markwilson.it

Category: Waffle and randomness

  • World Environment Day 2008

    Today is World Environment Day 2008 – a day for promoting environmental awareness with the aim of moving towards a low carbon economy.

    Generally, I’m in favour of reducing carbon emissions. Regardless of whether you believe that global warming is a man-made phonomenon (not everyone does) the idea of pumping out fewer harmful gasses just seems to be the right thing to do – why would you do anything else?

    Unfortunately, governments and businesses can harness people’s good intentions and use it to further their own causes. It seems that the UK Government, for example, is hoping that rising fuel prices and increased pressure to adapt green travel initiatives will avoid the need to invest in the nation’s infrastructure – meanwhile our roads are falling apart, trains are full (and the service is variable) and if you live outside a city then public transport is not generally practical. Then there’s the whole “green” energy issue. The windfarm that is being forced upon local people where I live sounds great. At least it does until you realise that it wouldn’t be viable without massive subsidy (because north-east Buckinghamshire is not a very windy place – even if the UK is as a whole) and that those subsidies (paid for by consumers who are already struggling with rising energy prices) are being pushed through a complicated chain of investments back to companies based in the Bahamas and the Marshall islands (both considered to be tax havens). How cynical is that?

    That’s not to say that we shouldn’t all do our bit. Hopefully I’ll write a bit soon about my investigation into energy usage for some of my IT – looking at the items that consume the most power and how best to reduce the markwilson.it carbon footprint. I do find it a little odd though that so many companies are adopting the “Please consider the environment – do you really need to print this email?” message and including it in their e-mail signatures (including where I work – where, paradoxically, many of our printers are old and inefficient and very few them support double-sided printing…). Think Before You Print But do people really print their e-mail? (I admit that I do sometimes print documents that I’m reviewing because it’s easier to read in print than on the screen). Regardless, I preferred to use the slightly punchier “Be green: keep it on the screen” line until I saw one of my colleagues from down under using a “Think before you print” logo which I’ve since adopted – much broader in scope than just not printing e-mail.

    One thing’s for sure – there are very few “right” decisions on green issues. Not so much black and white but with many grey shades in between (perhaps that should be not so much forest green or spring green but emerald, jade and lime). Sometimes, it’s difficult to know what the right choice is… for instance, should I buy fair trade produce and help out poor farmers in developing nations – or should I stick to local produce, and reduce my food mileage? I guess it all depends on your point of view.

    Leon Hickman: A Good Life - the Guide to Ethical LivingIn the meantime, a good read if you are interested in the whole idea of sustainable living (I even started to grow my own vegetables this year!) is A Good Life – the guide to ethical living, by Leo Hickman.

  • Diary of a business traveller: when it all comes together

    Ask anyone who travels a lot on business and they’ll tell you it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. After a while, every hotel room is pretty much like the last one. Driving gets tiring. Trains run late. And airports are my idea of hell.

    Most of my travel is within the UK but today has been an exceptionally long one. Up at 5.45, out of the house by 6.10 and onto the first train to Manchester. Taxi across town to spend the day on a training course (soft skills stuff – nothing technical for this blog…) then travel south again (fighting to keep a VPN signal on Vodafone
    ‘s 3G/GPRS networks as the Virgin Pendalino sped across the Midlands and I wrote my presentation for tomorrow’s client meeting) to pick up my car and drive to London to check into the hotel that I will call home for the next three nights (it takes about half the time to travel down at night that it would in the morning). All in all, I’ve travelled about 500 miles and managed to fit in a full day’s work as well.

    So imagine my surprise when I checked in to the Hilton London Docklands tonight. First of all I was greeted by name (that’s why I use that particular hotel when I’m in town – it may be a bit shabby around the edges but its within my budget limits and I’m treated well – and I don’t stay that often). Then I was told that my room had been upgraded. It turns out that “home” for the next few nights is a suite – with a bedroom, two bathrooms, a living room and a view over the Thames to Canary Wharf. It might not be the Hilton Auckland (where my wife and I stayed on the first night of my honeymoon) or the Shangri-La in Sydney (where we spent Christmas the year before – back when it was the ANA Harbour Grand) but, compared to some of the dives that my company’s booking agency puts us in, this is great – it’s just a shame that I’m here on my own!

    Canary Wharf from Rotherhithe

    The picture above is the view from my room. For those who don’t know London, it shows the Thames and Canary Wharf (one of London’s two financial districts – the other being the square mile that is the City of London itself). The small version of the image for the blog is a bit difficult to view, so click through for a larger version.

    The final image is a cropped photomerge of three separate pictures taken using my Canon Digital Ixus 70 (not even my DSLR), cropped and resized. What I hadn’t appreciated before was just how easy this is to produce using Adobe Photoshop CS2 (even better in CS3, as Alex Lindsay describes in episode 12 of This Week in Photography) – just go to the File menu, select Automate and then Photomerge. After this, select the images, and let Photoshop work out how to join everything up. It’s incredibly simple and it even handles perspective (I don’t know how – it’s just amazing).

    Photomerging in Adobe Photoshop CS2

    Business travel may be a bind but I do like it when it all comes together – especially when I get a good picture out of it.

  • What’s it like to work at Microsoft?

    I’ve often thought about applying for a job at Microsoft (and actually went along to a recruitment evening last year) but have held back for a variety of reasons (one of which is that if I didn’t get the job, I’d be gutted).

    Anyway, I found a blog post, written by a Microsoftie in Redmond, in which he attempts to dispel some of the myths about working at Microsoft – no great revelations but an interesting read nevertheless.

    Sadly, we don’t have free soft drinks where I work, so I can’t go cold turkey on the Diet Coke to save up for a tablet PC!

    In the meantime, Ken’s follow-up article on how not to get hired at Microsoft is a sobering reminder that if I do submit my CV, I may well end up disappointed.

  • The T-qualiser

    T-qualiser t-shirt with graphic equaliserEarlier this evening I won a t-shirt in a quiz (thanks to Phil Cross at Microsoft). I already have many Microsoft t-shirts, but this one is a little bit different… it has a battery pack sewn in and a graphic equaliser on the front that responds to the ambient noise. Cool huh? Now, where can I go clubbing in Reading on a Tuesday night? (On second thoughts I’ll wait a while as I need to lose a few pounds before I can squeeze into it!)

  • Brett Williams

    I’ve just got home from a weekend away and learned that one of our friends – Brett Williams – passed away this weekend after almost two years battling with cancer. Even though this was in some ways inevitable, it’s still a shock because he had been doing so well and I cannot begin to imagine how his family are feeling right now.I can’t pretend to have known Brett well but I do believe that, on the whole, people can be classified in three groups – those who leave a positive impression on you and who make you feel good, those who may be fine once you get to know them but who (at least superficially) don’t really affect you one way or the other, and those who drag you down. Brett was definitely one of the former. I can honestly say that every time I met him he amazed me by always having a smile on his face, being extremely positive about everything and being a genuinely good guy.

    We got to know Brett because he was a commercial photographer and my wife (not yet my wife at that time) worked with him on a few PR shoots. Later, he took our wedding photos – and this is a measure of his selflessness – there was no extortionate wedding day package, just a time and materials based fee – and he gave us all the negatives along with the prints. After some friends saw the fantastic job that he had done for us, he later took photos to capture their wedding day. Brett was also very supportive of my interest in photography – when I was between jobs in the first few days of 2004, Brett was happy to let me work with him as an assistant (I found an new job in IT very quickly so didn’t actually get to take up that opportunity) and when he switched from Nikon film cameras to Canon digital ones, I bought some of his old Nikon kit.

    It seems incongruous to me that Brett left this world during a major Christian festival – Easter. Those with stronger religious convictions than mine will say that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. He certainly does if taking a man in his prime, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters is His idea of kindness. It’s times like this that reinforce my own agnosticism.

    Brett will be sadly missed.

  • Is Apple so cool that their stores don’t need safety notices?

    Last Sunday, I was looking after the kids for the morning to give my wife some R&R. I needed to head to the shopping centre (mall) in Milton Keynes, so whilst I was there, I decided to “drop in” to the new Apple retail store (as geeks do). OK, so it’s an Apple Store – light and airy – even if it is shoehorned into a standard retail unit (this is Milton Keynes, not Regent Street!) and it sure as hell beats the old “Apple Store” in Tesco! I wanted to pick up a copy of VMware Fusion and an for my iPod so that it can remain protected when I plug it into the iPod dock in my wife’s new Volkswagen.

    I managed to get the last copy of VMware Fusion but was out of luck on the invisibleSHIELD (the “genius” I spoke to had never heard of it and tried to sell me a normal case), then I made the mistake of trying to leave the store…

    I already mentioned that I had my children with me but I didn’t point out that they are aged 3 and 1, and as I wanted to move at a reasonable pace, they were both riding in a double pushchair. Being just a normal retail unit, it has a small lift, at the end of a short corridor at the back of the store, but it is definitely for customer use. I wheeled in the pushchair, my son pressed the button to go down and we moved the vast distance of about 18 inches before the lift stopped and there was a feint beep. I pushed the buttons but nothing happened. I tried to open the door but it was locked. I picked up the intercom but there was no dial tone – and no-one answering. At this point I was worried. It seemed I was stuck in a lift with 2 toddlers and no obvious way to call for help.

    Purely by chance I moved the pushchair and the beep stopped. Then I pushed the button and the lift began to move. It seems that the sound was an alarm that cuts in when sensors detect that the lift occupants are too close to the edge (it’s the sort of lift that has a moving platform rather than a closed “box”) but where were the safety notices? And why hadn’t the intercom worked when I picked it up? Should I have pressed another button? I don’t know – there were no instructions!

    It seems that Apple expects its customers to be technical enough to work these things out for themselves. Or maybe the display of some safety notices in the lift runs contrary to the aesthetics of an Apple retail store…

  • The delicate balance between IT security, supportability and usability

    There is a delicate balance between IT security, supportability and usability. Just like the project management trilogy of fastest time, lowest cost and highest quality, you cannot have all three. Or can you?

    Take, for example, a fictitious company with an IT-savvy user who has a business requirement to run non-standard software on his (company-supplied) notebook PC. This guy doesn’t expect support – at least not in the sense that the local IT guys will resolve technical problems with the non-standard build but he does need them to be able to do things like let his machine access the corporate network and join the domain. Why does he need that? Because without it, he has to authenticate individually for every single application. In return, he is happy to comply with company policies and to agree to run the corporate security applications (anti-virus, etc.). Everyone should be happy. Except it doesn’t work that way because the local IT guys are upset when they see something different. Something that doesn’t fit their view of the normal world – the way things should be.

    I can understand that.

    But our fictitious user’s problem goes a little further. In their quest to increase network security, the network administrators have done something in Cisco-land to implement port security. Moving between network segments (something you might expect to do with a laptop) needs some time for the network to catch up and allow the same MAC address to be used in a different part of the network. And then, not surprisingly, the virtual switch in the virtualisation product on this non-standard build doesn’t work when connected to the corporate LAN (it’s fine on other networks). What is left is a situation whereby anything outside the norm is effectively unsupportable.

    Which leaves me thinking that the IT guys need to learn that IT is there to support the business (not the other way around).

    Of course this fictitious company and IT-savvy user are real. I’ve just preserved their anonymity by not naming them here but discovering this (very real) situation has led me to believe that I don’t think company-standard notebook builds are the way to go. What we need is to think outside the box a little.

    Three years ago, I blogged about using a virtual machine (VM) for my corporate applications and running this on a non-standard host OS. Technologies exist (e.g. VMware ACE) to ensure that VM can only be used in the way that it should be. It could be the other way around (i.e. to give developers a virtual machine with full admin rights and let them do their “stuff” on top of a secured base build) but in practice I’ve found it works better with the corporate applications in the VM and full control over the host. For example, I have a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 build in order to use technologies like Hyper-V (which I couldn’t do inside a virtual machine) but our corporate VPN solution requires a 32-bit Windows operating system and some of our applications only work with Internet Explorer 6 – this is easily accommodated using a virtual machine for access to those corporate applications that do not play well with my chosen client OS.

    So why not take this a step further? Why do users need a company PC and a home PC? Up until now the justification has been twofold:

    • Security and supportability – clearly separating the work and personal IT elements allows each to be protected from the other for security purposes. But for many knowledge workers, life is not split so cleanly between work and play. I don’t have “work” and “home” any more. I don’t mean that my wife has kicked me out and I sleep under a desk in the office but that a large chunk of my working week is spent in my home office and that I often work at home in the evenings (less so at weekends). The 9 to 5 (or even 8 to 6) economy is no-more.
    • Ownership of an asset – “my” company-supplied notebook PC is not actually “mine”. It’s a company asset, provided for my use as long as I work for the company. When I leave, the asset, together with all associated data, is transferred back to the company.

    But if work and home are no longer cleanly separated, why can’t we resolve the issue of ownership so that I can have a single PC for work and personal use?

    Take a company car as an analogy – I don’t drive different cars for work and for home but I do have a car leased for me by the company (for which I am the registered keeper and that I am permitted to use privately). In the UK, many company car schemes are closing and employees are being given an allowance instead to buy or lease a personal vehicle that this then available for business use. There may be restrictions on the type of vehicle – for example, it may need to be a 4 or 5 door hatchback, saloon or estate car (hatchback, sedan or station-wagon for those of you who are reading this in other parts of the world) rather than a 2-seater sports car or a motorbike.

    If you apply this model to the IT world, I could be given an allowance for buying or leasing a PC. The operating system could be Windows, Mac OS X or Linux – as long as it can run a virtual machine with the corporate applications. The IT guys can have their world where everything is a known quantity – it all lives inside a VM – where there will be no more hardware procurement to worry about and no more new PC builds when our chosen vendor updates their product line. It will need the IT guys to be able to support a particular virtualisation solution on multiple platforms but that’s not insurmountable. As for corporate security, Windows Server 2008 includes network access protection (NAP) – Cisco have an equivalent technology known as network access control (NAC) – and this can ensure that visiting PCs are quarantined until they are patched to meet the corporate security requirements.

    So it seems we can have security, supportability, and usability. What is really required is for IT managers and architects to think differently.

  • Buyer beware

    I’m sure that the vast majority of people who sell products via Amazon/eBay/insert-web-shopfront-of-your-choice are honest. Many people, myself included, have sold items that they no longer need and are keen to retain high customer ratings/feedback so will do whatever they can to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Of course, from time-to-time things can go wrong. I recently sold a book to someone via Amazon and thought the Royal Mail had lost it (because I’d sent it using the Recorded Signed For service but for some reason the tracking code didn’t work) – thankfully when I e-mailed the buyer, they were honest and told me that they had received the book already. That’s the basis of many web transactions – mutual trust.

    It’s because of this that I was furious when a recent third-party purchase from Amazon turned out not to be as described. I’d bought a product from a merchant called “pixmania-uk”. Everything looked good, the price was fine, the order was confirmed, and then I received a strange e-mail that suggested my item was going to be a French specification (I live in the UK):

    “Important information about your order from our Pixmania Marketplace:

    […]

    Please read the following information carefully. If you have any question, thank you to contact us.

    • Your parcel will include at least one product which will come with an adapter plug free of charge.Be assured that this product will have the same specifications as a UK model.
    • If your product is not supplied with a hard copy of the manual in English; we would like inform to you that a PDF format of the manual is available. Please contact us in order we sent to you the PFD file.

    […]

    Now, the whole point about the European Union (EU) is free trade between member states and I have no problem with a continental European product but I want a UK power supply – not a French one with an adapter! I also expect instructions to either be multi-lingual (as most are), or in English (because that’s what we speak here). I contacted Pixmania and asked to cancel my order. Too late – already shipped. Their advice was to refuse delivery once it turned up here.

    Having refused delivery, I had to wait for over 2 weeks before my refund was processed and then Pixmania only refunded the item cost – not the £6.95 shipping charge. So I contacted Pixmania again and received this response:

    “Dear Mark Wilson,
    Thank you for your feedback, Unfortunately your request was refused by our accounts department.

    In the case you missed our seller information on Amazon.co.uk, I would like to kindly inform you that; Pixmania warehouses are based in Paris France manufacturers here in France do not supply us with the UK power cable, an adapter plug should have been provided, this is stated on the Amazon website under the “sellers” information for Pixmania, please use the following link to see this information; http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/seller/home.html?ie=UTF8&isAmazonFulfilled=&orderID=&asin=B0007UATDG&marketplaceSeller=&seller=ACRTI4YR8LRR0

    We apologise for the inconvenience and if you have any further questions, please contact us at amazon_uk@pixmania.com

    Best regards,

    Team Pixmania”

    Luckily, third party orders paid for through Amazon are covered by Amazon’s A to Z Guarantee and they refunded the shipping cost. If that hadn’t worked then I still had the protection of having used my credit card for payment.

    Now, turning my attention to the link that Pixmania had sent me. Did they really clearly state that this was a French product before I bought it? Well, yes, but only if I clicked through a few pages to find the information. First I would have needed to notice that the seller ID was “pixmania-uk” (suggesting they might be based in the UK…). If I clicked through on that, I would have seen their UK storefront (which uses a tiny font) and only then, if I clicked on a link at the bottom-right corner of the page would I have seen a Note for French spec. products.

    Part of Pixmania-UK Amazon storefront showing feedback

    Actually, before I got to any note about the products being shipped from France I should have seen that their shipping rates are not as advertised (how does £4 per shipment plus £0.50 per kg add up to £6.95?) but more obviously that their feedback is appalling. At the time of writing there have been over 70,000 shipments with an 89% satisfaction rate. 4% of customers (i.e. almost 3000 people) gave a neutral response and 7% (almost 5000 people) gave a negative one – mostly complaining about French products. 4 and a half stars may be fine if you are a tiny vendor with 10 sales and one complaint but when 11% of your customers are hot happy, that’s not good. (And why is Amazon doing anything about it? It’s their reputation too!)

    All I can say is be careful who you are buying from when you shop at Amazon. Avoid Pixmania. And buyer beware.

  • USB flash drives can be washed at 30 degrees

    As I emptied the laundry from the washing machine this morning I noticed something small and brightly coloured wedged against the rubber seal by the door and realised with horror that it was the USB flash drive that had been in the pocket of my jeans. USB flash drive with 30 degree wash symbol“Oops”, I thought (or something similar that can’t be repeated in front of the kids), “I didn’t mean to do that…”.

    Well, after a few hours in my pocket, making sure that it stayed warm and dry, I decided to try and use the device and it seems everything is fine. Probably not recommended though.

  • Scotty McLeod

    Sometimes it feels as though the UK IT Pro community is a very small place and I’m always pleased to hear from people that I consider to be experts in their field; however last Friday’s e-mail from Richard Siddaway knocked me for six.

    ScottyScotty McLeod, leader of the Windows Server UK User Group, was involved in a horrific accident last Wednesday night and is currently fighting for his life in hospital. I still can’t quite comprehend what’s happened (hence the reason it’s taken so long to write this post) but I’m sure that there are many readers of this blog who know Scotty (many better than I do) and will join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.

    Dmitry Sotnikov is keeping a post on his blog updated with the latest news on Scotty’s progress.

    In the meantime, my thoughts are with Scotty and his family. Get well soon.