VGA Cables

Good Morning,

Just thought I should clarify that VGA cables don’t run on some sort of fluid ink system, seeing as we had a rather helpful customer send us back his broken VGA cable stating that “all it needs is a top up on the red ink…”

Of course the fact I even have to write these words escapes me – how would you look at a VGA cable and assume ink is involved? Where does the ink go? Where would it come from, surely when taking it out you’d have to wrap it in tissue to avoid leak residue?

Brilliant.

SOS Wednesday

Greetings,

Yesterday I made a post regarding my fondness of a particular type of technology sold by Zenith Infotech – well this morning my love for them grew at an exponential rate as I was requested to wake up at 7am (2 hours before my shift) to, again, investigate a situation regarding them basically… Dying… Again…

Now forgive me if my feelings of intense bitterness have clouded my fair and rational judgement but am I fairly right in suggesting a server that stays up for a little over 13 hours is the equivalent of a net-book with better than average battery life? Of course if this WERE a net-book it would be the most expensive one ever owned…

Of course it now stands at 12:07pm and we’ve JUST managed to get the SBS server online, however, the Microsoft Exchange installation has now become corrupt… No doubt I’ll be posting about that later…

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

 

What If? Physics

Hi Readers,

An article was bought to my attention today which postulates a baseball being thrown at 9/10th’s the speed of light with cool drawings of explosions and stuff. Pointless? Yes. Advances human understanding of the universe? Perhaps not. Without educational merit entirely? Now hang on…

I don’t pretend to know much about anything, I solve IT problems – new, old and repetitive; ranging from a cat chewing on the printer wire, to a man who once tried to tell me Microsoft’s Server Operating System is coded inefficiently and, without compromise, stressed I NEVER close his support ticket until the OS is either redesigned, or he is upgraded (he may have had a small point, but my word did he exaggerate).

What I lack in knowledge of the universe I make up for in appreciation for people who explain it in ridiculously stupid ways I understand and, honestly, this article made sense while providing me pretty mushroom clouds of destruction to look at, one dude even gets disintegrated…

Have a read! You’ll love it and learn! It seems to be an initial series starting out and it has promise… Expect more redirects to this guy in the future!

SmartStyle Office (SSO) AKA SOS

Hello,

While we are all familiar with that feeling of purchasing a product believing it to be reliable, and the pretence of safety that particular brand or the reputation it has gives – it is safe to say we are all equally familiar with the feeling of being wrong, or worse jumping head first into a product based purely on how great it sounds on paper.

Enter Zenith InfoTech… now unfortunately I am not exactly in a position to be making any big decisions at the undisclosed company I work for, however, you don’t have to have a degree in Google or a PhD in Marathi to understand that this Mumbai based company is not held in the highest of regards. Simple RnD into the product prior to investment would’ve saved us a lot of time and money.

As you can tell by the tone of this article I am bitter about the fact we weren’t included in the discussion that led to the purchase of these SSO devices but are now expected to pick up the slack for them. But imagine the embarrassment of us having to restart a company’s mission-critical VM once every morning just to have it functional for them which is ideally 30 minutes of time lost (Windows SBS boot time is also ridiculous – I’ll save THAT gripe for another time), then have that server gradually over time issue requests at a slower and slower pace until the Outlook clients spend almost 3 minutes on each request for data to the exchange. Did I mention this is a “fully-managed service” that doesn’t notify us when server communications cease? I feel in safe hands already…

I am writing this article to warn people away from the SSO units we have affectionately named SOS units as to save themselves a headache. We are discovering more and more shocking secrets about them that ultimately make them less reliable and to us technologically hilarious – if the fact that they are a Type 2 – Hypervisor running on a Ubuntu version of VirtualBox doesn’t scare you away I hope my warning written here does!

While I regret the additional hard work, anguish and pain these units have added to my life I can only thank them for keeping me in a job.

 

Mobile Stereotyping!

Hi Guys,

I’m a firm believer in healthy competition, and if there is any competition in today’s market that could be deemed unhealthy it’s the ongoing struggle between Android and Apple – this is a struggle which seems to transcend just the technology involved and even attacks the social architecture of the planet, there are stereotypes of characters that own iPhones and people who own Android devices and I can’t help but become drawn into that stereotype myself.

In our office we have 4 senior technicians including myself and 1 junior apprentice who was hired for having “a passion in IT” he is a completely different story… 3/5 of our department have Android devices (ironically all HTC too not that this really matters at this point), my device also sports a Custom Rom LeeDroid (which I plan on writing a lovely review on later on). The remaining senior technician has a Windows Phone ( he is the oldest one of all of us) and our “passionate” young compadre has an iPhone 4S, and almost wets his pants at the thought of getting an iPhone 5.

How fascinating is it that the technically minded opt for the highly customisable Android platform (I myself love the ability to apply and edit the code to my own custom roms as well as modify that of others), the technical yet aged appear to have opted for the Windows Mobile Device and our local village idiot picks the easy to use and perceivably cool iPhone. I may be being a little harsh there but when I look to our sales department I can’t help but notice they all have iPhones too… Yet our technical MD has an android device.

What do you think? Does the device you purchase define who you are or does who you are define the device you purchase, have you noticed some unforgettable stereotypes regarding other devices?

Microsoft Exchange Vs. Linux

Hi Guys,

If there is one thing I enjoy doing it’s sticking it to the man, and what says that in an incredibly geeky way MORE than getting your companies exchange email to your Linux box running Thunderbird. Who says they can’t play nice?

The trick involves a genius little program called DAVMAIL which exists as a gateway between you and the exchange, and creates a POP/IMAP server out of your Exchange regardless of whether your company allows POP/IMAP.

My understanding of the technicalities are limited however I can confirm the instructions in this article work perfectly to the letter in setting it up. Instructions are only for UBUNTU and some Debian based linux distros.

Big thank you to all the developers involved in DAVMAIL/Thunderbird and I suppose Microsoft should get a mention for Exchange……….

 

Tuesday Support AKA I Hate Blackberries

Hello there,

I live in a world of precise timings/calculations and maximised efficiency; I know, for example, that if I shower in the morning instead of the evening before bed I am required to be up by 7:50 at the latest, and should the day be what I call a dry shampoo day I can quite happily wake up at 8:00. In all scenarios if I leave after 8:17 I’m boned when it comes to getting to work on time…

However unrelated it may seem, the above is why I HATE blackberries… I don’t recall a time when they ever truly worked for an extended period of time. The company I work for support these phones on a “best endeavours” basis for our larger (and consequently valuable) customers, and I must get more calls about these things than anything else.

The most infuriating aspect of this is not that it occasionally disconnects, Microsoft Outlook plays that shit on me all the time and it just summons an innocently playful “Oh You!” and you can use the whole Microsoft stigma over the phone to instigate a laugh with the client with no additional damages to the reputation of the company (You know the one, where all Microsoft Software is to be taken as standard to be non-functional to the point where if it works the customer actually feels lucky and oddly more productive). In either case my point is when Outlook disconnects I can get it hooked back up in 10 minutes and the customer feels like we’ve given them a professional and fast service. Thank you Microsoft, your constantly malfunctioning yet easy to fix software makes me look great!

Now RIM on the other hand (curious abbreviation), have developed a system designed not only to infuriate their users but it infuriates us and in the process makes us look like cowboys. So imagine, your blackberry accidentally loses it’s “enterprise” connection to the server for no apparent reason and you stop receiving your email and all of the shit on their page about deleting CMIME books and other random anti-solutional bollocks, doesn’t work; your next logical step would be to reactivate the blackberry… But alas the option has disappeared!?

So in this fresh hell RIM have created I have to tell the user they need to backup their device and wipe it JUST to re-activate their enterprise connection, only to have it lose connection a few months down the line.

RIM IF YOU READ THIS, I AM COMING FOR YOU! THERE WILL BE BLOOD! MY YOUTHS ON THE STREETS OBVIOUSLY AGREE: