The fruit flavoured consultant comes to town

Today was consultant day at work and we achieved quite a bit.
I am still not entirely sure why it didn’t work when we went solo but stone me if we haven’t sucsessfully bound a machine to AD/ OD and have mcx preferences working.
This particular exhibition of the black arts was pretty much done by lunch time and Mr C (onsultant) was quite pleased with himself afterwards (rightly so perhaps).

I did my best to document the procedure and am going to replicate it in full tomorrow from scratch to test the documentation, its the only way to be sure I captured it accurately. Why this is not already procedurised from the support site I have no idea. Perhaps it is a little too esoteric, I don’t know.
I guess the key to the whole solution is cleanliness, He cleaned all relevant Kerberos and password server databases which seemed to do the trick.

So now we just have to test the arse off it and spend extreme amounts of cash on storage and jobs a good’n

Mrs B is a bit grumpy, the hand is hurting and she has been in all day because of the snow (yes its been snowing). She doesn’t do “in” for long periods and is going a little stir crazy. The snow has all melted now so hopefully she can leave the house without fear of taking a tumble tomorrow for all our benefit.

Wifey in Hospital and things are not so terminal at work – life twists again.

My beloved has been in hospital today to have her hand fixed. Private med is great when you can’t get into the NHS. Considering she is a nurse herself, it is rather poor that they wouldn’t see her.
No matter, she has had the op and the best surgeon in the area to boot. Now there is just recovery time (4 weeks) and the hope that the nerve damage isn’t too great.
She doesn’t complain much, but I can tell its hurting a lot. Its times like this you realise how much you care for your partner isn’t it? If I could take the pain for myself I would.

On a more mundane note, there is light on the horizon at work.
It would seem our friendly consultant wasn’t quite so forthcoming with all the details about how to configure the system. The since quoted “50% command line stuff” to configure the system correctly, wasn’t initially mentioned and may be a clue as to why it didn’t work when we tried. I suspect much of the CL work is concerned with BSD’s dsconfigad command which tweeks the settings of the AD native plugin. I was lead to think that this was a propriotory plugin but they have again taken freeware to use as their own.
I am still learning the arcane art of *nix CL and although I can get by with extensive reading of the man pages, some stuff still doesn’t occur to me.

I am on holiday until Tuesday but the consultant is in on Wednesday for two days (at a serious cost to the company, I hope he gets it working) and I am looking forward to getting to the bottom of the whole thing.

I suspect much of these issues and concerns would not have arisen had we have attended the ACSA courses we have been plugging for the last year. Now that they are available we need to do them. The irony is that after June (with another feline release due), the exams we have already achieved will be void and we shall have to do the process again.

I have to agree with Mr Cringely, I think the Mac Mini is a delivery platform but there is something missing….

Bob Cringley recently suggested that the reason for the Mac Mini’s existence was to provide a platform for delivering films over broadband to HDTV. We already have something in the UK called HomeChoice that does the SDTV version of this (the Mac Mini looks like a HomeChoice box too!).
Blessed though the Mini is, there is the small matter of sound of course. The Mac Mini is limited to only two analogue audio channel outputs which would be fine for Dolby Pro Logic sound, however if the target user has a $20K HDTV plasma screen (they aren’t in the UK yet!) hanging in their living room you might expect him (or her, but probably him – a ‘her’ wouldn’t spend $20k on a TV, ‘hers’ are far too sensible and do not normally do that kind of thing), to have at least Dolby Digital if not some form of THX. However there is no optical out on the Mini which precludes all forms of normal digital connection i.e. Optical or Coax.
Perhaps this is what the long rumoured Asteroid is intended for and not GarageBand after all or are Apple just ahead of the game and planning for Firewire based audio?
The FireWire trade association list a number of high end surround sound amps with built in 1394 interfaces There is a very interesting white paper on their site here about just this, so FireWire may be the future to replace those ToS Link fibres we all know and love.
Time will tell I guess so look out for an Apple media event around July – August. This will give the dust around Tiger time to settle, 10.4′s h.264 media system will be vital for this strategy.

I think this will be another occasion where Apple will set the trend. Interesting times.

P.S., I am not spreading rumours here, just speculating on future products. As far as I am aware I have not divulged any information not in the public domain already. You really have to be so careful these days!

Sometimes its nice to have someone to argue with that won’t be scarred for life…

Its probably about time to introduce to this tale my fellow fruit worshipper Ian.

Ian has been working with me for about five years and does pretty much the same sort of stuff I do.
I thought it prudent to introduce him as I am sure I will be talking much of him later.

Everyone’s favourite fruit company scares the pants off me

I have always said that if you cut off one of my appendages I would bleed a rainbow (or a translucent shade of the colour blue – to keep it current) that’s how deep it runs in my veins, however my faith has been quivering somewhat this month as I find out more about their software. Superficially it is great and very pretty however deep underground there is trouble afoot.

I feel part of my job is to promote the use of their products around the company – everyone plays favourites after all and so I therefore sometimes go out on a limb a little and paint a nice rosy picture, in the faith that by the time we look at the product in question they would have made it work correctly and all would be cool.

We have been trying to find a way of making a directory service and associated network home directories work for our workstations on various back-end systems. The one we know works, the manufacturers own system, is not trusted by various elements among us (System Architect), so we have been looking for alternatives. First came the “solar” solution, and after about a year it was discovered that, due to reasons I can’t be bothered to explain, it just would not work. Incidentally we told them so – repeatedly, but the *nix guys refused to listen.
Now we are looking at an alternative system so when a representative from the “fruit temple” comes in with his consultant and states categorically that their software will work with our main enterprise middleware product, we were inclined to believe them – it would be fantastic and, well, they should know right?

Well it didn’t work and still doesn’t seem to when we built it again. At the moment my reaction is “Oh crap. We bet the farm on this one, it was the last option on the list.”

At this point I thought it best not to order the £90k of equipment poised to be purchased off the project budget and tell everyone to wait while we looked into it.

Said consultant is coming to work on site for a couple of days (at our expense) so we shall see next week, although I shall not hold my breath.

Best laid plans of mice…..

My upcoming trip to Switzerland has taken a minor setback today when I was told that my visit to a well known software manufacturers conference has been pulled by the IT director. The fact that I am going there anyway on the Sunday (the conference is on a Friday) for a training course and all ‘they’ had to pay, was for 2 nights hotel and the conference fees is beside the point.
Perhaps I upset him, I don’t know. I sent an email anyway to ask why (the news came third hand down the chain of command). I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.
Its a shame because not only would we get loads out of it but I was trying to persuade my beloved to join me out there. Oh well the best laid plans and all that.

Welcome to my blog.
In a desperate ploy to find an original name I chose Pushing Jelly Uphill, because like life, it just not very easy to do, is it?……

I suppose I should introduce myself.
I am Brad, a Mac technician at a large newspaper publisher in London, UK. and have worked here for about 10 years. I thought I would start this blog as a way of charting (some time down the road) the day to day stuff I come across. If any of the stuff I write annoys you, well change channel. If you want to say something constructive feel free to mail me (be nice though).

Needless to say, the views expressed here are mine and do not reflect in anyway the views of the company I work for. (sorry)

Well, in my pursuit of the ideal blog. tool, I am now looking at iBlog. So far so good. Yes I am a lightweight and should be bleeding PHP and stuff but I much prefer an easy life – hey that’s why I use Macs.

Oh and the rest of the phrase is (apparently) “Pushing jelly uphill with a toothless rake” quite difficult to do, I think you would agree.