I'm not sure what upgrade did it but at one point, Spotlight became totally unusable for me. I think it was a major update that enabled web-searches as part of Spotlight.
Now I've been using Spotlight for years to launch applications. There's nothing easier when you're typing along and need to launch an application than hitting 'command - space' and continuing to work, or to do a quick bit of math, or a to take a quick note... the possibilities are endless (okay, not endless but it's a lot!). At some point, that quick little shortcut became a long, long pause.
Now recently I decided to tackle this issue as it became just too frustrating. I messed with the Spotlight preferences, I re-indexed, I searched, but eventually gave up until I launched activity monitor to see what was going on behind the scenes. I saw that 'suggestd' was pegging the CPU during that time. A quick search brought up this link which seems to have solved the problem.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7264893?start=0&tstart=0
Basically you need to delete the ~/Library/Suggestions folder and relogin. I'm sure there is some kind of cache in there that was corrupted somewhere along the way. Anyway, this was a great find for me and I'm happily back to using Spotlight on a regular basis.
Showing posts with label Helpdesk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Helpdesk. Show all posts
Mar 17, 2016
Mar 10, 2014
Typical Network Speeds
Borrowed from http://www.channelz.org/network-speed-table/
| Tech | Scope | High | Low | Typical |
| POTS | WAN | 56,000 | 300 | 50,000 |
| ISDN | WAN | 2,048,000 | 128,000 | 128,000 |
| T1 | WAN | 1,544,000 | 1,544,000 | 1,544,000 |
| E1 | WAN | 2,048,000 | 2,048,000 | 2,048,000 |
| 802.11b | WLAN | 11,000,000 | 4,300,000 | 4,300,000 |
| DSL | WAN | 52,000,000 | 256,000 | 6,000,000 |
| 802.16 WiMAX | WLAN/WWAN | 70,000,000 | 10,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Ethernet | LAN | 10,000,000 | 10,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Cable | WAN | 400,000,000 | 512,000 | 16,000,000 |
| Token | RingLAN | 16,000,000 | 4,000,000 | 16,000,000 |
| 802.11g | WLAN | 54,000,000 | 4,300,000 | 19,000,000 |
| 802.11a | WLAN | 54,000,000 | 5,500,000 | 23,000,000 |
| E3 | WAN | 34,368,000 | 34,368,000 | 34,368,000 |
| T3 | WAN | 44,773,000 | 44,773,000 | 44,773,000 |
| 802.11n | WLAN | 248,000,000 | 4,300,000 | 74,000,000 |
| Fast Ethernet | LAN | 100,000,000 | 100,000,000 | 100,000,000 |
| FDDI | WAN | 200,000,000 | 100,000,000 | 100,000,000 |
| ATM | LAN/WAN | 622,000,000 | 622,000,000 | 622,000,000 |
| Gigabit Ethernet | LAN | 1,000,000,000 | 1,000,000,000 | 1,000,000,000 |
GB = 1e9
10GB = 1e10
Sep 5, 2013
How to solve the 10 most common tech support problems yourself
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047667/how-to-solve-the-10-most-common-tech-support-problems-yourself.html
Jun 18, 2013
9 Reasons SysAdmins Hate You | ITworld
|
Happy sys admins mean happy systems. By avoiding these 9 common mistakes, you can stay on your sys admin's good side.
|
Mar 27, 2013
Nov 27, 2012
Here's all the crapware that comes with new Windows 8 PCs | ITworld
Great little fact that has always bugged me. One more reason to use a Mac.
Here's all the crapware that comes with new Windows 8 PCs | ITworld:
Here's all the crapware that comes with new Windows 8 PCs | ITworld:
Feb 17, 2012
Impressions: Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference
Impressions: Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference: 
Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis have written another awesome addition to the Microsoft Press catalog, Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. Per my policy, because I did not read the whole book I am only posting "impressions" here and not a full Amazon.com review.
In brief this book will tell you more about the awesome Sysinternals tools than you might have thought possible. One topic that caught my attention was using Process Monitor to summarize network activity (p 139). This reminded me of Event Tracing for Windows and Network Tracing in Windows 7. I remain interested in this capability because it can be handy for incident responders to collect network traffic on endpoints without installing new software, relying instead on native OS capabilities.
I suggest keeping a copy of this book in your team library if you run a CIRT. Thorough knowledge of the Sysinternals tools is a great benefit to anyone trying to identify compromised Windows computers.
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Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis have written another awesome addition to the Microsoft Press catalog, Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. Per my policy, because I did not read the whole book I am only posting "impressions" here and not a full Amazon.com review.In brief this book will tell you more about the awesome Sysinternals tools than you might have thought possible. One topic that caught my attention was using Process Monitor to summarize network activity (p 139). This reminded me of Event Tracing for Windows and Network Tracing in Windows 7. I remain interested in this capability because it can be handy for incident responders to collect network traffic on endpoints without installing new software, relying instead on native OS capabilities.
I suggest keeping a copy of this book in your team library if you run a CIRT. Thorough knowledge of the Sysinternals tools is a great benefit to anyone trying to identify compromised Windows computers.
Tweet
Copyright 2003-2011 Richard Bejtlich and TaoSecurity (taosecurity.blogspot.com and www.taosecurity.com)
Dec 24, 2011
Sorry, IT: These 5 Technologies Belong To Users
Sorry, IT: These 5 Technologies Belong To Users: GMGruman writes "The BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon hasn't been easy on IT, which has seen its control slip. But for these five technologies — mobile devices, cloud computing services, social technology, exploratory analytics, and specialty apps — it has already slipped, and Forrester and others argue IT needs to let go of them. That also means not investing time and money in all the management apps that vendors are happy to sell to IT shops afraid of BYOD — as this post shows, many just won't deliver what IT hopes."
Dec 20, 2011
Windows 2003 Server Domain Time
I have a system with a 5 minute time delay. It's domain joined but for unknown reasons it has a 5 minute delay. Now being an e-commerce system this is a bad deal. Credit Card companies don't like it when transactions are delayed by 5 minutes (can you say "man-in-the-middle"?).
Now I just need to figure out why it was off in the first place.
Here is the command to reset the time to the Doman time.
C:\Documents and Settings\wal>net time /?
The syntax of this command is:
NET TIME
[\\computername | /DOMAIN[:domainname] | /RTSDOMAIN[:domainname]] [/SET]
[\\computername] /QUERYSNTP
[\\computername] /SETSNTP[:ntp server list]
C:\Documents and Settings\wal>net time /domain:your.domain.com /set
Current time at \\server.your.domain.com is 12/20/2011 9:56 AM
The current local clock is 12/20/2011 9:51 AM
Do you want to set the local computer's time to match the
time at \\server.your.domain.com? (Y/N) [Y]: y
The command completed successfully.
C:\Documents and Settings\wal>
Dec 12, 2011
Verify Email with Telnet
Stolen from: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/
We have all been doing email address validation for a very long time to make sure that the email is correctly formatted. This is to avoid users entering wrongly formatted email address but still they can accidentally give us a wrong email address.
Example of a correctly formatted email address but still wrong:
mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com [VALID email format but it does not exist]
Above case specifically happens when you take important customer email on phone and you type in the wrong email. So is there a QUICK solution to really check the email without sending a test message to the user? Yes.
The solution
A quick & simple check below can be implemented in most programming language including PHP, Python etc. It relies on using the same SMTP which is used to send emails.
To check if user entered email mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com really exists go through the following in command prompt.
First - Find mail exchanger of reddit.com
COMMAND:
nslookup – q=mx reddit.com
RESPONSE:
reddit.com MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.reddit.com
mail.reddit.com internet address = 208.96.53.70
Second - Connect to mail server mail.reddit.com
COMMAND:
telnet mail.reddit.com 25
RESPONSE:
220 mail.reddit.com ESMTP Postfix NO UCE NO UEMA C=US L=CA Unsolicated electronic mail advertisements strictly prohibited, subject to fine under CA law CBPC 17538.45. This electronic mail service provider’s equipment is located in the State of California. See http://www.reddit.com/static/inbound-email-policy.html for more information.
COMMAND:
helo hi
RESPONSE:
250 mail.reddit.com
COMMAND:
mail from: <youremail@gmail.com>
RESPONSE:
250 2.1.0 Ok
COMMAND:
rcpt to: <mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com>
RESPONSE:
550 5.1.1 <mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table
COMMAND:
quit
RESPONSE:
221 2.0.0 Bye
NOTES:
1) the 550 response indicates that the email address is not valid and you have caught a valid but wrong email address. This code can be on the server and called on AJAX when user tabs out of the email field. The entire check will take less than 2 seconds to run and you can make sure that the email is correct.
2) If email was present the server will respond with a 250 instead of 550
3) There are certain servers with a CATCH ALL email and this means all email address are accepted as valid on their servers (RARE but some servers do have this setting).
4) Please do not use this method to continuously to check for availability of gmail / yahoo / msn accounts etc as this may cause your IP to be added to a blacklist.
5) This is to supplement the standard email address javascript validation.
Mar 9, 2011
Dear Mildred...
Here is a blatant cut and paste from PCPro. I love stories like this as they educate PC users around the world.
I was going to contribute to Stewart Mitchell’s request for horror stories about computer repair people; then I was completely diverted by a panic phone call from an old friend, which helped me to realise that I was far more of a repairer than a customer of repairers.
That 72 hours of raw-edged panic was quite enough for me to focus on the sins of those who come and ask for help, which can be every bit as difficult as the sins of the fixers. So pardon me while I abuse the Pro blogs to let my friend know how I felt about her approach to the whole sorry matter.
Dear Mildred (name changed to protect the innocent here),
It was delightful to hear about your holiday in Kuala Lumpur, for 20 minutes, before you got around to mentioning that you had brought back a DVD burned for you by a charismatic local photographer and thrown it in that laptop you obtained from me six months or more ago. It was sadly not surprising to hear that once that DVD had been introduced to the laptop, you had laid yourself wide open to every hacker and script kiddie on the planet. The parts I did find surprising then came so thick and fast that I was barely able to assemble a coherent reply, so let’s unpack all your assumptions and deal with them item by item, now that facts can take precedence over emotional blackmail.
- No, it doesn’t matter how you imagine viruses work: they will not be amenable to persuasion, they will do what they like. Responses like “that seems a bit far-fetched” won’t get your laptop fixed, or keep the hackers away. After the initial, invisible infection has granted the underworld open access to your PC, they are unlikely to steal your personal data – you’re not rich enough – but they will sell off access to your machine, for a relative pittance, to much less accomplished hackers. It’s their lesser efforts you can see, and they’re just evidence of the basic high-quality infection.
- No, you can’t sue AVG. You put a physical piece of storage in your DVD drive and clicked on various dialog boxes, some of which you neither understood, nor can now remember, because you wanted to get at the content on the disk. Once you do that, it’s game over.
- No, I am not responsible for everything that befalls something I once owned. It is now your laptop and your responsibility. Curiously, I am not sitting around at home doing nothing waiting for machines to die, and there is no way that you can cajole, seduce or otherwise influence me to “just spend ten minutes on it”. There are two reasons for this. One is that it’s perfectly clear that if I do touch it, I will never hear the end of the matter for as long as I live. The other is that once you stuck that DVD in there and started saying “yes, OK” to every resulting dialog box, you sank the whole thing. It doesn’t take 10 minutes to sort that out; it requires a complete machine reload to properly guarantee the infection is history.
- No, there is no neat and handy way I’ve been keeping secret that allows you to retain your extensive collection of stolen software licences loaded on that laptop. It’s even possible (but unlikely) that one of those copies you downloaded from total strangers via BitTorrent was actually the source of infection, not the DVD from that far-off and well-known training school for global cybercrime supercriminals. But you don’t believe that possibility either, so that’s me told good and proper. I personally remember all those nights in the 90’s when your standard response to any creative suggestion was “that’s great, but don’t tell anyone else so they can’t steal your idea” – rampant hypocrisy always offends me, especially when the software you’ve stolen is used to maintain your creative business. Perhaps you wouldn’t be in this dire situation if you had actually paid for the things you use (and therefore could reinstall them), even paying for a decent image-based backup program would have saved your bacon. Just because I use one and recommend it to everyone doesn’t mean it must therefore be nerdy and incomprehensible so you shouldn’t touch it.
- Don’t worry. I don’t propose to identify the specific products you don’t have licences for, mainly because I think the whole business of what’s free and what’s not is now so murky and confused that I don’t think you are even doing anything special these days. It’s not something I will involve myself in, though, which is in part why I am more tilted towards the hardware business, than software, these days. I have gone about as far as I can here to make it clear why your approach to the way your laptop drives your business, mixed with your approach to the way that people in the computer business sell things to you, adds up to a disaster waiting to happen. And I do disaster recovery, not disaster participation.
Love and kisses,
Steve
I was going to contribute to Stewart Mitchell’s request for horror stories about computer repair people; then I was completely diverted by a panic phone call from an old friend, which helped me to realise that I was far more of a repairer than a customer of repairers.
That 72 hours of raw-edged panic was quite enough for me to focus on the sins of those who come and ask for help, which can be every bit as difficult as the sins of the fixers. So pardon me while I abuse the Pro blogs to let my friend know how I felt about her approach to the whole sorry matter.
Dear Mildred (name changed to protect the innocent here),
It was delightful to hear about your holiday in Kuala Lumpur, for 20 minutes, before you got around to mentioning that you had brought back a DVD burned for you by a charismatic local photographer and thrown it in that laptop you obtained from me six months or more ago. It was sadly not surprising to hear that once that DVD had been introduced to the laptop, you had laid yourself wide open to every hacker and script kiddie on the planet. The parts I did find surprising then came so thick and fast that I was barely able to assemble a coherent reply, so let’s unpack all your assumptions and deal with them item by item, now that facts can take precedence over emotional blackmail.
- No, it doesn’t matter how you imagine viruses work: they will not be amenable to persuasion, they will do what they like. Responses like “that seems a bit far-fetched” won’t get your laptop fixed, or keep the hackers away. After the initial, invisible infection has granted the underworld open access to your PC, they are unlikely to steal your personal data – you’re not rich enough – but they will sell off access to your machine, for a relative pittance, to much less accomplished hackers. It’s their lesser efforts you can see, and they’re just evidence of the basic high-quality infection.
- No, you can’t sue AVG. You put a physical piece of storage in your DVD drive and clicked on various dialog boxes, some of which you neither understood, nor can now remember, because you wanted to get at the content on the disk. Once you do that, it’s game over.
- No, I am not responsible for everything that befalls something I once owned. It is now your laptop and your responsibility. Curiously, I am not sitting around at home doing nothing waiting for machines to die, and there is no way that you can cajole, seduce or otherwise influence me to “just spend ten minutes on it”. There are two reasons for this. One is that it’s perfectly clear that if I do touch it, I will never hear the end of the matter for as long as I live. The other is that once you stuck that DVD in there and started saying “yes, OK” to every resulting dialog box, you sank the whole thing. It doesn’t take 10 minutes to sort that out; it requires a complete machine reload to properly guarantee the infection is history.
- No, there is no neat and handy way I’ve been keeping secret that allows you to retain your extensive collection of stolen software licences loaded on that laptop. It’s even possible (but unlikely) that one of those copies you downloaded from total strangers via BitTorrent was actually the source of infection, not the DVD from that far-off and well-known training school for global cybercrime supercriminals. But you don’t believe that possibility either, so that’s me told good and proper. I personally remember all those nights in the 90’s when your standard response to any creative suggestion was “that’s great, but don’t tell anyone else so they can’t steal your idea” – rampant hypocrisy always offends me, especially when the software you’ve stolen is used to maintain your creative business. Perhaps you wouldn’t be in this dire situation if you had actually paid for the things you use (and therefore could reinstall them), even paying for a decent image-based backup program would have saved your bacon. Just because I use one and recommend it to everyone doesn’t mean it must therefore be nerdy and incomprehensible so you shouldn’t touch it.
- Don’t worry. I don’t propose to identify the specific products you don’t have licences for, mainly because I think the whole business of what’s free and what’s not is now so murky and confused that I don’t think you are even doing anything special these days. It’s not something I will involve myself in, though, which is in part why I am more tilted towards the hardware business, than software, these days. I have gone about as far as I can here to make it clear why your approach to the way your laptop drives your business, mixed with your approach to the way that people in the computer business sell things to you, adds up to a disaster waiting to happen. And I do disaster recovery, not disaster participation.
Love and kisses,
Steve
Dec 19, 2010
OS X Boot Key Combinations
I'm not sure where I got this but here it is for my reference.
Boot key combinations:
Everybody knows about some of these boot key combinations, but some of the more obscure combinations have been long forgotten (like how many of us have a Quadra AV and use a TV as a monitor!) – Check these out, you may need one of them someday!
- C : Forces most Macs to boot from the CD-Rom drive instead of the internal hard drive. Only works with Apple ROM drives and with bootable CD discs.
- D : Forces the first internal hard drive to be the startup disk.
- N : Netboot (New World ROM machines only) – Looks for BOOTP or TFTP Server on the network to boot from.
- R : Forces PowerBooks to reset their screen to default size (helpful if you’ve been hooked up to an external montior or projector!)
- T : Target Disk Mode (FireWire) – Puts machines with built-in FireWire into target Disk mode so a system attached with a FireWire cable will have that device show up as a hard drive on their system. Very useful for PowerBooks!
- Mouse Button Held Down : Ejects any mounted removable media.
- Shift : Disables all extensions (Mac OS 7-9), or disables Login items when using Mac OS X 10.1.3 or later. Also works when booting Classic mode up just like you were using the OS natively.
- Option : When using an Open Firmware "New World ROM" capable system, the System Picker will appear and query all mounted devices for bootable systems, returning a list of drives & what OS they have on them. On "Old World" systems the machine will simply boot into it’s default OS without any Finder windows open.
- Space bar : Brings up Apple’s Extension Manager (or Casady & Greene’s Conflict Catcher, if installed) up at startup to allow you to modify your extension set.
- Command-V : Boots Mac OS X into "Verbose Mode", reporting every console message generated during startup. Really shows what’s going on behind the scenes with your machine on startup!
- Command-S : Boots Mac OS X into "Single User Mode" – helpful to fix problems with Mac OS X, if necessary.
- Command-Option : Rebuilds the Desktop (Mac OS 7-9).
- Command-Option-P-R : Erases PRAM if held down immediately after startup tone. Your machine will chime when it’s erased the PRAM, most people will hold this combination for a total of 3 chimes to really flush the PRAM out.
- Command-Option-N-V : Erases NVRAM (Non-Volatile RAM). Used with later Power Macintosh systems mostly.
- Command-Option-O-F : Boots the machine into Open Firmware (New World ROM systems only).
- Command-Option-Shift-Delete : Forces your Mac to startup from its internal CD-ROM drive or an external hard drive. Very helpful if you have a 3rd party CD-ROM drive that is not an Apple ROM device.
- Command-Option-Shift-Delete-#(where #= a SCSI DEVICE ID) : Boot from a specific SCSI device, if you have your 3rd party CD-ROM drive set to SCSI ID 3, you would press "3" as the # in the combination.
- Command-Option-I : Forces the Mac to read the disc as an ISO-9000 formatted disk
- Command : Boots with Virtual Memory turned off.
- Command-Option-T-V : Forces Quadra AV machines to use TV as a monitor.
- Command-Option-X-O : Forces the Mac Classic to boot from ROM.
- Command-Option-A-V : Forces an AV monitor to be recognized correctly.
Nov 8, 2010
Sophos offers Free Anti-Virus Home Edition for Mac
Sophos offers Free Anti-Virus Home Edition for Mac: "World's first free business-strength security solution for Macs."
Nov 3, 2010
WiFi Channel Problems
Recently I have been struggling with my home wifi network, at least with my laptop. It seemed that every other machine in the house didn't have a problem. However, my laptop would perform erratic, at best. It would chug along then all network activity would freeze. I few minutes later it would start to flow again. I tried everything (or so I thought). I eventually ran a network cable down the stairs and into the office and wired my laptop. It solved the problem so I was sure it was wifi related. A friend of mine suggested using a spectrum analyzer to find what was the best channel to use. I was skeptical at first until I realized what all used wifi frequencies (cordless phones). Sure enough, when I changed to channel 12, I couldn't see anything at all. Then I tried channel 1 and all was right with the world.
Just to satisfy my curiosity, I searched out a wifi channel analyzer to test the channels and find the best available. There are a number of freeware choices out there for Mac and PC. When the report came in I was not too shocked to see that the channel I was using had the most interference. Channel 1 was pretty clear but channel 3 was clean. I quickly changed my WAP to use channel 3 and my problems are solved.
Just to satisfy my curiosity, I searched out a wifi channel analyzer to test the channels and find the best available. There are a number of freeware choices out there for Mac and PC. When the report came in I was not too shocked to see that the channel I was using had the most interference. Channel 1 was pretty clear but channel 3 was clean. I quickly changed my WAP to use channel 3 and my problems are solved.
Oct 15, 2010
Oct 12, 2010
Host File Kung Fu
MVPS Custom Host File Instructions
I've been using a custom host file on my workstation for quite a while now. It works really well in blocking all sorts of undesired activity. Of course I only have 3 lines to block specific advertising sites but the potential is endless. Such a small change to my local configuration makes such a huge difference in all aspects of online activity.
If you are familiar with the NoScript or AdBlock plugins for Firefox then you are familiar with the concept of blocking certain domains, URLs or DNS names. Your host file is just an extension of how this works. Only instead of doing it at the application level, it does it at the operating system level.
Any time your machine tries to access a resource on the network, it has to translate that network address from a name to a number. If that process doesn't work (or is told to look in the wrong place) the resource isn't found. If that process is a looking for an advertisement or a nasty script, then that resource fails to load. When that resource fails to load it frees up resources on your machine to load more important stuff, like that article on how to winterize your lawn. Your host file just tells your machine to look in the wrong places for specific resources since any resource at this specific location is known to be undesired.
I use Open DNS at home to block a lot of these sites but this doesn't help when you leave the safety and comfort of your home network.
There are multiple sites out there that help with custom host files but MVPS is one of the best. Please take a look and see what they have to offer.
I've been using a custom host file on my workstation for quite a while now. It works really well in blocking all sorts of undesired activity. Of course I only have 3 lines to block specific advertising sites but the potential is endless. Such a small change to my local configuration makes such a huge difference in all aspects of online activity.
If you are familiar with the NoScript or AdBlock plugins for Firefox then you are familiar with the concept of blocking certain domains, URLs or DNS names. Your host file is just an extension of how this works. Only instead of doing it at the application level, it does it at the operating system level.
Any time your machine tries to access a resource on the network, it has to translate that network address from a name to a number. If that process doesn't work (or is told to look in the wrong place) the resource isn't found. If that process is a looking for an advertisement or a nasty script, then that resource fails to load. When that resource fails to load it frees up resources on your machine to load more important stuff, like that article on how to winterize your lawn. Your host file just tells your machine to look in the wrong places for specific resources since any resource at this specific location is known to be undesired.
I use Open DNS at home to block a lot of these sites but this doesn't help when you leave the safety and comfort of your home network.
There are multiple sites out there that help with custom host files but MVPS is one of the best. Please take a look and see what they have to offer.
Apr 22, 2010
I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin
Bingo.
I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin:
I often wonder if plumbers reach a point in their career, after cleaning clogged drain after clogged drain, that they begin to hate plumbing. They hate pipes. They hate plumber’s putty. They hate all the tricks they’ve learned over the years, and they hate the need to have to learn tricks. It’s plumbing, for goodness sake: pipes fitting together and substances flowing through them. How complicated can it be?
I hate computers. No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle, hardware and opaque, restrictive software. Why?
I provide computer support all day every day to “users”. I am not one of these snotty IT guys who looks with scorn and derision on people who don’t know what an IRQ is. I recognize that users don’t care about computers. The computer is a means to an end for them: a presentation to solicit more grant money, or a program to investigate a new computational method, or just simply sending a nice note to their family. They don’t want to “use the computer” so much as do something that the computer itself facilitates. I’m the same with with cars: I don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works or know how to change my oil or in any other way become an automotive expert — I just want to drive to the grocery store!
But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about. A host of ancillary software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve.
Computer error messages are worthless.
What sparked this current round of ire was a user’s inability to check for Windows Updates. Windows Update, the program, starts up just fine. But clicking on “Check for Updates” results in an unhelpful message that Windows Update could not check for updates. A meaningless error code is presented to the user, as if he’ll know what to do with that. There’s even a helpful link that says “Learn more about common Windows Update problems”. The list of suggested problems includes a variety of other meaningless error codes, but not the one that this user received. The Windows Event Log, which I know how to access but the user does not, contains nothing instructive. For a normal user, this would be a dead-end with one of two options: ignore the problem and hope nothing bad happens in consequence; or try to repair the operating system using some half-baked recovery method provided by the computer manufacturer or the Windows install disk (assuming they have one).
Another user I support has had nothing but trouble with Adobe Acrobat. Trying to open PDFs from within his browser fails spectacularly. Either the links simply never open, or they open a completely blank page, or Internet Explorer renders an error page suggesting that there’s a network problem! The user can right-click and “Save As” the links to get the PDFs, and I’m thankful that this user understand how to right-click at all, such that he has a viable workaround to the problem until I can find the root cause. But many, many users do not know what the right mouse button is for.
I pick on Microsoft a lot, because I think they do a lot of things fundamentally wrong. But plenty of other companies are just as guilty of bad design, bad implementation, and bad communication with their users. Google’s Chrome browser is cute when it says “Aw snap!”, but that leans the other way in terms of uselessness: it doesn’t give the user any better idea of what might be wrong, and users are left to feel helpless, powerless, and stupid.
Even when things go right, users are left to feel powerless and stupid. Installing almost any program on a Windows based system involves an inordinate number of clicks, all of them just saying “Okay” “Okay” “Okay”. No one reads the click-through EULAs, no one changes the default installation location, and no one selects specific installation options. They just keep clicking “Okay” because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. And then they end up with four extra toolbars in their browser and a bunch of “helper” programs that don’t actually help the user in any way and which they user doesn’t actually want. And they don’t know how to get rid of them.
Computers don’t make sense.
There’s an awful lot to be said about the simplicity and usefulness of installing software on Mac or Linux. In the latter case, you simply drag a file to your Applications folder, and you’re done. Linux package managers do all the heavy lifting without any user intervention. If a Linux program requires additional libraries, the package manager finds them and installs them automatically. In both instances, I can install new applications in a fraction of the time it takes to install something on Windows.
Removing software is another cause of much consternation for users. Again, Mac and Linux make it pretty easy most of the time. Heck, on any Linux system I can enumerate all of the packages installed in seconds with a single command from the package manager (or click of the appropriate button using a GUI for the package manager). But in any Windows machine — even a brand new one with top-of-the-line hardware — it requires long minutes to enumerate and display the installed software; and to make things worse the “Add and Remove Software” control panel item doesn’t actually show you all the installed applications. And removing any particular piece of software is not always a clean operation: cruft is left behind in the filesystem and the registry (don’t even get me started on my loathing of the Windows registry!).
Speaking of filesystems, why is it that a SQL database can find a specific record in a database of millions of records in a fraction of a second, but finding a specific file on your hard drive takes minutes? I’m sure there’s some very real reason why filesystems are so unfriendly to users, but I’ll be darned if I can explain it to any of my users.
Computers are too complex to use.
Average folk might take a “computer class” which instructs them on a few specific tasks — usually application specific (How to use Microsoft Word), as opposed to task specific (How to use a word processing program) — but when experiences diverge from those presented in the class, the user is not well equipped to deal with the situation. How does one interpret this new error message? How does one deal with a recurring application fault?
The pace of change in the computer industry works against users. The whole color-coded ports initiative was a great step toward end user convenience, but that’s not enough when users now need to know the difference between VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort. A lot of the computers that are coming into my office have all three video ports, and the monitors support multiple inputs, leaving users to wonder which one(s) they should use when setting up their PC. I’ve had multiple calls from really smart graduate students who couldn’t figure out how to connect the computer to the monitor. Sure, it’s an easy joke to make fun of these situations, but it’s a damning indictment of the computer industry as a whole, if you ask me.
Like Nicholas, I’ve never had a malware infection on any computer I own; but I’ve helped lots of people — users I support professionally, and family and friends — recover from malware infections. Can you imagine your mother-in-law being able to find and follow these instructions for removing malware? Or worse, knowing about and responding to a botched antivirus update from your AV software?
Computers fail spectacularly, taking all our data with them.
Hardware and software companies know that we use our computers to store information that is important to us. And yet backing up data to keep it safe is still a gigantic pain in the ass. Lots of “enterprise” backup software exists to try to protect us from computer failures (hardware, software, and user errors), and a host of “consumer” solutions vie for our consumer dollars; but frankly they all suck. Why do we need third-party software to protect the investment we’ve made in our computers? Users don’t buy backup software because they don’t expect their computers to fail.
It’s so easy to amass a huge amount of data today — digital photo archives, MP3 collections, and video — that it’s a real pain to reliably back up. Not only is it a pain, it’s expensive. You shell out a couple hundred bucks for a fancy new camera, and you’ll need to shell out a couple hundred more bucks to get an external hard drive onto which you can duplicate all your photos for safekeeping. And then, of course, it takes a long time to actually copy your data from your computer to your external hard drive, and you just don’t have the time or patience to commit to that regularly, so you start to neglect it and them *bam* your computer blows up — hard drive failure, malware infection, whatever — and you lose weeks and months worth of irreplaceable data.
Sure, some computers come with redundant disks, but most consumer-level RAID is a fragile mix of hardware and software, further complicating the setup. Why haven’t reliable, low-cost RAID solutions reached the mainstream yet? Why don’t end users have better access to useful things like snapshots, or ZFS yet?
And what about all the little failures that end users can’t possibly begin to detect or diagnose, like bulged capacitors on their mainboard, or a faulty video card, or wonky RAM?
Computers are overwhelming.
The mind-numbing number of computers available for purchase at any retail establishment right now is enough to cow even the most stalwart bargain shopper. How is a layperson to proceed in the face of row after row of meaningless statistics? Will that extra 0.2 GHz make a demonstrable difference in their use of the computer? Will it give them an extra six months, or even a year, of useful life? Why should a normal user even care about the number of bits in their operating system?
The Laptop Hunters tried to help people find the right laptop, but Sheila’s $2,000 HP isn’t necessarily the best pick of the available options, is it? Sure, AMD is simplifying its brand. But is that enough to really help people find the best product for their need? Will their branding refresh make any difference at all when there’s still five or ten seemingly identical systems on the shelf at the big box retail computer store?
I hate computers.
I know my little rant here is like shouting at the storm: there’s a huge, lethargic industry making gobs of cash on the complexity of the computer era, and there’s little capitalistic incentive to change the status quo. These complaints aren’t new. Many of them have been made for the past quarter century. We try, in our little way, to highlight some of the deficiencies we perceive in the industry as a whole, but that’s about all we can do from here. What are you doing about these problems?
Maybe I’ll become a plumber…
I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin:
I often wonder if plumbers reach a point in their career, after cleaning clogged drain after clogged drain, that they begin to hate plumbing. They hate pipes. They hate plumber’s putty. They hate all the tricks they’ve learned over the years, and they hate the need to have to learn tricks. It’s plumbing, for goodness sake: pipes fitting together and substances flowing through them. How complicated can it be?
I hate computers. No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle, hardware and opaque, restrictive software. Why?
I provide computer support all day every day to “users”. I am not one of these snotty IT guys who looks with scorn and derision on people who don’t know what an IRQ is. I recognize that users don’t care about computers. The computer is a means to an end for them: a presentation to solicit more grant money, or a program to investigate a new computational method, or just simply sending a nice note to their family. They don’t want to “use the computer” so much as do something that the computer itself facilitates. I’m the same with with cars: I don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works or know how to change my oil or in any other way become an automotive expert — I just want to drive to the grocery store!
But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about. A host of ancillary software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve.
Computer error messages are worthless.
What sparked this current round of ire was a user’s inability to check for Windows Updates. Windows Update, the program, starts up just fine. But clicking on “Check for Updates” results in an unhelpful message that Windows Update could not check for updates. A meaningless error code is presented to the user, as if he’ll know what to do with that. There’s even a helpful link that says “Learn more about common Windows Update problems”. The list of suggested problems includes a variety of other meaningless error codes, but not the one that this user received. The Windows Event Log, which I know how to access but the user does not, contains nothing instructive. For a normal user, this would be a dead-end with one of two options: ignore the problem and hope nothing bad happens in consequence; or try to repair the operating system using some half-baked recovery method provided by the computer manufacturer or the Windows install disk (assuming they have one).
Another user I support has had nothing but trouble with Adobe Acrobat. Trying to open PDFs from within his browser fails spectacularly. Either the links simply never open, or they open a completely blank page, or Internet Explorer renders an error page suggesting that there’s a network problem! The user can right-click and “Save As” the links to get the PDFs, and I’m thankful that this user understand how to right-click at all, such that he has a viable workaround to the problem until I can find the root cause. But many, many users do not know what the right mouse button is for.
I pick on Microsoft a lot, because I think they do a lot of things fundamentally wrong. But plenty of other companies are just as guilty of bad design, bad implementation, and bad communication with their users. Google’s Chrome browser is cute when it says “Aw snap!”, but that leans the other way in terms of uselessness: it doesn’t give the user any better idea of what might be wrong, and users are left to feel helpless, powerless, and stupid.
Even when things go right, users are left to feel powerless and stupid. Installing almost any program on a Windows based system involves an inordinate number of clicks, all of them just saying “Okay” “Okay” “Okay”. No one reads the click-through EULAs, no one changes the default installation location, and no one selects specific installation options. They just keep clicking “Okay” because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. And then they end up with four extra toolbars in their browser and a bunch of “helper” programs that don’t actually help the user in any way and which they user doesn’t actually want. And they don’t know how to get rid of them.
Computers don’t make sense.
There’s an awful lot to be said about the simplicity and usefulness of installing software on Mac or Linux. In the latter case, you simply drag a file to your Applications folder, and you’re done. Linux package managers do all the heavy lifting without any user intervention. If a Linux program requires additional libraries, the package manager finds them and installs them automatically. In both instances, I can install new applications in a fraction of the time it takes to install something on Windows.
Removing software is another cause of much consternation for users. Again, Mac and Linux make it pretty easy most of the time. Heck, on any Linux system I can enumerate all of the packages installed in seconds with a single command from the package manager (or click of the appropriate button using a GUI for the package manager). But in any Windows machine — even a brand new one with top-of-the-line hardware — it requires long minutes to enumerate and display the installed software; and to make things worse the “Add and Remove Software” control panel item doesn’t actually show you all the installed applications. And removing any particular piece of software is not always a clean operation: cruft is left behind in the filesystem and the registry (don’t even get me started on my loathing of the Windows registry!).
Speaking of filesystems, why is it that a SQL database can find a specific record in a database of millions of records in a fraction of a second, but finding a specific file on your hard drive takes minutes? I’m sure there’s some very real reason why filesystems are so unfriendly to users, but I’ll be darned if I can explain it to any of my users.
Computers are too complex to use.
Average folk might take a “computer class” which instructs them on a few specific tasks — usually application specific (How to use Microsoft Word), as opposed to task specific (How to use a word processing program) — but when experiences diverge from those presented in the class, the user is not well equipped to deal with the situation. How does one interpret this new error message? How does one deal with a recurring application fault?
The pace of change in the computer industry works against users. The whole color-coded ports initiative was a great step toward end user convenience, but that’s not enough when users now need to know the difference between VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort. A lot of the computers that are coming into my office have all three video ports, and the monitors support multiple inputs, leaving users to wonder which one(s) they should use when setting up their PC. I’ve had multiple calls from really smart graduate students who couldn’t figure out how to connect the computer to the monitor. Sure, it’s an easy joke to make fun of these situations, but it’s a damning indictment of the computer industry as a whole, if you ask me.
Like Nicholas, I’ve never had a malware infection on any computer I own; but I’ve helped lots of people — users I support professionally, and family and friends — recover from malware infections. Can you imagine your mother-in-law being able to find and follow these instructions for removing malware? Or worse, knowing about and responding to a botched antivirus update from your AV software?
Computers fail spectacularly, taking all our data with them.
Hardware and software companies know that we use our computers to store information that is important to us. And yet backing up data to keep it safe is still a gigantic pain in the ass. Lots of “enterprise” backup software exists to try to protect us from computer failures (hardware, software, and user errors), and a host of “consumer” solutions vie for our consumer dollars; but frankly they all suck. Why do we need third-party software to protect the investment we’ve made in our computers? Users don’t buy backup software because they don’t expect their computers to fail.
It’s so easy to amass a huge amount of data today — digital photo archives, MP3 collections, and video — that it’s a real pain to reliably back up. Not only is it a pain, it’s expensive. You shell out a couple hundred bucks for a fancy new camera, and you’ll need to shell out a couple hundred more bucks to get an external hard drive onto which you can duplicate all your photos for safekeeping. And then, of course, it takes a long time to actually copy your data from your computer to your external hard drive, and you just don’t have the time or patience to commit to that regularly, so you start to neglect it and them *bam* your computer blows up — hard drive failure, malware infection, whatever — and you lose weeks and months worth of irreplaceable data.
Sure, some computers come with redundant disks, but most consumer-level RAID is a fragile mix of hardware and software, further complicating the setup. Why haven’t reliable, low-cost RAID solutions reached the mainstream yet? Why don’t end users have better access to useful things like snapshots, or ZFS yet?
And what about all the little failures that end users can’t possibly begin to detect or diagnose, like bulged capacitors on their mainboard, or a faulty video card, or wonky RAM?
Computers are overwhelming.
The mind-numbing number of computers available for purchase at any retail establishment right now is enough to cow even the most stalwart bargain shopper. How is a layperson to proceed in the face of row after row of meaningless statistics? Will that extra 0.2 GHz make a demonstrable difference in their use of the computer? Will it give them an extra six months, or even a year, of useful life? Why should a normal user even care about the number of bits in their operating system?
The Laptop Hunters tried to help people find the right laptop, but Sheila’s $2,000 HP isn’t necessarily the best pick of the available options, is it? Sure, AMD is simplifying its brand. But is that enough to really help people find the best product for their need? Will their branding refresh make any difference at all when there’s still five or ten seemingly identical systems on the shelf at the big box retail computer store?
I hate computers.
I know my little rant here is like shouting at the storm: there’s a huge, lethargic industry making gobs of cash on the complexity of the computer era, and there’s little capitalistic incentive to change the status quo. These complaints aren’t new. Many of them have been made for the past quarter century. We try, in our little way, to highlight some of the deficiencies we perceive in the industry as a whole, but that’s about all we can do from here. What are you doing about these problems?
Maybe I’ll become a plumber…
Feb 25, 2010
Support Stories
The Daily WTF often has some great stories. Here is one that I can really relate to. Back in the day, I fixed PCs and I remember actually fixing a down machine before discovering I was at the wrong location.
Here are 3 great stories of tech support nightmares.
Problematic Problem (from Ben)
Way back when, I was responsible for doing on-site support for a fairly complex ERP solution that our company sold. My support radius was 100 miles, which meant I was on the road a lot and traveled to places I wasn't all that familiar with. My trusty navigation aide was a compass and a Rand McNally map book. Fancy, online mapping services weren't around yet, let alone super-fancy GPS units.
One day, I was assigned to visit a customer on the far end of my region (99.9999999 miles), first thing in the morning. It meant that, not only would I need to battle rush-hour traffic through the city, but then drive another 60 miles once that cleared. I was not a fan of early mornings, and getting that client on that wintry day meant a 5:30A departure with a 2.5 hour commute.
That morning, traffic was even worse than I anticipated. And to make matters worse, I had a terrible time finding the place. Fortunately, a kind fellow at the gas station pointed me in the right direction, and I was able to ring the client from the nearest pay phone to let them know I was running behind.
When I arrived, everything seemed to be downhill from there. I went to the receptionist, tacked on my visitor badge, headed over to the server room, set my briefcase down, and got to work. Before I could even try logging in, someone walked up to me and said, "hey, I know this isn't really your thing, but I'm desperate, and reeeeaaaallly need some help getting this report for our PM meeting."
It certainly wasn't my thing, but given that I was 30 minutes late, a little goodwill towards helping a company executive could only help. So I followed her to her office and helped troubleshoot the problem. An hour-and-a-half later, we had the report running, no problem. She was thrilled, and I headed back to the server room.
For some reason, I couldn't log-in to the server console, but the generous IT guy helped me past that hurdle by logging in with his credentials. But then I had another problem: I couldn't access any of the servers listed on my sheet. In fact, I couldn't even find a server that looked anything like ours.
I called the IT guy over again and asked him where our ERP server was. He shot a confused look to me, and said that he's pretty sure they don't have an ERP server. I assured him that they did, so he went back and looked into things on his end. Thirty minutes later, he assured me that they absolutely, positively, definitely don't have an ERP server.
We were both utterly confused. And then something dawned on me, and I silently prayed it wasn't true. I pulled out my sheet, showed it to the IT guy, and pointed towards the customer address heading. "That's you guys, right?"
As it turned out, not so much. Our actual customer was down the street, in another un-marked office building.
Problem supply (from Brendan)
Working as a coder for a small company that operates worldwide, I was on the team that deployed a project to China. Now I realize that my English is far from perfect, but dealing with Chinese customers in English has been quite the experience. One day, four months after going live with the new system, I received this mail from our Chinese client:
A Text-Destroying Problem (from Esko Tanakka)
Back in 1999, I was just beginning my career and worked at a small store that built and configured computers for the public. Occasionally, I'd have to answer customer calls and help people with general computing problems.
One day, a man called in and immediately started complaining about how we sell utter crap, that we should take responsibility for our problems, and that he was owed money back because of the problems we caused.
I begged him to calm down and explain specifically what was wrong. He told me that our computer is destroying his text, and that something had to be done. At first, I thought his files were disappearing, but after more investigation, I discovered what his actual problem was: typing text in Microsoft Word overwrote previous text.
I told him that he simply had the INSERT key on, but he insisted that he never pressed that key, and that pressing the key did nothing. Running out of phone-support options, I told him he’d need to bring in his computer. But first, I needed his warranty information.
Well, it turned out that he bought the computer seven years earlier, then had another company install Windows 95 and the Corel Office Suite. After hearing that, I told him that I obviously couldn't take the machine in. That just made him more angry, and he accused me of working for "Satan and his minions", and threw all sorts of other ridiculous insults at me. But then all of a sudden, he calmed down. Apparently, he actually tried pressing the INSERT key (as I asked him to do before), and his computer stopped destroying his text.
Here are 3 great stories of tech support nightmares.
Problematic Problem (from Ben)
Way back when, I was responsible for doing on-site support for a fairly complex ERP solution that our company sold. My support radius was 100 miles, which meant I was on the road a lot and traveled to places I wasn't all that familiar with. My trusty navigation aide was a compass and a Rand McNally map book. Fancy, online mapping services weren't around yet, let alone super-fancy GPS units.
One day, I was assigned to visit a customer on the far end of my region (99.9999999 miles), first thing in the morning. It meant that, not only would I need to battle rush-hour traffic through the city, but then drive another 60 miles once that cleared. I was not a fan of early mornings, and getting that client on that wintry day meant a 5:30A departure with a 2.5 hour commute.
That morning, traffic was even worse than I anticipated. And to make matters worse, I had a terrible time finding the place. Fortunately, a kind fellow at the gas station pointed me in the right direction, and I was able to ring the client from the nearest pay phone to let them know I was running behind.
When I arrived, everything seemed to be downhill from there. I went to the receptionist, tacked on my visitor badge, headed over to the server room, set my briefcase down, and got to work. Before I could even try logging in, someone walked up to me and said, "hey, I know this isn't really your thing, but I'm desperate, and reeeeaaaallly need some help getting this report for our PM meeting."
It certainly wasn't my thing, but given that I was 30 minutes late, a little goodwill towards helping a company executive could only help. So I followed her to her office and helped troubleshoot the problem. An hour-and-a-half later, we had the report running, no problem. She was thrilled, and I headed back to the server room.
For some reason, I couldn't log-in to the server console, but the generous IT guy helped me past that hurdle by logging in with his credentials. But then I had another problem: I couldn't access any of the servers listed on my sheet. In fact, I couldn't even find a server that looked anything like ours.
I called the IT guy over again and asked him where our ERP server was. He shot a confused look to me, and said that he's pretty sure they don't have an ERP server. I assured him that they did, so he went back and looked into things on his end. Thirty minutes later, he assured me that they absolutely, positively, definitely don't have an ERP server.
We were both utterly confused. And then something dawned on me, and I silently prayed it wasn't true. I pulled out my sheet, showed it to the IT guy, and pointed towards the customer address heading. "That's you guys, right?"
As it turned out, not so much. Our actual customer was down the street, in another un-marked office building.
Problem supply (from Brendan)
Working as a coder for a small company that operates worldwide, I was on the team that deployed a project to China. Now I realize that my English is far from perfect, but dealing with Chinese customers in English has been quite the experience. One day, four months after going live with the new system, I received this mail from our Chinese client:
From: Louis ChangAh, the lingo of the busisness... I can imagine that you'd have the faintest idea what he was talking about... but don't worry, neither did I. So I replied to him, hoping to get a better description of his issue:
To: Brendan ******
Subject: Problem supply
_____________________________________________________
Hi Brendan,
Sorry disturbing you. There is a problem with supply programme on the
button. Please advice?
Regards,
Lou Chang
From: Louis ChangI didn't have to wait long for his clarification, as his problem seemed to be really urgent.
To: Brendan ******
Subject: RE: Problem supply
_____________________________________________________
Hi Lou,
Could you please state your problem more clearly?
Thanks,
Brendan
From: Louis ChangYup. Much better. Thanks.
To: Brendan ******
Subject: RE: Problem supply
_____________________________________________________
There is a problem
with supply
programme on
the button.
Please advice?
A Text-Destroying Problem (from Esko Tanakka)
Back in 1999, I was just beginning my career and worked at a small store that built and configured computers for the public. Occasionally, I'd have to answer customer calls and help people with general computing problems.
One day, a man called in and immediately started complaining about how we sell utter crap, that we should take responsibility for our problems, and that he was owed money back because of the problems we caused.
I begged him to calm down and explain specifically what was wrong. He told me that our computer is destroying his text, and that something had to be done. At first, I thought his files were disappearing, but after more investigation, I discovered what his actual problem was: typing text in Microsoft Word overwrote previous text.
I told him that he simply had the INSERT key on, but he insisted that he never pressed that key, and that pressing the key did nothing. Running out of phone-support options, I told him he’d need to bring in his computer. But first, I needed his warranty information.
Well, it turned out that he bought the computer seven years earlier, then had another company install Windows 95 and the Corel Office Suite. After hearing that, I told him that I obviously couldn't take the machine in. That just made him more angry, and he accused me of working for "Satan and his minions", and threw all sorts of other ridiculous insults at me. But then all of a sudden, he calmed down. Apparently, he actually tried pressing the INSERT key (as I asked him to do before), and his computer stopped destroying his text.
Aug 24, 2009
Tech Support Cheat Sheet
I think the big problem is the box about "Google". Most people are so intimidated by "Googling something" that they refuse and would rather have their hand held. The rest have no idea how to read the results of a Google search. Let's face it, there is an art to "Googling" something and the even more difficult part of reading the results.
Tech Support Cheat Sheet
Tech Support Cheat Sheet
May 28, 2009
Helpdesk Software Directory
Here is a link to the Helpdesk Software Section on Open Directory.
I recently found the link from the Wikipedia Helpdesk page.
I recently found the link from the Wikipedia Helpdesk page.
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