IT makes you go AAARRGH

Lets face it, IT can really make you go bonkers. There are just so many ways that your PC can screw you over. Here are just a few :

• Monday morning snooze fest - reboot at the start of the week or month and every bit of AV and configuration control software forgets it's history.
• 1/2 started hang - the march of icons hangs, the problem is the next icon that has not appeared yet how does that help diagnosing the problem ?
• Scan mania - searchIndexer, AVscans, Google desktop, system configuration checkers; why is that they all want to scan the machine at the same time ?
• Backup of death - you just want to save your data but the very process of copying the data makes the machine unavailable for normal use.
• Flash past options during the boot cycle - Please choose between booting on a) windows b) something sensible .... opps too late snooze you loose, no time to wait the damm thing just boots what it whats to.
• Legacy applications that break after OS upgrades.
• Legacy websites that break after browsers upgrades.
• Poor websites that only work in certain browsers for no good reason.
• Predictability of restart - every one needs to reboot once in a while, why is the process so unpredictable ending up with random sets of services and process running.
• Upgrade leap frogs - Reinstall an application, an auto update is suggested, update the application, an auto update is suggested, rinse and repeat. Acrobat reader did that every step from 10.0.2 all the way up to 10.14.

Damm that IT that makes you go AAARRRGH.

The only antidote to this madness is of course the "It Crowd" now available on box set at Amazon. :-)

Cheers

Gannett

Gannett's law of internet shopping

"Whenever multiple dependent items are ordered from the internet, they will arrive in the most inconvenient order."

For example if you order a camera outfit the first arrive will be the case, then the camera, then the batteries, and only finally the memory chip needed to actually take pictures.

Gannett

Endowment policies - Keep the profits - dump the cost

The sorry tales describing the failure of UK Endowment policies to deliver on their promises are well documented. What is not so widely recorded is how the insurance and endowment providers managed to keep the profits and dump the risks on the policy holders.

The promise of an endowment policy was to pay off a house debt at a predicted time in the future by means of regular payments invested over time with (the same) insurance company. In addition to that there was a life insurance component that would pay back the debt in the event of an early demise.

The insurance company get from the deal, regular premium payments split between commission, life insurance premiums and cash to invest. The policy holder gets life cover ( that only really benefits the mortgage debt owner ) and a share in possible future profits of a fund he does not control and cannot influence.

When things started to go wrong in the 90's and 00's and the returns from the investments did not match the generous projections upon which the policies were sold, the insurance companies dumped the risk on the customers and just gave up on the moral obligation of meeting the target returns for the policies. The colour coded letters being your guide to their abject failure. What they did not do was reduce the management charges on the investment funds, reduce or remove the cost of the life insurance premiums ( many people would have alternative cover available) or anything that actually alleviated the shortfall costs to the policy holder.

At the time the provision of cheaper monthly payments just drove up house inflation giving no more purchasing leverage as everyone else had the same deal. Basically the payments were cheaper because the debt was not being paid back. The actual overhead costs of the policies, life premiums, selling commissions, and investment "management" charges are obscure or not disclosed leaving the policy holders in the dark about the internal financing of endowment. There is no option to challenge the life companies to tighten-up on costs which would help to meet the loan repayment due.

They promised to pay for your house, you will be lucky to get the price of a second hand car out of most endowment policies. Given that may folks will still have the entire original house debt, will have paid the full interest on that debt for 25 years and will have put in premiums to the endowment policy on top, this all adds up to the Great British housing finance rip off.

Gannett

See also this BBC article

Technical support in 3 stages ( not easy )

There are three stages to the technical support process. Follow these for good service delivery. See if your supplier follows theses critical stages on your next call.

• Knowing.
• Understanding.
• Predicting.

Knowing is about getting a good picture of the situation, gathering the evidence, logs and environment. Knowing is more than just the technical aspects of the situation. Registering the impact of the issue on the customer and consequences of the issue is as vital. That will be the driver for the pace of intervention.

Understanding is built buy pulling the knowledge from the gathered evidence and placing that along side a detailed insight to the environment in which the situation arose. The situation could be a PC failure, Data centre outage or a car that won't start. Unless there is good understanding, technical support is just Googling, "been there done that" and guess work. Lets not pretend a lot of tech support can be done with just a browser, research and good set of documents but moving beyond first line take understanding of product, environment and the interactions that bind them.

Predicting is vital to the technical support process and is more than just guess work. Based on a clear knowledge of the problem, an understanding of what changes can be done to vary the situation, prediction will provide the answer. Sometimes that prediction is based on hard logic and sometimes a combination of intuition and research but you can be sure that the techs that can effectively predict the outcome of their recommendations close more cases first time. Predicting, at it's best, is as near to science as tech support comes. A few experiments may be needed to set the direction but that last interaction along the lines of "This *will* solve your problem" is a thing of beauty. The "will" is emphasized because if you get a "could", "should", "might" the outcome is not certain.

Cheers

Gannett

eBay is a warehouse.

My mate Pete reckons that eBay can be used as a warehouse to store your less used stuff. The idea works on the principle that everything is for sale on eBay so what ever you need you can get. If this is the case why bother storing stuff that you may never need again ? Sell it now and if you should ever need it again just buy it back. Chances are that you will sell more than you ever buy back so the whole idea can be self funding.

The same can be said for storing books, Why bother storing them when you can use Book Moocher to free your house space ?

The cost of storage is the difference between what you get for selling the item and what you have to pay for getting it back. Sometimes that storage fee is money to you when the "value" of the item has gone down.

I can see what he means - Great thinking Pete.

Cheers

Gannett

There is always one...

There is always one...
Who claims too many outrageous expenses,
Grabs all the best bits from the buffet,
Spoils the Aprils fools joke, before others have time to be tricked.

Today that numpty showed his colors, don't you just want to give em a right slapping.

Gannett

Overclocking is the new hot-rodding

Back in the days when you could improve a car using a set of spanners and a trolly jack the craze for Hot rodding was all over the streets. These days the testosterone filled teens ( and other geeky enthusiasts) overclock their PCs instead. There are many similarities, both activities are all about getting the best performance from what starts as commodity equipment; both interests involve a combination of detailed information, home engineering, trial and error tuning, and of course those manly pursuits of bragging and racing.

The purchase of carefully selected bolt-on goodies from RipSpeed, Demon Tweeks has been replaced these days by Corsair and Zalman specialities. "Throwing a rod" has been replaced by a catastrophic meltdowns as the cost of getting it wrong. Unlike racing on the public road to compare performance, Lan parties and folding teams are where system performance are compared and debated.

My first overclock in 1992 was pushing a Mac IIsi from 20Mhz back to the 25Mhz the motherboard was designed for. A hardware hack described here. These days pushing cpu clocks from 2.8Ghz to over 5Ghz ( 5000Mhz) is not routine but possible.

The pattern for both hot rodding cars and overclocking PC follows the same levels, use stock parts, get the best replacement parts, swap out the weaker parts with reengineered parts, buy or build exotic replacement parts. Tweak tune and adjust at each level to get the best performance and discover the weakest link.

The common fascination of tweaking and tuning, pushing a set of carefully assembled kit up to and beyond the meltdown limit joins the hot rodder from previous generations to the PC overclocker of today.

Cheers

Gannett

Addition to the folding farm..

I like to fold and I just installed a gtx275 in an ubuntu normally smp folding box. I also followed this guide to set up the necessary "windows on unix" wine environment.

Things that were different for my install ...
1) The mobo I have has built in Nvidea graphics chips (non-foldable Gforce 7100) which caused the Nvidea graphics drivers to be installed at Ubuntu installation/upgrade time.
2) Also because of 1, I needed to make some adjustments in the bios to put the pci-xpress card as the first graphics head and the onboard as second. This is so I can try out the new card and only have to plug in one monitor.

I would suggest that you test the graphics cards and adjusted system for cooling/stability using fancy screen savers, some games etc. Also using the temp sensors.

The step "wine notepad" does two things. Firstly it does indeed create some directories for the wine environment. Secondly it shows that your wine environment works correctly by starting the building accessory application notepad.

I also saw the permissions message on ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/cudart.dll
easilly fixed with a
chmod +x ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/cudart.dll

Looking forward to doubling my ppd with the gpu client, just hope it doesnt melt the PSU &| mobo.

I won't know it it actually works until someone plugs in the Stanford folding server room back in again (power outage today). Currently waiting for both SMP and GPU units now.

Cheers

Gannett