Year: 2012

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-07-22

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My Favorite IT Disasters!

I’m an IT guy, and I’ve seen my share of colossal failures in the workplace over the years. Recently there have been some “IT disaster” threads at Ars Technica and Reddit which got me thinking about my own disaster stories. Here are four of my favorite. Note that all but the last one come from the same job at a third-party IT company I used to work for.

THE RAID ARRAY FROM HELL

I was sent to a real estate firm to swap out a failing drive in a RAID 5 array. Thanks to the LEDs on each drive, I quickly spotted the drive I was to replace. I opened the RAID utility on the server to make extra-sure I was replacing the correct drive. The software verified that yes, the drive with the blinking LED is failing. I removed the old drive, put the new drive into the slide, and placed it in the array. The software recognized the new disk and asked if I wanted to rebuild the array. I clicked yes, and for the next 20 seconds or so everything seemed normal. But then the server BSOD’d. When I tried to reboot it I got the dreaded “SYSTEM DISK NOT FOUND” error message.

Come to find out, this server was one of the first my boss built himself after he started his company. For reasons only he knows, he installed Windows 2000 Server on to the RAID 5 array itself. Now this isn’t a “disaster” per se. The RAID software should have been able to rebuild itself without taking down the entire array. But installing an operating system onto a RAID 5 array is just something I’ve never seen done, ever. I’ve only worked with small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). In an SMB environment, you’d typically install Windows Server onto a regular hard drive or possibly a RAID 1 array. You then create the RAID 5 array as a separate disk to store vital data. And you do it this way because the operating system files just aren’t that valuable, and installing Windows on a standard (or RAID 1) drive is significantly less complicated (as a general IT rule, the fewer points of failure or complexity the better). If you have no idea what I’m talking about, imagine installing Windows on a regular hard drive, and putting all your important data on a heavy-duty, “guaranteed to never fail” external hard drive. If the Windows drive dies, it’s no big thing to go to Best Buy, get a new hard drive, reinstall Windows, then reinstall the external drive, right? Same theory, different implementation. And this real estate agency had tried to become as paperless as possible, so everything was on the server… which was now dead.

The icing on the cake was that the owner, an attorney with zero sense of humor but a giant sense of ego, flipped out because… “[my boss at the IT company] told me that we didn’t need backups because of this RAID thing!” I tried explaining that RAID is not a backup, just a way to make hard drives more fault tolerant. But he seemed to be of the opinion that my boss told him otherwise. Which put me in a pickle. Anyone who’s worked in IT knows that you can say one thing, even in as simple English as possible, and clients hear another. So it’s possible that my boss said no such thing, but the client interpreted it as such. On the other hand, I knew my boss would tell clients anything he felt they wanted to hear to make a sale. Perhaps my boss was afraid that the client wouldn’t sign the contract if he added a $1,200 tape drive into the mix. Maybe my boss was planning to sell him some kind of tape or online backup later on. Whatever the case, I had a dead server and a highly pissed off attorney to deal with. And it wasn’t pretty. I took the server back to the office and rebuilt it from scratch – not installing Windows Server on the RAID 5 array this time. My boss claimed to have recovered more that half the data off the old array… but the recovery software only pulled the file names; the actual files themselves were just a bunch of binary gibberish. So the firm started over from scratch.

LESSONS FROM THIS ORDEAL: RAID is not a backup. Don’t lie to clients, and make them understand, no matter what you have to do, what they’re signing up for.

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RETRO TECH: Microsoft Mira

Poor Microsoft can never seem to get a break. Any time they mimic an existing product (like say, their Zune to Apple’s iPod) critics say they’re just copying someone else’s work. But when they do come up with something cool, no one seems to buy it. That’s exactly the case with Mira, a “Smart Display” device:

mira

Here’s how it worked: the tablet computer ran Microsoft Windows CE for Smart Displays (thankfully shortened to just “Smart Display OS”). It was nearly instant-on, and it would automagically connect to a desktop PC running Windows XP via Remote Desktop. So you could be sitting at your desk working on something and suddenly decide to go sit on the downstairs sofa, or the back deck, or the big comfy bed. You’d bring your Smart Display with you and BOOM! in seconds you have your desktop on the screen, and can continue what you were doing.

While it was a really cool idea – hell, I still like the idea of a Smart Display… imagine a 19″ model with today’s thin hardware that could sit on a stand like a regular monitor until you wanted to leave your desk – the actual implementation of the device left a lot to be desired.

For one thing, the 802.11b Wi-Fi of the day simply wasn’t fast enough to allow wireless videos, and Remote Desktop didn’t have any video optimizations at the time. The touchscreen tech was subpar at the time. The battery life wasn’t nearly as good as a modern iPad or Android tablet. The tablet was as thick and heavy as a notebook, but was useless without a desktop PC to “mate” with. What’s worse, Microsoft desperately wanted vendors to sell them in the $500 range, but devices were introduced at between $1,000 and $1,500… at at time when a decent notebook with far more functionality could be had for $600.

But the funniest thing about the devices was Microsoft’s own licensing issues. Because only Windows XP Professional (or higher) allowed Remote Desktop connections, millions of consumers running Windows XP Home were out of luck. But even if you were lucky enough to run XP Pro, that OS only allowed a single session, meaning that once you connected to your computer with the Smart Display, the desktop would be locked and no one else could use it until you shut down the Smart Display device. And because of XP’s RDP limitations, only one device could connect to a PC at a time. So Mom, Dad, Johnny and Susie couldn’t use their Smart Displays at the same time… unless they had individual computers to connect to.

Of course, Microsoft probably could have fixed the RDP\licensing issues if Smart Displays really took off. But they didn’t. They were released in early 2003 and discontinued in December of that year.

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Top 10 Tunes

Here’s my top 10 song chart for the week ending July 15, courtesy of the home office in London:

1) His Name Is Alive – “Blue Moon”
2) Lisa Gerrard – “Largo (from Händel’s Xerxes)”
3) This Mortal Coil – “Mr. Somewhere”
4) Enya – “Caribbean Blue”
5) This Mortal Coil – “You And Your Sister”
6) This Mortal Coil – “The Lacemaker”
7) Brian Eno – “1/1”
8) Brian Eno – “1/2”
9) Brian Eno – “2/2”
10) New Order – “True Faith”

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-07-15

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Goodbye Old Friend

I first met my girlfriend, the love of my life, back in 1995. But we didn’t start dating until 2002. She lived outside of Charlotte, and I lived outside of Atlanta. We eventually decided to move in together, and since she had a mortgage and my lease was almost up, it only made sense for me to move in with her.

One of the first people I met after I moved to Charlotte was my neighbor. Let’s call him Tom. Tom was in his late 50s, with a head full of white hair and a little beer belly. He almost looked like Santa Claus minus the beard.

Tom and his wife had lived in our townhouse complex since the late 1980s, and Tom knew every little eccentricity the builders indulged themselves when building our townhomes. So I often asked him for advice with home improvement projects, or borrowed some tools from him, since he was the kind of guy who always had the 9/32″ drill bit or handful of #10 deck screws you needed to finish a job. Tom even came over and helped when we had a couple of minor emergencies, like when the upstairs toilet sprung a leak or when the pipe leading out of our hot water heater cracked, spewing water all over the crawlspace. I also remember stopping by his house one time to ask if he knew a good local place to get my kitchen knives sharpened; Tom told me to save my money and did it himself instead, and did a great job.

Because our complex has a huge common back yard, Tom received a fair amount of money from the homeowner’s association each month for cutting the grass. The yard is so big that it would often take him two or three days to cut it all. And since I work from home most days, it drove me insane to hear that lawnmower running all the damn time as I tried to concentrate on creating a batch file, or troubleshooting a wacky IIS server, or figuring out why desktop clients weren’t resolving DNS names correctly.

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Liars

paterno

Not making light of it, but if Georgia Tech can have their 2009 ACC Championship taken away over $300 worth of clothes, then Penn State should lose their football program forever. Here’s hoping the death penalty comes to State College. Soon.

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RETRO TECH: Philips Velo 1

One of the hottest gadgets of Christmas 1997 was the Philips Velo 1. It was a Handheld PC (sometimes called a “palm top”) and it was absolutely tiny:

philips_velo_1

When closed, this bad boy was smaller than most paperback books. It ran a Philips MP3910 chip at a blistering 36.864 MHz (yes, that was sarcasm). It had 4 whole megabytes of RAM and 8 whole megabytes of storage space. It rocked a 480×240 monochrome monitor, had a built-in 14.4kbit/s modem and connected to your computer using RS-232.

It was, compared to even the cheapest Chinese knockoff electronic organizers of today, absolutely awful. But it was also bad ass! I could whip this puppy out at a bar or restaurant and people would crane their necks to get a peek at it. And connecting to the Internet via dial-up on this thing made a lot of people (even me) absolutely giddy! Seriously – it almost seemed like something out of a James Bond movie!

I once worked at place where I had a very specific job; it was made very clear to me by the management that if I had nothing to do, I was supposed to sit at my desk and do nothing. As a contractor, I was not allowed to have an email address. The company’s firewall prevented access to (literally) 98% of the Internet, and I was “strongly discouraged” from bringing in books or magazines to pass the time. So I’d sneak in my Velo 1 and connect to the ‘Net via dial-up. I’d check email and surf a few sites… but the main thing I’d do was talk to this 19 year-old Israeli girl I’d met on ICQ (and no, it wasn’t “that kind” of chatting; she just seemed to be online ALL THE TIME).

While I loved my Velo 1, the main problem with the thing is that it ran Windows CE 1.0. Just typing that made me wince! (Get it? Windows CE? WinCE? Wince?) That OS was a complete disaster. As you can tell by the above picture, the operating system looked just like Windows 95 or Windows 98… which would have been great, except Start Menus and taskbars and system trays are a horrible idea on a device with a 5.1″ screen. And the device, for some godawful reason, supported multitasking, which meant that you’d sometimes have to use the built-in stylus to manually move windows around… on a 5.1″ screen. I was able to eventually upgrade it to (IIRC) Windows CE 2.1, which was slightly better. But still, there just weren’t a lot of apps for WinCE out there, and many of the ones that did exist weren’t that great. And synching the device via serial port seemed to take FOREVER, even though the amount of data being transferred wasn’t all that much.

It’s really amazing that this device was almost “cutting edge” in its day… but less than three years later Compaq would release the insanely popular iPaq 3630. The iPaq had a vivid color screen, a 206 MHz processor, supported Wi-Fi via CF card, had a vast array of accessories (including a folding keyboard, which I used to take notes in meetings), and syncing with a desktop PC didn’t totally suck, either. The Velo 1 seemed like 1950s black and white TV, while the iPaq seemed like a late 1980s color TV. But a mere 30 months separated the two products!

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The “Monty Hall” Problem

For years I’d heard about the “Monty Hall” math problem, and I could never wrap my head around it. I’d read about it in a magazine or newspaper, or on a web site and it always seemed so counter-intuitive. But this year I finally figured it out, and thought I’d share my “solution” with the Internet in case some mathematically-challenged folks want it explained to them in simple English.

The problem comes from the old TV game show Let’s Make a Deal. Host Monty Hall would pick an audience member and show him three numbered doors. Behind one of the doors was a genuine prize, like a car or vacation. Behind the two other doors were booby prizes called “zonks”. These were usually live goats for some reason, but would sometimes be wrecked cars or junk furniture. The audience member would pick a door. Hall would reveal a booby prize behind one of the other doors, then ask the contestant if he or she wanted to switch their pick to the other door.

Lets Make A Deal

The actual math part of the problem addressed whether it was better to stay with your original choice or switch to the other door. Mathematically, switching increases your odds of winning to 66%, while staying with your original choice only allowed for a winner 33% of the time. So my question was always… why? Doesn’t it seem like the odds don’t matter? There are only two doors left, so shouldn’t your odds be 50:50 regardless of whether you switch doors or keep your initial choice?

No. You see, this problem has to do with timing and knowledge.

Let’s imagine that instead of 3 doors, Hall shows you, the contestant, 100 doors. You choose one of the doors (let’s say door #23). At that point in the game, you have a 1 in 100 chance of picking the right door… because you chose 1 door, and there are 100 total doors. Ergo, 1 in 100. But then Hall opens 98 of the losing doors and asks if you want to switch. At this point in time, choosing to switch gives you a 99% chance of winning, because you now know which of the 98 doors are losers, whereas before you lacked that knowledge.

If it helps, think of the doors as groups. With your first pick, you chose 1 door. There is one door in that group. But if you switch, you not only get the second door, you’re also getting the 98 losing doors, too. So the second group contains 99 doors – the 98 losers plus the door you switched to. You’d be a fool not to switch to this second group!

Of course, the exact odds will vary based on the total number of doors. And that’s where my confusion came from. With one door out of the picture, it appears that you only have two to choose from, and it’s natural for humans to have two choices and think 50:50 odds. It’s also worth nothing that if you came in to the game after the first door had been picked, then your odds really would be 50:50.

Math… so confusing!

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Top 10 Tunes

Here’s my top 10 song chart for the week ending July 8, courtesy of the home office in London:

1) Ambra Red – “Beauty 606”
2) Marsheaux – “Empire State Human”
3) Katy Perry – “Part of Me”
4) Pink Floyd – “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”
5) Ramones – “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”
6) Cheap Trick – “Dream Police”
7) Love and Rockets – “No New Tale to Tell”
8) The Jesus and Mary Chain – “Head On”
9) Concrete Blonde – “It’ll Chew You Up And Spit You Out”
10) Dramarama – “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You)”