Category: Technology

I feel it’s appropriate to issue a public apology for introducing so many of my friends to Google Earth and in so doing consuming hours and hour of their valuable time.

Over the last few weeks I have talked to a few people about how fascinating I had found Google Earth, and how much time I had spent on exploration of our amazing planet.

Unfortunately I clearly didn’t explain to them just how addictive this pass-time was. Following on from these conversations I have since had many of them complaining about the amount of time that they have spent just looking around.

I went around to Dave’s house the other day and we spent again trying to find a hotel in a middle of a lake in India. We had the maps out that he had used to get there, we searched around and eventually found it. We were consumed for a good hour. I have no idea how long Dave had been playing prior to this, but it was more than a few minutes, I know that much.

Another friend, I won’t name them for obvious reasons, who works from home admitted to spending an entire working afternoon enjoying the views of South America.

Perhaps I should start a self help group helping people to release themselves of this addiction. ‘Google Earth Anonymous’ how does that sound, or ‘Addicts to Google Earth’ although that would be AGE.

OK, so I’m not the only thinking about it. It’s interesting how often this happens though.

The Guardian today ran an article on “How Green is your PC?”

“Christian Aid has just done something that is, but shouldn’t be, unusual: it has chosen its new PCs partly on the basis of their “green” credentials. However, governments have already started to introduce laws that will oblige PC manufacturers to take better care of the environment, even if most buyers can’t be bothered.”

And it was only yesterday that I was bemoaning my own dismal lack of effort.

In a world which is clearly getting warmer (yes, it is) we should all clearly do anything we can to try and limit that situation.

In a world where we human seem to bring devastation wherever we go, we should do all we can to limit our impact.

So how those of us in the IT industry stand up to close scrutiny.

How about our recycling credentials?

Today The Register reported on this report produced by Greenpeace on the impact of IT equipment refresh an recycling;

Expansion of the global market for electrical and electronic products continues to accelerate, while the lifespan of the products is dropping, resulting in a corresponding explosion in electronic scrap.

As noted by UNEP (2005)*:

“Every year, 20 to 50 million tonnes of electrical and electronic equipment waste (“e-waste”) are generated world-wide, which could bring serious risks to human health and the environment. While 4 million PCs are discarded per year in China alone.”

This rapidly growing “e-waste” stream presents additional difficulties because a wide range of hazardous chemicals are, or have in the past been, used in components of electrical and electronic devices, and these subsequently create substantial problems with regard to handling, recycling and disposal of obsolete products.

And:

Results confirm that all stages in the processing of electrical and electronic wastes have the potential to release substantial quantities of toxic heavy metals and organic compounds to the workplace environment and, at least to the extent studied, also to surrounding soils and water courses. Among the toxic heavy metals most commonly found in elevated levels in wastes from the industry, as well as in indoor dusts and river sediments, were those known to have extensive use in the electronics sector, i.e.

• lead and tin, most probably arising in large part from solder and, in the case of lead, batteries
• copper, for example from wires and cables
• cadmium, from a variety of uses including batteries and solder joints
• antimony,most probably from use of antimony trioxide as a flame retardant additive in plastics and resins as well from use in electrical solders

Many other metals associated with the electronics industry were also relatively abundant in many samples, including barium, chromium, cobalt, gold,mercury, nickel, silver and zinc.

So not too well on that one then.

How about our usage of power and the inevitable production of green-house gases that accompanies it?

Well for this I’m not going to use a study, I’m going to use personal observation, self critique.

When was the last time I considered power consumption in a purchasing decision for piece of hardware? Never.

When was the last time I considered the power requirements of a piece of software? Well never of course, because that would require me to do a lot of study on how the software works.

When was the last time I actually turned all of this stuff off? Well, again, never. I always leave something on in some way or another. it’s only tiny power use after all, I think. If I’m going to turn a single PC off I have to turn the machine off, and the monitor, and the speakers and the printer. that’s too much like hard work. And then there is the router which stays on, and the cable modem which stays on.

How many people are there currently in my house? One

How many computers are running? two. Why, well one is for work and I’m remote controlling it from over here because it’s more comfortable.

So are both of these computers working really hard? Well of course there not, they never really work really hard.

That’s my example and I know it’s not unique. Drip, drip, drip, all of this energy flowing out of my house. All of that CO2 flowing into the environment.

I think that it’s about time we started to take these things seriously as an industry. Understanding the power requirements associated with software would be a really good start. One of the reasons the the third world isn’t taking our fat bloated software is because they can’t afford the power requirements, and why should they. If we can make powerful software work on low power hardware why don’t we? A little effort on our behalf would go a long way too, go on turn it off. Your time isn’t really that important, or that precious. If it was you wouldn’t be using that software, you’d be using a pen and paper.

I have been playing with SyncToy over the last few days at home.

There are three computers in my house and regularly a requirement t keep bits of data in sych. This is partly for back-up purposes, but also to keep the network load down a bit; photos and stuff like that. Previously I have built scripts with quite complicated robocopy.exe jobs in them. This has been OK, but it’s not that easy to maintain.

SyncToy fulfill all of my requirements, but there are some bits that aren’t quite there and would lead to problems for others.

There isn’t any real granularity on how files are compared, it really is about synching.

There isn’t any way of doing a recursive synch to make sure everything is in synch. So if you are synching more than one computer you have to run it a few times to get everything into synch.

I liked the ability to select which sub-folders were synched, but I couldn’t see any way of defining the default behaviour for new sub-folders.

The performance across the network seems to be good too, would be very interested to see how Microsoft take it forward as the ability to do block level copies comes into their arsenal elsewhere.

In general though, super little tool – why did it take this long?

Just to provide that I’m not the only nerd in my family:

The hunting of the Snark

Consideration of the formal semantics of APL particularised to consideration of the unusual properties of the null expression. It was something of a surprise to discover that these properties had already been fully documented 100 years ago by Lewis Carroll (Cal). Since that opus is not normally a part of the lore of APL, this paper attempts to re-interpret the original findings in 20th century terminology. APL has a number of objects which are, in some sense, null or empty – two empty vectors, multitudinous other empty arrays, undefined objects and local variables with names but no values. There is at least one other null entity. It has no name, and it has no value. Worse yet, it is denoted by the empty string, and is therefore not easily seen.

Philip R Chastney

Philip is my uncle…

silicon.com has a report today on the situation with Europe’s IT resources titled “IT skills crisis looms – and outsourcing won’t help”, based on a Forrester Research report. For me the most telling statements are:

Forrester senior analyst Richard Peynot said: “All the evidence indicates that Europe faces a serious risk of a shortage of IT skills and Forrester believes that companies need to take action now to support long-term IT competency needs and to pay close attention to the implications of renewed competition for the best talents.”

For what I see though the IT industry is actually heading in completely the opposite direction and reducing training. the logic seems to go something like this “we don’t need to give someone technical training because those jobs are going abroad and all of these IT people already have some business experience”. In my experience most IT people struggle to relate to business issues. Most IT people are in the job for the technology, not for the business benefit that it delivers. The ones who get a buzz from seeing a business change are the minority, and it’s those skills that the IT industry is going to need in increasing numbers over the coming years.

The technical jobs are inevitably going off-shore because they really can be done remotely. The jobs that need to be done intimately with the customer can’t be done remotely (yet).

Joe Wilcox posed an interesting question today over at Microsoft Monitor.

After stating that he had suffered from a number of problems he stated this:

There is a strange lesson here. Nearly every week, I talk to technology managers resistant to change. They would rather run that aging Windows NT 4 server until it breaks, because computing changes, they say, create unforeseen problems and so more work. I didn’t realize that my Comcast broadband account was broken, because I had service. The attempt to fix the problem, so that I could upgrade to a higher-level service, eventually really broke the account. Suddenly, some IT manager’s “no changes” policies make lots more sense.

In my many years experience of running complex corporate systems I have some sympathies with this point-of-view, but it would not be my preferred way of doing it.

The ‘no change’ policy works for simple single instance systems with few dependencies, it most certainly does not for systems which have dependencies. And there in lies a bit of a dilemma, because it’s actually the simple systems which are easy to update, it’s the complicated ones which aren’t.

I have regularly been in a situation where people have left a system without any maintenance (on the basis stated above) and then they have run into a problem. resolving that problem takes an incredible amount of time because you get into loops and cycles with the vendors.

This cycle sometimes due to the situation requiring an upgrade to something like the driver on a card in a server in order to fix one problem, resulting in a chain reaction of events requiring us to upgrade everything. All of the upgrades that chained on from the initial upgrade were already known about, they just hadn’t been done. So rather than trying to assess the impact of one change you are left assessing the impact of 20, 40, 60, 80 changes. I’m actually in the middle of one now where in order to update the firmware on one piece of equipment we need to update the drivers on more than 30 servers.

More regularly the support cycle is severely elongated because vendors who provide the ‘expert’ support work on single tracks. Once they find a problem they insist on that problem being fixed before they will go any further. Often this problem isn’t even related to the problem that is being experienced. Of course as soon as that one is fixed there is another problem found, and on it goes. This iterative cycle just takes forever. And of course the greater the number of changes the less confidence you have that you haven’t actually caused the problem by making the change. The longer the system has been running, the longer it takes to resolve the problem.

I much prefer the situation where a system is maintained to a reasonable level in a consistent incremental way. This way, when a problem does occur, it can be fixed in a reasonable time-frame.

I tried to get some progress on the McAfee issue from the other day today, so thought it might be fun to have a live support chat with them. The transcript below is the result, and not the most helpful of discussions I have ever had:

Please wait while we find a technician to assist you…
You are currently at position number 1 in the queue.
You have been connected to Support.
Support: Graham, thank you for contacting McAfee Online Support Center. How can I assist you with your McAfee software today?
Graham Chastney: The person who normally uses the PC is defined as a standard user and the update process insists on them needing to be an administrator to update.
Support:: Graham, I would be happy to clarify this. 
Support: Have you previously contacted McAfee Technical support regarding this issue?
Graham Chastney: No
Support: Graham, you must be the Administrator user to update McAfee programs.
Support: This is a security feature. All users can not update McAfee.
Graham Chastney: But that’s ridiculous – especially for DAT files. Why would I want to log-on as the administrator every day.
Graham Chastney: Can’ I configure the update service to run as an administrator
Support: If all users are granted access to update McAfee, they will get access to all McAfee data and it can be a breach of security.
Graham Chastney: But it’s a breach of security for me to log-on as an administrator every day? 

I completely fail to see how it can be a security feature to stop users updating their virus software. So Ian looks like you were wrong…perhaps it’s time for a bit of DIY.

Anyway, it shows how many people are running in least privilege – and it’s not many. 

 

This has to be the daftest dialogue box I have come across in a long time.

I run my wife on her PC as a User, with standard User privileges – why wouldn’t I? But every day when VirusScan decides to check for an updated signature she gets this dialogue box.

I haven’t done any detailed research into the reason for this dialogue box, but there doesn’t seem to be any sensible way to change this situation. It astounds me that a security supplier would choose to make their update process require Administrator privileges. By installing the software and configuring it (as the Administrator) I made the choice that I wanted the updates down-loading and installing, I don’t want to have to log-on as an Administrator every day to make sure the updates happen. But also, and almost as importantly, Sue doesn’t want to have an annoying pop-up sat on her screen all day every day (if you click “Continue what I was doing” it just comes back”).

We have such a long way to go as an industry to get people off the drug of ‘Administrator’ privileges.