough.

As I've noted before, Vista is very pretty when you first fire it up.  Nice graphics and sound.  The whole glass effect is quite cool and pretty.  The widgets thing is quite cute and actually somewhat useful for some things (like having a nice visible clock on your desktop).  All in all, visually Vista is quite nice.

There are also some nice new features here and there.  There are some improvements in the interface, some new tools provided to help you understand what your machine is up to, etc.

That is, however, where the fun stopped.

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Ok, it's time to put on my grouchy old man of technology persona and make a list of the technologies that I think utterly blow ass for one reason or another.   The really interesting bit is that many of these things are enormously popular technologies, but my criteria for suckage has absolutely nothing to do with popularity.

You could pretty much boil down the essence of my statements here to "Goddamned city slickers and their new-fangled flying machines!", except that clearly I am correct, whereas Old Farmer Jenkins was clearly not.

If you're interested, keep an eye on this entry for a week or so as I'll update it with new entries as I think of them.

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This tendency for the world to pickup on these silly marketing schemes and "fad" ways of talking about things really drives me wild.

The "web", is not definable by anything more than a collection of content served via servers in a roughly, but not strictly, standardized format consumable by a variety of tools called browsers.

There are some standards which are generally accepted, but the fact is if someone releases a little widget that makes your web browser work like a terminal session to a mainframe, well, that's now a part of the web.  The point of contention here is that Web 2.0 implies some kind of "new release" of the web... an addition of X major components (usually Wikis, "Blogs" (shudder), video, etc.) that somehow make the web a whole new and different thing.

While no one will argue that these particular items appear to be "coming of age" and have all but permeated the "web" at this time, they, like everything on the web, have been a slow and gradual adoption of a technology that has been around for quite a while.

For example, Wikis.  Ironically, I'll link to an article on Wikipedia for some source here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

This shows Wikis coming into existance sometime in the mid-90s.  Not the mid 2000s as would be suggested by "Web 2.0".

"Blogs" are a whole seperate topic that drives me mad.  Again, from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Not only did "blogs" suddenly burst onto the scene as some sort of "Web 2.0" product release, but they've effectively been around as long as cavemen wrote about their exploits on their local cave wall.  I could be a little less pedantic, and at least accept that "blogs" are a form of electronic diary or journal readable by a defined or undefined external audience, but even there... "Blogs" are nothing more than a hokey term for a place to write stuff about what you think online so that others can read it.  BBS forums, newsgroups and even a static HTML page that I update by putting a date at the top of every new entry and just add some more content can all be considered "blogs".  This all became cutesy and fun and got its name when tools such as LiveJournal came on the scene to make it easier to do this, thus affording the opportunity to mouth off to anyone who could connect to AOL.  (yes, myself included, but I daresay I'm a bit more clueful than that.)

Finally, video.

Yes, I'm sure there are other things in "WEB 2.0!! NOW WITH XK-9 ADDED!!!" that I'm missing, but the recent spike available bandwidth, maturization of some entry-level video editing technologies, and the coming of age of sites such as YouTube and MySpace have caused the internet to burst to overflowing with video of just about everything you could imagine.  Well, ok... sure, but I don't think I need to go look up this history of video or the internet to tell you that video has been on computers as long as there have been computers.  This is merely a increase in quality over time... a gradual increase.  I once had a video that was entirely made of ASCII characters that ran on an Apple II.  So now I can watch the game on NESN.  Is it cool?  Sure.  Will it get better?  Yup.  This isn't exciting, people, it's a predictable and steady change over time.  Is it Web 2.0?  I dunno, was it web 2.0 when it was on my Apple II in like 1982?  Get over it.

So, I guess in synopsis to you people who are all giddy over Web 2.0, I'd ask you a few things.

1. What was Web 1.0?  Please define it.
2. Have there been any interim releases of the Web?   Please list them.
3. Who decides what is Web x.xx?
4. Please detail for me what version of the web included Flash?  Dynamic HTML?  ASP?  .NET?  CGI?  XML?

Think about it.

http://apcmag.com/5835/vendors_in_no_rush_to_ditch_xp_for_vista

In short, Microsoft is pushing their OS on you.  Vendors will no longer be able to sell XP with their new systems as early is the first part of 2008.  Sure, Vista has huge compatibility problems.  Sure, it doesn't run games properly.  Sure, it has all kinds of driver issues.  Sure, it's a performance hog, but hey, Microsoft needs to make more money somehow, right?

This is different from most other major MS release in the past in a lot of very critical ways: 

1. The OS is effectively unusable performance-wise on a significant amount of pre-existing hardware.
2. The OS has almost no compelling functionality enhancements or improvements that make it worth making the switch.
3. The OS has major incompatibility and driver issues (last time we saw this was really Windows 95).
4. The OS is actually less compatible with older applications, whereas most of their new releases compatibility has improved.  (again last time we saw this much of a dip was Windows 95)
5. The OS is more about being in bed with major media houses and content providers than it is about making the user experience better.  (I hereby rename Windows Vista to Windows DRM+)

My advice to anyone with a PC has consistently been to avoid Vista like the plague.  There's no good reason for it and it causes way more harm than good.  

This is a huge statement coming from me.  I have been a Microsoft booster for years.  I love their products.  I think they work pretty well, and in some cases VERY well.  I think that their standardization of the desktop platform has brought the compute industry nothing but success.  

While they laud themselves as innovators in technology and I tend to laugh that off, their real innovation is more important.  They innovate in integration, standardization and making a complex thing a commodity that we can all pretty easily use and interact with in a very successful way.  That is no small thing.  I'm loathe to make the comparison, but it truly is akin to what Henry Ford did for the automobile.  He didn't invent the automobile, he didn't perfect it really... what he did was perfect a way to make it easy to build, affordable and comparatively easy to maintain.

Microsoft has now fallen completely off even that position of worth.  Unfortunately for them, they are a business and they've managed to continually improve to the point where their products are basically solid.  XP is, in my opinion, an almost perfect operating system.  Yeah, sure security holes and all that rot- whatever.  You have that much of an install base and you're a big target.  Sure, MSFT needs to continue to improve their coding practices and plug up the holes, but if they had just decided to continue to tune and patch XP it would be a usable platform for a great many years to come.  Arguably for the forseeable future. (which is scary to me as a total geek) :)

Now, as a business, they are presented with this problem of  "Oh crap, it doesn't need many changes, but we still need to make money!!!"

So everything they are doing is trying to get a last fast buck out of the consumer in Vista, establish a solid platform to begin their next push (in Vista), and then start holding the compute industry hostage for monthly or yearly fees to use their products.  

This is the Holy Grail of business, of course- if you can get people to pay you yearly fees for your product, you have a continual revenue stream forever.  You don't necessarily have to do much different as long as you can hold the majority and keep collecting checks.  I don't blame them for trying this tactic, but I'm certainly not going to be a part of it if I can avoid it.  I don't buy products just to give money to a vendor I don't believe is pulling their own weight, and I'm going to do whatever possible not to give to a vendor that I think is actually trying to rip people off.  Which is why I say...

Just say No to Vista.  Just say No to Microsoft.

God I can't believe I wrote that.  I guess I should go home and install Linux now.