NewlyWeds

Posted: Thu 25 March, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, Media, Technology, Twitter | Leave a comment »

One of the funniest Twitter things this year was NewlywedsOnTJob , a prank by a best-man, automatically recording every time the newly-married couple went at it – start, stop, times, “frenzy index”, “Judge’s review”, the lot. It was very funny to just get the updates saying they were at it again – sometimes in the middle of the working day – and ended up with twenty-odd thousand followers all told.

Things went quiet at the end of February, when Best Man had said he’d be telling the groom about the prank. I hadn’t heard anything, so today did a quick search and found the end of the NewlyWedsonTJob story at I Am Staggered.

It’s well worth the read – made me laugh, anyway.

Shit, Meet Fan

Posted: Sat 23 January, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Technology, Work-related | Leave a comment »

It’s been a quiet couple of days here on D4D™, and with good reason.

On Thursday, the database at work died in spectacular fashion. It’s been getting shaky for a while, but this week it keeled over totally, and since then I’ve been putting in silly hours getting things back to something approaching usable.

The problems are many, but basically the entire site – user-facing and company-facing – is database-driven. Without the database, there’s no business. It just grinds to a halt. So it’s been a case of “fix the essential bits, deal with the rest later”.

The other main problem is that the database was originally written as a proof-of-concept, a basic thing that’s then been extended and extended. Think of the original as a bungalow. The current site, all built off that bungalow, is the size of an airport, and all balanced on the roof of that original bungalow.

Because it wasn’t written with “the big picture” in mind, some of it is downright fucking nasty- and I suspect the original developer was also learning as he went along. For example, there were no date columns in there ’til I came along – instead it all used some very dodgy string-handling to figure out dates.

One of the main tables in the database now has 170,000 records in it. Which (in the database scheme of things) is nothing. Well, until you realise that each of those 170,000 records has 180 fields in it. That one database table is 600Mb in size. Oops.

So the last couple of days have been spent in Database Intensive Care. I’m through the brunt of it now, but it’s meant that other things – food, sleep, relaxation, D4D™ – have taken a back seat. I’m still going to be working on stuff around this for the next week, but things should be a bit calmer now that the urgent repairs are done, and it’s now more a case of fixing the underlying issues.

Thank fuck my assessment isn’t next week.

Slimline Plug

Posted: Wed 11 November, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Creativity, Geeky, Technology | Leave a comment »

via bsag, I think this slimline plug is an absolutely fantastic idea.

UK 3-pin plugs are pretty sturdy, but if you’re carrying a couple of power cords around – or phone chargers, laptop power bricks etc. – then you quickly become aware of how bulky they are too.

The design of the slimline plug is aimed at getting round that, and seems to work really well. Even better are the adapters that allow three or four slimline plugs to be used in a space similar to that of a normal three-pin plug.

Email Fuckwittage

Posted: Fri 30 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Security, Stupidity, Sweary, Technology, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Following on from the post a while back about the Marketing Manager for the Ireland distributor of a Japanese car sending out a marketing email with all the addresses CCd in instead of BCCd, I’ve had a couple more instances this week of email fuckwittage.

First of all, an email from a recruiter at Modis International (an Agency I dealt with once) who pimped out an email again using CC instead of BCC to throw it to loads of people. Even better, there were a number of fuckwits who then exacerbated the situation by using ‘Reply to All’ rather than ‘Reply’, and thus ended up spamming everyone themselves.

The second instance is even better though – at work, we’ve been setting up a secure site with SSL, and the company being used for the SSL certificate tried to email the equivalent of me@www.site.com instead of me@site.com . And tried it three times, without understanding what the problem was.

So all told, it’s been a bit of a week for fuckwits.

Firefox vs. AVG

Posted: Tue 15 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Technology, Work-related | 5 Comments »

As part of setting up the new laptop over the weekend, I’ve installed (among other things) AVG for anti-virus and Firefox as my main web-browser.

Bizarrely, I found that when I was entering a URL in Firefox, the Enter key wasn’t working – I had to click on the ‘Go’ arrow in order to get it to go to the URL. Now, I never click to go to a URL, always just type it in and whack Enter, so this was going to be something that was deeply annoying if it stayed around.

It turns out that AVG installs a toolbar/add-on in Firefox called “AVG Safesearch” and for some reason it’s that add-on that was breaking the functionality for the Enter key. I don’t know why this is the case – it strikes me as just something that hasn’t been tested properly.

But if you’re having a problem with the Enter key not working in Firefox, the first port of call is to check you’re not running AVG Safesearch. As soon as it’s disabled, everything works fine.

Most odd.

iPhones Galore

Posted: Tue 25 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, iPhone, Technology, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

On the journey into London yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice how ubiquitous the iPhone now is – it seems like everyone and their dog has one.

When I used to commute in to London from Bracknell, Blackberrys were the thing everyone had – or at least all the “Look at me, I’m so important” fucksticks had, anyway.

While I do agree that iPhones are a nice bit of kit, I’m still not convinced I’d actually use one if I had one. That lack of a “proper” keyboard is (for me) still a significant factor, as most of what I do on a phone involves typing – text messages, emails, SSH connections to servers for admin, that kind of thing.

But there’s also the ubiquity of it that’s (for me) detracts from any desire to own one. It may be childish, but I have a built-in reaction to doing “what everyone else does”, and while it’s not an over-arching reason for not getting one, it certainly contributes.

Migrating Contacts

Posted: Mon 3 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, iPhone, Stupidity, Technology | Leave a comment »

As I said yesterday, one of the more interesting challenges with Herself’s new iPhone was getting the contacts to transfer across from her old Samsung G600 phone to the iPhone.

When it comes to contacts and phonebooks, Samsung are – to be polite about it – bloody awful. They don’t support useful standards like SyncML (basically a standard set of markup for addresses, contacts etc.) and instead stick to their own proprietary method. And their phones really don’t like giving up their data. In this case, it wouldn’t even send the information via BlueTooth, or save the details from the phone onto the SIM in order to transfer that across.

In short, a fucking abysmal experience when it comes to transferring away from a Samsung phone to anything else. (If memory serves, even Samsung to Samsung is a pain in the arse, let alone Samsung to anything else)

On my Sony-Ericsson phone, I can regularly sync the phonebook up to an online service called Zyb, who make the entire process pretty painless for phones that support SyncML. It also gives you a backup of the entire contacts database, which can be useful if (for example) you lose your phone, or have it stolen. They’re now owned by Vodafone, but in a fit of surprising sanity, Vodafone haven’t locked out non-Vodafone users from the service.

Through Zyb, when I upgraded my phone at the end of last year, importing the contacts etc. took ten minutes, and was one of the smoothest examples of that procedure I’ve ever done.

Anyway, on checking, it turns out the Zyb supports the iPhone – so that seemed to be the way to go.

After that, the process was fairly simple.

  • Sign up Herself with an account at Zyb
  • Install the iPhone app for Zyb (they even provide a link to it in the sign-up process, so it includes all the information necessary)
  • Type in all the contacts from Herself’s Samsung, setting it up with correct addresses, merging mobile/contact/home/work numbers into one contact where necessary
  • When done (about an hours work) sync the Zyb contacts onto the iPhone
  • Job done.

Of course, if Samsung supported SyncML (or any other decent service) then it would’ve been a max of ten minutes to sort out. As it was, it took an hour.  It could’ve been worse – far, far worse – if we’d been trying to do it via SIM or BlueTooth and then had to reorganise everything on the iPhone.

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