Snow is pretty, I like looking out windows and seeing it and will even walk through the stuff in appropriate quantities. I glanced out the window today and saw a gleaming field of white and was rather excited. Had snow fallen while I wasted the hours on configuring desktops? What I interpreted as snow was actually a set of tents for a catered luncheon for a product launch involving people that did vastly less work on the product than I did. Not only was it not snow, but it was the opposite of purity. Not only was it not snow, but it was like 48°F outside. Not only was it not snow, but it was an expense that I’m going to blame for me not getting a 10k hard drive and upgraded video card in my new work computer. It wasn’t snow, it was the paragon of non-snow, it was anti-snow. I hope it snows so the snow and anti-snow make contact and blow up.
Tag: computers
Timecard Worksession
Being poked in the eye is the common comparison I use to convey the dullness of a presentation. Today, there was a presentation on how to fill out our new timecards. It’s actually a simpler system than the one currently used with an AJAXy interface and radio buttons. The presenter went on to do a rundown of the system in possibly a single 10 minute breath and asked for questions.
At first, I thought that the event assumed we were idiots and thought we needed to go over a trivial change in stupid detail. On second thought, I think it was a test: anyone who sees a presentation on something that simple and then asks a stupid question should be culled from the employee pool and be fired… out of a cannon… into the sun.
Free Access Promises
One of the promises made when we received our new computers was that we’d have unfettered access to the devices which wouldn’t be as crippling as some of the limitations on the old computers.  So I ran through a checklist:
Can turn off McAfee Antivirus – No
Can prevent machines from going to sleep after 10 minutes – No
Can access certain parts of the Windows folder – No
Can run web connected apps over something besides port 80 – No
Can change the screen saver – YES!
Take that showing-diversity-from-people-playing-cats-cradle-with-our-logo.scr!
Measured Praise
Our new workstations arrived today and I began setting up one of them. They are a massive improvement over our previous systems but about 75% the power of my reasonably powered home PC at about four times the cost and I am skeptical that they will last the 40 months asked of them. This after my request has several corners shaved from it for trivial cost savings. I did some initial benchmarking and my very excited boss asked for feedback about their speed. I was unsure of how to respond and the revision history of the email was something like this:
While sufficient to run AutoCAD I don’t think they’d run Crysis as well as you’d like.
They’re fast enough that I no longer realize how much slower they are than my home PC.
They are sufficient, for now. Please plan to upgrade in 18-24 months.
While an improvement over what we have, I’m glad they didn’t come out of our department’s budget.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the monitors included displayport adapters.
Elitist Server
Me:Â This server’s going absolutely bat-shit insane.
Boss:Â What does that mean?
Me: I can remote desktop to it, but I can’t ping it, and another computer located physically on top of it can’t communicate with it either.
Boss: Contact the host, see what they can do.
Me: I did, they claim they’re doing nothing to it except that when I look in processes I can see the processes associated with being logged in like explorer.exe and freecell.exe listed in the Task Manager under their name but they insist no one’s logged in. Also, a little icon in the corner of the screen keeps telling me a network cable is unplugged and, whenever it is, I have an Internet connection and, whenever it’s not, I don’t.
Boss: I have an idea. You’re from the future, just a few minutes or maybe an hour and you’ve come back to warn us that something disastrous is about to happen. But the trip through time has damaged your memory and you can’t remember what you need to avert.
Me: So what should I do?
Boss: Go out to lunch. There’s no way of knowing when the real Terry will return and your meeting may cause the end of the universe.
Me: Good thinking.
That, sir, is how one applies Ockham’s Razor.
Microsoft: Speedbooster
My little hack arrangement of Filezilla, FlingFTP, the WAMP stack and AbiWord for documentation hummed along smoothly for the first part of the day, gleefully grabbing files, moving them to a new location, uploading them to a server and then retrieving them on the other side of our corporate firewall until it all suddenly stopped in the afternoon. We had n f*#$ing clue why.
We contacted the remote worker and tried to replicate the situation in the lab running a nearly identical rig and we experienced a similar crash when opening a program, so we fired up task manager and eyed the CPU usage as we opened various programs. We started at about 80% and opened Outlook, when it dropped to 76%. We opened Excel, it dropped to 72%… Finally we opened Word and it leveled off at 70%. WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT. The only way we were able to kill it? By opening Powerpoint while running something in Microsoft Search 4.0 WHILE running Prime95 and searching for Mersenne primes, a phenomenon the remote worker probably wasn’t enacting. Next I’ll find that Chrome is just Internet Explorer with a different theme and browser.bugs.enable set to “0”.
You Can't Get There From Here
After yesterday’s awesome discovery regarding FTP setups I tried to find other ways of setting this up. One option was to remote into the computer and email a file but with a caveat as I explained to the person requesting the solution:
Me: I think I have a solution, email yourself.
Him: How?
Me: Get subscription to GoToMyPC.com and remote into the computer and send an email to another account.
Him: Great, how do I set it up?
Me: First you need to go home and setup the account.
Him: Why?
Me: It’s blocked from work.
Him: But I can remote home, can I use that?
Me: Probably, so, remote to your computer at home via VPN then setup the account on your laptop and use that to remote into your computer here.
Him: Is this the simplest way to do this?
Me: Using your office computer to remote into your home computer to setup a remote account to get a download to put on your laptop that then won’t be accessible from work but only from home or remoting to home. Yes.
Free Hardware Caveat
I go through a lot of hardware from doing repairs for other people. Frequently I’ll do a repair in exchange for the parts left over after an upgrade which has given me a smattering of RAM, small hard drives, a smattering of peripheral cards and enough cabling to safely repel El Capitan. After a while I started jotting notes on sticky notes attached to the hardware to help sort through it and today was dumbfounded by one. Someone had requested a hard drive and this was the conversation:
Him: Do you have a spare hard drive, mine died?
Me: Lemme see.  Yes, but there’s a note on it “HP NSFW”. I can’t remember what it means.
Him: Well, do you think it’s safe?
Me: Maybe it was out a Hewlett-Packard mach…. oh, I remember. I have a drive for you from someone whose system I upgraded but I need to warn you: This drive may or not contain alarmingly hi-resolution slash fiction pictures of whom I’ve been told is a naked Daniel Radcliffe.
Him: Hm… one sec. *Shouting* Yeah, my girlfriend’s fine with that.
Computer Catch 22
My brother’s girlfriend’s sister’s computer wasn’t working so I figured I’d give it a crack. My standard test setup is a 20″ monitor, with a ps/2 keyboard and mouse which were useless as this computer had a DSUB 15 monitor connector and no ps/2 ports only USB. I plugged in my spare G15 and MX518 and was able to boot into the BIOS and did some initial checks. I then booted to Windows XP and was stymied by the keyboard and mouse not being recognized. Well they were, but I needed to click the little button to let Windows load the appropriate drivers, which I couldn’t do, as I had no keyboard or mouse… until I clicked on that button, which I couldn’t.
I’m normally impressed with what I can only call the tenacity of Windows to create drivers out of bubblegum and tape to figure out something. Sure it may cut your printing speed by a factor of 10 or your monitor will only show 4 colors but it works until you can get something done. Today, that died…
Hard Drive Recovery, at what cost?
My tenant’s girlfriend’s computer lit on fire and suffered a rather severe hard drive crash. He asked me to look at it telling me the drive held important stuff and I started running drive recovery. The progress was glacial but I bore through knowing “it was important”. I recovered the first set of data which yielded a collection of emails in txt-speak about concert tickets. My resolve waned. I kept it spinning for a day or two more seeing it’s estimated completion time was around Candlemas thinking it’d magically speed up. The final straw was when files for WinAntiVirus 2009 (a virus program) and I snapped. This computer was dead, it deserved to die, the hard drive was simply the device who decided to end itself.
After seeing its pain, I’m thinking of having a new mission in life: create something to cause hard failures in PCs and become the Kevorkian of computers.