Tableau…

A product manager pointed out this product when I was showing her our new MS Analytics (olap) implementation a couple weeks ago.

They have some great examples on their site of just how powerful this product is.  http://www.tableausoftware.com/learning/examples

It is spendy, $1500 per named license + maintenance.

It’s primarily designed to go against Excel or table data, but it works with olap cubes as well, or at least somewhat.  Just enough to get you excited then you find out there’s a number of things you can’t do.  Hopefully this will be enhanced in a future version.

It works outstandingly well if your data is nice and pretty.  Normalized well.  Of course all of the sample data falls into that category.   It also works well against SQL, gain if your joins are easy to do.  It would be nice if they had a visual tool for creating joins.

Even so, I highly recommend it.

Granted the software is still beta, and I’ll try not to beat it up based upon that, but I will expose some of the issues that may or may not be a problem for switching from a CrackBerry to iPhone.

First some clear facts:

1. Edge simply blows.  It’s too slow for this.  Things are good when on Wifi, but edge…  Not good.  (3G should fix this right?)
2. The Microsoft Active Sync stuff leaves a little to be desired.  If your organization really leverages the security and lock down aspects of Black Berry Enterprise server you may have a hard time convincing them to let you do this.  (I’ve played with ActiveSync in the past with WinMobile phones and it’s been better than it currently is on the iPhone.  Again, it’s still Beta so we’ll see).
3. I have not tried to nuke the phone remotely from the Exchange console.  I will try that later this week.

First things first, it works, or will work at some level.  If you’ve totally been brainwashed into the BlackBerry messaging management then you probably aren’t going to like the way Apple, the iPhone, and ActiveSync work.  Simply provide your account details, and viola, your contacts, cal and mail are synchronized as it should be.

Email:

Blackberry sort of consolidates all your inbox messages if you so choose (and I do).  Meaning messages that are filtered and put into other folders by default are still in my messages application on the BlackBerry if I choose to sync those underlying folders.   With ActiveSync you only get notified of new items in the inbox.   This could be bad if you organize your inbox as I do.

If I wanted to know about new MGMT_Meeting emails which are filtered into that folder, I won’t know unless I look there.  That folder isn’t initially sync’d until you open it.

Mail works and is beautifully rendered as you’d expect.

It doesn’t appear to support landscape mode which kind of sucks for some emails.

Beta Warning: So far email notification has been spotty at best.  There are times I’ll open mail and the last updated time will be hours behind the actual time.  The mail app hangs a lot.  Generally 2-5x a day I’ll need to hard boot the phone.  It handles some attachments well; Excel, Word, even Cisco Voice mail messages are playable, others, not so much.  I have a couple attachments that will hang the phone in a really bad way, one is a pretty simple PDF.

Contacts:

Contacts work just as you’d expect them too.  Create contacts in Outlook and they magically appear on the iPhone with full details including the photo.

This is the most stable part of all of it at this time.  I have no complaints or issues to point out here.

Calendar:

This is where things get quite fugly.  First, you end up with a second Calendar.  One which can still by synchronized with iCal, and another that goes with ActiveSync.  While you can turn off the iCal synchronization within iTunes I haven’t found a way to delete it from the phone.  As a result you end up with two calendars without visual clue as to which one is which.  You can pick which one is the default, but again, it’s not immediately clear which one is which.

1. There is no week view.
2. Meeting invites work provided you’re the one invited.  Standard Exchange/Outlook responses are:  Accept, Decline, Tentative.   Apple however chose; Accept, Decline, Maybe…
   
3. There’s no facility to invite someone when creating a meeting or scheduled item (I hope this gets fixed).
   

Last but not least is the keyboard.  Nope, it’s not tactile, no you really can’t two-thumb type worth a damn (at least I can’t yet) and the predictive text will bite you when you least expect it but it’s pretty good otherwise.  I suspect that a good portion of Blackberry users primarily ‘read’ and don’t respond to anything in detail.  If you’re that type you will be just fine.  It takes some getting used too and touch is a big thing.   It took me quite a while to adjust to the Blackberry’s lack of touch screen when coming from a Palm even though it had a keyboard, I still used the touch screen a lot.  After using the iPhone I again found myself wanting to touch the icons on the Blackberry.  If there is an adaptation of Graffiti for the iPhone that would rock as well.

So all in all this looks very promising.   The data speed has to improve, reliability has to improve.   The email management will force me into a different email organization paradigm but I could probably work that out.   It is a straight forward shift from the Blackberry to iPhone?  No.  But I think this will make a lot of people happy in the long run.  As of now the Beta stuff is getting better,  Beta 3 was more like Alpha 1 to me.  It was completely unusable.  Beta 4 is much better but still not usable enough.  I still have to carry the Blackberry.

More later as things progress.

Of course they say; “The server is fine”. So I’m looking for some good tools to prove them wrong when I can’tget to it.

I stumbled on host-tracker.com tonight and it’s pretty sweet.

It’s not fast, but the data they give you for free is pretty cool.

So yeah, currently, as in right now, the server is doing just fine.

Give it a look…

I guess it’s kind of slow if you’re viewing this from Iran or Germany, but that’s not our biggest target audience…

If you know of other good testing tools please post them in the comments.

When Firefox is first launched, the initial window is fine. I have my bookmarks toolbar:

Any new window I create (and I do use multiple windows regardless of tabbed browsing), the bookmarks toolbar goes blank…

It doesn’t seem related to any plugins that I’m aware of. I’ve tried disabling most. I can’t imagine that it’s an actual bookmark in this folder but it could be.

Has anyone else seen this?

Edit/Update: This appears to be directly caused by or related to the use of Automated QA’s Test Complete Add/On:

Disabling this puppy and my problems go away.

Other blog upgrades went smoother than this one… Not exactly sure what went wrong, but I had to copy the files up a couple times.

The admin pages still don’t render exactly right :/

PLAYSTATION(R)Network

-----------------------------------------------------------

Dear Customer

We have recently discovered the possibility of unauthorized access to
personal information on the PLAYSTATION(R)Store through PCs, a content
download service of the PLAYSTATION(R)Network.

Protection of personal data is Sony Computer Entertainment's highest
priority. Please be assured that we have taken immediate measures to
rectify this issue and system security has been restored.

Although very unlikely, it is possible that your password to sign in to
the PLAYSTATION(R)Network may have been changed through unauthorized
access, making it possible to view users’ personal information and/or
use the Wallet for the PLAYSTATION(R)Store. PLAYSTATION(R)Network accounts
do not display entire credit card numbers, so any unauthorized access to
your PLAYSTATION(R)Network account is very unlikely to compromise your
credit card number.

We have investigated the extent of any unauthorized access and possible
alteration of passwords that could have occurred before corrective
measures were taken, and are sending out emails directly to those
customers who may have been affected by this incident.

The theme quest continues.

Regular Updates should return soon.

Mass hysteria is being reported everywhere for a very expensive toy. One which I still think isn’t going to live up to the hype.

Has something to do with HD DVD content or something

Hurry, sign up for the Google Free In-Home wireless broadband.

Make sure you clearly understand the installation requirements: Here

Much to my dismay, the love affair I’ve had with X1, my all-out favorite for desktop search, has come to an end.

Why? It’s certainly not because I’ve found something better, no.

It’s because it’s simply stopped working. Others have given up on it a long time ago, but it has stayed and remained my favorite.

Nothing else give you the speed and flexibility. Results as you type, etc.

Crashes with the products have become more prevalent, though usually work-around able, they were becoming more than I could stand. I checked for an update, and there was a ‘minor’ release. I tried to upgrade to that. Tried simple upgrade, and full-reinstalls. It works, it indexes my files, and my Mozilla email but for some reason it won’t touch my Outlook anymore. The prior version had stopped updating per the schedule, but I could still manually update the index from time to time, which I had done.

But now, nadda, nothing, zilch. No Outlook/Exchange indexing to be had. Spending more than an hour screwing with it negates all benefit, so it’s now gone.

I’m now on the hunt for the best tool for my needs. No, Windows desktop search isn’t it. While it works, it’s slow and clunky.

I’ve just re-installed Google Desktop. It’s claming it will take another 10 hours of idle time to finish the initial index. We’ll see how that goes.

My biggest need is searching emails. I get too damn many. When it’s time to fill out an expense report I want to be able to search for $49.95 to find the email receipt for that software I purchased a month ago. I want to be able to easily pull up all emails from *@domain.com fast and easy. X1 used to give me that.

Outlook search folders work fine if you’re in no hurry but I usually am.

If you have tip for a good email indexing product, post it in the comments.

A directory which should have simply contained “Product (build).exe” had both that file and one named: “Product (buildE.exe”. “Product (buildE.exe” still had it’s digital signature, where as the one that was properly named didn’t.

Hrm, let’s take a look. Scan the files with Trend Micro’s Office Scan, nothing, scan files with AVG, nothing. Jump on Trend’s website, using house call, still nothing.

Do a quick Google search for Virus software ratings which point to “BitDefender” being the best. Run that and *blam* we have an un-identified Win32/File Injector.

Nice….

These files so happened to be on the same server as all of our software builds, legacy and what not.

We’ve been a big believer in Trend. Office Scan is rolled out in the organization. We have Trend on our Exchange servers and McAfee on our Mail gateway.

Of course none of this protects us when certain QA machines and other machines which change their OS more often than I change my underwear go unprotected. They are supposed to be used in our LAB, our lab which allows these machines internet access and shouldn’t.

We blow images of all shapes and sizes on lots of hardware. It’s meant to be used for testing not surfing. That’s our best guess as to how we contracted this virus but it’s not conclusive at this point.

To make matters worse, a whole LOT worse, the server that holds all of our final builds and legacy builds shares two other services. Our source code change management product and our defect tracking database. A year ago this was fine, but we’ve outgrown a single server for all of these purposes and as Murphy would have it, the replacement servers are on order to arrive early next week.

< insert screaming and banging head on desk here >

We desperately look for a product that will locate and eradicate this virus. As I said previously BitDefender was so far the only thing we could find. However running their web-based *Freebie* was too slow and too limited. We could only delete the infections. Not quarantine them. Did I mention how slow it was? I tried like hell to download a real live trial edition, BitDefenders site wouldn’t give it up. It would take my info but not send me the email I needed to download. Frustrations grew.

Looking at that list of what’s supposed to be good we go for Kaspersky. I download the file server edition for small business and queue it up to be installed. It want’s to reboot, but I can’t reboot that server right now. It’s only 5pm and there’s still work to be done.

Having settled on the fact that we don’t know where this originated but assume we got the most likely targets with the web scan we call it a day. We make sure we have the absolute latest version of Trend and kick off a scan on that server.

Two hours later we’re getting emails about our precious server not allowing files to be copied to/from it. Our change management software is tossing up errors too. A developer suggest we run Check Disk on that volume based upon the error we’re seeing.

This has the potential to be really bad. (We do have backups of this box, we back it up every day, but the question is, are those backups infected?)

Throwing caution into the wind, I shutdown the services, and proceed with the Check Disk. 2 and a half hours later it’s done. No major errors to report. Hrm….

Well, perhaps it and Trend just don’t get along. We need to reboot this box anyway and the services are stopped so let’s go for it. Of course I’m working remotely and cross my fingers, say a prayer and do a sacrificial dance to the IT Gods that it will come back up. 10 minutes later it appears to be so.

I get on remotely, start to poke around with Kaspersky (which was installed previously). Then the server just freezes. Locks up, cold.

F#$%

I contact my right hand man and we’re both enroute. 20 minutes later we’re discussing our options. Are we going to build a new box? Repurpose a box? That’s so wasteful, as new machines are on order. But we have to get this up. We’re able to get a management console hooked up and kill off the Kaspersky service. The server springs back to life, sort of…

We deinstall it. It’s much happier now.

We’re finally able to procure a copy of BitDefender, and get that installed. It’s scanning, but seems like it’s deleting a lot of stuff, and it’s not much faster than the web version.

Sh*t

We go looking again and decide to try NOD32. This software works the best thus far. It too doesn’t really know what it is but it isn’t messing around.

We start doing some investigating with our little infection off the network with a loaner laptop. We can’t figure out what this thing does other than sometimes ruin your original .exe and propagate itself.

The potential for mas wreckage though is pretty high, considering the infected product installers. Not externally, but internally.

We immediately start scanning the main server, and all points of contact with it. From those that reported a problem to those that may have had a casual opportunity to brush up against it.

It’s now about 4:30am, this scanning business is still too slow, but it is progressing. People will be here in two hours and things need to be as back to normal as possible.

Of course most of the organization has Trend installed, and it and NOD32 don’t mix too well.

We start deinstalling Trend and scanning what we can. At 6 am we break for breakfast.

People start showing up and things get even more interesting. We put out an email explaining our situation, asking for patience and giving guidance on what to do and what not to do.

For the most part our users were very helpful. I’d say from the user level, their cooperation was at an all time high and that’s a good thing. All in all, I’d say they exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. Of course we’re very, very tired having stayed up all night battling this so maybe we’re just numb. Nah, they did good.

We still have a few hurdles in front of us. Products that we paid good money for that let us down. Servers that are still acting a little unhappy about the fact that they need this extra resource hogging process on them. But we’ll have most of that taken care of by the middle of next week when the new hardware arrives.

I’ll report back if things turn for the worst.