Serious Headaches

I have not had a good weekend. In between arguments with both my sons I've had to un-install four different anti virus programs from my youngest son's PC which he installed in the belief that more is better. It took about five hours to get back to just the one - most of the time being taken up with waiting for one av program to let go of the other long enough to un-install it.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

The doctor is in.......

Happy New Year all!

It's almost two months since I wrote anything, mostly due to lack of time: if I haven't been working, I've been sleeping.

This weekend I've been holding a "laptop clinic" for the family. The result is one repaired and working keyboard, one cleaned and working DVD drive and one completely trashed BIOS - not caused by me I might add.

The keyboard - fairly simple. A liquid induced burn out fixed by an eBay purchase.
The BIOS - no solution really.The laptop is a geriatric Acer TravelMate with  a seriously screwed chip. Randomly set BIOS passwords and nothing past the time and date shown on the Basic Settings screen. It was to the point where it wouldn't even recognise any of the hardware properly. This will be cured again by eBay I suspect. I was able to salvage everything of importance of the hard disk so no real loss.

Now the DVD drive. If you have a family who like to grow their hair long, and you start getting problems with their computer and home entertainment kit, don't go looking for you nearest repair man first, go looking for the large hair ball (or similar) wrapped around the central spindle of the drive. It'll save you money!

Go careful out there people - it's a rough world.

Disable your Adblock!

Has anyone seen this page appear recently?
http://www.cpalead.com/adblock.php

Surely the idea of pop-up and adblockers is to stop all of this happening. 

CPA Lead is a web advertising agency and to be honest, I think they've missed the point - as have some of their customers. I suspect that this is going to make matters worse for those customers who have taken this script and it will actually decrease the amount of traffic through their sites, rather than boost their customer's - and therefore CPAlead's own income.

Just as an experiment I disabled adblock on a page that presented this message, just to check out  the  ads on the page. Practically every ad on the page was for a company or a product that I'd not use because I can't get them where I live on this side of the planet. The only ads I did find that were remotely relevant were from Google - those at least were from companies in my own country.


Not sure this is a good company either. Looking through their blogs and the comments that people have left I get the distinct impression that as far as they're concerned there isn't a world outside of  North America(possibly even outside the USA). They are also very good a dodging the question.

I wonder what the writer of Adblock/Adblock Plus has to say about this?

Oh, by the way, you can get around it with AdBlockPlus.

• As the page loads, go to the adblockPlus icon and select:"Disable on this page only".
• Wait for the page to finish loading
• de-select: "Disable on this page only".

You get to read the page AND not have to worry about pop-ups getting in the way or get that stupid message!

"Greening" IT

I've just been browsing through the latest crop of IT trade mags that drop onto my desk around this time of the month, and it never ceases to amaze me when I see headlines "Most efficient data centre to date".

Without exception every single story I have seen of late that has a picture attached, either an external shot of the building or an internal shot of one of the data halls, shows the damn thing has been built in a converted factory unit!

Whilst I will admit that there are a growing number of these that have some form of environmental containment, surely it's about time that people began to look at the buildings themselves and what can be included in the design and construction stage to lessen the need for the more expensive solutions.

And yes, I agree. If there's no option because your data hall has to be built inside an exisiting building with no hope of re-designing the structure, then containment is your only option.

Newsbytes

Canvassing Support.

Bertelsmann who own the UK's Channel 5 have pulled them out of the Project Canvas consortium, just when broadband was looking to be a serious competitor to DTT and DSAT for streaming output to the punter.

For those of you who want to know the consortium had the idea of another set-top box, this one dedicated to picking up streamed content on the web and letting you watch it on your TV. Considering that the only serious web-based competitor to this is Windows Media Edition, I thought this would be a winner.

One caveat on that though..... there's still over 10 million people who either don't have or don't want broadband, which may put a crimp on what the consortium are doing if it were delivered tomorrow, but as they are taking their timer and developing this slowly, I think Bertelmann are leaving the party too early.

via El-Reg

Crossed eyes forever!.

UBIsoft's UK marketing mogul Murray Pannell has gone out on a bit of a limb recently and said that there'll be a 3Dtv in every home by 2013.

Yeah,.... right,......

OK, I think he might seriously look at the current sales figures for HDtv - they still aren't great for either the sets or the set-top boxes. I honestly think he needs to rethink himself. I wouldn't even know where to find what the figures for those who still don't even have DTT, not a show-stopper, but still a significant number I would have thought.

via The Independent

Out-foxed.

I'd never heard of Martha Lane Fox until all the quango-culling happened when the Con-Lab coalition came to power after the last election. She was head of what was called the "Digital Public Service Unit": one of Gordo's last few inceptions before he and the Labour party lost their remit to govern. She's put herself forward as a sort of digital champion.

She's published a document which is both a masterpiece and a travesty of publishing. Her "Manifesto for a Networked Nation" is - if you can bear to read through it before your eyes give out with the ludicrous colour scheme and almost infinite changes in font - is a laudable aim. She has done her homework reasonably well, even if she is colour-blind. And don't think her website raceonline2012.org is any better: it fries the eyes as well.

via Digital Spy - which is far easier to read than her manifesto

Data Centre Headaches.

It's a bit of a pipe dream I know as I don't have any budget for this at all, but surely I'm not asking for the impossible or indeed the only person looking for something like this?

I'm looking after a few data centres and machin rooms at the moment and actually managing the power systems and environment needs automating badly! I have no remote monitoring of the power and I have some geriatric environmental monitoring systems that are seriously on their last legs.

What I need is a PDU to install in the racks that can give me:

• 2 inputs
• Static Switch between them.
• 8 - 12 outputs 
• Sequential start on each port
• Remote operation of each output
• Remote monitoring of each port
• Environmental monitoring of Teperature and humidity.
• Central management of the lot: e.g. stats gathering etc..

I keep looking but I never seem to find one that does everything, just a subset of what I've listed.

We don't care, we don't have to - we're the phone company!

Now I don't often slag off the bandwidth providers as I have to work with them so often, but this news story caught my eye this morning and I could only think of a hot, brown, semi-solid organic waste product. This was unfortunately also accompanied by a case of Deja Moo.

The village is rural, not remote. The nearest town is less than 7 miles away. There's no way you can make me believe that no-one in the town has broadband!!

£130,000 ($190,000) for a domestic broadband install? No, that's just a confidence trick.

Deja Vu or Deja Moo?

In the news today, Toyota are having engine management problems: the car's brakes don't seem to want to work sometimes. It seems I've heard this all before somewhere... way back around 1998 with the Ford Explorer and Ranger models here in the UK having cruise controls that suddenly set themselves to some ridiculously high speed and wouldn't let go of the throttle.

This is not the most worrying aspect of this "occurrence" as far as I'm concerned. What I find more worrying is the initial response from both manufacturers was exactly the same when the problems first became apparent:

"Problem? What problem? There's no problem!"

In the case of Ford, it had to take a couple of severe accidents that couldn't be attributed to either mechanical defect or "pilot error" for them to even begin to admit there was a problem, and to show how widespread that problem actually was, the recall is well over 4.5 million vehicles worldwide as of the end of 2009.

At least Toyota were willing to entertain the possibility of a problem existing or though why the customer facing parts of Toyota in both the US and UK say they knew nothing until very recently says a lot about the "never admit blame, even if it's true" culture in both countries. Come on guys, what's better; admit that you may have got it wrong or have the stigma of at least one very large lawsuit hanging over the company's profit forecast for a number of years.

As my wife often says to Customer Service departments: "Better safe than sued!"

Oh, the definition of Deja Moo: "having heard that bullshit somewhere before."

Your targeting is Off!

"The farce is strong in this one."

So Phorm could be getting the push - businesswise - with British Telecom's decision to ditch their part in Phorm's Webwise product. I would suggest that since they were the major partner in the entire project - if not holding Phorm's purse strings, at least holding their wrists - pulling out at this stage means it's unlikely that either Virgin or TalkTalk will take up the baton in the UK.

As being the type of person who considers web advertising as a necessary evil, actually having my browser awash with badly targeted ads as it is (Google ads anyone?) is enough already!

The "personal privacy" brigade have got it slightly wrong - these people are interested in your browsing habits, not you in particular. What they're really interested in is the big advertiser's budgets and how much they can screw out of these people.

Think on this, how can these companies prove that it's Phorm's software actually boosting their sales as against any other fluctuations in the market? They can't. All that can be proved is that a certain group of people visit these particular sites at anyone time. However, having something sitting in the back-office part of your ISP's system, trying to second-guess what you are looking for is not a good idea, for several good reasons.

One, if your are as mercenary a browser as I am, I'm not interested in the same old thing, day after day. I want my browsing experience to be fresh every time: all that Webwise will do is make my experience stale and uninteresting.

Two, how are the ISPs and Phorm going to ensure that the data they collect/intercept is secure? Let's be honest, there's a lot of hackers out there that would find it very easy to put hooks in this software to harvest the personal details of the ISP's customers, especially when these people are making on-line transactions of any sort, encrypted or otherwise. When you register with a site of anything, it's your browser that holds the passwords. Unless the site uses Secure Server authentication, that password is sent in plain text.

Phorm? No thank you. It'll just turn into a phisher's paradise.

I spoke too soon......

Actually it's not the boss this time... it's the trolls from the Finance Department. It seems that for the third year running someone has forgotten to budget for a set of software licences that the customer is paying us to renew...

Now I wonder whose office got re-decorated this year with that money!

Or is it a case of.... "Due to budgetary restraints, the light at the end of the tunnel has had to be turned off."
[deep sigh, wanders off to the coffee machine for a refill.]

Language - a changeable constant.

You could quite easily sub-title this "Evolution or Perversion".

As my knowledge of others is quite limited I don't know if this happens outside the English speaking world much, but with my native tongue words acquire other or alternate meanings. For example, I am working in a group that is charged with maintaining and supervising those parts of our customer's IT installations that aren't the actual server, network or communications hardware, the power and cooling, the cabling, the security, etc.: classically, the environment of the rooms and the infrastructure that connects and supports it.

However over the past few years someone, somewhere in the IT industry decided that the term "infrastructure" should include everything that doesn't sit on someone's desk or in their office.

This has made my life a little difficult as I'm the only one in the team who has any inkling into how the active part (servers, switches etc..) of the system actually works, so guess who ends up fielding the questions our technicians can't answer and re-directing them to our NOC or SOC!

I'm sure we in the IT world cannot be the only group to suffer this.

Change for the better or just meaningless change?

As Ford Prefect noted, "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." I'm actually wondering when I can get to eat at the moment.... you can crunch only so many glucose tabs before your tongue revolts!

This morning we had one of those occasional tortures that they inflict on you: the "Management Meeting" This morning's effort was all about "Lean Management" and "eliminating waste in the procedures". This all stems from the experiment Toyota tried back in the 70's which they employed the principles that became "Kaizen". IT seems to work well in the manufacturing industry, but seems to fall short in most other sectors.

Kaizen is a Japanese term formed from the words Kai meaning change and zen which means good. In Korea, this translates as ge sun and in Chinese gai shan both meaning improvement change for the better. However, modern management has perverted it to stand for one of it's supposed foundations: continual inmprovement. From what I can see this is just another case of "smoke and mirrors"

While I agree waste, in terms of time and effort should be got rid of with all possible speed, I'm not sure how we in particular can do this as most of the waste is generated by the procedures thrust upon us by the management itself.

As a team, once our own pointy-haired boss had left (20 minutes into a scheduled 90!) we sat down and worked out some ways we could use to measure how much time we are actually spending on fulfilling the reporting tasks he demands from us as against how much time we are spending actually servicing our customers; we intrinsically know we are spending less on the latter, we just can't prove it yet.

This afternoon I'm going over to see the union rep. with one of the team (I'm acting supervisor as he's resigned!) as the guy has issues with the pointy-haired one

UK ID card scheme.

The pig-headedness of politicians never ceases to amaze me.

10 Downing St. and the Home Office are still pushing to get this running even after having all the problems the chosen implementation will suffer from made pellucidly clear.

I personally have no objection to a national ID card system that would make my daily life easier - I'd welcome it in a minute if it would combine all the goverment/tax/health/social services data that currently exists about yours truly.

BUT.........................

Unfortunately these are still science fiction due to the stupidity inherent in the human race.

So what are my objections to the current scheme? Well, it has nothing to do with human rights or anything to do with the so-called "surveillance society". They can be summed up simply as:

• Fraud: No matter what the underlying card system is, Chip'n'Pin or contact-less, it is still open to abuse. Note how quickly the criminal fraternity caught up with the technology after it was introduced.
• Physical reliability: The physical environment and cleanliness of the card can and does cause significant problems. With Chip'n'Pin it's the build up of crud on the contacts that causes the problem. It then builds up in the reader and it's not going to be long before
  the reader needs servicing, if not disinfecting!
• Cost: the current government estimate is about £5bn ($7.4bn). In the past, an overspend of not less than 50% of the original estimate is a good bet for HM Gov. projects, so the independent experts saying £10bn to £20bn is quite feasible.
  Oh, and you the holder of the card are going to have to pay £50 just for the privilege of having the card produced.
• Logistics: yes.... well the way the UK's vehicle licensing system works seems to be OK, but it's only dealing with one un-related item of data at a time, this system is eventually going to have so many hooks and tie-ins it's bound to collapse eventually.

Give it up for now Jacqui, wait until the technology is a little more reliable and can cope with these problems.

I too, am Dilbert!

As Arthur Dent was noted to say:-

"This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays"

On his particular Thursday, his planet gets blown up, On my planet, I'm just suffering from a procedure-driven manager.

I have just spent three days researching and writing a report on something that needs doing on a corporate scale - three days that could have otherwise been more productively used solving the problem itself.

It runs to 9 sides of A4 in 10pt type, I mailed it off to him and got a reply within minutes flinging back in my lap saying "run with it" So what exactly was the point of me writing the report in the first place if he's not going to read it properly and just give me the job straight back???

BTW, three days at my charge-out rate is about 1,200 quid (about $1,700) This isn't a large sum in the corporate scheme of things, but someone still has to pay for that, and knowing him, he'll charge the customer for it!

There's no point in discussing anything with him - he doesn't listen properly. Up until recently we (as in my team) all thought it was just us he did this to. Over the past few days we've been in meetings with some of our colleagues from the Projects side of the company - and worse, some of our older colleagues still working for our main customer - who have said exactly the same thing.

Oh Scott, why, oh why didn't I listen! The pointy haired bosses are taking over!

How green is Silicon Valley?

Well, what do we think?

Being closely involved in the world that encompasses these almighty cathedrals to technology that we call "data centres", I wonder seriously how green we can actually get them. It may be unfair to single out this particular part of the world as there's nowhere that's any less guilty at wasting energy.

The prime problem is how inefficient the actual equipment is at using the power that we put into it. There are very few "conventional" server/network chassis that can boast better than a 20% efficiency rating, and as you've most likely guessed the rest simply comes out of the box as heat.

Thus we have a situation where the problem has to be solved in the long term by the manufacturers. Moves are being made in this direction: more efficient ways of distributing the power to the servers, more use of blade servers, far more intelligent power and performace management software in the servers themselves, and so on.

Meanwhile in the short term, we just have to make the environment that it lives in far more efficient at dealing with the problem the equipment is causing us. Here are some ideas from my addled brain.

How much heat in the data centre is coming from outside the building? In certain climates, I suspect quite a lot at certain times of the year, yet I have visited places where the insulation in the area of the DC's suites has been non-existent. Conversely, how much cooling can we achieve from the outside of the building by just allowing the outside atmosphere to get in? Some method of controlled heat transfer when the outside air is cool enough cannot be beyond the whit of Man.

Can the excess heat be converted back to useable electrical power, or indeed be condensed enough to help in powering the air conditioning systems - a Combined heat/power system maybe.

How do we cool the equipment itself? The current method in an awful lot of DC's - even brand new ones - is to cool the suite itself rather than the equipment itself. This is a hangover from mainframe days when this was really the only viable way of doing it. I come from a broadcast engineering background where it has always been the norm to use contained cooling within an area, so this way has never made sense to me.

This has got to change.

CFO's have got to realise that saving money in the capital stage of a project and just throw air handling units around a large open area is only going to increase the costs to the company when it reaches the stage of going into operation, especially when a large number of governments are introducing carbon taxes in some form or another.

Bite the bullet guys and consider doing this now: there are options out there already, some of which can be easily (and relatively cheaply) retro-fitted to your existing installation.

Finally, an idea for the manufacturers out there: the Dell's HP's Cisco's of this world. Broadcasting, especially national broadcasting uses a fair number of high-power transmitters to reach it's audience. To keep these enormous beasts going they are cooled directly. The coolant pipes are plumbed directly into the output stage and the liquid pumped through these rather than having an intermediate "air stage" in the process.

It's already being done on larger scale computers... think Kray and the like. Is it really so mad an idea to do this to even small machines like say a C7000?

Be lucky and stay safe out there people!