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Category Archives: IT
X1, it’s time to go…
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.
Our day in virus hell.
It all started around 2pm on the 29th. One of our developers pointed out that one of our installers didn’t look ‘quite’ right.
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.
Someone’s getting fired at Kroger
Story [here]
I was lucky enough to be at a Krogers last night and experience the chaos that ensued when the scanners didn’t work.
Of course I only needed to pick up three things. Easy in and out for some cold medicine, apple juice and bread. That turned into a 30 minute debacle.
The Self checkouts were closed, and apparently there are only 2 cashiers capable of doing math and making change. (On a Friday night at 8p.m.)
Of the few things I purchased 2 rung up wrong and one wasn’t able to ring. Nice…
So the story above explains what happened. Apparently when they updated their recall info so they wouldn’t sell dog food that is tainted, the system got all fubar’d.
They couldn’t cope and had to shut down the stores for many hours. I wondered why at 8p.m. m 24 hour store was shutting down the lights.
It would have been easier I would imagine to just remove the stuff you can’t/shouldn’t sell from the customers reach. That’s how we did it in the good old days.
This is one downside of too much reliance on technology. Some things are just not all that complicated and aren’t technology problems to solve. 
I’m glad I’m not the product/project manager for this. A whole bunch of stores closed. How much revenue was lost?
powered by performancing firefox
Cisco and DST…
Well, they ‘almost’ got it right. (ignoring the fact that they waited until the last minute like everyone else and grossly underestimated the effort involved in everyone updating)
Most things work, and have the right time. That is unless you have a 797x color phone. You know one of the ‘good’ phones, the expensive ones.
If you have one of these, check the time. Is it right?
It probably is because when you did your update you rebooted all of the phones right?
Now reach around back and unplug it (if you are using this powered over Ethernet simply unplug the cable, if you have a power brick, just unplug that).
Let the phone boot up.
What time does your phone say now? Yeah, that’s what I thought, it’s back to the wrong time.
Now simply reset your phone, ‘hit settings, **#**’ and viola!, you’re back to the right time.
So what’s the difference from a ‘powered-off boot’ and a reset/reboot? And why does that screw up the time? Who knows, but it’s stuff like this that drive us absolutely crazy.
Microsoft DST Fix it gets better!
Not only does Microsoft provide you with a spectacular tool (Tzmove.exe), not to be confused with (Tzmove.exe) that you can distribute to all of your brilliant end users and ask them to run on your behalf.
(This works so well because as we know, end users just love running tools to fix IT problems that really should be addressed at the server level, and of course they fully understand what has to happen and why things are broken. Yes, delegating IT problems down to the user level is always the best move).
The best they could do from an Exchange administrator perspective is this:
- Create a client fix tool.
- Create absolutely the most convoluted way to take that ‘client’ based tool and script it to run on one machine, mailbox after mailbox. (That is in fact what they are doing).
- Exchange security issues as side, this should be fixable at the server level, without pretending to be a MAPI client for crying out loud.
Remember when Microsoft released the Windows NT domain, and promised us Single point of administration? This is not what I had in mind, if I wanted to script client tools to do things in bulk across my organization, we’d still be running DOS.