Tag: Technology

Posted on

Sometimes being cheap is more expensive.

AppleTimeCapsule

After fiddling around with backups, networks, dropping WiFi connections, and a myriad of other tiny annoying issues I came to the conclusion that I’d have quite enough of death by a thousand cuts!

I just yanked out two 7 year old Apple time capsules and the NetGear router that was freaking awesome when I bought it, but which became a complete POS with subsequent firmware upgrades.

With each “Upgrade” the machine got slower. Now its to the point that the device is now almost completely useless. (Before you ask, I’ve downgraded the unit to previous versions of the firmware. It doesn’t help. At some point, there must have been a hardware module that was reprogrammed, but is not being flashed to its original state. Or theres something really wrong with the device itself.)

The Time Capsules were very reliable over their lifespans. The larger of the two units WiFi had become unreliable and that’s what prompted me to purchase the NetGear. I was trying to save money by replacing the WiFi and continuing to use the hard drives in the Time Capsules.

Recently the drives were becoming increasingly unreliable and the NetGear device had become way too SLOW to do any kind of WiFi to disk transfer. In fact the NetGear unit was slowing data transfers down on wired connections too. 

IMG 0472

Although the NetGear bought me a year, I should have done what I did yesterday instead of going cheap…

Yesterday, I bought a new 3TB Apple Time Capsule. If this one lasts 7 years like the previous units it’s replacing, I’ll have gotten my money out of it.

Best Buy is running a $50 off special on the unit so there is that.

This also simplified the network cabinet considerably, I was able to remove 2 devices completely.

This little cabinet is where all the communications in the house is accessible. Phone line, cables for TVs in whatever rooms and of course al the networking. I do wish that when the installation people for the Satellite TV and the Satellite internet had been a bit more frugal with the lengths of the cable they were running. It’s a pain in the butt fighting with 8 or 10 RG58 & RG56 cables that run along the back of the top shelf. 

In a fit of annoyance yesterday, I mounted a spitter and some kind of power unit from DirecTV to the top and rear wall of the cabinet. I shouldn’t have had to do that, the installation guy should have done it. I didn’t notice until after the installation guy split, that he’d not mounted these things, having them rattling around in the top of the cabinet was a royal pain in the ass anytime I needed to do something up there.

IMG 0474

I still need to purchase a set of CAT6 patch cables of the correct length to connect the switch to all the wall sockets and peripherals. But the cabinet is once again clean and in general orderly.

I can provide Gigabit speed ethernet throughout the house. Once I pick up the patch cables all but one of the ports on the switch will be connected (Yes, I have 13 sockets in the house. Hey I wanted to be prepared for whatever! You never know when you might have to supplement NORAD…)  

Currently, not all the devices in the house can take advantage of gigabit due to their age, but the potential is there as equipment is updated.

Success! I’ve moved the salvageable data from the older drives onto the new Time Capsule. I haven’t flushed those units quite yet. I’ll wait until the new TC is past its infant mortality period. Then its low level format time and reset to factory defaults for everything I’ve yanked out of the network. (Quite a pile now.) Then it is away to E-Recycling for all of it, I hate trashing this stuff, I wish to heck it was repairable. 

Its not a sentimental attachment, its hating the thought of adding to the e-waste problem. I’d really appreciate Apple or whoever making products that could be retrofitted with the latest technology.  

Macbook Air

Take my MacBook Air for example. It’s a fantastic machine. Because I purchased the full boat machine with all the upgrades available at the time, it still beats many of the new Apple Machines including the new Macbook, and all of the Macbook Airs.

There are two areas that are starting to become dated. 1) WiFi and 2) The display is not a retina display.

As of this writing new Macbook Airs aren’t available with a retina display anyway.

It would be very cool to hand Apple my Air, plunk some cash on the table and have them upgrade the WiFi, the display and hell, why not throw a 1TB SSD in the machine while they’re at it.

Because… I am sentimentally attached to my Macbook.

I suppose it would cut into their sales a bit but they’d be SUPER Green if they offered that option.

I can swap out the current 512 SSD drive for a 1TB SSD through Other World Computing. It only costs about $500 or so. I’m not that slammed for disk space yet but when I get there, I’ll go for it. Hopefully It’ll extend the life of my Air for another 4 years.

Oh Cool! Thus far, I’m seeing major speed improvements on data being moved to the network drives and my backups are now taking only 6 minutes instead of a projected 8 hours.

I’m such a dumbass, I saved $150 bucks last year only to subject myself annoyances and troublshooting that cost far more in terms of my time, lost data, and general frustration, than the savings.

OH well… Live and freaking learn!

Posted on

Um… hey Banks, you need to work with default browsers

banklogos

Just got off the phone with one of the banks I do business with. Turns out the bank whose online banking used to work just fine with my Mac OS X supplied Safari, or the default Windows 7 browser Internet Explorer now is broken on both.

Say What?

The very nice gentleman suggested that I use FireFox or Chrome. Uhhh NO! 

I was nice about it, I told him that neither of these were viable options because of all the wonderful “Malware” these browsers ship with.

I have no need to have my system infested with tracking software, crappy antivirus solutions, new tool bars, switching my default search engine to AskJeeves, or any of the other shenanigans that these 3rd party solutions are often loaded with.

Oh I can say No to loading this crap, I can even remove it if one of these “solutions” sneaks past me. 

But I shouldn’t have to.

If your product is good and clearly a better solution than the default, then prove it to me and by that I mean make the product FOR SALE. If during a free trial I decide that your product is in fact better than the default, then I’ll pay for it and continue to enjoy an ad free existence.

Bundling your product with crap that installs all over my computer is not likely to endear you to me.

When I explained my reasoning, the 2nd level support guy was laughing. He understood exactly what I meant and was good with it. He reminded me that the IOS version of the bank’s software might provide me with the functionality I needed.

I hadn’t thought of that, so I thanked him and ended the call.

The thing that blows my mind, is that the bank rolled out customer facing software that didn’t work with the default web browsers supplied with the two leading computer operating systems.

Who’s brilliant decision was that? What kind of testing did they do, and what the HELL kind of Software QA department are these people running?

I guess it touches home for me since A) I’m pretty much a career Software QA guy, and B) I’m looking for a job in my field.

Clearly the bank needs my freaking services!

I can tell you that the version of software these guys rolled out would NEVER have seen the light of day on my watch.

You always start your testing with the DEFAULT browsers unless you specifically check the OS and browser versions and then politely inform the client, “We don’t work with your browser / OS combination.”

At least then you’re not annoying the hell out of your customers who are using the same computer, browser, OS, etc they used last week.  Only now, not only can’t they log on, your web site is actively telling them incorrectly that their password and user id is incorrect. “Was I hacked??” 

Folks, it’s time to clean house.

h-1b visa

Fire all the offshore QA companies and hire Americans.  You know, the folks you made homeless by importing H-1B visa holders, then forced to train the H-1B’s under threat of layoff,  which you did anyway. 

Oh and by the way corporate America most of us will work pretty darn cheap these days.

Posted on

Ahhhh That’s nice… You could’a told me about it sooner!

I’m very fortunate to have some really smart friends.

Unfortunately, those same friends sometimes forget to share really important stuff.

So rather than complain about my friends lack of sharing… I’m going to share with you.

As I’ve written recently, ads, popups, and all the tracking crap on the internet has gotten completely out of control.  We’ve all told our browsers to block ads, popups, and everything else we can.

Blocking popups can sometimes be a problem because some sites actually use pop-ups in the way they were intended to be used, instead of as a means to display an ad for the latest dancing dildo from ronco.

Ads in general aren’t a big issue & I generally don’t mind seeing them. Until they become so intrusive that I can’t read the web page I want to read.

Its become insane, ads for everything I’ve EVER looked up are flashing around the perimeter of the page leaving me a 1 inch wide strip of text that I actually want to see.

Apple addresses this in part on iPad, iPhone, & Mac with their “reader” view. This strips everything out of the page and presents clean easily readable content. The problem is, I’ve not found a way to turn “reader” view on all the time by default.  (I’ve often thought that would be bliss.)

Adblockplus

So after yesterday’s post about the jpg that was nothing more than a link to a malware infested site.

A friend contacted me this morning and after several exchanges asked if there was a program like ADBlock for the Mac.

“ADBlock? What the hell is ADBlock?” I think to myself.  

BING Search ADBLOCK

Surf the web without annoying ads

D’OH!!!!!

Surprise, surprise surprise! They make a version for Safari!

“Damn straight, I want to download it!”

One simple manageable extension to safari and Bliss! 

It also displays how many ads it’s blocked per page. 

REALLY Breitbart, 17 ads on a single page? Do you think you’re being a little excessive???

While the application counts the ads… I don’t see them! 

Blessings to the folks at Adblock Plus!

To my friends using this application…

Speak up sooner!

You all know I run a very vanilla system but I do take a look at applications and stuff that you suggest…

I might think you don’t love me or something, you sadistic bastards!

Posted on

Ok Folks… This Ain’t Rocket Science!

angrychimp

This is one clearly destined for the annals of “how to really piss off your customer”

I’ve got someone for whom I put together a web site.

What I built is much nicer than the site they’d built using their web hosts “Web Design” package.

Honestly, the “web designer” used by their hosting site was barely functional. While it did produce a web site; Well you know the old saying about Shakespeare? The one  about 10,000 monkeys with typewriters and 1,000 years???

Lets just say what the web designer output was less than pretty. 

monkeyfangs

That my friend could make the site look decent at all is a tribute to a lot of patience and time spent on their part.

Had my friend NOT spent all that time and energy his website would have looked like a rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid had cobbled together some HTML. Or the great technologist Hillary Clinton, whichever floats your boat.

But that’s not the worst of it.

confusedmonkey

See, my friend was paying for this… Where things turned due South was when we tried to upload the site I built, to his host.

Turns out that even though he “Upgraded” the web hosting service wouldn’t allow FTP access. Additionally, they provided no way at all to simply upload HTML files. He asked again, and again he upgraded his service giving them MORE money and still FTP was denied.

hillary

FTP is one of the basic underpinnings of the internet. Virtually every operating system has the ability to FTP built right in. You have to specifically block this ability. In most modern Operating Systems, FTP access is blocked by default by the manufacturer, but during installation there is usually some question about enabling it, and a couple of other things. Many average consumers answer “No” or they skip the question. This leaves the service? protocol? (I honestly forget which FTP is classified as,) turned off and thus doesn’t leave a security hole open. If the consumer find they need FTP later, they can enable it. Often, if the customer has purchased an FTP front-end package, (Something that pretties up the service) during installation of the package, FTP is enabled.

Then I tried talking to his hosting site, and WOW! What an unmitigated cluster fuck!

Gandalfclusterfuck

I could log into the site as my friend, but when I tried making changes, I was sent to another site, and another site.

I’m not just talking about different webpages here, I’m talking about entirely different web sites all of which you have to log onto independently.

I started out logging into something called OptimalWebhosting.com. But that wasn’t the real host, they were called Wild West something something.com

But they weren’t the actual web builder people, and the web builder people weren’t the security people, and at one point godaddy.com popped up performing some function.

As we tried dealing with these people it became clear that there was no single entity in absolute control of his domain name.

Since there were so many people with fingers in the pie, nailing someone down for answers, getting something fixed, or getting anyone to take responsibility for anything, proved impossible.

Famouslastwords

My friend said he was completely tired of dealing with these people.

I said, “I think I can help.”

Famous last words!

I contacted my hosting service HostGator.com.

I’ve been very happy with them and their service over the past 3 years. In that time I’ve always been able to get ahold of someone that knew a lot more about some of this stuff than I do. I’ve always closed a chat, or hung up the phone thinking, “Dang! It’s really nice to talk to folks who are on the ball and have a ‘can do’ attitude.”

So I called them, I asked if my friend’s domain could be transferred to HostGator, how much, and how long?

The answer was, “Yes we can transfer the domain, it’ll cost $20 and once we have control of the domain name it usually takes only a few hours.”

I said, “Great! Clicked on the little transfer button, entered the domain name, and told my friend to authorize the transfer when he got an email about it.”

That was almost thirty days ago.

badserverroom

We went down the rabbit hole of politics, greed, stupidity, and really shitty corporate policy. 

Optimalwebhosting, A.K.A. Wild West Hosting, dragged its feet at every possible turn.

They refused to answer HostGator, they allowed transfer tokens to expire requiring that those tokens be recreated twice! They annoyed my friend and whined because he was leaving them, but wouldn’t expedite his leaving and wouldn’t correct the issue that was causing him to leave. 

They finally figured out that they wanted yet MORE money to provide FTP services that would allow him to upload a website. They also wanted to charge him by the web page!

So lets take a look at this business model shall we? 

14.95 Yearly domain registration.

75.00 Yearly hosting service using their web builder (rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid, HTML code.)

25.00 to upgrade site to have more web pages. (YET MORE, rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid, HTML code.)

Grand total… 114.95 to STILL have no ability to upload a custom site, and have crappy support spread across who knows how many different  companies.

Uh NO! This is not value for the money… this is death by a thousand cuts. This kind of billing structure makes you look like you’re running your business on retired or defective equipment that you’ve cobbled together out of dumpsters in Silicon Valley. 

As of today, it looks like the transfer may finally be nearing completion of ‘the domain transfer from hell’. I’m not holding my breath, I suspect that Wild West Hosting has something else up its collective sleeve. They’ve gotta have at least one more monkey wrench to toss into the works, it’s their nature.

Bottom line,

If you see Optimal Web Hosting, or Wild West Hosting offering really cheap domains and webhosting… 

RUN AWAY!

Posted on

One of these days Alice, POW! Right to the moon

oneofthesedays

No, I’m not advocating violence towards women. I’m just frustrated by the constraints of this future. When I was growing up, the Future was about everyone being closer.

Yet our technology is having the opposite effect. There’s far less human interaction today, than in my youth. 

The weird thing is that in our technological isolation, instead of allowing each of us more freedom of thought and expression, is often being used to enforce an homogeneity that is rather oppressive.

At least Ralph and Alice talked to each other in the same room.

The isolation was highlighted for me recently because I needed some help with a misbehaving bit of software. So I went to the manufacturers website looking for a phone number to give them a quick call.

I know,, I know, I obviously thought I was still living in the 20th Century, instead of the 21st Century. Phone numbers? You want to call us?

Villan1

Ohhhh No Mr. Bond, I expect you to email!

In reality, I ended up on a chat application. Thrilling! At the end of the Chat session, I got to answer a survey too!

After waiting for about 5 minutes, I ended up with a “Technician” in chat.

I explained my problem, He, She, It? put me on hold then came back after a couple more minutes. Then sent me a PDF file that was instructions concerning how to fix my problem. 

Okaaaay, the instructions were all about Windows, and the PDF had a link back to the website for the solutions to the Mac version of the problem. Unfortunately, their explanation of the cause of the problem was in no way true on my system. So I couldn’t follow the instructions to resolve it.

It was only an activation number that wasn’t being accepted. I figured there was something simple like wiping a configuration file then trying again. Apparently that was beyond this chat “Technician”. 

He/She/It,  couldn’t understand that I couldn’t execute their instructions because the initial condition didn’t exist. After being put on hold again (Hold on Chat?) He/She/It determined something was wrong. DUH!!!

Chats

After more pointless back and forth, I deleted the application, then re-installed it from the 6 original CDs. After the reinstallation, the application accepted my activation number without question.

It dawned on me that the Chat does a couple of things for companies.

The person only has to be able to type English. It doesn’t matter if they have a thick accent. They have to be able to figure out what document to send and then they hang up. That’s exactly what He/She/It did to me.

Once I confirmed that I’d gotten the PDF, He/She/It was gone.

southparkIndiansweat

Great way to save money and time for the corporation. The “Chatters” are in India or wherever. They’re probably being paid a 1.00 a day and after only 10 years are eligible to be considered by their company for an H1B1 Visa!

Lately, I’m feeling more and more on my own when it comes to problem solving. The really sad part is that I’m pretty high functioning when it comes to computer crap.

I hate to think of my poor mother chatting away with someone expecting help.

Welcome to the future.