A bad computer day

It is already bad enough that we're battling technology problems in a project at work, but it seems every bit of equipment that has a byte of data in it, decided to make my life more difficult today.

While my personal laptop is doing a scan for that virus I just can't seem to get rid of, now my work laptop is starting to have a life by itself.

I spend minutes just watching the small harddisk LED flicker, and I have no clue what it is actually doing. Because *I* am not doing anything. Just watching the darned harddisk activity.

I gathered it might be running out of diskspace (which in retrospect it is not), so start to clean up, but the laptop decided a 0.5 Gigabyte file can not be moved nor deleted. Cause? Unknown!

Meanwhile, I am waiting for a call from a friend on Skype, but find out he disappeared from my Skype account on my work laptop. So when he calls me, it is the second laptop that rings. Not the one I have the headset on.

After the Skype conversation, I see the second laptop decided it had done enough, and went into hibernate. For no reason I can see, as it was plugged into the wall socket..

Several restarts later, followed with just as many hibernates, I figure out that it is either on strike, or might be too hot - even though I am wearing a sweater.. Maybe try to put something underneath it? Need some air, baby?

That worked. Except that while starting up, all of the software that was running before the hibernate decided it has to re-build databases, restart indexing, and checking data consistency. And halfway through the process, it gets too hot again.

So, being obedient to technology, I persist in cleaning up files and making sure it has gigabytes and gigabytes of virtual memory space (why it needs that much, I don't know as I don't run that many programmes at the same time).

I decide to update some of the software I use, just in case. Big mistake. As it usually is.
The regular Apple update of Safari and Quicktime+iTunes. 100 Megabyte. 100! How on earth does anyone keep their software updated without access to cable or ADSL is a mystery to me...
Checking for Microsoft updates leaves me equally dazzled. I just upgraded all Microsoft software two days ago. And it keeps on finding new stuff. 15 new updates in two days...

Just not a good day for computers. But look at the bright side: at least I got this blog posted. And it was a glorious sunny day today! :-)

Picture courtesy Jineg

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Get a life! Or "Some Computer Problems I Will Probably Never Figure Out"

Sometimes I wonder if computers are really productivity tools. How much of our professional and spare time do we spend figuring out why the damned thing just does not add one plus one to a total of two?

The thought often crosses my mind when we start a meeting, and five people, all IT wizards with an IQ way above average, fiddle with the laptop, the video plug, the remote control and the projector trying to make the resolutions between computer and projector to match. Up to the point that the presentation is dwarfed by the fact that whatever is shown on the screen is not readable.

If we spend 30% of our lives sleeping, then I must spend at least another 10% of my life debugging silly IT problems. When I am home in Belgium, pump that up to 20% of my time. I have two laptops at home in Italy. But at home in Belgium, add another two desktops and two laptops to make our family complete and happy. And have me pull out my hair...

In the past two weeks I have come across a couple of IT problems I know I will probably never solve. Or will take an unreasonable amount of time if I would want to solve them.

- One computer is running on Windows 98. An operating system doomed to the Stone Ages by Microsoft. I understand. But I will probably never be able to upgrade this computer to XP with all the correct drivers.

- Another computer is running Windows ME. Same despair to upgrade. We need it though, as it is the only one with a parallel port. Which our shared printer needs...

- Our cable Internet connection goes bazurk when you upload too much data. The girls have just started their own YouTube channel, and upload masses of data. I will never figure out why the Internet connection then dies. And I know if I'd call the ISP, they will charge me loads of Euros to end up with a silly answer. Like "please don't upload that much data!"

- One laptop has a vicious worm virus since a month. Despite the fact I have not used it for a month, leave alone downloaded any software or visited any dubious website. And it has two up-to-date and reputable anti-virus programmes on it. Several nights of disinfecting leaves me with my hands in my hair as I only seem to disinfect whatever malware the worm itself is generating. But can not delete the worm itself.

- Since two weeks I am trying to find a way to create a new domain for theroadtothehorizon.org which forwards to my new server. Helpdesk help in vain.

- On one computer, the email program keeps on prompting for a password. Can't get it to store passwords. All known solutions don't work.

- I tried to move a Microsoft Outlook Express mailbox to another computer, using Microsoft Outlook. Exporting mails doesn't work. I am left with forwarding dozens of emails from one account to the next.

- The wireless LAN repeater does not seem to work with data encryption. And when I leave the access open, the neighbour's son pirates it.

- One computer keeps on hanging.

You want more?

Either my days as a computer professional are over, or I am too old to cope, or IT systems are just meant to cause problems these days...

Picture courtesy Zoe the Smooth Fox Terrier

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Rumble: Information Technology in Evolution...

The school I graduated from, had one PC at the time: An Apple II. It stood in the library, and was almost inaccessible for any student. If they could, they would have put it under a glass bulb to make sure nothing happened to it.
I wrote string loads of programs in BASIC, but it remained a paper exercise as was never allowed to key it in.

After I graduated in 1983, I worked for an IT research company. We worked mainly on high tech graphic stuff. Such as digital imaging. Such as the stuff you can now do 1,000 times faster and 1,000,000 more accurate on any laptop. With freeware software. But we, we needed a 15 by 10 metres room full of PDP and VAX minicomputers. The number-crunching power of this room was roughly 1/10th of my laptop. My laptop also stores 1,000x more information.

In 1985, I bought my very first home computer, this Apple IIe:

It costed around US$5,000. Had a whopping 64 Kbyte of memory. No hard disk, but storage in two 128 kbyte mini floppies. The screen featured 40 characters per line. I sneaked in another 64 Kbyte of memory and upgraded to 80 characters per screen, but that is how far I could go.

Just last week, we bought this little thing for my youngest:


This iPod Nano has 18 Gbyte of memory, roughly 100,000x more than my Apple IIe but at 1/20th of the price. Hard disks are no longer used. The screen has a better resolution than anything we could dream of in the 80's.

And still, with all of this technology, we can not get half of the flights in the air due to 10 cm of snow. Proof of the matter: I am looking at it, here at Brussels airport.

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Rumble: Who needs Internet Explorer, anyway?

OK, OK, I am not impartial. After my computer failed to reboot after the Microsoft XP Service Pack 3 upgrade, the guys from the ICT helpdesk at work had no other choice but to reinstall the whole operating system ("a new image") on my poor laptop.

All my personal data was backed up, so I was cool, but all software settings went back to the defaults. I also had to reinstall the software I had put on it. And of course, there was the usual debugging. Kept me busy on and off for two days.

But the deed is done. Except, I could not get Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 to start up properly. It kept on referring me to this configuration site, which failed to register my settings. So each time I started IE7, it asked to configure itself.

A year ago, I got to learn Firefox (it is for free), and in a short while the newer versions got faster and cleaner... Only a few problems left (some HTML tags don't work properly), but hey...

After installing Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (beta), and seeing there were more problems (default font were bigger screwing up layouts, scrollbox did not show well etc..), I took a drastic and emotional decision: For the first time in all my life, I configured Firefox to be my default browser.

Looking at the statistics of the visitors on The Road, it seems more and more people did the same. A year ago, only 25% of the visitors used Firefox, now over 50% of you preferred Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Now I know why.

Picture courtesy One Man's Blog

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Rumble: I loooooooove Microsoft sooooooo muuuuuch!

I just upgraded my laptop with Windows XP Servicepack3 (SP3). And after one hour, found it rebooting itself over and over again. "Safe Startup" and any other trick in the book did not help. Searched the Internet on my other computer and there seem to be a thousand reasons why SP3 goes wrong and ten time that many cures. Darned.
Guess the ICT helpdesk will have their hands full on Monday. Running on my personal laptop at this moment.

Let's put what we endure with computers and Microsoft in a bit of a perspective. A joke I will always remember:

A while ago, Bill Gates compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM (General Motors) had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon."

GM responded by saying: If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally, your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would accept this, restart, and drive on.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart; in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car.

6. Apple would make a car that was powered by the sun, was more reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water, temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car fault' warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same butt size.

9. The airbag system would say 'Are you sure?' before going off.

10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more.

12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

13. About twice a day, all your luggage would disappear from the trunk, and would reappear in your closets at home.

14. You'd press the 'Start' button to shut off the engine.

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