Author Archive for Rhys

Vista’s point of maturity

Published
by
Rhys
on November 30, 2008
in i-think IT
. 0 Comments

There’s been a lot of bad press about Windows Vista. Some of it warranted, but a lot of it seems to be just jumping on the Anti-Vista bandwagon. Let’s face it, there is a large (or perhaps just vocal) community out there that automatically dislikes anything coming out of Microsoft. Within this community it is “cool”.

I admit that I’ve been drawn to Linux in the past and I believe Linux does indeed have its place, but in the current form (and all the directions I’ve seen) I would never recommend it for general use by the community (both technical and non-technical) and would absolutely recommend against it in an enterprise environment (unless of course there were some very specific needs that Linux met better).

Working with the .NET Framework over the past 12 months I have been amazed by its richness and power. I love .NET’s generics implementation, a feature whose need becomes evident very quickly. But most importantly I have been impressed with the tools. Visual Studio 2008, IntelliSense and the MSDN library help bring joy to the activity of development. Perhaps even more importantly, they provide the opportunity to expand knowledge rapidly.

Best of all is that Microsoft is not standing still. They are rapidly advancing the .NET framework and working on new exciting developer and testing tools that will be part of Visual Studio 2010.

Microsoft has recognised its mistakes with Internet Explorer and has done incredible work with Internet Explorer 8. Bringing standards compliance to the Internet’s most dominant web browser is no mean feat and to achieve it with minimal disruption will be an outstanding achievement. I am confident that Microsoft will be able to do this and we will see more innovation in the web browser industry.

Two weeks ago I bought an Xbox 360 of my very own and have been absolutely thrilled with the console, the games and the recent improvements to the Xbox dashboard (including the ability for me to finally run my Xbox at my monitor’s native 1680 x 1050 resolution). The Xbox 360 controller is a huge improvement on the original and far friendlier on the hands than its Playstation counterpart.

Microsoft’s mice are among the most comfortable that I’ve used. Sure, they’ve had a few that don’t quite meet the mark, but I’ve been generally impressed with Microsoft’s mice for over ten years.

Then there is Microsoft Office. The 2007 release was a risky endeavour with the new ribbon UI. An interface that I feel has worked to improve most regular operations. Still, I accept that such a massive shift can be frightening for users, although not having to trawl through menu screens may provide some compensation. The ribbon UI was the most prominent new feature of Office 2007 which unfortunately overshadowed some of the great improvements to the templates which finally made it easy to create great looking documents.

And finally back to Windows Vista. Drivers were always going to be an issue, but by now this has been addressed and those manufacturer’s that haven’t updated their drivers are probably not worth dealing with (ignoring legacy hardware). User Account Control (UAC) is arguably not as big a problem as is suggested. Sure, IT professional’s are constantly tinkering with the innards of Windows, but an extra warning when I install software is perfectly acceptable. Indeed once a computer has been set up, these prompts are rare to non-existant unless you find yourself downloading software often (which is arguably a high level action anyway).

All up I’m quite happy with Windows Vista and have realised that sometime in the past six months I have shifted from being hesitant to recommend it to being confident in making the recommendation. I’m not suggesting that everyone should rush out an upgrade (most people that should probably have), but if you are buying a new computer, go with Windows Vista.

And while we’re on the subject, make sure your new system is ready for Windows 7. I can’t wait.

Ads in search results

Published
by
Rhys
on November 21, 2008
in i-think IT
. 0 Comments

Am I the only one sick of overly wide ad terms when conducting searches? Searching for “Windows 7″ produced an ad suggesting I was able to buy “Windows 8″ online today. This is just poor.

I know eBay is pretty bad with them on Google, so it isn’t a problem limited to Live search.

Movember

Published
by
Rhys
on November 3, 2008
in i-think
. 0 Comments

A while ago I shaved off my beard. Now I’m letting some of my facial hair grow back in the form of a Mo for Movember. This lip-tickling effort is about raising awareness (and hopefully money) to help address men’s health issues, especially depression and prostate cancer.

I’m not asking you to turn your head and cough, but you can help by donating. Hell, you can donate online at my Movember page using either credit card or even PayPal. How cool is that? There site is nice and secure and even makes the address bar turn green in Firefox! My internet banking site only recently got on that bandwagon.

Talking about wagons and things that are old and obsolete, seems that even cheques are acceptable! Just write a cheque payable to ‘Movember Foundation’, referencing my Registration Number 1835396 and mail it to:

Movember Foundation
PO Box 292
Prahran VIC 3181

And I haven’t even mentioned the best bit yet. Not only can you give money away while I grow my magnigificent Mo, but you can also give a bit of a smack-down to the tax man. As usual, donations over $2 are tax deductable. It’s a whole world of awesome.

If you are a tight-arse (you know who you are) you can always grow your own Mo and ask others to cough up the dough.

Of course if you do give money (remember you can donate online) it will go towards continuing to raise awareness of men’s health issues through the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - the national depression initiative. The PCFA and beyondblue will use the funds to fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and depression. You can’t ask for more than that. Well, you can, but it’s probably better than what you would have spent the money on. The wonderful people at Movember (it’s not just a month) have even detailed what they do spend the money on.

I’ll be posting some pictures of my Mo once it starts to properly set in. While you are waiting, why not make a donation?

Mo On!!

Your travel survival plan - Part 2

Published
by
Rhys
on October 11, 2008
in The Mill
. 0 Comments

Moving alert readinessNow that you’ve organised your duress words it is important to consider what actions you want taken when a duress word is received. Finding the right balance between a simple phone call and declaring war against a foreign country can be difficult, but is an important step to get right. Aim too high and your safety line back home may be hesitant to act (in which case you need a better safety line), too low and you may be found too late lying in an icy bathtub sans two kidneys.

The action that you choose to take should take into account the possible situation that you are in. For instance, if you have agreed to call every 30 minutes and miss a call in, phoning back is not a useful safeguard if the battery in your phone has died. For this reason it can be beneficial to split communication methods so as to not allow for a single point of failure. For instance, you may choose to write three blog posts within 24 hours to inform your safety line that you are still alive (for now) and even give away information on your whereabouts (photographs are especially good, doubly if they include Geocodes). Unfortunately this mechanism is susceptible to attack, and could also become unavailable if the country you are visiting happens to ban your website (again a potential single point of failure). You may even be travelling in an area where they don’t have internet access or mobile phone coverage.

Depending on where you are travelling and how much you want to mitigate risk you may need to invest in a good satellite phone (or two), an EPIRB satellite beacon or simply forego the holiday and spend the time in your fallout shelter, shotgun in hand watching the door. You do have a fallout shelter, right?

Better yet, why not utilise the system that has been used throughout time and take a buddy with you. At least then if you both lose your kidneys you get a wonderful shared experience to end your vacation.

Your travel survival plan - Part 1

Published
by
Rhys
on August 10, 2008
in The Mill
. 0 Comments

Recently a close friend travelled to China for many weeks. Whilst I can’t think of a good reason to go to China for pleasure, he certainly has (I have heard something about some little sports competition they have going at the moment).

So, having now “hooked up” with someone he has has to turn back to his friends in Australia to perform a very important duty: “Keeping track of his kidneys”. Unfortunately this plan was enacted too late and didn’t have enough detail to properly react to this scenario. Fortunately he still claimed to have his Kidneys less than 24 hours ago, but I can’t be certain he has them at the time of writing.

Don’t think this is purely limited to the stealing of Kidneys. Other problems you need to keep aware of include:

  • Stealing other organs. Sure, kidneys are the main ones, but you’ve already crossed a line, so why not harvest some other organs while you are at it, such as your liver or corneas.
  • Kidnapping. Even if you don’t have anyone back home willing to fork out for your ransom, you may still be worth something to kidnappers who can send your bodyparts in the place of genuine kidnap victims in order to encourage the ransomee (is that even the right word? If not, it is now) to fork out the dough.
  • Slavery. Don’t underestimate your worth on the slave market.
  • Being accidentally married and thus being financially responsible for your new bride/groom’s entire family

So with all these things that can possibly go wrong who in their right mind would want to even travel overseas? I’ve heard culture and life experience are a couple of reasons.

So that you can continue having life experiences that don’t involve getting you addicted to drugs and becoming someone’s sex slave in their dungeon, you can arrange a plan to communicate your whereabouts and status to the outside world. Depending on the level of the problem, a quick call to the local embassy or a crack team of mercenaries will be ready to assist and extract you from any situation lickety split.

Unfortunately my friend consulted someone else to make these arrangements, who despite their many years of watching violent television and films has not been left as paranoid about how to prevent or deal with these situations as I. It’s important to take life lessons from movies.

The first and most important step is regular communication. How regular will be dependent on where you are going and what sort of access you have to communication equipment. Communication can be either one-way or two-way. If the communication is one-way you need to establish a protocol for verifying the validity of the communique and a plan if the communique is malformed. Most importantly is the need for a duress word. This word needs to be arranged in advance when their is a high degree of certainty that the person is not under duress.
Duress words

The best part about duress words is their ability to add extra meaning to your message. For this reason it is important to have more than one. Using these words you can communicate important information to give an approximate location, description of the problem and even a rough count of how large the team of mercenaries should be.

It is important that the duress words be able to be slotted in with your normal messages without arising suspicion. Poor choices of duress words include “help”, “I’m being kidnapped” and “get me the f@# out of here”.

Because the duress words are supposed to be so normal it is possible that a duress word may accidentally be used in a communique. That’s why it is important to have a procedure to follow when a duress word is received, a communique is late or malformed. Usually this procedure would have varying degrees of action as you increase your state of readiness. You can either use numbers or colours[1] (or a combination of the two) to help make it easy to determine where in the process you might be.

In my next post I’ll describe what steps to take as you move from one alert level to another.


  1. That’s right, colour is spelt with a “u” [back ↩]