Fiona's Ramblings

Life of a Server Admin

fiona@tkarena.com — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:53:46 GMT

I just had to wake up our webmaster. The site had been down for fifty minutes and that was enough downtime. He had said to call, what ever time of day it is, if the site was ever down, so even though I felt bad for waking him in the wee hours of the morning, I made the call. Sorry to anyone who tried to visit when it was down. I don’t know what Stuart has done but just minutes after speaking to him, it’s back up and working again. :/

The life of a server admin must be a drag at times. It is a 24 hour job. Huge hosting companies must have several employees on 24 hour call. Maybe they even have people who work a night shift in case of hardware failure? It probably doesn’t have quite the allure of a surgeon – no hot doctors or nurses, and it’s not exactly life or death - but someone’s got to do it. I probably watch too much Grey’s Anatomy!

Virus Logic

fiona@tkarena.com — Wed, 07 May 2008 06:33:26 GMT

A friend of mine was using USB flash drives to cart her homework to and from college. One day there was a problem. She wasn’t sure what was going on but she did the smart thing and stopped what she was doing to run her virus protection software, in her case, AVG.

When it completed the scan she found that sure enough, it had found something – delete, quarantine or ignore it asked? She did what would seem to be the most logical thing to do – she chose delete. Problem is that it was a worm virus that attached itself to a dll file for Windows Explorer, so by choosing delete, she could no longer navigate through her files. Opening My Computer and then double clicking on one of her hard drives now just comes up with an error – how would you like to open this file? Windows will have to be reinstalled.

This has got me thinking – how was she to know? Of course deleting a virus is a good idea – right? Was it because the free AVG virus anti-software she was using was not advanced enough to tell her it was part of a critical file? Or at times, is there just no way to beat a clever virus?

Tired

fiona@tkarena.com — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:31:55 GMT

Wow am I tired! I think the anti-biotics I’m taking for the ear infection are messing with me. The ear is almost clear but I feel like a slug – a tired slug, without the gooey coating.

Could also be the long hours at the moment? The new tkArena office renovations are finished so we’re starting to move all of our kit into it. Mayhem rules in the current and future work spaces as we sort it all out. But we plan on shooting a vlog in front of the new blue wall tomorrow, or actually a bit of a pan and scan of the new workspace might be in order.

The desks aren’t out there yet. It’s hard to know how to approach the move. If we unplug PCs to move then we don’t have them to work on but they’ve got to move at some stage.

But tonight I’m not doing anything except to relax. Might watch a bit of M*A*S*H – I bought myself the box set back in January. And I’m also enjoying A Time to Kill by John Grisham – gripping stuff, although I feel sure that if I sit up in bed reading, even though it’s a fantastic read, I’ll end up with the book on the floor and my glasses off the tip of my nose in no time.

What a bloody whiner I am today! I might as well re-name this blog to grumpy not so old woman! Now, point me towards the couch …

Boy did I stuff up!

fiona@tkarena.com — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:44:19 GMT

I started using gmail in January and ever since I’ve told anyone who will listen how superior it is to using a regular email application like Outlook. I have four email addresses routing to gmail, as well as my actual gmail account. Over the past week I have noticed that I wasn’t receiving as many emails as I usually do. And all of the email notifications I get from other sites about their new content seemed to be a little thin on the ground. Must be a slow week, I thought. It was just as well, I was battling a bad head cold last week that turned into an ear infection. I couldn’t really hold an intelligent thought long enough in my head last week to actually act on it, otherwise I might have realized there was a problem with my email sooner. This morning as I surveyed my inbox and looked over the items that were starred and waiting for responses, I surmised that I wasn’t receiving all my mail. It wasn’t just a slow week, there was a bloackage in the pipeline somewhere. When I looked under Settings > Accounts in gmail I saw a bright red warning - Error: Too many messages to download. Mail from this account has not been received since April 15.

April 15^th! Stupid gmail I thought. Couldn’t I have received some sort of notification about this! The party’s finally over and my new most favourite web application had failed me. But, turns out, I had failed me. When I had set up the forwarding of my email I had the box checked to leave a copy of my messages on the server. There were over 50 000 messages there!

So now I’m in the process of downloading them all so that the server will be cleared and I can get back to emailing with gmail. It’s been downloading for hours now and it’s only at 16764.

So here’s a tip – unless you’re only temporarily using gmail for an email address, don’t leave the messages on the server, because after long term use, one day it’ll all get stuck!

Blog Hate

fiona@tkarena.com — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:31:09 GMT

OK, I haven’t blogged for a few weeks. Actually I think blogging is highly over-rated to be honest. That’s right, the truth finally comes out. Who the hell wants to read about my lame computing experiences, Jo Smith’s reading habits or Felicia Tries-a-lot’s diet?! Maybe journal style blogs should have stayed down the side of the bed in notebooks with cheap locks – private, and more importantly, not cluttering the Internet with precocious drivel driven by miss-diagnosed self importance! Or am I on the wrong track – maybe that’s not what blogs really are?

Blogging was originally a web log, an online journal that, due to its technical nature, was easy for others to link to. These were all IT geeks. There evolved a community of bloggers who made each other’s blogs more widely read by their collection of reciprocal links. Now, blogging is made available as a free for all hobby. Corporate employees feel obliged to blog, to show their importance and generate web content for the mother company. Motivational speakers give people a morning pep talk that’s quickly forgotten as the day drags on. Teenagers pine over lost love. I mean, honestly, who reads this stuff? What are the popular blogs out there, and are they really blogs?

According to Technorati, TechCrunch is the number one blog in the world. It’s a tech news service, with some opinions, but essentially, it reports tech news.

Huffington Post chimes in at number two. It’s a US non-regular news service in the form of blogs – and lots of them, by a team of journalists, commentators etc. O’Reilly is no where to be seen.

Gizmodo and Engadget come in as third and fourth. They are both gadget and cool tech news services who post in the traditional reverse chronological order of blogs, but like TechCrunch, it is news and reporting more than journal-style entries.

But what about a site like The Inquirer? They don’t claim to be a blog, yet they post news stories in reverse chronological order and have done for a hell of a long time – and often with more wit and exegesis than any of the top three tech-related blogs I’ve already listed. Same goes for HardOcp. It’s a top notch news service and the regular contributors stamp their own brand of humor and sarcasm into the posts in a way that rivals any blog I’ve come across.

Blog is a tainted word. Or it is for me anyway. Why get so hung up on having a blog? Why I am putting this rant in the blog section and not as an editorial on tkArena? It’s all still chronologically posted. It can be subscribed to. Why are we so hung up on having a labelled blogs section? It’s just a pressure pot of potential must-have content. You must have something clever to blog about and it must be in that expected blogging style. Why not just have editorials when the mood strikes and longer news posts with more personality? After all, many of the top blogs sites are just news with personality…

Home/Work: The Ten Meter Difference

fiona@tkarena.com — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 04:32:14 GMT

It's either a drought or a flood. Or at least that's how my work-load can seem at times. Actually, there's never really a drought, just a manageable stream that allows you to sleep at night as you're carried along - no terribly sharp turns and certainly no rapids, until the dam gates rise and flood-waters gush in. I was almost getting into a rhythm of handling the generation of content for tkArena and everything that goes along with that, when suddenly one day one writer is no longer able to be part of the team and as soon as I'd let out a big sigh over that disappointment I have more writers and topics and products being hurled at me than I can handle!

Actually, this is great. I just have to learn to shut off properly at the end of the day - to turn work off and quiet down my busy mind. I often find myself running into my study when I'm cooking dinner at night or making school lunches in the morning, so that I can hurriedly write down a reminder about something that needs doing for work. Maybe that's part of the package when you work from home, or maybe that's just the way I work. We'll soon find out as work and home life will soon be more separated than they've been in years, ten meters from the house. Yes, that's right - we're moving to the garage!

Just to make life extra-busy, we're in the midst of converting our two-car garage into the office. At the moment, I have a small study where I work most of the day. John's work area is in what should realistically be a rumpus room, which joins the kitchen/meals area. The problem is that it's also his after-hours area. His gaming PC is in there as well. So poor old John never really gets out of his office! It has room for 2-4 test beds, depending on how much cramped space you can stand, plus the video editing/share PC, his gaming rig and his laptop. Hardware is stored in tubs and boxes under the seven tables that line the walls of the room. Once you get a couple of lamp stands for photography and video work in there, it's more than a little cramped.

So finally, after being in this working situation for over three years, last weekend we had over half a dozen mates spend two days completing the major work to convert the garage to an office.

The large metal door was removed and in its place is a lined wooden wall with one large horizontal window along the top to let in some natural light.

Several sci-fi obsessed friends said we ought to paint the wall silver and get a red light installed on the inside and we'd have ourselves a Cylon wall!

We also installed two man-holes in the ceiling and lined the roof with 7-ply to give us ample storage for motherboard boxes etc.

Now all that's left to do is the electricity, heating/cooling, networking/phone, strip and paint the walls, ceiling and floor. Looks like we're in for another grueling weekend. Have a good one everyone!

Internet Explorer 8 Beta Released - Microsoft Tries to Rule Web Services

fiona@tkarena.com — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:42:41 GMT

Microsoft has seen fit to publicly release a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Although the main purpose of the release is for web developers to be able to test their code and platforms on IE8, anyone can download a free copy.

There are different downloads for different operating systems and all available Windows updates must be installed. Ironically, if you have the beta download of Vista Service Pack 1 installed, you can't install the beta of IE8.

After the download and installation you are asked if you want to set IE8 up as a by default install, or whether you want to choose settings. The default settings all feature Microsoft services, except that the default search engine is Google.

I decided to Choose My Settings but soon found that (at the moment at least) unless you have signed up for life as a Windows Live junkie, the new Activities options in IE8 really don’t lead to anything. If you were able to choose Google Maps instead of Microsoft’s Live Maps, or Gmail instead of Send with Windows Live Mail, or which ever blogging service you use instead of only Windows Live Spaces – well then it could be pretty exciting.

The idea behind Activities is that you can be surfing the net and read something you think is worth blogging on. Right click on the page or highlight a word or sentence and right click and you’ll get the option to blog, define, map, search, send, translate (etc). It’s a theoretically seamless integration of online services to the browsing experience – so long as you’re happy with the versions of those types of services as offered by Microsoft.

Web developers can also embed the option for their readers to use these activities from within their own website. Many websites already have options to Digg, Slashdot, del.icio.us etc their news posts, blogs etc. The new activities in IE8 offer even more options, which could be appealing to websites because they offer more ways for readers to easily promote content and potentially expose the website to more readers.

IE8’s Activities may be Microsoft’s way of attempting to counteract the rising popularity of Google’s online services. The crucial factor will be – will people use them? If you already have a blog setup via another service, would you really start a new one on Windows Live Spaces just so that you can right-click in your browser and choose the option to blog? Will Microsoft end up allowing other service providers to link their XML-based activities into IE8?

Funnily enough, when I wrote this blog, I then went to upload the image above from within the website's admin system. The option to upload from the image insert window was missing. It was there with IE7 and it's still there in Firefox but in IE8, the link is gone. So there's one quirk. Another is that there is an option along the toolbar to Emulate IE7. So when I stumbled across the image upload problem I thought I'd revert back and then upload the file. I clicked on the option, restarted IE as asked but it hasn't emulated IE7 at all. No matter how many times I select the option to emulate IE7 and restart IE, it stays in IE8 mode. Not impressed. Using Firefox again.

I am yet to explore the other new features of IE8. Expect either a preview article or another blog next week.

What You Should Know About HDMI Cables

fiona@tkarena.com — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:24:01 GMT

Some time last year we came close to buying a HD TV. We currently have a rear projection TV that’s about five or six years old, but it’s 102cm, so it’s a good size. That was ultimately why we didn’t bother upgrading at the time. That and the fact that in Australia, there were only about two HD free to air channels available. Now there is at least four and many channels.

But we did have a good look at the options and of course a friendly (read pushy) sales rep made his pitch to us. Having looked at the screens themselves he took us over to a wall of cables – HDMI cables with all sorts of variations or promises to be clearer or more colour rich. And they all came with pretty hefty price tags.

Buying a HD TV means you also need to buy a good HDMI cable. I am betting by the end of the year we might have finally decided to upgrade out TV along with a Blu-Ray player. Blu Ray Guide has put together a page of information about choosing an appropriate HDMI cable.

PC Prototypes

fiona@tkarena.com — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:35:25 GMT

PC World is currently running a pictorial sort of story that show-cases fifteen designs of prototype PCs for the future. A couple of them are specifically for the visually impaired while the others cover home automation and ultra-mobile segments.

As the computer industry has grown, I’ve noticed two different approaches to PC designs. PCs are either being pimped as all-in-one solutions – PCs that can be used for word processing, gaming and multimedia OR PCs that have a specific purpose – a UMPC that is for on the road use and doesn’t replace a desktop and Home Theatre PCs that are never more than a metre from a TV.

The difference lies in the marketing spin as much as the design itself. The reality is that computing is permeating into more and more aspects of our daily lives. The hardware itself is also becoming more and more affordable. Sometimes I wonder how low can it go? How do we expect chip companies to actually stay afloat?! But that’s a topic for another blog.

These days it’s not uncommon for households (in the developed world) to have more than one PC – more than two actually. In the future we should expect to have desktops, laptops, home automation and entertainment units throughout a home as well as very portable devices, cousins of the UMPC. The notion of the all-in-one PC will be dead in the water, if it isn’t already. After all, manufacturers need you to buy more than one PC and more than one type of PC. And aside from that, as I’ve said, we’re using PCs in an ever increasing number of ways, mainly because of our reliance on the Internet.

In the PC World line-up, there’s a bracelet that acts as the base unit for a PC that you then view via a small portable screen. A wearable PC in the future seems perfectly logical to me. I also like the folder that’s actually a flat tablet-type PC with a twist. Then there’s the mug that doubles as a news reader. I’m not sold on the practicality of that one – you can hardly read the news with the mug at your lips. The interactive map book with blogging utility though, is a clear winner in my mind.

PC World calls their collection the 15 Offbeat Computer Designs – though I suspect that at some stage people will just view a lot of these things as Internet devices and not computers per se.

Seasoned Internet

fiona@tkarena.com — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:51:37 GMT

There is a story circulating the web that five major Internet cables, mainly around the Middle East and South East Asia, have been cut since the beginning of the year, disrupting millions of users. Even in this report on PC Mechanic, the details are all contradictory in terms of how many people were effected and even whether this represents a curious mystery or just a common problem with under-water cables.

I remember seeing a TV show once, I can't remember what it was called. It starred Eliza Dushku, who played Faith in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer series. Anyway, the scenario was that solar flairs from the sun had disrupted all electrical appliances in the United States and in the aftermath, the economy had collapsed and with it, social order.

So all these rumors and conspiracies about these cut cables got me thinking about what it would be like if global Internet connectivity was sabotaged. If all the under-sea cables were cut and the satellites blown from the sky. I'd be out of a job for one thing. The global economy would be effected, but would we be able to revert back to the old way we all used to do business and banking and communications?

About twelve years ago I was working in administration at a major Australian university and the student records were being moved over from hand written cards to a database. I remember some of the staff feeling very nervous about not maintaining the cards. What if the database was lost or there was a power-out when you needed to look at a record? At the moment, the Internet provides a lot of convenience and it's like one giant reference book as well. But imagine five years from now, when many people will be using online applications and storing data online. If all Internet connectivity was cut at that point, it really would be as catastrophic as electricity being unavailable.

A global blackout of the Internet would make for a good blockbuster movie or end of year best seller, but is there any real risk of this happening? Ironically, the Internet provides the full gamut of speculation, a cocktail of fact and fiction, from conspiracy theories involving the US government, to engineers claiming they repair cables daily and cannot believe the fuss being made - and everything in between. It's a good thing the cables are in the sea - the Internet needs some salt on it.