Warranties, app stores and me

Friday, January 6th, 2012

My late uncle and I were very different people. Despite being the two ‘fixers’ in the family, the ones who got the busted kettles and the snapped gear cables from the rest of the clan, we were poles apart in one area: our approach to warranties. Even though he would keep his cars going for 20 years, he had a very sharp understanding of what should be his responsibility, and what was down to the vendor.

Actually, that’s an understatement. Woe betide the firm whose slipshod customer handling captured his attention. Once the horn-rimmed specs and the Brylcreemed bonce were aimed in their direction, he would pursue them relentlessly, his measured drawl torturing their receptionists until they actually did put him through to the MD or the Company Secretary (which incidentally is still quite a good one to try, since chancers seldom know enough about company law and structure to try that route).

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How a wonky DIMM ruined my server upgrade

Friday, December 16th, 2011

As you may be able to see in the highest-resolution version of the snapshot above (click to enlarge), it’s not every day one comes across a physically distorted DIMM.

This is one of a set of eight 4GB sticks, originally intended to boost the performance of a Hyper-V host machine at Ratcliffe & Brown Wines & Spirits, the subject of a forthcoming PC Pro Business Clinic. The server upgrade wasn’t part of the subject, but it pretty quickly turned into a source of aggravation – this bendy SIMM is not immediately apparent until it’s placed on a flat surface, and I tend to land DIMMs on a lump of textile, like a mouse mat or a rucksack; anything but a conductive perfectly flat plane like a rack-mounted server lid.

Surprisingly, it sat in the DIMM slot perfectly well. Unsurprisingly, the server (a Dell PowerEdge 2970) spat the dummy the minute power was restored, quite accurately complaining about “unusable memory” in the scrolling front-panel display.

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How do we make the public understand programming?

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

In response to a recent survey telling us that schools are getting the teaching of Information Technology all wrong by not including “computer programs” in the syllabus, the BBC has offered up seven questions about computer programs. I urge you to take the quick quiz and then come back here when you’re done.

I scored five out of seven. I don’t know the correct HTML for inserting an image, and I couldn’t work out which subset of acronyms the question with GNU in it was driving at, mainly because the preceding five questions were not about “computer programs” at all; they were about the history of the people who happened to be involved in the invention of programming, either as a general concept (Jaquard) or as an incredibly early implementation (Hopper and COBOL).

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Why you shouldn’t let builders anywhere near your Wi-Fi

Friday, October 14th, 2011

I’ve just had a proper argument. My circle of friends and even a few colleagues at Dennis will tell you, this isn’t unusual of itself, so I won’t do the down the pub routine that relies heavily on the phrase “So then I said…”. I’ll give you the helicopter view.

It was an argument about Wi-Fi. I went to a meeting to go through re-wiring a retail shop to accommodate a CCTV system, the sales PCs, the PDQ card-payment setup, and the email workstation. There was also a couple of new ventures, in the shape of kiosks for customers to look through the website and ask about styles, sizes and colours not visible in the shop.

At this meeting were the proprietors, me, and a jobbing interior decorator. The list of snags, water leaks and bits of paint and the like was long and diverse: then we came to the wiring. Just a small shop, but very quickly we arrived at a total of 15 locations. It’s also an old building, which means that it won’t be falling down any time soon; but conversely, drilling holes is going to be a proper rufty-tufty builder’s job, one I am very glad I won’t be undertaking. Looking at the job in hand, the jobbing builder decided to propose a different approach: Why not just put in wireless?

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The everyday computing behind F1

Friday, September 9th, 2011

It’s properly, seriously hot here at Monza. This is, many would say, the most theatrical of the Formula 1 weekends and in the 30-plus degree heat, there’s a vast amount of technology on show. Most of it’s related to making cars go round at over 200mph, and this is the province of items like a solid tungsten nose-weight, or a £200,000 steering wheel — and that’s what you’ll hear about when the big TV stations walk around the pit lanes or chat with the drivers and managers.

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How phone-hacking feds have been fooled by the cloud

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

I was in a meeting last week where both of the staff from my client had a strong affinity for the word “layman”. Whenever I strayed into territory they preferred to find too technical, they would say “well, I’m just a layman…”. I’m thinking of a particular conversation about their server hard disk running out of space. “What” they asked “you mean the memory? We bought some more of that, didn’t we?”

I despair of the whole concept of the “layman”  - they seem to stop being laymen and turn into the copyright-smashers from hell when it comes to downloading the illegal copies of movies that make up the bulk of the space consumed on their file server, after all.

Now, I’m sure we all have our stories about wilful ignorance in pursuit of a bit of nerd-baiting, but this particular BBC article caught my eye, because it implies that the “layman” state of mind is doing a good deal more damage.

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Kicking off the Business Clinic at Sandy Balls!

Monday, July 11th, 2011

There’s a very special pleasure to getting out of town on a working day: a pleasure that’s doubled when you can borrow an open-topped car to do it in, and even more Brownie points attached to going somewhere with a fascinating story to tell.

This combination of plus points made me very happy to kick off PC Pro’s new Business Clinic feature – where Real World Computing contributors such as myself pay a free visit to a business for a spot of IT troubleshooting –  with an inaugural visit to see Dan Rooke, down at the Sandy Balls Holiday Centre in the northern extreme of the New Forest.

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Microsoft connects you to the cloud at TechEd 2011

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Relax – when I say Microsoft’s “connecting you to the cloud” this isn’t the long-predicted release of a brain implant chip worthy of Cronenberg at his finest. It’s a bit more straightforward, though describing it to those not already in daily contact with the cloud produces furrowed brows – not because it’s hard to understand, but because systems designers considering a cloud rollout in their business can’t believe it’s not included already.

It is now. Robert Wahbe was the main presenter in the TechEd keynote, and he laid out a toolkit for linking your internal servers to your Windows Azure cloud instances. There’s Azure Connect, which is all about the TCP/IP pipeline between the inside of your organisation, and the inside of your cloud presence: and there’s Concero (not Concerto, before the subeditors shoot me), which is a data synchroniser, so you can have an internal server and a cloud server and keep the two in step.

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The perils of being an irrational Motorola fanboy

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

As you can see from the picture above, I have a deep dark secret to share with you. I am an irrational Motorola fanboy. Here in the picture is the Motorola Xoom tablet and my recently purchased, thoroughly huge and dorky looking Motorola S805 A2DP headphones.

The A2DP bit is what makes them so much fun. Like the HT820, which I also own, these headphones will stream music wirelessly, for a sensible amount of time, over Bluetooth, all the way to the outside world while the Xoom is sitting on my basement desk. That’s 25 feet away in a concrete-walled building.

I think they’re huge fun, and a seriously accompaniment for the Xoom, because you surely cannot be carrying that around in your top pocket when you’re working. The S805 takes the concepts found on the HT820 a bit further, with rings on the unfeasibly huge ear-pads to change the sound level (left ear) and to jump back and forward a track (so that would be the right ear then – I am getting the hang of this consumer electronics review game you know!).

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How much datacenter does $1 billion buy?

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Dell brought together a rich mixture of hacks and industry faces for a big announcement recently. It wasn’t a single product – no new laptop, no box to kick – but rather a whole slew of announcements that boil down to the simple statement that Dell wants to be a cloud provider in its own right. It has a huge preconfigured stack of servers, storage, switching and power which it can wheel into your datacenter on demand, called vStart, which takes care of the private cloud.

If that wasn’t quite enough for you then how about splashing out a billion dollars on cloud hosting centres? In the spirit of one of my all-time favourite books (the Tiger That Isn’t), I was minded to ask, almost the instant the announcement came from the lips of Brian Jones, head of public and large enterprise from Dell USA: a billion dollars, wow, but how much is that, really?

The money is going on datacenters. There are at least 10 candidate locations, though the Japanese earthquake has made the location of at least one the subject of one of those rushed sentences you can tell the speaker would rather you didn’t notice.  And some of the decision-making on locations for these centres has been about things that hardcore datacenter techies don’t like to see themselves bothered by, such as the legal position over government or company data and whether it can be moved outside the country it came from. A billion dollars spread across ten centres is $100m a centre (I worked that out on my own you know!) and that set me thinking: how big is a big datacenter these days?

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