iiNet on the road to mirvana

Alongside a story titled “Microsoft warns of new Word vulnerability” sits a new announcement that “iiNet is going to migrate early” to... Vista & MS-Office 2007.

Uh... this is a technical firm?

I guess iiNet haven’t changed that much in recent years, then.

A friend of mine, some years ago, rang up their tech support because their (iiNet’s) main DNS was dead, and was told to hang up and dial back. He patiently explained the problem & all of his testing, but they insisted. It was more than 2 hours before his modem was answered again.

Contrast this with the early organisation who proxied their entire traffic through a very busy (something like 6 SCSI hard drives) Linux-based Pentium 200 for several years, not replacing it simply because the blasted thing wouldn’t die.

I watched one of their techs spending time with a PuTTY session running full-screen on his apparently-mandatory ’Doze workstation, setting up websites (I vaguely remember the target being a Linux box) where he could do useful work. Policy vs utility.

Comments

Anonymous said…

cSo how does an internal deployment of one technoloy inside a company define its external facing infrastructure and its value to customers or users. Yes I agree crap administration internally or externally is crap but I imagine if they can't cope with an easy to install, configure and manage platform how the hell are they going to do the same with an antiquated product of Windows 95 capability

08 December, 2006 19:36

Leon RJ Brooks said…

The one technology is not so much definitive as symptomatic.

It may be easy to install, kinda, but there are a few DRM-like gotchas waiting in the wings to bite later. That we know of so far. It was also kind of symbolic to see the zero-day exploit sitting alongside the announcement.

09 December, 2006 22:52

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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