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This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
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| Friday, April 30, 2004
It's still around File this under the headline of "old hoaxes never die". I've been dealing with the jdbgmgr.exe hoax this morning. Apparently, someone with another organization fell for this one and passed it on. You should see the "to" line of the email. There are more addresses there than I care to even guess at. Let me put it this way, using Outlook 2003, on an XP machine set to 1024x768 pixels, I have to scroll more than halfway through the message to get past the addresses. Nice. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:03 AM | 0 comments | 
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Thursday, April 29, 2004
An offer I couldn't refuse The fine folks who make The Ultimate Troubleshooter offered me a free copy of the software to try and use and to tell you all about. Being a sucker for free software, well, what could I say? I installed in last night so I haven't used it nearly enough to get anything resembling a real impression, but I'm sure you'll hear more about it in the coming days. One thing I will say, if nothing else it's a nice tool for getting immediate information to help identify startup programs, running tasks, and services, and the option to send them info on tasks or services that they don't already have information on promises to only make that part of it better. Now as to whether it lives up to it's name or not, well I have my doubts. I've always believed that you need some human intuition to be the "ultimate" troubleshooter, but I'll settle for a pretty good troubleshooter. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:58 AM | 3 comments |
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Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Well, nevermind then.. I was able to run in those two conference rooms in between meetings this afternoon, only to discover that they both seem to work fine now. Figures! I'm still going to try and take advantage of the mystery network problem to put together a proposal on using a router with DHCP to give easy internet access to the conference rooms and the Chairman's work room for folks to use when they're in the building. Shouldn't cost very much to add a 4 port router in the wiring closet and plug those network ports into it, making those rooms capable of getting an IP address and DNS settings automatically, while leaving the rest of the network with the same static IP's that we've always had. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:54 PM | 0 comments |
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Bugging So I checked the switch that conference room was connected to and the port is fine and dandy. I can plug my laptop into the port directly and it has no problem connecting to the network. This is not good. This may mean there's trouble in the wiring in the walls of that room. I'm hoping that the conference room next to it is still functioning properly, but since both of those rooms are occupied, and seem to be booked all day for meetings, it may be tomorrow before I can figure that out. If it's working maybe I can convince my boss that it'll be cheaper to get a 2-port mini hub and simply split the connection from the working conference room into the one that doesn't work than it would be to try and get cable pulled through the floor down to the wiring closet on the floor below. If neither of them works, well, that's going to be a big problem. In the meantime, not being able to check on the status of that other room is bugging me. Update: Actually the more I think about it, for about the same price I could stick a 4 or 8 port router in that connection that uses DHCP and that would allow us to provide internet access to our members when they are in the building prior to or after a meeting, if they have a laptop and a network card, without having to do any configuration for them. (Yeah I know a wifi access point would do the same thing, even better, but I'm dealing with a very conservative and very tech-clueless management here, I've got to do this in baby steps.) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:22 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Ugh, I hate that! I hate it when there's a conference room full of people, one of our folks is all ready to do a presentation using our website and suddenly, for no obvious reason, the network port in there just seems to die. Luckily I have a 100 foot Ethernet cable so I just ran the connection over to the next room and put them back in business, but at some point I'm going to have to figure out why that port stopped responding all of the sudden. Here's hoping it a bad port on the switch, which I can route around, and not something "in the walls", which gets a tad more complicated, especially since we don't have those fake floors and ceilings. The cabling is, literally, in the walls! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:33 PM | 0 comments |
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More on Scoble's aggregator blog Looks like Kunal has come up with a solution for Robert's aggregator blog that should keep everyone happy: "His new version will post titles, and some text from the body, and post that. Only a small portion, though, not the entire text." That's excellent, I was really worried that he would switch over to a typical "link-blog" which is not one of my favorite things in the world. Simply put, unless you have really descriptive links, I don't have time to follow all the links on your link-blog to find the one or two that might be interesting to me. I've found that most people don't put enough in the text of their links to help you decide whether the link is relevant to you. (Myself included, which is why I've really tried to not do posts with just a bunch of links and no real discussion of what will be found there.) Looking forward to seeing it back in my aggregator! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:00 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, April 26, 2004
The questions that defy answers. Questions like, which is more annoying, sending an email to all of staff asking them not to do something, and less than three weeks later finding someone doing that exact thing, or having a request for something given to you, with important information missing, asking for that information, and not getting any response? And, is it fair for me to have to deal with both of these things on a Monday? Or, is Monday the perfect day for these things to come up, because it is Monday and this is what we expect on Mondays? Lastly, is there some sort of formula that determines how much crap you have to deal with on Monday, based inversely on how fun and relaxing your weekend was? Does it factor in the weather, too? Like, are Mondays in the Spring and Summer crappier than Mondays in the Winter? What if you like snow? Is it the opposite? Is it Tuesday yet? ;) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:36 PM | 0 comments |
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Sunday, April 25, 2004
Scoble, RSS and fair use.. Scoble has stopped his experimental blog. As he says, he's reached a point where some folks think he's "stealing their content" by reposting it to an aggregated blog. It's an interesting idea, but I think they're wrong, although I'm not a lawyer and I certainly think he's probably wise to shut it down until he can get some actual legal advice. Here's why I think they're wrong. Everything he publishes to that blog comes from other site's RSS feeds. (Or Atom feeds, but for this purpose let's say those are the same thing..) The very definition of syndicated feeds is that the content can be distributed and displayed in different ways. Whether that way is in an aggregator or on another site, the ability to redistribute content comes with the territory. As long as you are publishing an RSS feed, you are not protecting any copyright you might have, since anyone with an aggregator can display that content without ever having to go to your site to read it. For example, once I grab your RSS feed, there's nothing stopping me from having an aggregator display my subscribed feeds over an intranet. Is that somehow different from what Scoble is doing? Actually Scoble's only putting the occasional post up on his site, not your whole feed, so what he's doing is probably much better for you then other things that, to my mind, would be completely legal. For that matter, if Bloglines grabs your feed once and then displays it to everyone using their service who has subscribed to your feed (I don't know if they actually do that, but I imagine it would be trivial to set it up that way if they wanted to), aren't what they doing stealing, much more than what Scoble's doing? As long as you make your full posts feed available, aren't you giving some sort of passive permission for that to happen? I really don't see the big deal, at all. Scoble quotes wholes posts, but he also provides links and probably drives more traffic to those sites than he takes away. In fact, having the opportunity to read what some other people post by simply subscribing to Scoble's experimental blog feed has introduced me to plenty of folks I never knew about before and helped me find their sites. That's not stealing, that's free publicity! Robert, you can quote my posts any time you want! :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:48 PM | 0 comments |
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