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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, December 17, 2004
Doppler Doppler 2.0 RC1 is out. I downloaded it this morning and checked for the bug that I had to work around in 1.1.1 involving using space savers by date, and sure enough it's fixed. And that's not even the best part about it. It also supports multi-threaded downloads, resume downloads, and comes with a light weight RSS reader. Nice work! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:30 AM | 0 comments | 
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Thursday, December 16, 2004
IT and the free lunch I know I promised you all over the weekend that I'd have more to say about some of the topics that came up in the Tech Chat over the weekend, but, obviously, this week has not gone as planned. So, here's my attempt at making amends. First off, let me point out something about myself. I got into the IT field relatively late in life. I was 29 when I got my first "tech" job. Before that I spent a number of years in accounting-type functions working at a large banking institution. So, unlike some techs, I have a background in Accounting, Finance, and even a little Economics, that comes in handy when dealing with other departments. Now, as any Economist would tell you, the price of a good is not the only cost. Economic decisions are based not only on the pure price of a good, but on the opportunity cost of that good. So, if I see a nice laptop selling for a $1000, just having $1000 in the bank is not enough to warrant purchasing the laptop. I also have to factor in the cost of what else I could do with that money if I didn't buy the laptop. (How much your significant other will yell at you might also be a cost you would consider..) On that same subject, the reason the phrase "no such thing as a free lunch" is entirely true is because no matter how you come about getting the "free" lunch, your cost is always going to be what else you could have done with that time. If there is something else you can do with that time that is worth more to you than the price of a lunch, you might make the economic decision to forgo a free meal to pursue another activity, despite the fact that it will cost you more money. A perfect example of this is an oil change. Changing your oil yourself is cheaper, but it involves time, and a messy cleanup. That's why many people who could easily change their own oil and save money, don't. Now, back to what we were discussing in the tech chat the other day. In discussing the extra time required to support non-standard systems, I said that to many senior management types, there is no "cost". Upgrading across the board so that everyone has the same basic specs in front of them and so that you do not have to spend time chasing down settings, patches, documentation, etc. for any number of different systems is a monetary cost. One that accountants notice, and one they can measure with certainty. Most finance, accounting and business people are concerned with the "bottom line", as well they should be. This upgrade affects their bottom line. As I said earlier, they're already paying you for your time, so there's no extra monetary cost to them if you have to spend the extra time. But, there is a cost. As I've already pointed out, the cost is not a monetary one, it's the cost of time. The opportunity cost of not upgrading won't show up in the general ledger accounts, but it's the cost of what else you could be doing with that time. Now measuring that is a bit tricky, but if you can show that the extra time spent dealing with dissimilar systems has prevented you from accomplishing other projects, you have a start. If you can reach a point where not completing those projects has a detrimental effect on the productivity of your organization as a whole, then my friend, you have yourself a pretty good economic and financial case for standardization. For example, if a nice corporate intranet would increase the productivity of all of your staff, and you find yourself unable to build it because you have to spend so much time patching different OS'es without any sort of patch management tool you could probably convince them that spending a bit on a patch management tool will allow you to finish up that intranet, which will then allow HR to automate vacation requests, and accounting to automate payroll tracking, among many other possible benefits. Chances are, you'll get your patch management tool. The trick is figuring out what needs to be done to benefit the entire organization, not just yourself. Let's face it, most of us work in places where if we said we need tool "X" to save time doing our work, management wouldn't trust us to use that "extra time" to do anything productive. Mostly that's because they really don't know what we do! I bet someone in your office thinks all you do is surf the web and wait for something that needs to be fixed. If you don't think that's true, ask yourself this. How many people get angry at you when you can't drop what you're doing and answer their question? Could it be because they assume nothing you're doing could be as important as what they do? If so, convincing this person to spend money to save you time is incredibly difficult. All that being said, there are two things you need to do if this is a major concern to you. One, like I've said many times before, get to know your users. If you know what they do, how they do it, and how they interact with technology to get things done, you'll have a much better idea of what tools will help them be more productive. The other thing, as difficult as this is some times, educate people as to what you're doing when you're back in the server room, or your office, futzing around. Management will be more likely to trust you if they can see that you're accomplishing things with your time, even if they don't completely understand what it is you've accomplished. This will also help you to learn to speak their language, which is a very important part of making your case. You'll quickly realize that there's a world of difference between "integrating the database with the website will improve data flow" and "integrating the database with the website will allow members to update their own information, a task that we currently spend a few hours per day doing for them, and will allow our salespeople to access the data from anywhere they have an internet connection, instead of having to call the secretary from the road to get that information." You can see where the focus of the second is on what this expense will allow the entire organization to accomplish, in concrete terms they can easily understand. Of course, if you can articulate all of this and senior management still doesn't see the need to spend any money on technology, those new communication and people skills will also come in handy as part of your job search, at least that's the theory I'm still holding out hope for. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:43 PM | 0 comments |
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More good news Loaded up bloglines this morning to discover that my cable internet speed will be increasing come January, (Thanks to both Geek News Central and Chad for pointing to that.)and Movable Type has officially recognized the server load issue associated with comment spam and is working on correcting it. My replacement has been ordered and will ship today, and should arrive Monday or Tuesday. I went home after the Christmas party last night and got some documentation done so it's looking like I will be caught up enough come noon tomorrow that I can leave to spend the weekend celebrating Xmas with my in-laws without having to drag some work with me, which I'm sure my much-neglected-lately wife will appreciate. And then, starting next week, I'll be moving and setting up new PC's and getting ready for all the stuff I need to have done by year-end, so I'm looking forward to having this weekend to focus on the non-work things in my life! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:44 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Happy Ending After further review with that PC this afternoon, there is obviously a very serious problem, maybe even a hardware issue with the network card. The system restore actually made the intermittent problems it was haivng with print jobs and emails much more acute. You can download things from the internet, the work network, etc. just as fast as you can at any PC, which I mistook to mean that the network connection was ok, when in fact, sending anything out from that PC over 100kb or so is impossible! That includes uploading to a website, copying to a network share and sending an email. This user simply doesn't do those things very often so I had missed those symptoms, but I see them clearly now that I've been testing it. This evening, literally as we were getting out of the car and turning it over to the valet at the resturant we were having our company Christmas party at, my pager went off. (Our phone system is set to page me if I have a voice mail message, it acts as a quick way to reach me in an emergency.) It was our CDW rep confirming the RMA. (Return Merchandise Authorization) Tomorrow I'll have to figure out whether they're sending me the replacement first or I have to send this back first, but either way, it's better news than I went to bed with last night! Of course, now that I've spent so much time on this, there's a backlog of other projects that demand my attention, and an ever approaching deadline of when I need to have those two other new systems in house and setup for users. It's looking like quite a hectic couple of holiday weeks for me! Not to mention that I hadn't been aware of this little bug in Outlook 2000's publish calendar as a web page function, which is widely used in my office! I can hear the complaints already! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:44 PM | 0 comments |
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Crossing my fingers It's amazing how few companies in the world will actually accept responsibility for anything. That PC still doesn't work. I was in the office until 9 last night doing a system restore, bringing the PC to exactly the state it shipped in two weeks ago, and then, when the problem still existed, talking to HP support. My thinking was that since it obviously shipped with this flaw, they should do something about it. They wanted me to troubleshoot, and asked about programs I might have installed, security settings I had configured etc. I hadn't done any of that. I restored it to the way they shipped it, gave it an IP address and setup a couple of different email accounts. Obviously, it did not work out of the box. Their final "less than useful" suggestions were to contact my system admin, which of course, is me, or to call Microsoft, since it's obviously an operating system issue with the email and they're not trained to handle that. Of course right there at the top of Microsoft's support page is the "If your OS came pre-installed contact the manufacturer" message, which tells me everything I need to know about that option! So who, exactly is capable of troubleshooting an OEM XP install? After talking to my CDW account rep this morning, he asked me to talk to their tech support, who helpfully informed me that they don't support the software that comes with the PC's, just the hardware. Back to the sales rep and it appears that because it's been less than 30 days he should be able to authorize a complete replacement, but I'm still waiting for confirmation of that fact. (Please let this happen, although the not quite finalized purchase of two other systems from CDW gives them some incentive to get this right, because until this one works, I'm not ordering those!) So my question is, who is capable of supporting an OEM operating system? If the manufacturer won't, MS won't, and the reseller won't, what's a user to do when there's a problem with the pre-installed OS? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:38 PM | 0 comments |
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Monday, December 13, 2004
Pulling my hair out I spent just about all of my work day troubleshooting issues with a new PC I just setup last week and it's driving me crazy! This is a new OEM of Windows XP Pro, updated to SP2, running Office 2000. There were two issues, both of which involved spooling processes and timeouts. One was sending print jobs to a network printer, the other sending attachments in Outlook. Both would get done fine for very small files, but anything of any size would just belch. The example I used in testing was a 300Kb, 8 page Word file. Nothing out of the ordinary size-wise, but the print job would just freeze and the email would bounce, with an error of "No transport provider available". My first gut feeling was that the issues were really the same, and possibly network related. Perhaps an issue of dropped packets, some sort of inconsistent network connection, but all of the other network connections were no problem. I could transfer large data files across the network just as quickly as I can from any other machine, and I don't get any sort of connection time out errors on any other connection. Even installing the loopback patch to SP2 didn't provide any relief. Eventually, I decided to view them as seperate issues, and simply reinstalling the network printer seemed to help out with the print jobs, but the email attachments are still a problem. I have already tried disabling the Windows Firewall, changing the time out settings, and have gone to the extreme of creating a whole new profile and trying to send an attachment before I imported anything from the orginal .pst file. Still no luck, so it's not a problem with the .pst file. It's not a problem with the ISP server, as I sent a couple of even larger files from my machine today without any problems, and even can send an attachment using this person's account from a different machine. No the "no transport provider available" is definitely being created by the local machine before it even tries to connect to the SMTP server. The message spools in the Outbox for minutes and then does an immediate bounce. Messages with very small attachments (2Kb) or just text messages don't have any problem going out immediately. The only other bit of odd information is that while the message is sending, there is no spike in CPU usage, and the MAPI32 process is not using any extra system resources, so that leads me to believe that we're not talking about a system issue. In a nutshell, there is nothing that I can see about the settings of this machine compared to other machines on the network, but it will not connect to send attachments with any kind of significant size. If I don't come up with any thing else, perhaps tomorrow will bring a complete reinstall of Office and we'll see if that fixes what might be wrong with Outlook. I sure hope so, I don't really have time to spend another day working on this! Next Day Updates: Same thing happens with Outlook Express, definitely not just an Outlook problem. Uninstalling SP2 likewise did not help problem, nor does disabling AV scanning. Further updates even later the next day: When you do a system restore to the original configuration and STILL have the same problem, you'd think HP might be willing to accept some responsibility for shipping a damaged OEM system, but you'd be wrong! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 6:55 PM | 0 comments |
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Sunday, December 12, 2004
Tech chatting Kevin has the latest episode of his In The Trenches podcast up on his site. I quite enjoyed being part of the Tech Chat with Kevin, Kevin Mazur and Eric Maynard, chatting about the difficulties of dealing with dissimilar systems on your network. Eric put his show prep notes on his site, and I have some further thoughts on the frustrations of proving the cost-effectiveness of standardization when the only cost management sees is your time, which they're already paying for, but those thoughts haven't quite finished percolating in the coffee maker that is my brain. Hopefuly they will and I'll post some more about it tomorrow. In the mean time, what do you have to say about it? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:05 PM | 0 comments |
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