If you have ever used public transport in London you’ll recognise that this song is just genius. Definitely not for the easily offended though.
MBP Gone Again
It became obvious during the day that the fan problem on my repaired Macbook Pro is more serious than I had hoped. In the office I use a laptop stand which happens to have a fan built into the bottom which is powered by a USB socket, with this running and the fans continued to churn at full pelt the case of the laptop was actually cold to the touch even when I was running really heavy duty software. So I headed back out to the Apple Store (again) this evening and they’ve taken it back to try and fix it (again). Which all means that I’m back to the borrowed Vaio 🙁
In the past I have recommended without hesitation, and to be fair the guys in the store are very helpful. But this is a real pita which may well make me think twice in the future about my hardware platform of choice. Windows is still a steaming pile of crap, but at least the hardware is cheap and generic, if a laptop breaks it’s a lot easier to fix.
Migration to Outlook :-(
Into work this morning to be reminded that my client has migrated from Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange for email over the weekend. It seems like the migration has gone pretty smoothly but now I have to sully my PC with Outlook and I’m not a happy camper.
Wish me luck.
MBP Back
I got the call from the Apple store last night that my Macbook Pro had been fixed so I dashed down to pick it up and then spent about 3 hours restoring it to include all of my apps, data and configuration. They seem to have fixed the problems as I can listen to my purchased music and use the ethernet port with no problems. One thing I have noticed is that the fans now kick in at a lot cooler temperature than before. I’m undecided whether this is a good thing. On the one hand it’s a lot easier to use on my lap now but the extra noise is annoying. Maybe it’s just because this weekend is so warm, I’ll see over the next few weeks.
Boy am I glad though that I can get back to my proper machine with everything set up just the way I like it. It’s amazing how much muscle memory is involved in using your computer, the simple act of moving a few keys or removing trackpad features on the Vaio really slowed down my work during the week as I was having to think about using the computer rather than the problem at hand.
Now out to the balcony to enjoy the sunshine for the afternoon.
Heavy Duty Javascript-ing
The new project I’m working on is moving on quickly and I’m in the middle of some really heavy duty Javascript work for a complicated web form. We are making use of a Javascript library which I think I’ve mentioned before called the DHTMLXGrid which is a full featured dynamic table solution which can store it’s data as XML and HTML. No single bit of it is especially complex but put together it would take several months to duplicate and it only costs £150 for the professional version so we’ve forked out for it. Well worth a look, even the basic, free version is very good.
Sunburnt
The weather for the long Easter weekend has been stunning and with a combination of sitting round my parents pool, then walking along the bank of the Thames for a few hours my head is well and truly burned. A good price to pay for a wonderfully relaxing few days.
I hope you all had a good Bank Holiday as well, back to work tomorrow 🙁
Laptop gone
I’ve taken the opportunity of the long Easter weekend to send my Macbook Pro off to the shop to get fixed. Hopefully it will come back next week as at the moment I am using a borrowed Vaio laptop which is slow and rubbish. It’s amazing how much you come to unconciously rely on OS X when you’re using it all day every day. I keep finding myself trying to use Exposé or QuickSilver. Boy I hope the Apple store does it’s magic quickly.
iTunes Error
I’ve been having some problems with purchased music on iTunes since the upgrade to 7.0.1. Well today I got a call from the iTunes tech support team who informed me that I can’t authorise my laptop until I get my broken logic board fixed. Apparently when you authorize your computer it looks for some hardware information that my dodgy MBP can’t provide so the authorisation fails with this error:
Hopefully this will provide some help to other people with this problem because I certainly couldn’t find any mention of hardware problems causing ITMS specific errors.
New Project
After a not-so-enjoyable end to last week, the new week brings new projects. I’ve been moved onto the development team of a completely new green-field system as my old project has come to a natural conclusion now that it has released.
So I go from doing the thing I least enjoy about my job, to the best part… designing and developing new code. What’s more it seems like my new PM and team have things pretty well organised, there are proper specs (gasp!), a dev environment, with test and UAT being built at the moment, and even proper Scrum sprints defined until the end of the year. It’s going to be a good few months.
Release Hell
I was involved in the release if an updated Domino / Sametime application today and it wasn’t any fun. Basically I had updated an existing application to be more AJAX-y , it has hooks into Sametime which required us to roll out Sametime 7.5 to all of the application’s users. This didn’t go well. Sametime 7.5 is great if you install it as a local administrator of a Windows machine, but if you require an administrator to come around and do the install for you (which we had to do to 30 desks from 7am this morning) there is little help. We left a drop sheet at each desk saying what the user’s “community” setting should be but you can’t expect users to type fully qualifies domain names, so lots of problems there. But as far we could ascertain there is no way to do a pre-configured silent install. I hope this is not the case for the Notes 8 client when it rolls out.
The rest of the problems today were down to a lack of planning on our part. We have two machines which are used in the reception of the building by people who walk in to book appointments, they both run IE in kiosk mode in conjunction with touchscreens and Sametime Links. A person books an appointment and an instant message is sent to the person involved that they have someone waiting for them, a text message is sent to the person waiting when their meeting starts. All very cool. The lesson learned is that you need to have the Sun JVM installed to use the ST Links JS file, otherwise the web pages will simply not work.
In the end we got everything working but what should have taken an hour ended up taking 4 hours, which included us taking quite a lot of jip from the people coming in and trying to book appointments. Oh well, a couple of pints after work sorted that, but I have a new-found respect for people who do desktop support. It’s really not something I want to get involved in again any time soon.