Lenovo Support – A Cautionary Tale

I’m in the middle of an unpleasant customer support experience with Lenovo at the moment and wanted to share my experience as a “caveat emptor” for other potential Lenovo customers (at least here in Australia)

In the Beginning.

We start our tale with an online purchase of a nice, shiny Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro for my daughter for school at the beginning of the year. Being a school laptop it gets transported back and forth to school in a backpack each day. Much like my work laptops get carried around in my backpack each day on my commute.

A few weeks back a number of keys on her keyboard started falling off. The 3. The 2. Right cursor. Left shift. M. And before you ask; no, there’s no obvious damage to the machine. It hasn’t been dropped (that I can tell). There’s no dents. No cracked screens. No warping. Nothing that I could detect that would explain why the key caps are dropping off. I should’ve taken a photo.

Now I will admit that I tried to push the keys back on, thinking they’d just click into place, but without success. They kind of half go on, but then fall off again with the lightest of touches. I guess it’s time for a support call, so I jump on the Lenovo site and start a warranty request.

Failure to Launch

I get an confirmation message (without a reference number) saying I’ll get an email from them shortly with the details for returning the machine. But there’s no email. Not even in my junk mail. I wait a few days wondering if their “eventual consistency” system will catch up (if they have one). Still no email. Great. I guess I’ll need to follow this up myself and call support. A job for tomorrow, since I’ll need to grab the serial number from the laptop again.

But then I get a call from Lenovo asking me why I haven’t arranged to send in the laptop yet. Huh? I explain I haven’t received any emails from them as yet and then they tell me “Oh, yeah. We had some issues with our email systems. Sorry”.

Well at least we’re getting somewhere, so we arrange the details for the laptop to be returned and I’m told I’ll get an email with the forms I need to include for shipping when the courier arrives.

Attempt #2

You can guess what happens next. That’s right. Nothing. No email. I wait another day and decide this is ridiculous so I trawl through Lenovo’s web site until I can find a number to call (it’s not obvious). The service rep I talk to apologises, cancels the original service request and creates a new one, organising a new collection date with me over the phone. He also calls me back the next day to follow up and check I received the email. This time I did. That’s also showing signs of better service.

So now, we finally get the laptop collected and it’s returned to base for servicing.

A Ransom Situation

3 working days later I get a status update email from Lenovo saying a quotation is ready for me to approve. A quotation for a warranty job? Hmm. That’s not a good sign, but I need the laptop back regardless. They’ve got my device hostage, so I figure I’ll accept the quotation and then call support once 9am rolls around to ask why they want me to pay since the explanation of what is wrong is unclear.

Here’s what happens. First I bring up the service request:

Yes, the keyboard is damaged. The keys were falling off. Duh! So I click the “Accept” button.

And confirm acceptance. Here’s the response:

Oh, yay! Great system there Lenovo.

Negotiating a Release

So now I need to call support. I follow the prompts to check on the status of a job, but the phone system asks me to enter a 10 digit job number. Lenovo only gave me a 6 digit number. Um… genius. Way to go Lenovo.

So I follow more prompts through the phone system until I manage to talk to a human. I ask him why there’s a $200 charge for a warranty fix and I’m told it’s because of “induced damage”. Was I not meant to try pushing keys back on when they fell off? Would I have even tried to do this if they hadn’t fallen off in the first place? If I’ve somehow damaged the keyboard when trying to push the keys back on I could be at fault, though it’s some pretty poor customer service if that’s the case.

Unsurprisingly at this point I’m not a happy camper. Frustrated, I explain that even if I wanted to, I can’t accept their quotation because their systems are broken so I ask him to do it over the phone for me. The reply? I’ll call you back. What? Why? No thanks. I’ll wait on the line while you do it. It can’t take that long, surely.

Turns out that it can. It’s a “different department” that handles this and it will be 1-2 working days before someone calls me back to confirm. Are you kidding? 1-2 days to get someone to make a phone call? Can we drag out this repair any longer? I just want the laptop fixed and returned.

So here I am. Still waiting for Lenovo to learn how to make an inter-departmental phone call or to write an email to someone and I’m getting stonewalled. I’m reminded of our favourite insurance manager from the Incredibles.

I’m certainly not getting anywhere penetrating Lenovo’s bureaucracy at the moment so I’m doing the only thing I can and blogging about the experience instead.

As a note, my current work laptop is now 2 years old and due to be replaced. I was seriously considering a Carbon X1 since it looks like a great piece of kit but this experience has soured me. Support is really important, especially for someone like me who completely depends on my laptop for my job.

Lenovo, you’re definitely scratched from my list of approved vendors. Just fix my device, send it back and let’s hope we never have to deal with each other again.

Working as designed, and yet still a massive failure

I just ran across the sad story of yet another failed software project (I missed it first time since it happened across the Christmas period). In this instance we see Avon writing off a $125 million project to revamp their sales systems and doing so after the initial pilot deployment was met with so much hate and derision from their people that sales staff were resigning from the business in massive numbers rather than working with the software.

This is a project that was started in 2009 and it wasn’t until December 2013 when the project was (mostly) killed off. That’s a 4 year investment of hard work and sacrifice from so many people to produce, well, nothing. Actually, not quite true. They did produce the software world’s equivalent of anti-matter, a substance that destroys everything it comes in contact with. It damaged corporate reputations for both Avon and SAP (well, maybe not SAP since their reputation is already heavily tarnished), it’s decimated Avon’s largely voluntary sales force, strangled sales revenue and cash flow, and burnt through $125 million and 4 years that could have been spent on building something that was actually valuable and useful for the business.

The culprit? It’s hard to point fingers anywhere other than Avon’s poor management and the poster child for expensive enterprise software that’s almost impossible to install and use without bus loads of specialist contractors; SAP. Of course, SAP aren’t taking any blame. No sir! They’re blame shifting to other vendors and trying to throw them under the bus instead. No doubt the same bus that is now shipping out all those expensive SAP contractors, of course. SAP are saying that they only built the back end and it was those other incompetents who people built a front end with poor usability that is at fault. Sure, SAP, you sit there and pretend that a back end doesn’t define the business processes and doesn’t impact usability.

"Many representatives couldn't even get logged into the new website, and once you got in, the system was not accepting orders, it wasn't saving orders properly, and it wasn't reserving inventory."
- Karen Edwards, Avon

Yep,  sure SAP, that sounds like a ‘usability problem’ right there.

With so many people leaving, there’s a sadly high human cost to this failed project but combine it with statements like these, I start to get really upset with just how delusional Avon management and SAP must be:

"While the pilot technology platform [in Canada] worked well, the degree of impact or change in the daily processes to the Representative was significant, this resulted in a steep drop in the active representative count."
- McCoy, Avon’s CEO

“Head office kept insisting that the system was working, but it was not”
- Edwards, Avon

“[the] software was working as designed, despite any issues with the implementation of the project”
- SAP media statement

Hang on?! The CEO is trying to tell us that the project and the product are successful, even though it’s an obvious, abject failure? Could the management team’s collective head be stuck any further into the sand?  Could SAP be any more uncaring as to the result of their product? I’m staggered!

We can add to this evidence of the ‘Failure is not an option” mindset within SAP. There was obviously no Plan-B. No rollback if things went pear shaped as they did. Instead, they’ll just keep pushing on with their rubbish.

“The company reported it would continue to use the software in Canada to avoid further problems in that market”
- Information Week.

Further problems? Like what? Putting the old system back in place and trying to bring back at least some of their disgruntled sales people? I’m crying right now.

Now, if this was a one-off then maybe it’s forgivable as a $125m rookie mistake. But they’d already failed this way before. In 2011, they screwed up with Oracle, and a logistics ERP rollout in Brazil that contributed to Avon’s then-CEO resigning.

“The roll-out of an Oracle ERP suite underpinning core supply chain and finance operations has posed huge challenges for the company’s operations in Brazil”
-IT Decisions

The troubles around the implementation have resulted in large numbers of IT staff leaving the company in the last 18 months, according to the source. […] a separate large-scale ERP project was launched recently with a view of transforming other customer service areas. SAP was chosen to supply products for that body of work.
”The [SAP] project will be significantly more complex. And if we work on the assumption that the same difficulties around change will remain, it would be fair to say that this project will take six to seven years to complete”
- IT Decisions

2 years to learn from that failure and adjust how the SAP project was progressing and they did nothing. When will people learn that when it comes to building software, and especially complex software, that the failed methods of the past simply don’t work anymore? In fact, they’ve never really worked in the first place.

When will people learn to stop building large systems over many years and attempting to do a big-bang deployment, without a fall-back plan, and without ever genuinely engaging their user base first instead of just selling them on the promise of something awesome.

Sure, I get it. I’ve lived it myself. Large and complex systems are hard to build, but let’s not make it harder than it needs to be. Start by building something for a small subset of the end solution and prove it works. Incrementally grow from there to meet your goal. Get user engagement and feedback early, not just from the management team. If you do go down the wrong path and build something that turns out terrible you’ll know about it early and have time to adjust rather than forcing your steaming pile of effluence down people’s throats and watching them quit.

Identify the value in your system and deliver on the key high value items first, your minimum viable product. After that pile in all the other features you want over time and subsequent smaller releases. Who knows? Avon may have been able to save up to $50m if they’d failed with a much smaller product first. If they’d done that though, I suspect that we wouldn’t be talking about them at the moment.

Finally, be brutally honest and transparent with where a project is at. I can’t image the number of times people on the SAP project said there were problems and it was going to fail. I can’t imagine the countless times that project managers and senior execs who wanted to report that things were ‘green’ shut down anyone who voiced problems. I can, on the other hand, imagine the ego, politics and bluster that drove this project off the road, through the guard rails and over the edge, resulting in the disaster that somehow execs still believe is a success.

Oh, and for the love of all things good in this world, please stop using SAP and the horrible waterfall based project practices that seem to go hand in hand with that shambling behemoth.

References:

• Avon to Halt Rollout of New Order Management System (WSJ)
• Avon Pulls Plug on $125 Million SAP Project (Information Week)
• Inside Avon’s Failed Order-Management Project (Information Week)
• Avon’s Failed SAP Implementation (Forbes)
• An insider’s view of Avon’s ERP troubles in Brazil (IT Decisions)

View the Password of a Disconnected WiFi Network in Windows 8

Disclaimer: This post is a 'note to self' reminder post, though if you find it useful I'm happy I could help.

As a consultant I tend to jump around various networks and when working with other consultants it's not uncommon to need to share WiFi passwords for networks that you aren't currently connected to. The problem is, Windows 8 dropped the "Manage Wireless Networks" feature so this isn't as easy as it used to be but there is a simple way.

How to:
1. Open a command prompt
2. netsh wlan show profile name=[network name] key=clear

That's about it. Simple.

Credit to LifeHacker where I originally found the info.

P.S. netsh is also useful for deleting profiles of the various public hotspots you've used. Why? Just ask Troy Hunt and his Pineapple :-)

How do you find and consume technical content?

I’ve been asked by the publisher of my VS2012 book if I want to go on a second date with them and write a VS2013 one. At the moment I’m undecided. The publishing experience was great and the publisher was good to work with, but I’m not sure if a book is the best way to get content out there and into the hands of the most people.

I've been asked if I want follow up my VS2012 book with a VS2013 one. Thinking of writing the content as blog posts/video instead. Thoughts?
— Richard Banks (@rbanks54) June 10, 2013

I wrote the first book, in part, to better understand the publishing process and the rigor involved and from that perspective it was wonderful and I learned a lot. On the downside, writing the book meant I put the Talking Shop Down Under podcast on hold to make the time for it, probably permanently, and that was something I really enjoyed doing and was helping people learn.

Now I’m wondering if I should do something else to get content out there. Obviously I could do audio content, but does that really work for people, especially if it’s technical? Do I do longer content or short “did you know?” bite sized things? Do I put written content out there for reference? Do I do standalone video? Or maybe text content backed by video? Or try something else entirely? My mind is far from made up, I just know I want to do something that people enjoy and get value from, and that gets the widest reach.

If you wanted to learn something about visual studio, how would you find it? Book store/Amazon? Search engines? Somewhere else?  And once you found it, how would you like it presented to you?

Leave your thoughts as comments on this blog post, or ping me directly via twitter. I’m @rbanks54. Thanks!

My Geek Origin Story, what’s yours?

Yay! It’s Meme time, people.  This one started by @delic8genius (Michael Kordahi) who wants to learn your Geek Origin Story and see how we all got in touch with our inner geek.  So here’s mine…

For me I remember it all starting with the Atari 2600 and a little game called Asteroids, though looking back at photos from my earlier years I can see that the Atari was merely the trigger that brought the latent geek in me to the surface. I mean seriously, look at this photo of me as a little tacker and just ask yourself if that’s not a geek waiting to happen!  And no, that’s not a laptop backpack I’m wearing, though it could be! :-)

I spent days and weeks blowing up asteroids in space and leaping through jungles, swinging on vines and jumping over pits (Pitfall anyone?!), but that all faded to backstory when I went to a selective school and my parents decided it was good for my education if they splashed out on a Commodore 64.  The day that thing came home, my fate was sealed.  As a kid in primary school I remember the unboxing, plugging it into the TV along with the tape drive and an external floppy drive, turning it on and then seeing the blue screen, the blinking cursor and the READY prompt.  What now?! We could LOAD something from tape or disk, or we could crack out the programming books that it came with and explore the possibilities!  The games were great, but being able to type things into that C64 and watch them run was a revelation! Not only could I play games, and oh! how I played games, but I could write them as well!  I remember writing my own text based adventure games (they were crap of course) and building programs that would show animated running man sprites moving across the screen based on how the joystick was pushed.  It was a marvel, pure and simple.  Being able to make the computer do what I wanted based on my decisions and actions and see the results on screen.  Mwahahaha! The power! The unlimited, unfettered POWER!!! *Cough* *Ahem* Yes, what was I saying? I think I got carried away with myself there…

So I’m sure my parents wished I would go play sport with the other kids on the street more often than I did, but I knew I’d never be great at that.  Computers however? Different story.  I controlled the universe there.  They made sense to me.  I could figure out how it all fit together.  I could PEEK and POKE with the best of them.  I got so much joy, fun, fulfilment and square eyes from playing games and writing software that I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.  You see, I’m a gamer, through and through.  I love playing games and programming is just another form of game.  A different form of accomplishment, but still the same sensation that you get from finishing a level or beating a boss fight.  Tell me you haven’t got some code working at times and fist pumped, or put your arms in the air in a victory pose! I’m sure this is how half of the world’s programmers started their coding careers – wishing they could spend all their time playing and writing games as cool and puzzling as Boulder Dash or Impossible Mission or Paradroid.  I’m no different.

So there you have it.  My geek origin story, what’s yours?

Windows Media Player and “In Use” External USB Hard Drives

I have a lovely new 1TB external hard drive and moved all my music onto it a short while ago.  Now even though I have iPods and iPhones, for playing that music from my laptop, ITunes on Windows is pretty poor so I’ve tended to use Media Player and, more recently, Zune for that task.

Now, as you would expect I wanted my music into these programs automatically I included the music folder in my library as shown:

Now given I’m on a laptop and I usually want to leave work at the end of the day I’ll Safely Remove the drive from my laptop before packing up, but now when I do I get either the infamous “Windows can't stop your 'Generic Volume' device because it is in use” message or the “Problem Ejecting USB Mass Storage Device” message as shown:

But I closed Media Player (and everything else) so it can’t be locking files can it?

Now, as it happens, in the past I’ve seen Windows Search Indexing locking external drives, but I’d already made sure that the drive isn’t indexed by turning off the flag in the properties window:

and if I look at the Indexing Options in Control Panel I see this:

You can see that the G: drive (the external) isn’t indexed, yet if you look at the location summary in the bottom pane there’s a folder called Music there.  What gives?

So I expand the G: drive settings and what do I see? That the folder is, in fact, indexed by Windows Search and it is very likely locking the drive.  What the…?! Why isn’t the G:\ drive showing with a greyed checkbox to indicate that one or more child folders are included.  Thanks for the great UI there, Microsoft.

So if I just clear it now, then I’ll be able to safely remove the drive, but this is what happens in Media Player’s settings:

Which of means that new items I add to my Music folder won’t automatically appear.  That’s not what I want.  In fact it sucks.

Maybe I should just use the Zune player instead? Unfortunately, by default, Zune relies on the Windows Media Player library settings, so to break the dependency I have to go into Zune settings and unlink the Zune folders from the windows libraries.

Now I can add the Music folder from the external USB drive and Zune will automatically index the folder and pick up changes to the contents, just as I wanted.  And it does it without keeping the drive locked when I exit the program.

So now when I want to go home, I can just close Zune and then safely remove the drive as I would expect.

 

Phew! Talk about a major pain in the butt! How is a normal, non technical person ever going to figure this out for themselves.  Maybe I should’ve just stuck with iTunes – at least it doesn’t lock your external drives on you.

R.I.P. Dear Desktop

Back at the start of 2009 I picked up an Alienware desktop (post and pictures here) and at the time it was perfect for my needs, and how I did love it so, but as theses stories go time passed and I found myself neglecting my desktop and spending more and more time with my other love – my laptop.  It’s what I use for my day to day work needs and as fate would have it where I ended up running almost everything that I once used my desktop for including my PC gaming since it has a decent enough graphics card and I get to take it with me when I travel.  The desktop has slowly been turning into nothing more than the place where I host my iTunes music collection.  Sad, I know.

Now recently this machine has been randomly shutting down. Initially I thought it was related to a video card driver update that had just came through shortly after Win 7 SP1, but it was a little too random and a driver rollback didn’t fix anything so I cracked open the case to check the internals, and what do I find? That the heat sink and cooling fan are loose in their mountings!  The plastic bracket used to hold the heat sink and CPU together had cracked and broken meaning that the CPU had only minimal contact with the heat sink.  This would explain the random shutdowns.

So now I have a decision.  Do I replace a few parts and get it running again or bid farewell to the desktop, and treat the laptop as the genuine desktop replacement it is?  I’ve decided it’s time to say R.I.P. dear desktop and time to spend all my time with just the laptop.  I’ll get an external HDD enclosure so I can still get my music and other files off the desktop drive, but that will be all.

So a question for you.  Would you do the same if it was you, have you long said goodbye to your desktop and think I’ve been a luddite for hanging on to mine for so long, or would keep the big box and use simply upgrade the motherboard and CPU, etc?  I’m curious.

P.S. If anyone wants to make an offer on a second hand Alienware desktop, needing a new CPU & motherboard with 4GB RAM and a decent graphics card, then let me know either via email or twitter.

Bravo, Suncorp! Bravo!

BYO Hardware at SunCorp

To quote:

“In what could prove to be a watershed moment for corporate Australia, financial services firm Suncorp will let thousands of employees use their personal computers, including Apple iPads, at work."

In case it’s not obvious, the approach taken means that the devices people choose to use will just be thin clients accessing Citrix virtualised applications and web based internal apps and I think it’s fair to assume that people will need to ensure anti-virus and firewalls are running on their devices where appropriate.

I for one think this is a great move and I hope more large enterprises follow suit.  The more places I can use my own hardware and the fewer places where I have to use horrible desktops, with awful keyboards and crappy screens the better.

Is The Way Hiring Happens Changing?

For those who don’t know (or just plain forgot) I run a weekly podcast for developers at http://www.talkingshopdownunder.com and in one of the episodes I talked with Matthew Wills about an idea I blogged about – the Developer Experience Index and wether we need one or not to improve the way we find and hire talent and raise the general skill level of the industry.

Interestingly I just ran across an opinion piece on GigaOm about the way hiring is changing and wether resumes are headed the way of the dodo - http://gigaom.com/collaboration/the-future-of-work-wont-contain-resumes/

It’s worth having a read, and most interestingly talks about the social networking aspects of hiring and how LinkedIn and your online presence in open source efforts can be a reflection of how well respected you are and wether you’re a good potential hire or not.

I still don’t think we’re there yet, but the aggregation of social networking information into a ranking of some kind is a very interesting approach to finding people, though likely will tend to favour those with the best connections or most popular projects, not necessarily the best developers for your team.  Still, if nothing else, it reflects passion and involvement, and without passion for what they do a developer is pretty much worthless.

Aw, Snap! (or How I got Hacked)

So there I am surfing the web and catching up on some blogs and news when I notice my Skype icon blinking away at me in the windows taskbar.  Hmm, someone’s sent me an IM, thinks I only to discover that Skype logged me out.

That’s weird I say to myself.  I guess I’ll just log in again. Click.  What? Invalid login?  Hmm.  Try again. Click! Click!! Click!!!  Dammit! What’s going on. Oh look – I just got an email.  It’s from Skype.

Aw, Snap!!!  (or insert expletive of your choice).

Yes, my Skype account had been hacked and on gaining entry the attackers had immediately changed the account password and email address on me, blocking me out.

Long story short, the good news is that after immediately contacting Skype they restored my account to me (thank you!!) in less than 2.5 hours and it only cost me a few euro in Skype credits and a few hours of panic.  Yet the whole thing was entirely preventable.

But How?

So the obvious question: how did it happen? Simple – I was stupid and lazy and forgot some of the basics of online security.  Doh!

You see, when I’d first used Skype years and years ago, it was way back in it’s early days and at that time I used an insecure password.  It was a dictionary word of all things – I know! I know! You don’t have to tell me! But because I was just trying the thing out I figured that if it was useful then I’d go back and change my password later on.  At the time I’d also clicked the auto-login option and let Skype sign itself in for me.

Unfortunately, because I never used it much early on I never went back and changed the password, and over time forgot what it was.  Kind of like when we tell ourselves we’re going to write those unit tests once we get this code working.  The reality is that we get distracted or do something else, forgetting to go back and clean up after ourselves. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Of course, at any point I could’ve done the “I forgot my password” routine, but as Skype kept logging itself in, I just forgot about it and fixing the password drifted to the bottom of my “stuff I should really do to be a good human being but that I’ll likely never get around to doing because I’d rather be sleeping or eating or having s..” well, cough, ahem, you get the idea.

Using a real word for a password all those years ago and not taking the one measly minute needed to fix it is pretty lazy of me, huh? Yet so many people do it.  And it could’ve turned out so much worse.  Thankfully that password wasn’t used anywhere else, so I didn’t have to worry about the hackers using that to break into other accounts of mine.

Of course, what irks me most is that these days I use KeePass and I’ve even blogged about it in the past (though I now use DropBox instead of Mesh for syncing), and I’ve read plenty of tales in the past of accounts being hacked and how easy dictionary based attacks are to pull off.  And yet here I am.  A victim.  Grrr. Dumb, Richard. Dumb!

So what are my lessons?  What do I learn from my dumbicity?

1. NEVER.  Not ever.  Not even on my deathbed will I use a weak password for anything.  Even if it’s a throw away account to register for some software trial that I’ll never use again.  I have Keepass and it can generate  passwords for me that are safe.

2. Never reuse passwords across sites.  Once a password is compromised on one site it’s compromised everywhere.

3. Keep my OpenId accounts extra secure.  If I lose an OpenId account I’d be really messed up, especially as these days the use of OpenId is increasing and more and more sites are accessed only via OpenId accounts.

4. Go and change all those other passwords I have just in case.  I can’t think of how many other sites I’ve used over the years that I no longer visit and where I may have old passwords laying around.  If one of those sites was compromised and I’ve reused that password elsewhere and not realised it, what else can the attackers get to?

So, enough beating myself up about this. I’ve learned my lesson.  Hopefully you can learn from my mistake as well and avoid being a statistic like me.

Bad Keyboard Design

I have to wonder at times what goes through designer’s heads and wether they use their own products.  Have a look at the following keyboard for a HP machine I’ve been given to use when on site.

Look at the size of that Shift key on the left there. The thing is about half it’s normal size, which of course means I keep hitting the key next to it far too often and screwing up my typing.  I have to train my hands to perform more finger gymnastics than is normal, and can’t easily slide my left thumb into position like I normally would (maybe I shouldn’t use my thumb for shift, but it’s a habit I’ve picked up from gaming and it’s hard to overcome).

But  maybe there’s a reason why they did it.  A reason why they cut the left shift key in half but kept the right hand one full sized?  Oh, there’s it is! It’s so they could add an extra (and duplicated) key on the keyboard! I for one know that the backslash and pipe characters are easily the most commonly used ones in my arsenal.  On my laptop the backslash key is so worn away from use I can hardly make out the symbols on it any more.  It’s worse than even the ‘e’ and return keys!  Thank goodness keyboard usability was sacrificed to add an extra one of those puppies!  Thank you HP! Thank you!

OK. Rant over.  Time to go steal a keyboard from someone else in the office, and while I do that why don’t you let me know what the most annoying keyboard design is that you’ve used or seen?

I’m Not Attacking You. I Promise!

 

It’s nice to know that you’re sanitising your user input but I’m pretty sure that my bog standard email address isn’t a SQL Injection attack.

Life without Flash, Acrobat, Air and Adobe

So I recently reached the tipping point of frustration and I got so sick of Adobe Flash causing problems on my system that I decided I’m over it, and over Adobe products in general.  The software they release is just so poor I don’t want it any more and I’d rather live without it even if there’s no valid alternatives.

I’ve now uninstalled all the Adobe products I can from my machine and disabled Flash extensions in my browsers where I couldn’t uninstall it and have been running like this for the past few weeks now.

As such I thought you might be curious as to how this is affecting me and my online life, so let me give you a run down on how I’m finding the experience now.

PDF Files

First up, the easy one.  Acrobat Reader.  140MB of installation and a reboot every time there’s an update.  Just to view PDF files? Seriously? Plus it’s fast becoming one of the more targetted security attack vectors now that Microsoft have picked up their game.  So I replaced Adobe Reader with FoxIt reader which is only a measly 10MB in size and it does a great job of viewing PDF files.  I don’t know why I didn’t dump Reader years ago – FoxIt is just so much nicer and so much faster!  No brainer decision, that one.

Flash on the Web

And what about the web experience? Flash is the choice du jour of interactive web sites and there are so many sites with flash on them that surely I won’t be able to live without it.  Now admittedly I could have installed a flash blocker and then turned flash on as and when I wanted to, but I was just so annoyed with Adobe I wanted to so get rid of their malware that I went the whole hog and disabled/removed the plugins from my various browsers (though Chrome was particularly annoying since I have to disable all plugins to remove Flash).

The experience without Flash isn’t always great, but I’m happy to deal with it.  Let me give you some examples of what I mean:

Google Analytics

I use analytics a bit to keep track of this blogs readership stats along with a few other sites I have.  Here’s what it looks like sans Flash:

I lose the funky charts but the data is still available.  I can definitely live with that.

General Web Sites

Still playing WOW? Meh.  Play a real MMO – one with great lore, an epic story line and no 13 year olds trying to trash talk you from 6,000 kms away.  Anyway – gaming choices aside, the lack of flash on many sites means no Ads.  Such a shame to lose them.  Really.  NOT!!

Grooveshark

I hit this site every now and then to listen to streaming music.  For Grooveshark and many other sites on the web Flash it the only option for streaming audio via web pages.  Most podcast episodes are embedded into blog pages using it.  I even use it on the Talking Shop Down Under episode posts because it’s what my audio file host (archive.org) provides out of the box.

Podcasts aren’t a big deal for me since I subscribe to them via iTunes and listen to them on my iPod/iPhone.  As for grooveshark? I’ll just make do without.  No biggie.

YouTube

OK, so this is an important one.  Video on the web is almost always done with Flash, though hopefully people will start moving to Silverlight smooth streaming or HTML5 video sooner rather than later.  In fact YouTube already has – if you have a HTML5 capable browser that supports video (aka Chrome) then you can go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and join the beta program and watch video via HTML5 instead of Flash.  It doesn’t do full screen yet, but apart from that it works perfectly well. Happy days.

Sites like Viddler, Tekpub and others still don’t offer Flash alternates so occasionally I run into situations where I can’t view videos, but once again I’m happy to live with that for now.

Adobe Air

So this was a pretty simple one.  I use Air for one thing and one thing only and that was so I could run TweetDeck.  I got rid of Air and TweetDeck and switched to Seesmic so I could retain the multiple account support and I’m happy with it for now.  Of course, there are plenty of other twitter clients out there that run natively on Windows and I could have just as easily used one of them if they had multiple account support too. (Halfwit, MahTweets, etc)  If they add that functionality in the future I may switch.  It’s not a hard thing to change :-)

 

So there you have it, life without Adobe.  And as a parting note, I haven’t had a browser or system crash ever since I got rid of their software.  Goodbye Adobe.  You won’t be missed.

Does the World Need Another Podcast?

Or do you for that matter?

For those who don’t follow me on twitter (and why not!?) I’ve been doing an internal podcast in Readify where I interview some of our new staff.  Anyway Dave (who is not Readify) suggested that I create a public podcast as well, which I have thought about before.

Before I do, here’s a few questions I’d like to hear some opinions on:

1. Would you actually listen to one? (Assuming the quality didn’t completely suck)

2. What’s your ideal podcast length? (I’ve been doing 15-25 minutes internally)

3. If I do an interview style podcast (think hanselminutes) then who should I try to get on as guests?

All feedback and ideas are welcome :-) and any disparaging remarks can be forwarded to my support email at  talktothehand@carefactor.com

P.S. I asked this same set of questions on the OzAlt.Net mailing list, so you can always reply there if you prefer.

Solved: Connection Issues with Communicator 2007

At Readify we use Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 as the internal IM and presence tool, with the added bonus that since we are federated with Microsoft we are also able contact the people we know in Microsoft through the same tool.

Unfortunately I’ve had a recurring problem where communicator wouldn’t connect when I was plugged in at home.  I had just assumed it was an ISP issue and since it was only a minor annoyance I never really bothered to do much about it.

That was until today. Today I finally pulled my finger out and decided to see what the problem was.

Firstly, I turned on event log error logging in Communicator via the Options…-> General settings area.

Next I looked at the event log itself and saw this:

Communicator was unable to locate the login server.  No DNS SRV records exist for domain readify.net, so Communicator was unable to login.
 Resolution:
Please double-check the server name to make sure that it is typed correctly.  If it is correct, the network administrator will either need to use manual configuration to specify the login server's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), or add DNS SRV records for the readify.net domain in order to allow automatic client configuration.  The DNS SRV records _sipinternaltls._tcp.readify.net, _sipinternal._tcp.readify.net and/or _sip._tls.readify.net may need to be configured if automatic configuration is desired.

No SRV records? Really, so how does it connect on other networks? Hmm, I sense something fishy.

So I then ran an nslookup from the command prompt and got this:

That 10.1.1.1 address is the internal address of my DLink DSL-G604T router that I’ve had for years.

At this point I decided to check the DNS server that my router talks to:

Oh, so that works! OK. So it rules out my ISP as the problem (sorry for assuming it was you IINet).  So then why doesn’t my router pass through the information it needs?

Turns out that SRV records are relatively new to the DNS scene and my old faithful router that has served me well for many years now doesn’t have a clue about what they are or what they should do and so simply ignores any request to resolve them.  Even better, none of the firmware updates add any support for them either.

So I decided to switch my laptop’s DNS settings to the ISP’s DNS server directly, and try again.  Whalla! That works!  Cool.

Now the only problem I have is that I can’t use those settings permanently as the ISP won’t respond to DNS requests made from outside it’s own network, meaning it won’t work for me when I’m on the road.

To solve this I wanted to use a DNS available from anywhere – and so I decided to give OpenDNS a try..  Talk about easy.  Just point my IPv4 settings to the OpenDNS name servers and try it again.

It all worked beautifully, and best of all I’m now network independent and able to use the same DNS server settings everywhere I go.  Problem solved.   All connected.  Happy me.

Our Job As Software Developers…

I’m lucky enough to get to do some public speaking about agile from time to time and a large part of my job involves helping teams improve their agility and one of the things I’ll talk about when introducing people to agile concepts is the role of the software developer.  If you’ve heard me blather on about such things in the past then this might just be a refresher for you. If you’re just following along on the blog then this might be something for you to think about, especially in what it means for how you approach each day.

So, here’s my view on what the job for a software developer is all about…

As software developers our job is not to write software, our job is to provide great customer service.

Customer Service?! What the…?!

“Surely not.  Our job is to write software!” you cry.  No, actually, it’s not.  Or, maybe I should say, that’s only a part of what our job is.

A number of years ago now, I read a great book on sales and marketing (its name eludes for now) and in it the author took the position that every single business in this world is a service business.  For some industries, that’s obvious, but what about manufacturing for example?  Well, the author stated that the reason these companies are able to sell their products at all is because the product is the result of a service they are providing.

What service? The satisfaction of their customers needs and desires through a physical item.  I stopped and though about this for a while and realised that this actually makes sense. It explains why me-too businesses can start in competitive industries and thrive and why other business that have good product ideas fail (they’re not meeting a need).  It also changed the way I viewed a lot of what we do as developers.  Software development is in essence the provision of the service to creating software that meets our customers needs.  If a customer doesn’t have a need or desire that they want satisfied through software then there is nothing for us to write.  No software –> no sale –> no money –> no job.  Similarly if someone else can meet the same need but do it with better customer service then they’ll get the sales and we won’t.  Once again: No sales –> no money –> no job.

Now sometimes this customer service mentality can be a little grating.  What if the customer asks for and insists on something we think is stupid and short sighted.  Do we go against them because we know better? I don’t think so. Why? Because we are in no position to tell the customer what they’re needs and wants are. We don’t have their perspective, we don’t have their context, we aren’t them.  In fact, if you put yourself in their position you might come up with the same demands.

The trick for us is in helping our customers decide if they are asking for is really what they want or need.  This is where the 5-whys approach to questioning or proposing alternate ideas comes into play.  However, whilst we can propose your counter-arguments and reasoning as to why “stupid idea A” is a stupid idea, if our customer still disagrees and want that stupid thing provided, then that’s their prerogative.  After all, it’s their dime they’re spending, and they can choose to spend it as they wish.

Customer service will also say that if it’s all going to fall apart then be ready to support your customer in their time of need because it’s very likely that they will be both embarrassed that they ignored our advice and dug themselves a deep hole and at the same time they will be desperate to remedy the situation.  “I told you so” will only serve to impair your relationship, instead of solving the problem.  It might make you feel better, but it won’t make any real difference to what is going on. 

Awkward truth: The customer is always right (even when they’re wrong)

If you don’t like this, well that’s a shame, but you can’t do much about it.  You could consider self-funded retirement or life in a monastery as an option since that’s probably the only chance you have of a life without customers.  Failing that, your stuck with dealing with customers.

Yes, customer service can be a difficult thing at times and at times you may want to chew your arm off in frustration but on the flip side it can also be very rewarding.  There’s a special feeling you get when you see your customers improve because of a service you’ve provided, smiling because of something you’ve done for them or, even better, telling others about you because you’ve given them such great service.

So, stop and think.  If your job is a service job, then what does that change about the way you approach your work?

As a side note, you’ll note I used the word customer throughout this and not “client”. To me “client” infers that the development team are the dominant party in the relationship, whereas “customer” infers the idea that we serve them instead, and I think this can help us keep our attitude right.

Live Tweeting From QCon London

I’m currently in London for the QCon developer conference.  Over the last few days I’ve attended two half days of tutorials and Day 1 of the conference proper is just wrapping up now.  It’s been a really enjoyable conference so far and everyone I’ve talked to has been really friendly, plus it’s been great to meet and chat to a few of the people in the industry I really respect (I’m resisting the urge to do some name dropping).  It’s got quite a different feel to a Tech.Ed conferencce.  Not better or worse, just different. Firstly the numbers are smaller so it feels more intimate, and there are people from the Java, Ruby and even Erlang communities here so there’s a much broader view of some of the topics, plus there are no IT Pro’s here – it’s all just developers.

Anyway, when I came over I originally planned on blogging my thoughts after each session, but sometime during the keynote this morning while I was tweeting I decided that the twitter messages would be enough. If there was anything interesting I wanted to follow up on I could go back through the tweets, and the thought of each day going back to the hotel and trying to put some semi structured blog post together about the days sessions seemed somewhat redundant so I canned that idea and settled on live tweeting instead.  Obviously tweets are going to be unfiltered and unstructured and a reflection of my thoughts at the time, but it’s much more immediate and I’m more likely to remember anything I need to that way.

So, if you want to know what I’m up to you can follow me on Twitter or just use Twitter Search with the terms #qcon and rbanks54.

My New Desktop

A few weeks ago my old desktop passed away in the heat and I decided to get a replacement.  I considered doing a build-your-own or looking for a greybox or Dell that would suit my desires, but building my own just doesn’t appeal to me anymore, and nothing else really inspired me to hand over the hard earned cash.

On a whim I checked out the Alienware site and noticed that they had some ex-demo units for sale.  Now admittedly Alienware is one helluva an expensive brand and even an ex-demo unit is pricey for what you get, but I thought to myself “hey – I’m due for a mid life crisis and I can’t really see myself buying a Harley so why don’t I get one of these little objects of nerd lust even if I have to pay a little extra”.

I’ve got to say, so far I’m very impressed and I’m not at all let down by the price premium.  The build quality of this thing is second to none. I can’t even tell it’s an ex-demo unit.

It’s now running Windows 7 x64 beta and it flies along so I’m a very happy little customer. Oh, for the curious the WEI on Windows 7 is a 6.0, with the hard disk speed being the limiting factor (it’s a 7200 rpm drive).  The RAM and CPU are low 7’s, and the gaming graphics are a 6.7.  I’m pretty happy with those numbers, plus when I’m bored I can just stare at the shiny black box with blue lighting effects.  Mmmm shiny!  Plus it came with a Razer backlit keyboard and a freakin’ awesome Razer mouse with blue running lights.  Gaming in the dark just got so much better!

Anyway, here’s some unboxing pics for your enjoyment and my self edification.  By the way if anyone comments to tell me my machine is teh suxOr your input will be promptly deleted :-)

The internals include a Phenom 9750 Quad Core, a single Radeon 4850 HD graphics card and 4 Gig of DDR2-800 RAM.

Using Gaming Tools for Improved Communications

I haven't tried this yet - I'm more curious than anything else as to your opinions.

I use Ventrilo (a VOIP utility) for gaming quite a bit and I never seem to get the voice glitches that Skype & Live Messenger seem to get. It's low on CPU (important when gaming) and high on sound quality – a pretty good mix in my book.

Since I regularly have up to 6 way conversations with it, I was then wondering how well it might work for remote software development teams. I can imagine an arrangement where everyone would run Ventrilo during the day and could chat with the rest of the team at any time they needed. They could also use the push-to-talk feature so that background noise wouldn’t be coming through all day long, and because it's so low on CPU usage it wouldn't affect the all important activity of software compilation :-)

So, do you think it would create a better sense of connectedness between team members? Do you already do something like this in your remote teams? Or am I just day dreaming here?

Opinions welcome.

Scrum Gathering on Monday & Tech.Ed Australia Starts Wednesday

Just a reminder of a few things happening next week.

First, there is a Scrum gathering on Monday night - http://www.scrum.com.au/2008/08/25/sydney-scrum-users-get-together-september-1 and it looks like the Syxpac user group will also be joining us.  It should be a fun night.

Secondly, Tech.Ed Australia starts on Wednesday.

If you're interested in seeing my session on building loosely coupled applications with Unity (ARC304), it's on Thursday at 11:45.  If you just want to catch up with me feel free to get in touch via the connect site, or email me.

It should be a long, tiring, enjoyable week :-)