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February 22, 2007

More Cranky-Geek

I’m making an effort to not be so cranky. Yesterday I had a follow-up meeting with the same outsourcing/vendor folks from before. It went rather well, they had more of an idea what they were after, and I could offer a bunch of alternatives/suggestions that would make things easier for all of us. All up, a rather productive meeting.

I thought I was doing fairly well, until I got this call from some random person in one of our IT Areas:

Random: “I’m just calling to ask a few questions about [Application], are you able to spare a few minutes?”
Me: “Yeah, sure – what did you need to know?”
Random: “What are the operational hours for [Application]?”
Me: “…I don’t understand the question? It’s a web application.”
Random: “What times can people use it?”
Me: “It’ll work whenever people access it, aside from weekly maintenance periods.”
Random: “Right… okay,”

[snipped stuff about support contracts]

Random: “So, you’re the person to contact for all support issues?”
Me: “Yep, during business hours.”
Random: “Okay, so can I just get your details? You’re located in…?”
Me: “Uhh.. Newcastle”
Random: “Right, but what address?”
Me: (confused why he didn’t look it up in Outlook’s Employee Address Book) “The same one in Outlook. [...address...]”
Random: “And your phone number?”
Me: (Thinking “wtf?”): “The same one you just called me on.”
Random: (sounds of flicking pages) “Right… uhm…. What area code was that?”
Me: *sigh* “02 [....my number...]”

Grrr..

2 comments

February 20, 2007

Signs you’re becoming the cranky geek cynic

…I just had a realisation. I’m becoming that cranky/cantankerous geek that growls at people.

Just now, I was on a meeting with someone from work, and a few outsourced/vendor folks who are building an application for another area at work.
They wanted to find out if I could modify one of the applications I own, and we were throwing around technical ideas, there were several different approaches discussed, ranging from fairly simple, to rather complex.

Vendor: “So, can you do these modifications?” (not having picked any specific alternative)
Me: “Yeah, sure – I’ve got plenty of experience with [all these technologies]”
Vendor: “So, will this be able to be done by [our timeframe]?”
Me: “I can’t answer that, it’ll depend on a number of factors, and whether I’m assigned to do the work.”
Vendor: “So…. How long will these changes take?”
Me: “I can’t answer that until the decisions have been made as to the final requirements.”
Vendor: [rephrases previous questions]
Me: “That’s not up to me, [our rep], would need to go through the process to get me assigned. My Manager(s) assign me work, and that’s what I work on.”

0 comments

February 14, 2007

Corporate Blogging

I got a question the other day: “Can we set up blogs for each of our staff, that only certain people in our area can read?”.

Well, I immediately thought of WordPress MU, and possibly some sort of Active Directory (via LDAP) authentication or similar.

It turns out there’s an LDAP Authentication plugin already created. So, we’d need some sort of additional plugin to specify only certain AD groups should be permitted to read the blog.

Excellent, now we just need a server to host it on… Oh, damn, I knew there was a catch!

Others are already doing this (or something similar), and seem to be reasonably happy, despite a few problems (such as the 11-tables-per-user thing).

0 comments

February 13, 2007

Missing Options: Outlook 2007

0 comments

Using Auto-Reply Effectively

John C. Dvorak rants has ~~request~~ demand: “Stop Using AutoReply!!!” (via Lifehacker).

I’m not sure what people John’s been communicating with, but where I work – it’s used pretty darned effectively.

When you use Auto-Reply (aka “Out of Office Assistant” in Exchange – commonly just “OOO”):

When you’re not available to answer emails.

…yeah, that’s it.

Where I work (a multinational company with tens of thousands of employees), we use OOO replies to let colleagues know not to expect a response any time soon.

No, it’s not perfect – and yes, when you’re replying to an email where every-man-and-their-dog is CC’ed in, you get an OOO notification for those who’re out. But, you only get it once (again, it’s a setting, which is defaulted to “on”) for that person. Even if you send that person another email while that same OOO reply is no, you won’t get it again.

The OOO notifications are only sent to those who’re on the corporate address book too, so spam bots don’t get an email confirmation. The one drawback from that is that vendors and customers don’t get a response, and need to be set up on a whitelisted AutoReply.

It’s very helpful for situations where people go on leave for months (and maternity leave for up to 12 months), and someone on the other side of the country is trying to find out who can deal with something.

(Before you say “You should have let them know before you went on leave” I can think of a dozen situations where that won’t work all the time. Getting someone else to manage your email isn’t always an option either)

0 comments

January 11, 2007

Microsoft slow to adopt own Tech

Paul makes a good point that Microsoft is slow to adopt and use it’s own technology. As some Microsofters put it: “eating your own dog food”.

Unfortunately, this is very true, and isn’t an isolated incident.

At work, we have no direct Internet access, All machines are isolated, and can’t even resolve a DNS entry outside the corporate network, let alone connect to it. Internet access is granted through the use of a corporate proxy – which requires you to authentication, and ensures only authorised users can access web sites outside the firewall.

As it would happen, we’re mostly a Microsoft shop, and so of course – a lot of applications and services leverage the Single Signon (SSO) capability delivered by Windows Domains and Active Directory. The proxy server happens to be one of these services – if you try and request a site, it’ll ask you to authenticate. No big deal, both Internet Explorer, and Firefox support NTLM / Kerberos Authentication, so everything happens seamlessly.

I decided I’d try using a ClickOnce application, which is a feature introduced in .NET 2.0 - so, it’s certainly not new technology. Proxy Servers requiring authentication are also nothing new – they’ve been around for years (decades?), so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that almost every application around that has proxy support, also has a username and password box. That is – unless they go to the effort of enabling SSO.

You can probably see where I’m going with this – so, to cut a long story short – it turns out that Microsoft has not enabled any form of Proxy Authentication support in ClickOnce for .NET 2.0. Yes, you can call up Microsoft and request the patch manually – but you need to hand over your card details first, and you might be let off without charge.

Microsoft – You need to start eating your own dogfood – a lot more often.

7 comments

January 8, 2007

Back at Work Today

Well, my short break is over, and I’m back at work today.

Nothing particularly new, everyone else around had the same time period off as I did.

0 comments

December 27, 2006

Why does it feel like I work in the same company as Dilbert?

Seriously – I see these things in dilbert and laugh. Then I stop, and remember that I’ve had this discussion dozens of times.

Argh. (I compiled a list of at least six, but decided to stop since it was just too depressing)

Hey, Ian – this one’s for you. How goes the Xbox?

1 comments

December 22, 2006

So, That thing.

So, last week I mentioned that something… interesting had happened, which resulted in me ceasing to post on here for a little while.

Well, it wasn’t anything major – but it has made me reconsider just how private this blog really isn’t. I suppose it shouldn’t be a suprise – there’s actually a suprising number of people (to me, anyway) hitting this site… Whether you’re actually reading or not – I’m not certain. But, anyway – apparently some of you do.

I’m a regular participant on Whirlpool’s Forums, for the most part in the Coding & Web section. Mostly I’m helping (or trying to help) point people in the right direction – or putting up some sample code to solve a problem if appropriate.

Anyway, last week apparently someone from a recruiting company noticed me, and followed the links back through to this blog. From there, they decided to contact me and let me know about a certain position that was being advertised, through their employer.

So, this is what got me re-thinking about what I was posting, what I was saying, and what kind of impact that could have upon future employment opportunities, etc.

But, well… I’ve decided I’m not going to change my posting habits. If I find something I think is interesting, I’ll post a link to it. If I’ve got something which I want to rant about, I’m going to rant about it. One thing I don’t do is post inappropriate comments about my employer. Don’t like it? Well, tough.

PS: No, I didn’t apply for the position. (They needed experience with some software which I hadn’t touched before). Oh, and to “S”, if you read this – Thanks for the email, really – but it was a bit of a shock to the system to get your email, and read how you’d found me.

0 comments

December 18, 2006

Project Manager Humor

Saw this on one of the internal work message boards:

Project Baby has now gone from Build & Acquire, to Advanced Acceptance Testing. So far he hasn’t been returned to the manufacturer.

Still no word on if there’s a vendor patch for the Buffer Overflows – they have a manual work around, last I heard.

*ahem*

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