Tech for Life

Working in support can be one of the most frustrating things in the world. It’s not all bad, there’s a lot of reasonable people out there and it’s a joy to help them. However I swear for everyone of those there’s approximately 1.5-2 dickish idiots. Here’s a few examples of the average form of queries we get:

“Hey I have something from you and something broke, nothing works”
- Hey buddy, mind telling us what that something is? What makes you think it’s broken? What’s the symptoms?

“YOUR SYSTEM IS STUPID, I CAN’T USE IT. IT DOESN’T DO ANYTHING I EXPECTED IT TO. GIVE MY MONEY BACK!”
- Did you ask about your requirements or look at any of our product information? You can’t expect your money back just because you threw money at a product without checking any minute detail of if it suits your needs. That would never work in a retail store.

“I notice you have a rather extensive list of guides, however I am strongly opposed to the idea of self learning. Can you please baby step me through everything and stay on the line for 40 minutes instead of me making any attempt to resolve the issue myself?”
- Why yes, I don’t mind completely destroying the queue for all other customers and wasting 8x greater than the target call length on the fact you don’t know what a browser is

“I have an issue with a product that isn’t yours, can you help me anyway?”
-No, just no.

“I don’t believe you that the fault isn’t on your end, I’m going to stay on the line until you work magic somehow. You can do magic right?”
-Nope, I can’t. If the issue isn’t on our end there’s no magic button I can hit to fix it, you need to go to the damn provider I told you has the problem and stop wasting our time. I get this from customers who clearly have an issue on the part of their email/web/DNS server when they only have a domain registered with us, they’re damn near impossible to get off the phone.

“I want to speak to your manager, I’m certain he’ll say something different because I want to be difficult”
-I am a manager myself, I stick to the letter of company policy. You’re going to get a near identical answer

“A hacker broke my site, my site is the most important thing to my business. FIX IT!”
-Your site is the most important aspect of your business and it didn’t strike you as important to retain a copy yourself, are you kidding?

Your server is broken, my site looks different in Internet Explorer than in other browsers”
-Internet Explorer is a steaming turd of a browser, it’s not our fault it renders pages differently. Go bother Microsoft.

“[insert irrelevant wall of text outlining your background as an "IT professional"] on my domain ivemisspelledthis.com”
-Thank you for so courteously providing such a long read with no relevant information then misspelling the one important piece of information that allows me to at least attempt to look into the problem you haven’t described. tl;dr

“Hi, I value my money making website highly enough that I literally searched high and low to purchase the absolute most tight arse option possible to host it. Despite you meeting all uptime guarantees and everything to the letter of your agreements and terms of service I think you owe me X number of dollars for an hours down time.”
-I think the above doesn’t need comment but…seriously, if your website is critical to your business get your own fucking server when you’re making thousands per day off it you could probably splurge a bit more than ~15 cents a day you fucking idiot.

Call me jaded, cynical, unsympathetic but in my opinion if you’ve got any of the above attitudes then don’t bother contacting us. People have a chip on their shoulder when they contact support at an IT company because they seem to think we’re making fun of them or that we just don’t understand them because we “know computers”. That’s not the case, we get angry when customers are unjustifiably angry at us. We don’t always know the answers, a lot of the time it’s a simple matter of logic/initiative which many people don’t even attempt to apply themselves. Just spare a thought for the guy behind the desk working day in day out to try and keep your services running, we’re here to help; you just need to be a calm and reasonable person.

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not Apple’s biggest fan but I was sad to hear that Steve Jobs has died. While I don’t agree with a lot of Apple’s business ethics there’s no denying that Steve Jobs was an outstanding businessman who had a profound effect on computing. Apparently there’s a couple of people out there that like him dead though:

It’s been ages since my last post so I thought I’d give an attempt at something useful for the interwebs. Tvmobili is a free DLNA server I’ve recently become familiar with. There’s a million and one ways of streaming media and DLNA is one of them, personally I’d prefer SMB but with an XBOX 360 being part of my network DLNA was a must for my new home server so this was my solution. The server is running x64 Debian which has posed a problem; tvmobili is only compiled to run on 32 bit. There’s a simple solution for this which I’ve listed below. Take note, I use sudo so if you don’t have the sudo command installed and configure login as root or type “su” enter and login as root. These instructions should work for many debian based systems:

1. Download the tvmobili *.deb package, logged into a terminal I used wget http://www.tvmobili.com/binaries/stable/tvmobili-debian-linux-i386.deb
2. Install 32 bit libraries if using x64 linux, these are required to run 32 bit software:
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
3. Install TvMobili:
sudo dpkg -i –force-architecture tvmobili-debian-linux-i386.deb (you can forego the –force-architecture on a 32 bit install)
4. Check tvmobili started properly:
ps -e | grep tvmobilisvcd
If this command shows any result then the tvmobili daemon is running
5. Login to configure tvmobili, you can do this from the same machine by visiting http://127.0.0.1:30888 or on the same local network by going to your server_hostname:30888 (where server_hostname is your hostname) or the ip_address:30888 where ip_address is your server’s IP. From here you should be able to follow the guides on their site regarding configuration, here.

If all went according to plan that should be all that’s required, give tvmobili a while to index all your content, though it is rather speedy and took only a matter of minutes to index about a terabyte of my own data (though this was on a 4 disk RAID so it had a lot of disk read speed). You can monitor this on the status page of the tvmobili configuration page. It should automatically become visible to all DLNA clients on your network.

Just picked up this great piece of tech, typing from if now. Will post up a proper review soon

Edit: So much for that, there are a million and one reviews out there now so it’s not like the world needs another.

Jesus Christ Apple, could you guys try any harder to be the biggest dicks on the planet? Check out this. It seems Apple have decided that as they are unable to beat their competition with technology in a fair market they’d rather file bogus patent infringement claims and try to impede their competition from being able to sell their products. It’s pathetic and I encourage everyone of my 2 readers to boycott them. No company deserves to be rewarded for this sort of behaviour. It’s an unethical form of business and stifles innovation through competition.

In the last few months Apple has filed against Samsung as well and probably a bunch of minor yet just as frivolous suits I’m not aware of. If anyone is disbelieving of me, check out Wikipedia’s article on Apple’s litigation hijinx. They sued the city of New York for using “a stylized apple design” for “Education services, namely, providing public service announcements on policies and practices of the City of New York in the field of environmentally sustainable growth”. They sued Woolworths over their new logo which looks remarkably unlike the Apple Inc logo. Where does it end? Does Apple Inc have it in for our much loved tree-growing fruit next for being a “clear infringement” on their IP?

So, I heard a little story today, apparently America’s antichrist Osama Bin Laden is now deceased. Nothing much to say on that. Bye.

Aside from that I’ve recently discovered a great app for streaming internet radio to an Android or iOS based device, check out Tune In Radio.

Today marks the death of the greatest cat I’ve ever known. Before meeting this guy as a kitten I didn’t even like cats. I’ll miss all his quirks and uniqueness, goodbye mate.

So the Bugera 6262-212 did eventually arrive. It sounds amazing, so powerful on the lead channel that I haven’t really played above about 3/10 on the volume. Ears will bleed with this baby. Here’s a video of me giving it a bit of a test with some of my own riffs:

Here’s a pic of the amp:

And the new guitar which for the moment has the title The Blue Beast:

I need to do a bit of setup on the new guitar before I can get a vid of them working together. The previous owner had it tuned to B standard

I’ve just bought myself a Bugera 6262 on eBay and I’m now eagerly awaiting it being shipped to my office. It should be a nice challenge to get this 28.5kg monstrosity home. It’s a clone of a Peavey 6505+, I’m aiming to knock down walls with this thing. Check out the video below for a demo of this amp (though it’s the half stack version rather than the 2×12 combo I’ve purchased).

Who in their right mind would ever want to run a Windows server? Intelligent programming that can “think” for itself is useful, but I’m pretty sure the “mind-of-it’s-own” behaviour of Windows machines is unintentional. At work we had our phone server crash because it was running on a Windows server platform, the server decided to install some automatic updates and force a reboot. A forced reboot on a server, really Microsoft?

I’ve recently been testing a Virtuozzo virtualised Windows Server 2008 VPS, which has been nothing but a painful experience. I even had something crash, that prevented me from restarting the server! On the other hand I’ve had nothing but good experiences with a Virtuozzo Linux VPS running CentOS.

On a different note, a million thanks to a certain Microsoft MVP who is helping me to obtain a licensed copy of Exchange for testing purposes. Time to cram a weeks worth of drinking into my one day weekend and reach Prestige on Black Ops. Anyone who’s with me I’m nitestick89 on XBL.