When I started this blog it was a way of airing the process of completing a large tedious project and to rant about things that I would otherwise keep bottled up. I guess I didn’t think anyone would be interested in my inane drivel. My bud Ian is a regular visitor, I can see by the hits I get from his ISP and the platform he uses. Frequently I get hits from futher afield referred by Blogspot’s “next blog” button, and it great to have new people come and look around. Best of all are those hits that come from the site itself. The fact that these guys were not sent here by another link means they came back. Now that is pretty cool.
So to all the people that came back, welcome back & please leave some messages. If you disagree or agree with something I have said or just want to say what kind of job I’m doing, leave some comments. Any press is good press, right?

Voice over IP is part of the next big thing (NBT). It is one of those technologies whch need other things to catch up before it makes it really big. There is a bit of a war going on for our cash between several different camps who want to be the next AT&T or BT.
The main player that everyone has heard of is skype. Skype started out small but through word of mouth has caught on and eventually was bought by ebay (bizzarely), I think in an attempt to get the NBT in their portfolio.
Ebay don’t seem to have done much with it however and the initial guesses of “talking to your buyer online” have not come to fruition.
Meanwhile, stealthily, an organisation called SIPhone (a long time exponent of an open VoIP registry and hardware) have developed a product called Gizmo Project. Its a fully featured phone, directory and best of all its open and free.
Looking into the two products it turns out that there’s a thing or two you need to know about Skype. Firstly the Skype Protocol is propriotory and closed. They could be doing anything with the data running back and forward and no one apart from Ebay (and perhaps the NSA or GCHQ) would know how exactly it works or what they are doing with your conversaions.
Secondly, Skype aparently uses a kind of bandwidth sharing technology which routes data through other Skype users connections, using their bandwidth.
Gizmo, however, does not share your wealth and is altogether better behaved.
Have a look at gizmoproject.com, its a cool thing.

I, like most people have lapses of good cheer every now and then. At the end of a day like this one I think I have earned the right to be a little grumpy. Not the all out depression that comes with things really going bad of course, that is reserved for special occasions, but mildly grumpy.
Work has been busy. Ian is off on holiday for the week and there is just the two of us responsible for third line support and all the integration for the project so I’m doing all of it at the moment. I don’t begrudge him his time off, he’s earnt it as much as anyone, and we get back a happier Ian when he has had some time away which is better for all of us, but as I said, its busy, that is why I finished work at 8pm this evening.

I drive to work every day and the company provide a parking spaces, which is great in central London.
I normally park in the biggest of our car parks which is used in the evening for the articulated lorries to wait until the presses roll.
Most days I park on the right hand side of the car park away from the lorries but this morning I was a little late so I parked at the end of the car-park.
Normally we are called by security if our cars are in the wrong place after 7pm and tonight I left at 8pm but wasn’t called so thought it was OK.
Walking out with our accountant, we moaned about the weather and a couple of other things then joked about looking on the negative side of life. Just to cap it all I said that I wonder what state my car was in as I was a little late going to move it.

I walked into the car-park and there was a lorry near to my car. I gestured to the driver, who was getting back in his cab, that I would move my car so he could reverse without worrying where it was. I was obviously too late. He had already reversed into my car destroying the rear passenger side wing, window and roof. Because the trailer pushed the car forward it seems to have messed up my front suspension too, pushing the wheels against the large logs in front of the car which scraped as I reversed out of the space. Nice.
I kept my temper under check and took the guys detail, the details of another driver who was parked on the other side of my car and reported the accident to security.

So after taking copious pictures of the damage when I arrived home, I installed a plastic window made from a recycle bin bag and LOTS of tape, then parked it as close to my fence as I could in case some little darling takes advantage of an easy in.

Tomorrow, the joy of Insurance

Well it goes to prove how much of a motivator a bit of cash can be. Someone has cracked the XP on Mac issue.
Regardless of this valient effort, I still think it sucks that MS dumped EFI. They are a backward looking company. Respect to them for supporting legacy kit but there comes a time when you have to move on to new technologies.
Perhaps we will see MSBIOS coming real soon instead, with all that lovely DRM stuff built-in to the system (like Apple in fact!). They won’t be tied to one or two chip manufacturers or bios writers.
It makes sense for MS in a lot of ways and will make it more difficult for the OSS croud too.

With Apple’s introduction of Intel based Macs, the world of tech was hoping for a choice. We were collectively hoping that we would have the choice to run our Macs with OS X and be happy pretty much most of the time. Occasionally, when the needs arise, we would boot into Windows on the same machine and do our stuff then boot back to Mac.
The more hopeful thought that with the addition of a program like WINE or the like, we wouldn’t even have to reboot, just fire up the application and have access to all those pesky PC applications that have yet to arrive at the Mac’s superior door.
Apple, being the pain in the arse forward thinking company they are, chose to dump Open Firmware and ignore BIOS (rightly), instead plumping to adopt Intel’s EFI firmware for the new hardware platform. The result is that Windows XP will not run on the new machines despite them being essentially just PCs under the shiny covers.
No problem (we thought), we’ll just wait until MS Vista, the new great hope for Microsoft. Vista, in it many guises was going to support EFI and all would be good with the world.
This week a Microsoft engineer at an Intel developer conference dropped a bombshell. Most versions of Vista will not support EFI, instead they will only use BIOS. EFI support, as it currently is under Win2003 Server, will only be offered in Vista 64Bit server version.
One has to ask why this is the case. Why would MS remove this support from their core product, surely they are not that scared of Apple. Their reasoning was this, there aren’t enough machines with EFI support to warrant the development of EFI support.
Hmm, does the phrase “chicken and egg” come to mind? Of course no-one is making 32bit mobos with EFI, the primary OS provider for the platform doesn’t support it.
Developers are crying out for the extensible clean architecture that EFI provides, but no-one is going to spend time and money on it. Intel have an EFI chipset of course, Apple are using it in the new Macs, so it is more than possible.
Looking at the UFEI website, the EFI trade association, all the major manufacturers are affiliated; Dell, IBM, AMI, Microsoft, Phoenix, odd then that there is an apparent dearth of mobos to run it on.
Personally, I think it is a time issue. MS are so behind shipping Vista, more and more planned features (and I mean core features not just the fancy bits) are being chopped out to meet their targets. Apparently “Steve” once said that “real artists ship”. Perhaps Mr Gates, Ballmer et al are taking some advice.

Having spent more time than I care to remember helping others with their computer issues, I have become acustomed to a general lack of gratitude from the people I help.
There are some of course that I have become “mates” with over the years here, and they seem to appreciate what I do, but there are others, sometimes closer to departmental home, who couldn’t give a rats arse because they feel it is “your duty to do what you do”.
I try to execute my tasks with the attitude of “how would I like to be treated” (well most of the time any way – we are all allowed BOFH tendancys some days), and am somewhat thick-skinned to it all. I enjoy my job (a rare thing) and enjoy it more when I do it well (alas, also a rare thing:-) so it kind of works for me more than them.
So anyway, I was helping chap from the department that deals with all the PC systems today, with a piece of software that he normally uses on XP but which he was trying to run through a web browser on the Mac. We had the usual difficulties with the proxy server settings, which we just worked our way through and eventually managed to get the application working, and although this wasn’t the ultimate goal, it was a stepping stone to where he wanted to get to.
I guess we must of spent a good couple of hours on and off on the issues with him making numerous visits to my desk and me his.
The problems were compounded by the fact that he was Mac first timer, but by persistance we did it and he said an obligatory thanks and that was it.

After normal hours that night, I was still sitting at my desk absorbed with a new auditing tool we are evaluating, and the chap in question walked over. I smiled and kind of expected another question about Macs but instead he said that he wanted to thank me for all the assistance I had given him and it was a really big help. He was really sincere. After I realised that he had made the point of walking accross the room, opposite to his way out, just to say thank you.

Its made my day.
I guess it really is the little things that count.