Tag Archives: microsoft

Flapping Albatross

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I get this task, it comes up again and again and it’s related to this interface we have between our database and the general ledger for the University. Our export system makes Microsoft Word documents, so the file BLAH.DOC gets spit out. We have to change this to a plain text file and (apparently) there is no way to export to plain text. So, okay. Open Microsoft Office. But here’s the rub. If you open it in Office 97 and save it as a Plain Text file, there is one column where there should be ‘-’ characters, but they are replaced once saved into the plain text as a slim box character, or at least that’s how we’ve been calling it. So then they open the file, which has to have an extension of DAT, gah, using Windows Notepad. Then they highlight the box, use Find and Replace and put the dash character back in.

So the other gift processor we have has Office 2010 and can’t do this procedure. So we discovered that you could force the issue of filenames using the quote characters. If you save a file and try to use a custom extension, you get BLAH.DAT.txt. What we want is BLAH.DAT. So if you wrap the filename in quote characters, you force Microsoft Office’s hand and it makes BLAH.DAT files the way we want to see them. But now in Office 2010 there is a problem, it just dumps the ‘-’ characters and the slim box characters and that’s that. I noticed an option “Allow Character Substitution”. If you turn this on, it renders the plain text file properly.

Its a long way around robin hoods barn but at least it’s properly done now. I don’t know if Office 97 has this option, it may be worth looking into, but now we can just adjust the files, give them proper names, and make sure those important little dash characters end up where they should be.

I need a drink. :)

Friday Flashback – March 1st

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2003 – We were in the thick of the Rosewar Chronicle RPG Game that Scott was running. I was riddled with doubt that I could really get into the game and on reflection it was a lot of fun even if I didn’t have all the details or, to my chagrin, have the ability to not pass out while playing because the turns took a fair while to come around again. When I wrote the entry for this day I was keeping my friend Ryan Abbott up and we were all dog tired. I miss him a lot.

2004 – Friends, Fun, Ahem… moving along… nothing to see here.

2008 – I took some pictures of myself to update my progress in trying to lose weight. I posted them online and then the service they were on was bought out by Google and so, they aren’t online any longer. I was nowhere near where I am now.

2009 – We were still going to Martini’s Restaurant then, after that we caught a showing of Streetfighter. Frankly I can’t remember the movie so perhaps it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.

2010 – We saw Shutter Island at Rave, when Rave was still open downtown. The cowards turned tail and fled when their tax abatement expired, so, bittersweet. At work a MacBook died because of an incident where the proper charging current wasn’t met and it burned out the charging circuit on the laptop. We were in the thick of playing City of Heroes, again, before it collapsed as well. I really enjoyed CoH, especially when a lot of people I knew played. The game was always fun with other people, way more than it was playing as a single player. March 1st in 2010 was sunny and everything was starting to melt. That March 1st 2013 was still in a deep freeze just illustrates in good relief my assertion that the climate is changing, that the seasons are shifting in their classic dates. Also, March 1st 2010 was when Jay Leno returned to the Tonight Show. I didn’t care then, which just marks the natural continuation of not watching for years and still not watching three years later. There’s a rumor that Jay is going to just retire, well, good for him. Say goodnight, Gracie.

2011 – I was enjoying Plinky prompts for a fair run around this time. It was when I started thinking about destiny and how people suffer when they try to write the story of their lives beyond what destiny has in store for them. Items like “Reflections on a Broken Relationship” are a great place to start, it’s where I did. Also, this was when gasoline was on it’s way up in price, and in 2011, it was $3.55 a gallon, quite the same as it is today. The shock of the gas prices got me posing ideas into the ether, none of them got any commentary. You won’t be able to get a Michigander to part with his car until the price doubles or triples. In 2011 I briefly considered switching the office paper out to A4 to just confuse my coworkers, I never did it, but I wanted to. I find it funny that we use paper that doesn’t make sense, and we spurn paper that does. HA! HA! Americans.

2012 – I tried the Windows 8 Customer Preview. The usual things that I mention when I review Microsoft products are there, the bile and the hate and the sheer incomprehensibility surrounding why anyone would even subject themselves to things so awful as what Microsoft has to offer blow my mind. I noticed early on that the loss of the Start Button would be a problem, that Metro was an albatross, and the experience of the system on a desktop was abysmal because it took all the awkwardness from tablets and made it something everyone has to deal with. Use a computer like a tablet? No touch interface? Use a mouse. Get a swear jar, fill it with pennies. Beyond this, we caught a movie on DVD called “Another Earth” and that was when we discovered the speechless surprise of someone playing a saw. I never thought of saws as musical instruments until that movie. In 2012 Andrew Breitbart died and nobody cared.

2013 – I realized to my chagrin that I could have skipped paying my car loan for a few days and saved myself the trouble of having to run all over creation for a false emergency. There was a lot of work lulz which never ended up being shared publicly, which is all for the best, and at home we had helped Griffin get over his uroliths and started him on Hill’s C/D cat food. That evening we attended a wine makers dinner at Cody Kresta Winery in Mattawan, Michigan. It was pleasant, the food was okay as it was from Zooroona’s in Kalamazoo which makes a lot of arabic food. I had dined at Zooroona’s before, so I had a good idea of what I was in for. We had some suggestions for them afterwards on the next time, as always, we felt very much at home there and really enjoy their wines.

Blueshirts on Parade

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Day One is on the path for changing how I record my life and share. This app is turning into how I prepare my drafts for writing in this blog and also for sharing to Twitter and Facebook. Ever since I came across those great notes for shifting Evernote content over to Day One’s format using its Command Line Interface and an AppleScript I’ve been able to make huge headways forward in my giant overarching project to get all my shared information migrated to Day One. I’ve been able to copy my Facebook entries, as well as my WordPress entries over to Day One and thanks to Twitter making their data download available, that as well. I’ve also found myself remembering friends lost, either from distance or death, and in some way, copying what they wrote into my blog. It’s a way that they can speak to me again and I can remember them.

I’ve also picked up a new app on my iPhone and iPad called Drafts from Agile Tortoise. So far I’ve used it here and there and I won’t have a good idea as to how indispensable it is until I’ve had a chance to really use it in-depth.

I’m finally done with my Mountain Lion demos at work. Last week was lost to me as I was doing 9, 11, and 1:30 demos for my coworkers to get them up to speed with the new operating system that they will be using. I took attendance and then crossed it against the staff list and discovered that the only people to miss my demo had a good reason as they were sick with influenza – except for one. One singular one without an excuse. Alas, with a 99% reach without the sick, I think it went quite well. The demo itself was just a cover of the 200-new-features-of-Mountain-Lion from Apple’s website where I demoed some of the new things that Apple was bringing. Some of the hits to Mountain Lion that I could see from the responses was the Dictation system, that we could use Millennium in Firefox on our Macs without having to schlep into Windows via VirtualBox, and the new way of automatically mounting network shares for users once they login.

It’s funny that I still have holdouts who consider Windows better than Mac in my midst here in the office. Each to their own and they are entitled to their opinions of course, but it is rather entertaining for me to hear them pine for sunnier days when they were using Windows XP or Windows 7. I even fielded a question of Windows 8, which because we don’t have a box with a Microsoft sticker on it, we can’t get the “University” price of $10 for a copy of Windows 8, we have to pay the full-scale price of $149 or so to get it. Since I already downloaded, installed, evaluated, and then degaussed my consumer evaluation copy of Windows 8 almost a year ago I can say without hesitation that $149 for Windows 8 is a waste of money. In fact, any money is a waste of money for Windows 8.

titanic_by_dammy_LCThis past weekend while we were out and about we stopped by Best Buy, which was unnaturally busy – turns out they were trying to goose the locals with a replay of their “black friday deals” at the end of January. So in we went. Best Buy has the unfortunate desperation that K-Mart had before they collapsed. Nobody was shopping, the store was full of junk nobody wanted and the stuff they did want was available online for cheaper and didn’t require exposure to the obnoxious blue-shirts getting in the way. Best Buy had lots of different computers on display and they had a big one from HP I think that featured Windows 8 running on it. The display touted itself as touchable and so I stepped up and gave it a shot. The computer was just at the right level for me to really get irritated quickly with the setup, not actually high enough for me to comfortably manipulate the screen or the keyboard by just standing up next to the machine, but I wasn’t expecting much actually so I filed my annoyance away for that. As I started swiping and poking I found my way into an instance of Internet Explorer. Each time I went to that app it played a fanfare and I started stabbing my finger against the mute icon trying to silence it and then I found myself unable to navigate away from it. What I was able to do, with great effectiveness was reload that annoying fanfare noise over and over again. I accidentally brought up the sideboard controls on the right side that didn’t make any sense to me and I tried all the gestures that I thought would work. I tried swiping from the sides, then I tried pinching, pawing, swiping from the middle, going from side to side, up and down, down and up – nothing. That isn’t exactly true, I was able to reload that site each time I muted it, so at least I was able to do something even if it wasn’t something I wanted to do. As I stood there battling with this annoying as hell computer there was a blueshirt and another customer talking about not wanting to buy something he’d regret and whether or not it was junk or not just a few feet from me. As I struggled with Windows 8 I couldn’t restrain myself and started to get angrier and more expressive as I struggled with the damn thing. After a few minutes in I started cussing and swearing at the computer declaring in a voice that everyone who knows me would recognize: “God Damn This Piece of Crap! It’s JUNK!” and then I grabbed my sides and laughed and pointed at it and walked away. I noticed that the fellow talking to the blueshirt noticed my issues and walked away and I like the idea of the blueshirt giving me the stink eye, but I didn’t look to check. I don’t care so much about blueshirts, really.

So my professional evaluation of Windows 8? What’s the point? I don’t have to list its pros or cons, I don’t even have to describe anything that might be engaging about it because there isn’t. It’s awful and horrible and nasty. It’s confusing, and because Microsoft can’t innovate like Apple can, and that they can’t duplicate the gestures that Apple has created for their devices which has conditioned me to interact with touch devices, it’s all a lost cause. Windows 8 is going to be a huge botch. It may be that Windows 8 finally kills Microsoft as I can’t see this albatross of an operating system succeeding. Microsoft used to have a lock on the entire computer segment with end-to-end provision – you’d start with a Microsoft operating system, you’d use Microsoft Office to do your job, and it was always Microsoft behind the scenes touching everything. Microsoft fell asleep and Apple snuck in and is doing a far better job of it than Microsoft ever could. It won’t be too long now and then we’ll see news items talking about how Microsoft is floundering and how their market share is shrinking. The hallmarks for this are already in the air, as Dell is on the fast-track to nowhere all on its own. I can’t say that makes me unhappy to see that awful company go down the drain. Both of them, Dell and Microsoft, buh-bye. It entertains me deeply to see how Microsoft may invest in the companies that will be the private holding firms that catch Dell before Dell drops between the cracks and disappears. Failure suits Michael Dell, almost as much as Steve Ballmer.

It won’t be too long until Best Buy dies as well. That’s the other side of the coin after all. Microsoft and Dell flagging in the manufacturing space, leaving nothing but worthless Asus, Lenovo, and wretched Samsung in their wake. It doesn’t help that Best Buy is panicking as they drown, trying to burst out tentacles to keep ahold of customers any way they can. Black Friday deals that never end (which is just price-matching Pricewatch.com and won’t end well for Best Buy) and endless emails with effusive emotional outbursts about how much Best Buy values me as a customer. There is touching and then there is desperate. There’s a soft touch and then there’s the tentacles of Sarlaac. Oh well, K-Mart, Best Buy. K-Mart.

So back to work, uncorking the folly of the previous week. Lets hope this week can stand on its own feet and not need a walker to make it to Friday. I’ve got three-quarters of a bottle of Jamesons. It will have to last!

Addressing Balance In The Force

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You can’t really have a lot of negative things in your head just mobbing out all the good things that also have happened. To that end, today I have a particular real humor-based life preserver brought to me by the Apple Spotlight twitter account. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and this is worth a million billion bajillion lulz:

 

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This pleases me.

 

Windows 8, Touch, Public Computer Access

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I was reading an article that was chatting up Windows 8 and how it really shines with touch technology enabled. I noticed this fact when struggling with demo units at my local Best Buy store. None of the units actually worked well, nay, worked at all, but some of the touch features were at least minimally working.

We won’t discuss how well the touch features worked, but they were at least present.

Then I found myself daydreaming about a fictional world where I was running a computer lab as part of my job, yeah, I wouldn’t do that even if someone paid me to do so, but I can imagine. So there in the imaginary world there is a long line of computers and they are all using Windows 8 and they all have touch-enabled technology. So, you open in the morning, everything is tidy and clean and orderly. By noon you revisit this imaginary location and after say a dozen to perhaps double that have passed through that environment, what will you find?

College students, staff members, people. Everyone touching one surface over and over again. Someone comes in battling the sniffles but still uses the machines because they are on a deadline, say a paper is due or some e-learning is in the offing. All it takes is a snotty sniveling wipe and you’ve got a great new infection vector right there. We could up the ante by introducing cold weather, skin that is so dry and cracked that it starts to bleed, now you’ve got touch surfaces with blood wiped on them. Can you say awesome? I know it! Talk about neat!

So, if Windows 8 is crap without touch, which the article posited and Microsoft is eventually going to push people into Windows 8 off of Windows 7, so, it seems almost bound, or perhaps a better word is doomed. For the first time we may need to have every purchase with a CDC tax plunked down on top of it to defray all the wonderful diseases people will spread using these public workstations.

Some Apple tech also is touch-only, like iPhones and iPads, but I would argue that these devices fit perfectly into BYOD arrangements and so each person retains their own little bucket of sick.

So instead of public terminals, perhaps more BYOD would be better for us? Either that or I could imagine also a automatic motion-triggered sanitary screen protector that every time you sit down and wave at the computer it spools out a new sanitary surface. I bet on really snotty days the ejection roll will be marvelously gloopy.

The best part of everything is, I won’t have to deal with any of this, so I don’t really care. But we will see this become a problem in other places around work at the University as well as oer public computing arenas as well.

It would be hilarious and so fitting for Microsoft to play the role of Northern Positronics/The Shop and pioneer a way to cultivate and spread a literal Captain Trips. I look forward to the…. Achoo.

Microsofts going to make it pricier to bring your iOS device to work | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Microsofts going to make it pricier to bring your iOS device to work | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Golly! It’s a good thing I didn’t leap with open-arms into our burgeoning SharePoint system! Or you know, any of the rest of it.

I find it really interesting that Microsoft releases a leperous abomination and just to add a brown cherry on top decides to raise the price of User CAL’s by 15 percent.

Shucks, I should get into SharePoint while the getting is good. ;)

Gartner: Macs invading the enterprise | Macworld

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Gartner: Macs invading the enterprise | Macworld.

First off I think Gartner is just about as useful as a bag of hammers. They style themselves as a company that somehow assumes that it can set precedent. Much in the way that people over-rely on snopes when it comes to debunking urban myths and internet memes, IT management over-rely on Gartner to do their thinking for them. The best way to evaluate isn’t to listen to some murky third-party but to talk to your network of peers and see what they recommend. If any of my peers asked me, I’d tell them the same thing I’ve been preaching for years – not only does Apple belong in the Enterprise space, but they should be absolutely dominating it!

Why do I say that? Because purchasing Macs and supporting these machines is a breeze in comparison to the nightmare existence of being stuck with Microsoft Windows. The cost of Macs are slightly higher than their PC counterparts however my argument is that even if the initial outlay is higher, you make that difference up and then a boatload more in the long term when you realize that the machines are built exceptionally well and in-and-of-themselves work almost flawlessly. Much of this is all about the Apple way of doing things, the computers are built with the OS in mind and the OS is built with the computers in mind. There aren’t any “Third Party” drivers or bloatware shipped with a Mac. Everything comes from Apple and you have the option of buying third party apps, but they are primarily mediated through the App Store. This irks a lot of people, especially the open-source types who get bent whenever they even catch a whiff that there is control over their online experience whatsoever. I have abandoned the open-source group and I’ll tell you why. Open source is meant for computer geeks, the people who professionally understand their computers on a very intimate and personal level – and these people are not the majority. The majority of people don’t give a damn about what is inside a computer, they just want to get their work done with a minimum of fuss and muss. Having Apple stand in as a traffic cop, or perhaps a better metaphor would be big brother is actually a very wonderful thing. The open-source mavens would chide me for being a bird in a golden cage, well, this nightengale is one very happy bird. I love my Apple cage. Because Apple stands guard on the App Store I don’t have to worry about sourcing applications, or the quality of those applications. Apple does all the gumshoe work for me! It’s a kind of executive abstraction that I absolutely love. Sandbox those apps, screw the developers to the wall, prevent them from being so clever that everything shakes to pieces and flies apart! It’s all about safety and sanity. I feel safe, so I am sane.

The other big point that I like to make about living in the Apple Golden Cage is that supporting 60 Macintosh computers is an absolute cakewalk! iChat runs and users can instant message, trade files, and request help using the iChat interface! Every once in a while iChat lets me down, I admit it isn’t perfect, but to cover the deficits of iChat (and I suspect it has more to do with our junky in-the-wall-behind-lock-and-key network, sorry guys) there is Apple Remote Desktop, or ARD. I love ARD. After I use ARD I want to seek out the team that wrote it and do favors for them. I want to hug them, I want to shower them with money, I want to buy them expensive beers and liquors and as many ladies-and-gentlemen-of-the-mid-afternoon as I can. This tool is heaven in a box. I can see each workstation and I can do whatever I like to each station! I don’t have to walk, sit down in the users chair, and upset them. As a sideline benefit, I don’t have to be exposed to their questionable hygiene or unique biology which helps me not get sick by having to use their keyboard and mouse. Support this way is heaven because the user can either hop on iChat or we can use the phone and ARD and they don’t have to stop and wait for me to walk out to see them and lose their train of thought. It’s good for the support staff, it’s good for the users, what isn’t to love?

When you sit back and think about all the technology and refinement and attention to detail that goes into Apple products, that they “just work” and do so with a minimum of fuss and muss, that they haven’t spread like wildfire in the enterprise segment baffles me. The only thing I can think of to align what I see in the world versus the absurdity of it is that people must be addicted to suffering with their technology. They accept that Windows is a headache, that it never works properly, that it lets you down just when you need it the most, and that it’s a nightmare to support. When I left Windows professionally it was like a breath of fresh air in a room previously filled with noxious fumes. It felt *exactly* like that! Even to this day when I hear coworkers pining for Windows I look at them like they are aliens that fell off the turnip truck. Are you seriously telling me that you’d prefer to go back to using the reboot-several-times-a-day oops-your-files-are-corrupted we’re-going-to-need-to-reformat-every-six-weeks way of life? Seriously? Now that we have Macs, and when I run into this sentiment it strikes me as a deeply upsetting thing that people actively seek out suffering and revel in it. We’re using Macs, if you want to suffer here’s a hammer, just smack yourself in the head with it and you’ll get your fix!

 

HICKIES – TURN YOUR KICKS INTO SLIP-ONS by Mariquel & Gaston — Kickstarter

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HICKIES – TURN YOUR KICKS INTO SLIP-ONS by Mariquel & Gaston — Kickstarter.

I caught this link off a VSL email that was just emailed to me. The initial link didn’t really do this Kickstarter project due justice but once I looked into it I thought to myself Guh-duh! Why didn’t *I* think of that!?!

I hear companies going on and on about innovation. They kick the word around like some sort of shiny can that if seen to do so everyone will treat them with reverence and respect. I get that feeling a lot from Microsoft and Samsung, which innovate via photocopier.

It’s these products, indeed the entire concept of the Kickstarter that really represents true innovation. These are novel solutions to problems that people never really thought about before. In this case, is there a way to turn run-of-the-mill shoes into slip-ons? With a set of “Hickies” the answer is yes, yes you can.

Innovation is about bringing new things to the world, not copying and changing little bits from others and posing that as something new. Any tablet after the iPad is a copy of the iPad and lame. Any music player after the iPod is a copy of the iPod and lame. It’s funny, but I think that the company with true innovation is and if they tread very carefully, will always be Apple.

So be very careful when you kick that shiny can labeled “innovation” around. People like me will spot it and call you out for the bullshit you are shoveling.

New Servers

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This all started for me several weeks ago. We were using a very old version of our database software, version 7.6.1 and the most recent edition of the software was 7.9.1. As a way station we decided to stop at 7.8.3 and see how that went. We didn’t see any unusual hardware requirements so we went for the gold and upgraded. The upgrade itself took 17 hours on a Saturday. Our test environment said it would go well, but test differs from production usually and I knew that what was coming was going to be a bear.

Then Saturday was upon me. A bear it was. I had upgraded both operating systems and database backends, eventually landing on the rocky shoreline of Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server, and SQL Server 2008 R2. It took 17 hours, starting in the morning and chewing all the way along and I just couldn’t stop. It was like every single task had hooks in the preceding task and the succeeding task, for each of them. I had to march my way right to the end. Once I was able to get the basic system up and running I called it a night. That extra time really came in handy later on. Hooray for understanding management types. :)

The next stop was to get reporting up and running. Mostly it was a non-issue, just set up replication in SQL, install a little bit of software and tweak some settings and the Frankensteins Monster of reporting tumbled off the operating room floor and went out to terrorize villagers as was appropriate. It wasn’t until days later that we discovered that SQL 2000 is a drooling simpleton when compared to SQL 2008. While the hardware met minimum requirements, the experience of it all took a massive hit right into the whirling vortex of despair. I valiantly tried to create new indexes to ameliorate the situation and for a little while it worked sort of. In the end we had to drop about $3000 to get a new server that would really put reporting in it’s place. Several weeks later, after ordering this new “savior in a box” I unpacked it and set it up – of course running headlong into the nightmare hellscape that is Microsoft “Technology”. Once I got the box set up and running well I figured that SQL 2008 with 32 gigabytes of RAM would be smooth as silk and I wouldn’t have to futz around with indexes. Turns out, I was horribly wrong. The server without indexes was abominably awful. What a waste of money. The only thing that saved my feelings throughout all of this was that all of it was Microsoft’s junk and that actually made me feel better. It’s retarded and awful, but it’s not my fault, it’s Microsoft’s inability to write a competent database server. In the end I did enhance the wretched monster so that it could actually sprint. I got my wits together and started building indexes, that helped immensely.

Now that the reporting monster is well beaten and obedient, I stand today on the precipice of another problem. The primary database system is flopping around like a dead fish. Again we have the same problem as before and the plan is to throw money at the issue and watch it shrivel up and die. We’re patiently waiting to see if $5000 will come down from on high and we can replace the aging database server. When that time comes, I’ll write some more about that. I’m sure it’s going to be a barrel of plague-monkies. :)

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I need a place to write down all the things I’ve bought over the years that never really worked out so I don’t end up wasting money on the “Maybe it’s better this time” angle…

  • Anything by Microsoft. Anyone who knows me knows this old straw man very well. If you don’t know me, here’s a quick update: Think of the worst thoughts and images that you can possibly think of, that’s the stage-dressing for me and Microsoft.
  • Anything by Oracle. See Microsoft.
  • Anything by Sun. See Oracle.
  • Altec-Lansing – So far I’ve been at bat for two of their earbud products and both times I’ve been stunned at how bad they are. Now before anyone from Altec-Lansing gets upset by this, you can’t help it, it’s the design of the things that’s the problem. Deeper than you can address, bygones.
  • Chick-Fil-A – It’s rather heartbreaking to put them on this list, but when a company is very clear about their hate for you, no amount of mental revision or not-caring will whitewash it.
  • Bose – Too expensive and too fragile. Again with the earbuds. They were nice enough to replace one unit, but the second unit didn’t last nearly as long as the first. Much like Altec-Lansing, the problem is with the design.

I’ll come back to this blog entry and update it the next time I buy something that ends up to be craptastic. I hope that over time I can avoid wasting money on this silly crap.