If you haven’t tried it yet, Cuil is supposed to be the next hot search engine. So I tried it while fixing a problem with a Domino server, expecting a much quicker search experience than was the case with dear old Google. Here, “Quicker” means less junk results and more useful technical snippets - something I find one can get, generally, by using more than three search terms.
So imagine my surprise at following cuil’s first match result to my search : A page solely concerned with showing you that the guy writing it can’t diagnose the source of his problems, no matter which bit of software he’s looking at. It has some random and unsubstantiated comments about mail rules: it contains no examples, no code, no fixes - just a raft of inaccurate statements about fossil versions of the product that nobody uses any more.
Why, one wonders, does Cuil rank this page higher than the tens of thousands of pages retreivable from IBM’s documentation and support forums? On one machine I tried this search with, all I got back from Cuil was 2 results - the Computer Gripes one, and another one from openntf (which is at least apposite, if not well chosen). Only by turning off the safe-surf filter, did I get any of the other common resources for Notes agents, rules & security information.
Credibility in search technology is a perennial problem, as the googlewatch people will tell you: but this strikes me as a repeatable example of downright odd results.
No not the middle finger… Those who are keen followers of the articles pages here might have seen my little refugee item-ette from a forthcoming PC Pro feature: for those who haven’t, I confess my fragile ego wants me toshow it to you. Not because I took the photos all on my own (though I did, with my Sony with the busted CF door sensor that drives me nuts) but because I’ve just been through a bodge cycle on the HP ML115 that gave me the giggles.
I now find out of course, that VMWare Server isn’t officially supported on Windows Server 2008. Beta 2.0 is but that’s a whole different world, and I need Bowie, Iggy and friends to run without hassle. Searching in the usual places produces a load of whingers who don’t see why it can’t work, and almost nobody who really has the inside track…
…and one completely crazy fix. The problem is, Windows Sever 2008 won’t run with unsigned drivers, unless you press F8 on startup and choose the option which - well, runs without checking driver signing. There is no way to automate this within Windows: you can automate the opposite, so it never runs an unsigned driver: but you can’t turn the check off.
Well, unless you use ReadyDriverPlus that is. It’s not so much the need for somethign like this: it’s how it does it. Registry patch? Nah. Group Policy template? uh-uh.
It stuffs the keyboard buffer in the pre-GUI startup phase, to push in an F8 and the required number of up-arrows (plus a return) to always start server 2008 in unsigned driver mode.
Looks like the Summer Season has well and truly landed at Microsoft: one client has been battling to download some licences from eopen for two days. This is not the first time the lights have been out at the software licencing pickup point - just as well it’s not a drive-thru (ugh).
But what takes the biscuit is their reply to his email asking when he can have his licences: oh sorry… would you like some CDs with the keys stuck on the back? Should be with you in…
(any guesses?)
…four weeks!
Adopting strictly limited software licencing systems tied tightly to the physical machine and the software install process looks good, for exactly as long as you can be bothered to stay responsive when people ask for new licences. A major cause of unease amongst my clients is the idea that one day, their right to get into their own files will be removed: having it taken away because you haven’t paid is pretty bad (if you thought you’d stopped paying). Having it taken away because someone is asleep at the wheel, or penny-pinching, or deliberately turning their back on the stream of customer-service requests… that’s far more worrying.
No, I haven’t been taken over by a random word generator: I genuinely like the stuff. Not just because it perfectly complements some Sashimi or a Bento Box; but because it helps me think about air-conditioning and heat. Miso soup is a mixture of stock - or dashi - with paste - or Miso. It’s supposed to arrive hot, and if you leave it in a coolish room you can see the little particles of paste circulating in an almost textbook perfect case study of convection: something very few people actually believe is really going on around us, despite being taught about it in school (by a mad Welshman with crinkly wavy hair, a la Dilbert, in my case, but I digress)…
When the weather is hot, and I’m standing in people’s server rooms and they are going nuts with fear and loathing about their precious servers going into meltdown, I like to ask them about Miso soup: and if they get all confused (and then angry and then don’t pay my bill), I ask them how much they think the air inside the typical hot-air balloon actually weighs.
Very few get it right: the answer is, about five tons. Once you get that idea into your head, getting emergency cooling for servers sorted out starts to make a good deal more sense - and those elephant’s-trunk so-called aircon units which harassed managers tend to put in as a reflex action during these periods, start to look more like a way to throw kilowatts into the air for very little benefit, than like a smart way to stop your servers going into meltdown.
Got any good “boy stood on the burning deck” stories from extreme heat or wild weather?
Anyone else suffered from this? At home I have a 30-inch HP TFT and a Kensington optical trackball (large, which is nice - but with a tiny moulding divot in the ball, which is not so nice), and in the last few months i’ve also had a Logitech Marble Mouse on my primary desk away from home (OK, so my working life is a complicated thing. Are you surprised?)
Since using both of these quite intensively, I have developed what I think is trackball-specific RSI - a sharp pain in the muscle group up at the elbow end of the forearm, when I make certain movements which involve grip with the middle (longest) finger.
Watching what I do when trackballing, it looks as if quite a lot of the fine movement with a ‘ball is done with the arm frozen in tension and the index and middle fingers moving very slowly, also in tension - which gets a lot worse when dragging. It could be that I’ll have to go back to the good old mouse to give my arm a break: at least, it’s that or buy that first sign of decrepitude - a shopping trolley…
Looks like VMWare has lost it’s den mother: CEO Diane Greene has been replaced by Paul Maritz. Having seen Ms. Greene in action on two occasions, I will be fascinated to see how Maritz copes with that role - VMWare’s somewhat scattered product portfolio and happy go lucky acquisition model always seemed to represent a collection of cats resolutely refusing to make up a herd. Seems like the shareholders - companies not famous for their touchy-feely, den-motherish management style, like Cisco and EMC - reacted with that classic American short-term peevishness when revenues dropped, and Someone Had To Go.
The question in my mind is; was VMWare surfing a wave during the pre-recession years, or actually driving it? Will the uber-boffins who delivered the goods, keep doing so without their Den Mother?
Nul points to anyone who actually tries that one, I’m being figurative. Looks like this is the year for dusting off old technologies with a new lease of life, including:
- finding that Nokia 6310i with the busted keypad, because it plugs straight into the phone integration in my new-ish car (and finding it’s more responsive than my 2007 model Motorola phone)
- actually having to solder up a male/male 9-pin straight through serial cable (by destroying a couple of crossover leads) and then finding the only lappy which actually possesses a workable serial port is a Toshiba Tecra 8000, circa 1999. Naturally, despite being on a shelf at Schloss Cassidy for at least half a decade, it just starts up and whacks on into Hyperterminal (private edition of course, off a PC Pro cover CD…) without a murmur. The effort was worth it, to get into an HP 9308 enterprise backbone switch…
- snaffling a BT ISDN line that everyone forgot after they sent a DASS conversion letter. Once that is tested and working it will be fed into a small VOIP PBX system: I know of six ISDN lines, which BT were quite sure they could stop bothering with, which have been sharply re-commissioned for exactly this purpose for small biz VOIP. Watch out for Ebay prices on old EICON DIVA cards rising steeply…
The last time I crossed the Swiss border was from the south: Mr Honeyball and I were going from Cannes to Mulhouse and the Schlumpf Museum (link is noisy - speakers off!), and I figured out that the best way to do this is not to schlep all the way round the French Alps, but instead go through the Gotthard pass and overnight in Lucerne.
As always, the Swiss border guards are like someone from Friends Reunited: cautious, a bit shy, and then the minute you are nice to them you are their best friend ever. Jon was expecting to be taken away and have his fillings sent for assay, but I deliberately picked a small crossing on the SP3 from Varese & Malnate, knowing the traffic would be light and the guys would be relaxed - and we wanted to drive over the bizarre ground-loops we found on Google Maps.
This friendly but thorough encounter - and a previous visit, going in through Basel, where the guards spent longer marvelling at the Japanese tax-disc on my personal import Subaru that they did looking at my passport - put me in mind of people’s approach to firewalls.
Working with a home network is not about appointing yourself a nice Swiss border guard (say “Gruezi” to the ones in the eastern half of the country if you want to be well treated, and make sure you roll the R without typical British embarrassment). it’s far more like having a garden wall with five different colour coded Tradesman’s entrances, all with doorknobs wired up to the 3-phase at your nearest substation - and yet so many devices now want unlimited access both to, and from, the web.
This last month I have had more questions about PS3 and XBox cohabitation on home networks, than all the other enquiries put together. It seems like those machines want to stand on the net unprotected and unencumbered: the fact that attack traffic seems to backtrack into all the addresses where games consoles announce themselves, on the principle that people playing games are probably not terribly au fait with protecting their other compute resources, seems to support my suggestion:
Buy yourself a proper, separate, hardware firewall. Not some freebie that hacker dudes can treat like a Swiss border guard.
