The Amazon Kindle

Some pictures of the Amazon Kindle.

Electronic ink, very easy and pleasant to read. Being used to touch screens meant repeatedly trying to select and scroll through the pages with futile finger-sliding attempts.

The keys are hard to press cleanly, navigation through and selection of the text feels odd using the joystick.

There's a cumbersome multi-step process to retrieve annotations to save elsewhere as it isn't possible to pull them directly from the device, and annotations will be lost if Amazon wipes-out your book collection. There's a limit to the amount of annotation (Amazon calls them clippings) available on some books controlled by DRM, it's not possible to check what this limit is other than by hitting it.

It's thinner than I expected at about a centimetre, and it looks better than the advertising and review pictures portray it.

It needs a wave of the Apple design-team magic-wand but a viable alternative to carrying a bookcase with you on to a train.

Graffiti art

I keep walking past this giant chap on the way to work, it took some time to work its way through my early-morning lack of consciousness but eventually, over this last week, it sunk in enough for me to take a photo.

It looks too neatly structured to be a free-form spray work, not sure if stencil or masking was used. Is the text to the left to do with the picture, it looks too amateurish, like the tag behind his backside? But the text has been written by the chap himself, the paint brush in his hand answers the question, although the tag would still be by someone else. Above the tag there is what looks like a signature in the more stylised form of the picture itself. It's on this wall on a main road.



Here's another one that's around the University campus, this appears to be a stencil although the spectacle frame over the right eye might suggest otherwise.



I don't think these examples are detrimental to the environment, I'll keep a look out for others, if I'm awake.

Thunderbird, and another thing my old fruit

This week, Wednesday 24 March 2010 at 13:30 to be precise, opening mail messages in Thunderbird started to take an age. I say an age but in seconds it was about 7 each time, which in computing terms is aeons, and in human terms is pretty slow for an email.

Given that I get 900+ emails a week that's at least one hour and forty five minutes of work time I would spend waiting for emails to open. Ok I make extensive use of filters, not all mail needs to be read, and with some mail I only need to know the mail has been sent and have a quick scan of the subject to see whether an error has occurred. But even so there are still plenty of mails that need a cursory glance at the contents before they are sent to dev null, the bit bucket, etc. - insert your favourite euphemism for the content-crematorium (data-cremator?) here.

I exhausted good old Google pretty quickly and ended up chewing the fat with a few colleagues, this went off topic on to Microsoft conspiracy theories that would have stretched to breaking the credulity of someone with a rubber credulity gland galvanised by Mr Dunlop himself. I made my excuses and left, although it's a positive thing in the IT world to have some sort of face to face interaction with colleagues, open, honest and frank discussions without a digital interface, there is always the danger of catching a cold.

Back to the matter, a few head scratches later I remembered that other bane of our lives, the virus scanner. Disabling a few components of the interactive scan brought things back to life. The issue had been clouded by an upgrade of Thunderbird from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 at around the same time the problem appeared, I'd rolled back to older versions which made no difference, faffed about with profiles, gone through the entire Mozillazine troubleshooting process.

Details:
McAfee Virusscan 8.7.0i with sp2.
Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0.3 and earlier versions.
Disable the "Access Protection" task under VirusScan Console, message opening time becomes a more acceptable one second or so.

The moral of this story:
Don't forget to point the finger of blame at your daily-updating, anti-virus software, probably written by programmers not quite good enough to get a job as a games designer (is that a little harsh?).

Apologies, this has been so terribly, terribly dull, I'll get back to my G&T.

Windows 7 with Netware

Further to the install niggles mentioned in the previous post.

If you are in an environment using the Novell Netware implementation of Cifs to attach to filestore (not using the Novell Client but connecting to a Novell Netware server) you will need to change your session settings otherwise you won't be able to connect to the server:

Start | Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Local Security Policy | Local Policies | Security Options | Network security: LAN Manager authentication level


Ensure you select:

"send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated"

Windows 7, first installs

Having a new PC at work prompted me to change my Operating System from XP to Windows 7. The need to run a variety of applications that are unsupported under Linux or the Mac makes the decision that it should be a Windows OS.

These are a few of the niggles I've had so far, and their solutions, your mileage may vary.

Installing the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client

Running a VMware infrastructure environment means the VI Client has to be installed. Connecting to an ESX server and downloading the 2.5 version of the client presents no problems. However, the vSphere client, version 4, requires a couple of other steps.

Connecting to a vSphere Virtual Centre server prompts the user to run the installer to upgrade the VI Client. If you don't already have Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Second Edition installed (or if one is installed and it isn't up to date) the installer will return the error:

The Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Second Edition installer returned the error code '4113'.

Download the working version from the Microsoft website, if you haven't already uninstalled the previous version it should prompt to uninstall and open the appropriate 'remove software' window. Once this is installed run the VI Client again, the installer should then run again but successfully.

Moving Thunderbird settings and mail.

Install Thunderbird on Windows 7, don't bother starting it up or configuring anything. Shut down Thunderbird on your XP machine.

On your XP machine copy the Thunderbird directory from:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\

To this location on your Windows & machine:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming

Start Thunderbird, there may be a compatibility check as it starts up. I found everything to be intact, even though I'd gone a bit mad with filtering and have about 130 filters set up.

Windows 7 has changed the location of Profile elements so it isn't immediately obvious that the Thunderbird profile location has changed as some of the Profile structure is retained in the same path as that of XP...

Installing VMware Server

I find it useful to be able to run up a variety of Virtual Machines with different OS's within my PC.
I found that accessing a Virtual Machine using the web client caused this error to appear, no matter which browser I used:

"The attempt to acquire a valid session ticket for "your machine name" took longer than expected. If this problem persists contact your administrator.":




The work around is to use the VI Client to access your VM's as installed earlier, you will occasionally still need to access the web client but the VI Client is much superior. Start the VI Client with the hostname:

HTTPS://localhost:8333

Use your local machine username and password to access it.

"I vant to be alone" Cheese on toast

This'll clear out the tubes, it's a possible hangover tonic, potential swine flu preventative, uncertain cure for black death and an underarm deoderant to repel snakes.

Required ingredients:
Mature Cheddar cheese
1 Onion
English Mustard
1 large garlic clove per slice of bread
Bread, unsliced wholemeal

On no account ever use an ingredient labelled 'mild' unless it is a beer, and you like that sort of thing.

I go for two slices of bread. Cut using a bread knife, if you are feeling a bit 'under the weather' then be careful with that part, no point in losing a finger or two, and don't used sliced white bread for goodness sake!

Toast your slices on one side, turn over and apply thin layer of English mustard to each. Place your not too thinly sliced onion on top, break the onion slices in to rings first. Put your mature Cheddar cheese on top of the onion, either slab slices or grated. Pop back under the grill.

When the cheese is over midway through cooking, partially to well melted on top, crush a large garlic clove on to each slice. That's a clove per slice of bread. You can use more if you really want to be alone for a while longer. If using a garlic crusher make sure the last of the stuff stuck in the crusher goes on top of the cheese too.

Put back under the grill and cook for a short while, don't cook too long or the garlic will become bitter, longer and it will burn.

Eat it. You should also have a large cup of tea as well. Best make a pot.

I don't get hangovers, I obviously don't drink enough, but this works for me, I've never had Lassa fever, Bilharzia or Beriberi, I'm not sure it is down this revitalising snack, but you never know.

Stink the unstinkable "because the answer is often behind you, behind you, behind you", and in a few hours...

Twit-tastic

A few Twitter moments of the past week.

Doing an early upgrade one morning and tweeting generally about the task in hand, I mentioned iSCSI timeouts, and within the blink of an eye @scevans in California replied to me regarding iSCSI. If i'd been having trouble there would have been a sounding board on hand, as it was we had a chat about the iSCSI implementation on a couple of OS's.

Looking for information on the Gartner website regarding outsourcing I was disappointed to find the latest blog directly referring to the subject was from 2004. I made a minor grumble about this. In an instant @jeffman from Gartner was on the case protecting his company's reputation, he found a few links for me and explained that the Blogs are now organised under analyst rather than topic. Personally I would find an index of topics to be more useful, nevertheless, this is good, on-the-ball stuff, and is/was very helpful.

While browsing the Triumph Motorcycles website I was getting miffed by the number of flash and fancy graphic related failures and broken links. I had a minor grumble about this (honestly I'm not a grumbler but this sounds like a theme developing!) Quick as a flash Mr Beelzebub himself responded (@beezly) to tell me how much he liked the website and that it worked for him, I know this is just a ploy on his part and that he is after a discount from Mr Triumph, fanbois huh!

Even with a signal to noise ratio as low as mine (I can often be the person that put the twit in Twitter) there are plenty of good moments when following (not in a religious sense) a diverse pool of people.