In Evansville, IN for a technology thingummy.
Spent an hour chatting with the lady at the front desk at the hotel: a self-confessed computer illiterate, she lusts after a new laptop and mentioned complaints she'd received about the complimentary wireless here.
For a cool little laptop, I directed her to the Dell Inspiron Mini 9; then I dug my Toshiba out of my satchel and, right there at the desk, ran a quick snoop of wireless using NetStumbler: seems they only offer 802.11g and the complaints came from owners of old laptops that probably only support 802.11b. I explained how, with most cheap WAPs, 802.11b clients drag down 802.11g clients anyway, so it helps users of the new WiFi spec to quit supporting the old.
This is what those of us in I.T. should be: enablers of technology for users who don't know better. Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the "death force" of modern technology, how it dehumanizes without even meaning to. We all should counteract that.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
Printer jam & toast
A buddy of mine called to say that he couldn't use his printer and he needed to print invoices for his business. It took me about three minutes to troubleshoot, then to pop the access panel and fish out a wad of paper using pliers.
I made a house call for this? Honestly, this is a skill I need to impart to others. Oh phooey, he was in the neighborhood anyway, and now he owes me a beer...
I made a house call for this? Honestly, this is a skill I need to impart to others. Oh phooey, he was in the neighborhood anyway, and now he owes me a beer...
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Are you not using it?!
Bart PE is the single most useful all-in-one tool I know for PCs. In conjunction with other stuff, like Sherpya's XPE, Truecrypt, JKdefrag, Password Renew, Portable Firefox and PeToUSB, it yields a crisp bootable thumb drive full of creamy diagnostic and portable goodness.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
If you'd like to make a call...
The folks who administer the legacy PBX also administer the packaged VoIP solution we bought to serve an outlying site; VoIP is kept physically separate from the rest of the network. Seems the VoIP system failed after an unscheduled power outage: we lost one of three phases at the main building over the weekend, servers shut down, etc. Servers came back up with grace, but today I got the call to investigate the phone outage.
The telco tech-rep seemed to think that the BOOTP server at the remote site was not functional, but I demonstrated this was not the case by plugging in my laptop and pinging a phone. Suspicion fell on the physical layer, but I saw this was not the problem when I pinged the phone switch at the main site. So we trucked ourselves back to the main site to learn that the interface card on the phone switch was the culprit. A replacement is on order.
A fairly quick resolution, I thought, except I wasn't called in until three days after the first problem report!
I conferred with my colleague who is responsible for phones and he allowed as how more I.T. involvement could be a good thing.
The telco tech-rep seemed to think that the BOOTP server at the remote site was not functional, but I demonstrated this was not the case by plugging in my laptop and pinging a phone. Suspicion fell on the physical layer, but I saw this was not the problem when I pinged the phone switch at the main site. So we trucked ourselves back to the main site to learn that the interface card on the phone switch was the culprit. A replacement is on order.
A fairly quick resolution, I thought, except I wasn't called in until three days after the first problem report!
I conferred with my colleague who is responsible for phones and he allowed as how more I.T. involvement could be a good thing.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Rot free space optics.
This company called Lightpointe introduced some neat products a while back: point-to-point laser-based communications that work in open air without any license requirement.
I was so jazzed I showed my boss the trade, and he says where would we use such a thing? The initial product was intended for use in a city, where a network could be strung between two buildings... so, probably not something we'd use in our sprawling campus. But when we decided to outfit a new building (well, not new, a legacy of the state, but new to us), we gave their product a try, reasoning that it was cheaper than radio.
Five years later: it's performed pretty much as expected, which is to say it gives us fine throughput until we get snow, fog or a storm (three things we get a lot of actually), at which point it drops deader than a beached whale. But it got us through, for a while.
(Fact is, the Lightpointe stays up longer than comparably priced radio would, a major selling point for us at the time. But I digress.)
Problem being, the project to link the new campus with hard fiber was delayed, first by money, so we shared the cost with an adjacent institution, then by bureaucrazy (when we are one patch cable away from lighting it up).
Well, we already have a connection right? Grrr... the problems we have had over the past day or two have been, ah, interesting. I would so appreciate a speedy resolution to the delay on the fiber!
This product was a fine compromise the day it was put into production, but now I say rot these free-space-optic doohickies.
I was so jazzed I showed my boss the trade, and he says where would we use such a thing? The initial product was intended for use in a city, where a network could be strung between two buildings... so, probably not something we'd use in our sprawling campus. But when we decided to outfit a new building (well, not new, a legacy of the state, but new to us), we gave their product a try, reasoning that it was cheaper than radio.
Five years later: it's performed pretty much as expected, which is to say it gives us fine throughput until we get snow, fog or a storm (three things we get a lot of actually), at which point it drops deader than a beached whale. But it got us through, for a while.
(Fact is, the Lightpointe stays up longer than comparably priced radio would, a major selling point for us at the time. But I digress.)
Problem being, the project to link the new campus with hard fiber was delayed, first by money, so we shared the cost with an adjacent institution, then by bureaucrazy (when we are one patch cable away from lighting it up).
Well, we already have a connection right? Grrr... the problems we have had over the past day or two have been, ah, interesting. I would so appreciate a speedy resolution to the delay on the fiber!
This product was a fine compromise the day it was put into production, but now I say rot these free-space-optic doohickies.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
"Specified service does not exist as an installed service"
Ah, Windows. Such useful error messages. This one occurred after a teenager in my improv group asked for help with her Sansa Express 1 GB MP3 player -- a very nice item, BTW; I own an older Sansa myself, and the Express has everything I would expect.
Her ancién PC recognized the USB device, identifying it as an "MTP device." Unfortunately it declined to load an appropriate driver, instead pointing out the largely unintelligible error message above, and the flash storage on the MP3 player remained inaccessible (though the device would suck power for its internal rechargeable battery -- a very nice feature).
So, after searching around (notably here), I found nothing that worked; and, in desperation, rather than choose to have Windows find a driver for me, I told it I would specify a driver. Lo and behold, come time to choose what kind of driver to load, Windows gave me two choices only: MTP Device or USB Mass Storage. Hallelujah! I chose USB Mass Storage and, with very little further adieu, the new drive letters appeared in Explorer.
(The Sansa Express has internal flash storage and a removable Micro-SD slot, so one would expect two drive letters to appear. BTW Sandisk, now that I lust after this device, feel free to send one around! It's been out for nearly a year now, surely you can spare one. :P)
Her ancién PC recognized the USB device, identifying it as an "MTP device." Unfortunately it declined to load an appropriate driver, instead pointing out the largely unintelligible error message above, and the flash storage on the MP3 player remained inaccessible (though the device would suck power for its internal rechargeable battery -- a very nice feature).
So, after searching around (notably here), I found nothing that worked; and, in desperation, rather than choose to have Windows find a driver for me, I told it I would specify a driver. Lo and behold, come time to choose what kind of driver to load, Windows gave me two choices only: MTP Device or USB Mass Storage. Hallelujah! I chose USB Mass Storage and, with very little further adieu, the new drive letters appeared in Explorer.
(The Sansa Express has internal flash storage and a removable Micro-SD slot, so one would expect two drive letters to appear. BTW Sandisk, now that I lust after this device, feel free to send one around! It's been out for nearly a year now, surely you can spare one. :P
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