Category Archives: General

Thanks, Toshiba

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Fairness dictates that I follow up on my recent travails trying to get Toshiba to send me recovery disks for my laptop, preferably without trampling over my privacy concerns as they do so. For they have responded superbly to my complaint and, in the process, quite converted me back into the Toshiba fan I was of old.

First things first, then: having emailed them a reluctantly-scanned copy of the receipt for the laptop, I rang the next day at 8.01am… and was immediately answered by a charming, polite and efficient bloke. After a quick 20 seconds calling my details up on screen, he simply asked for my credit card number, the address to which the disks should be shipped… and that was that. No hassles, no being kept in a queue, no strife. Service as it should be, I think.

Second things second: although I had been warned that the disks might take up to 5 working days to arrive, they actually arrived the next day. Efficiency, indeed.

Third, the “Customer Service Team Leader” took the trouble to write a long and detailed reply to my earlier emailed complaint. He stepped through the things I’d mentioned, point by point. He apologised for lines not being open when they were supposed to be, and for the recorded voice message advising incorrect opening times. He said he’d get the voice message amended as soon as possible -and the same thing about the email template that mentions a ‘Windows product key’ that Windows 8 users won’t have.

And then the biggie: he took the trouble to explain why Toshiba asks for the receipt in these circumstances:

For older versions of Windows where the product key has faded or missing from the base of the notebook, it was Toshiba’s process to collect the proof of purchase to show ownership of the notebook. I appreciate your feedback that since customers are willing to provide their payment details and delivery details [when purchasing the recovery disks] that their identity should not be in doubt. With Windows 8 now having the product key injected into the unit, I am currently reviewing our process with recovery disk orders.

You can’t get fairer than that, really: there was perhaps a legitimate reason for it back in the day; he recognises that reasoning doesn’t necessarily apply now; he promises to look into it and see what alternative approach he can come up with for the future.

My kind of customer response, really. And then this was the icing on the cake:

As a gesture of goodwill and thanking you for the time to provide feedback, I would like to refund the cost of these recovery disks to your credit card account.

I don’t think that’s ever happened before: taking the time to complain gets called ‘providing feedback’ and warrants getting your money back! Brilliant, Toshiba, and thank you.

Summing up: I think my complaint was legitimate, and Toshiba has responded to it extremely well and generously. As I say, although it would be great not to have to complain in the first place, you can’t ask for a better outcome when you do. Toshiba return to my good books, then!

Incidentally, my enquiry of the Department of Fair Trading suggests that Toshiba is within its rights to ask to see the receipt (though I remain unconvinced), but that if I couldn’t provide one (maybe because I’d lost it, maybe because it was a gift, etc) then Toshiba would not be within their rights to use that as justification for not supplying the recovery disks.That is, they have discretion in the matter and could well waive the receipt requirement on a case-by-case basis. Anyone for whom the requirement was not waived would be withing their rights to make a formal complaint to the Department, who would pursue the matter directly with Toshiba.

Happily, it didn’t come to that, and hopefully, given the response from Toshiba above, it won’t do so for anyone else in the future.

Camera Joys… and Windows Woes

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nikond600In January 2014, I turn 50. Rather more significantly, in November 2013, Benjamin Britten would have turned 100, if he hadn’t been unlucky enough to die in 1976. But whatever: the end of this year, one way or another, turns out to be of great personal significance… and, as a result, me and ToH will be travelling back to the UK in late November, to celebrate both occasions with family, friends and any strangers that want to take pity on a couple of wandering Aussies.

Yes, we are both completely bonkers, and fully understand that we are facing average maximum day-time temperatures of around 8 degrees Celsius (46 Fahrenheit for old-timers and American readers). But we will be in Aldeburgh on November 22nd, standing in the graveyard and paying respects to one of the great composers of our time. So it’s worth it.

I have also wangled a lifetime-desired trip to Bletchley Park (where we won the war by decrypting German Enigma traffic, happening also to invent computers along the way, just in passing). I’m looking forward to that a lot.

The trip comes with some costs attached, however (and I’m not talking about the unheard-of amounts that Aldeburgh’s White Lion hotel wants to charge us!). Specifically, ToH says that a new camera is needed since the last lot of London photos were a tad disappointing, and thus last Thursday we shelled out around $3000 for the Nikon D600 you see above. I coughed a bit, but since I’ve only just recently splashed out $2000 for a new Toshiba laptop, it’s difficult to complain much!

In fact, of course, there is no need to complain at all, because ToH’s former Nikon D80 gets handed down to me (definitely the ugly step-sister when it comes to matters photographical), and I accordingly take a rather large step up from the little Lumix DWC-FH20 I’ve been using for the past 4 years. The last time I used an SLR, digital or analogue, was back in the 1980s, when my trusty (built like a Soviet tank, in fact) Zenit did me duty in the likes of Bulgaria, Zimbabwe and Botswana… so it’s going to be a learning curve for me.

Of course, this means having to deal with RAW images and learning to stitch and crop them as the mood takes me -and thus I feel compelled to renew my hitherto fleeting acquaintance with Photoshop. And Photoshop, of course, means Windows (for Wine will let Photoshop 3 just about pass muster, but cannot cope with Photoshop 5, which we use chez Dizwell). And thus it is that only a fortnight after having purged the house of the last non-ToH-owned Windows machine, I have felt compelled to dump Fedora from my desktop and reverted to Windows 8. After 6 months uninterrupted Linux loveliness, I somewhat regret the move, but no way, no how am I going to try to wrestle GIMP into submission!

I hasten to add that it is not all ToH’s fault, since work is asking me to pick up some SQL Server administration duties, thus making domestic installation of Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 look like a sensible proposition for career prospects. Time to wipe CentOS off my two HP Proliant Microtower servers, then, after 9 happy months of just sitting there and working beautifully…

Some updates about Windows 8, Windows 2012, Hyper-V and SQL Server to come, too!

Colour me unhappy with… Toshiba :-(

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My new laptop (Toshiba p870) has been doing nicely of late, but I decided I’d like to get the factory-settings re-installation media after all, just because it seemed like a good idea at the time. I knew I’d have to pay for these disks, but it seemed like a worthwhile investment (though it would be an even better idea if Toshiba shipped a couple of 30cent disks with a $2000 laptop).

Little did I reckon with Toshiba.

First, there’s nowhere on their site you can request the re-installation media. I had to visit their site, poke around for half an hour and then give up and send a web-based general enquiry instead. No matter, I suppose: slightly inconvenient, but the message got through, since the next day brought a welcome response: please ring this phone number between 8am and 6pm, have a credit card, your laptop serial number and your Windows product ID handy.

No worries. At 8.01am this morning I rang…and got told that “the lines have now closed. They re-open 7am to 7pm”. Well, I’m guessing that since it’s past 8am and they’re not open for business, the reference to 7am is just a mistake. No problem: hang up, retry later.

Actually, I re-tried 8 times, between 8.01am and 8.08am. Only then did I get through.

No matter: at least I’m finally talking to a human. Ah, I say: I notice your earlier email to me mentioned I’d have to have a Windows product ID. Trouble is, the bottom of my PC shows a laptop model and serial number, but no Windows number. Yes, the Toshiba representative says: things have changed with Windows 8 and Microsoft don’t now have product numbers on the outside of laptops and PCs. (So, I ask myself, why did your email say I’d have to have one if that’s no longer true: time to update your automated email boilerplate with the reality of the Win8 world, instead of the old Win7, perhaps?)

Well, no worries: I have my credit card, my laptop serial number and I’m ready to do business anyway. Not so fast, says the Toshiba guy: we need to see the receipt you received when buying the laptop.

Now, I bought the laptop at the local JB Hifi store. That’s a transaction between me and JB Hifi. I used my credit card, so that’s a transaction between me and Visa. But nowhere, notime did I transact with Toshiba, and I don’t see why they get to see receipts of transactions between me and third parties. Ah, says Toshiba Guy: we have to establish proof of ownership. It’s a Microsoft requirement.

Well, I say, Microsoft wasn’t party to my transaction with JB Hifi either, so they’re no more entitled to my transaction records than you are. Somewhat less, I’d say, given that I wiped Windows off my laptop within a day of buying it!

I change tack: how do I get this receipt to you? Just email a scanned image of it, he says. But what if I don’t have a scanner, I say. Take a photo of it with your camera, he says. I point out that’s assuming quite a few things. Oh well, just fax it over, he concedes. I point out that that’s assuming quite a few things, too! (Does anyone still have a fax machine?!)

I point out that the laptop might have been a gift, and that as a result I might not actually have a receipt at all, despite having legitimate ownership of the laptop. I don’t believe he answered that one.

As one of my recent commentators moronically pointed out, these are all first world problems: but I’m nevertheless mightily and legitimately annoyed that it’s impossible to purchase re-installation media without having your privacy trampled on in this way. Since when did Toshiba (or Microsoft, according to them) get granted police powers to investigate issues of legitimate ownership of laptops? Don’t they just sell you the software to run on them, wherever you got it from??!

Even if one concedes that they have an interest in servicing requests from only legitimate owners, it’s all just pointless security theatre: I could knock up an impressive-looking receipt with a word processor and a bit of imagination, after all.

I’ve written to Toshiba to complain. I’ve also written to the Department of Fair Trading, since it seems odd to me that the question of my legitimate ownership of the laptop can be raised by my simply asking to be able to perform a factory reset, should I want to. I’m paying for the installation media, after all (or trying to!): it’s not being provided by Toshiba out of the goodness of their hearts.

I await a reply from them, and I’ll probably just email a copy of the receipt anyway… but Toshiba sucks on this one and I won’t be buying any more of their kit as a consequence.

Loyaulte me lie

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r3skullLoyalty me lie …Richard III’s motto, “Loyalty Binds Me” (and that’s his skull on the left). The discovery of the bones of the late King in a Leicester car park inspired me (finally, after years of dithering) to part with a few dollars and join the Richard III Society (whose members effectively funded the recent dig).

Some of us always knew that Henry VII was a money-grubbing, tight-fisted charlatan with no more right to the Crown of England than Mrs Miggins and her Christmas Pussycat. It is so nice to have been vindicated at last.

It will eventually transpire, I think, that the two Princes in the Tower buggered off for a fortnight in the Costa del Sol, circa 1483, and decided to set up a Grappa and Schnapps scuba dive bar, rather than face the trauma of steering the English throne through the travails of the Renaissance.

Anyway, I’d just like to add that we are all Plantagenets now.

So true…

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I couldn’t help but nod vigorously as I read this story: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/07/home_lab_career_saver/

In case that ever disappears, here are the salient bits:

IT professionals can’t assume their employers want, or can afford to, train them in the latest technologies and should hone and acquire new skills at home in a self-built test lab. That’s the opinion of Mike Laverick, VMware’s senior cloud infrastructure evangelist.

“The days of being sent on training courses is gone,” he told the user groups. “The burden is now on you to get the skills and knowledge you need. It is assumed you will learn as you go.”

“I drove my career development by not waiting for my employer to say this is an interesting technology. I told my employer I have used this in my home lab and this is what it can do.”

My new PC (see last blog) was a nod in this direction (though taken long before that article appeared). With some solid state hard disks of sufficient capacity, an 8-thread CPU, 32Gigs of RAM and some virtualization software, there’s not a lot you can’t simulate for a thousand dollars or so at home. (I have been coping with 3 other PCs, 4 laptops and a Xeon server before the latest acquisition, but the new PC makes a lot of that redundant).

toshiba-p870Similar thinking has just lead me to buy a ‘mobile home lab’, in the form of one of these. It wasn’t cheap ($1900), but 1.5TB of hard disk (spinning variety) and 16GB RAM means I can simulate the key things I need (RAC, DataGuard, Oracle/SQL Server integration, Active Directory authentication of Oracle users and so on) on the train.

Those comments about knowing what interesting technology can do, without having to wait for formal training to find out, are key, I think. I used to get asked a lot what it took to become a good DBA… and one of the key ingredients, in my view, was the willingness and the ability to experiment with the technology at home. The magic ingredient for that was virtualization above all -and it’s funny that it’s now a VMware man humming the same sort of tune. Virtualization plus a decent bit of hardware (without going overboard!) means that’s truly possible in a way it wasn’t always when I was first banging on about it back in 2000.

I particularly liked Mike’s comments about “the Girlfriend impact” of a home lab, though: ToH can attest to the accuracy of his description of the way this metric waxes and wanes, depending on how many cables, screwdrivers, mice, keyboards, RAM sticks and hard drives are left scattered around the dining room, against how much money is spent on new kit that renders that sort of tinkering redundant! I reckon we’ll have to have won the world’s biggest lottery draw before ToH nods through an £870-per-month server hosting arrangement, though! Obviously Mike is blessed with more technologically-understanding other halves than some of us!!

Jaws… A Bash Script progress bar

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Back in about 1987, I started working for a very small company running out of offices on London’s South Bank -hence their name, SouthBank Systems PLC. They wrote specialist, database-based applications for local councils and their contractors to manage how their parks, street trees and other amenity values should be maintained.

I learnt so much in that job -that Bowling Greens are about the most expensive piece of grass you can ever install, per square meter, for example. Or that, if you make the mistake of writing your code this way, it is easy to generate “random inspection lists” that send an inspector first to one site, then a second on the other side of the borough, then back to a third… which was adjacent to the first! Who knew that what they really needed was a random selection of sites that were then sorted into an ordered, walkable path. Well, we did eventually: but it took us a while before the penny dropped!

One of the first-ever training sessions I ever gave took place in a greenhouse in Aldershot, where the contractors were bemused by the two minutes of frenetic activity they’d seen me do before turning to them to speak. They wanted to know what I’d done, because it looked interesting. It took a moment for me to work out what they were intrigued by, but yeah: they wanted to know how to switch a computer on and what happens when you do. I learnt how to read audience expectations  that day!

Anyway, one of the little features of our software we were quite proud of, and which the clients loved, was Jaws. He was simply a shark fin that paced up and down the screen, letting you know that stuff was happening in the background. These days we call them progress bars and don’t think much about them, but to the kind of people I was working with back then, the “personality” of the progress bar was important.

I’d therefore like to present you with my 25-year tribute to Jaws, The SouthBank Systems progress bar, as implemented in Bash, as follows:

function jaws() {
i=1
char=">"
pos=4
while true
do
 i=$((i+1))
 if [ $(($i%60)) -eq 0 ]; then
 if [ "$char" = ">" ]; then
 char="<"
 else
 char=">"
 fi
 fi
 if [ "$char" = ">" ]; then
 pos=$((pos+1))
 if [ "$pos" -gt 60 ]; then
 pos=60
 fi
 else
 pos=$((pos-1))
 if [ "$pos" -lt 5]; then
 pos=5
 fi
 fi
 tput cup 18 5; echo "............................................................";
 tput cup 18 $(($pos)); echo -n $char;tput cup 20 5
 sleep 0.2
done
}

The variable “i” forever increments. But we pick a point when its value can be tested. In this case we check whether i modulus 60 is zero. (that is, can “i” be devided by 60 without leaving any remainder). If it is, then we use that to trigger a change in the progress bar character from “>” to “<”. Additionally, if we are left with “>” as our character, then we know to keep on incrementing the position where that character should be displayed. If we acquire a “<”. then the position counter will be decreased.

So you stick that function at the top of your bash script somewhere, and then it comes time to use it. Here’s the simplest case:

jaws &
jawsp=$!
sleep 40
kill $jawsp &>/dev/null

The “thing” this script is doing is simply to sleep for 40 seconds, but it could be doing any meaningful work. The point is that before the work starts, you invoke the jaws function -with an ampersand character (&) to make it run in a new, background session. We assign the process ID of that new session to a jawsp variable. When our sleep/work has finished, we can kill that process, which will stop the shark fins parading up and down the screen.

Eighties tribute bands are seldom worth the price of admission and it is similarly likely that you will consider Jaws a not very exciting addition to your set of Bash scripting skills. You may indeed be bemused that there was a highly professional set of clients and staff who thought Jaws was one of our most valuable bits of IP (shocking, but true, I fear). But even if it’s as welcome as a Mama Mia reunion ‘do’ at the Hammersmith Palais on a wet Wednesday night, I’m going to let you watch the video anyway because, for me, he brings back happy memories when my database skills extended to re-building DataFlex indexes and showing gardeners how to turn on a PC. Happy times!

Sharkfinsoup

Coming soon to a Gladstone shell script near you shortly, of course…

And cheers to Chris Megan, who wrote the original, all those moons ago.

Proved right!

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I hate being right all the time.

I said a new job would probably mean I’d not be posting as frequently as before… and so it has proved :-(

I doubt the situation will get better any time soon, either: the new employer has an SOE that is locked down so tight it’s difficult to breathe at times. Amongst other things, this means no wordpress.com sites can be visited (so Jonathan Lewis is out… please get a proper, independent domain name for your blog, Jonathan, so I can visit once more!) and no sites that involve a login (including this one) are accessible.

Fair enough, actually. I approve of SOEs on the whole, and I can understand the particular reasons for this one to be as strict as it is… but it sure makes things inconvenient at times, too!

It hasn’t helped that I ditched Google and self-hosted all my email: my email servers cannot make it through the SOE cloaking shield, either, so I’ve effectively had 3 weeks without any personal email at all. Why not email at home, after work, I hear you cry? Er, well… yes: had I not made to foolhardy decision to try out new ISPs, I suppose that might have worked. As it is, living where I live, it turns out that I have a choice of one ISP that actually works, so I’ve ended back with the one I started with… but it’s been mayhem getting there.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I will update this blog with something whenever I can, but you really don’t want to be holding your breath in the meantime!

 

Shh! Don’t disturb the consensus…

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I found this graph, courtesy of The Register, fascinating:

The top half shows average temperature anomalies in Greenland, measured with a number of different ‘proxies’ (such as tree rings, ice core analysis etc). We start using real thermometers in the latter part of the 19th Century (the red ‘instrumental’ line), and it is apparent, I think, that all indicators are suggesting that the temperature is going up quite rapidly as we reach the end of the 19th Century, with no sign of that increase really dropping off in any significant way.

What’s really interesting, though, is the bottom graph: it’s a plot of the rate of change of the Earth being hit by Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs), again as measured by a number of different proxies (such as isotope ratios for Beryllium). It’s an inverse scale, so the lower the line drops, the more cosmic rays are heading in our direction. Put another way, we’ve had far fewer cosmic rays coming our way since around the 1870s than we did in, say, the 1700s.

Spot a correlation between the two graphs? Does it perhaps suggest that when the rate of cosmic ray strike is high, global average temperatures drop? Or, more relevantly to today, perhaps, that the increase in global average temperatures we’ve measured in the past recent decades might be related in some way to the fact that cosmic ray activity has been tailing off over much the same period, and is now much lower than it has been in ages?

Correlation is not causation, of course, but if the cat is sitting next to an empty saucer of cream and licking his whiskers, you’d not want to discount the possibility that a bit of causation has resulted in the observed correlation!

The suggestion in this case is that cosmic rays act as ‘seeds’: by ionising air, they cause vapour trails to condense around their path, thus leading to the formation of clouds. And clouds reflect back the sun’s heat -so the more cosmic rays, the more clouds, the greater the cooling. Fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, greater warming.

(From the dim recesses of my brain I seem to recall that when they grounded all aircraft movements in the wake of the September 11th attacks, the same thing was observed: average temperatures over the continental USA shot up by a degree celsius or so, because there were no jets causing con-trails, and the completely clear skies that resulted allowed more solar radiation through than normal… so this is the same sort of idea, only with cosmic rays playing the part that jet engines commonly do). Update: I found a reference to what I’d only badly-remembered.

Naturally, implementing a carbon tax or an emissions trading system does not affect the number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth: that’s a function of the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field; and of the strengh of the Earth’s magnetic field; and of the complex interaction between the two.

Whether one draws the conclusion that a carbon tax or an emissions trading system is therefore a complete waste of time in the ‘fight’ against ‘climate change’ is, I guess, a matter for the politicians and not the scientists (which is no doubt why the physicists at CERN have been told not to draw conclusions from their research).

Personally, I look forward to a world powered by thorium reactors, hydrogen and solar (wind farms, not so much) and have no problem with the idea that switching away from a carbon-based economy is a Good Thing, for its own sake. I don’t expect doing so will make a blind bit of difference to the climate, however, and I suppose that makes me a “denialist”. So be it: I think research like this only serves to show how many known unknows there are out there!

Google be Praised

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I don’t think I’d be spilling any trade secrets if I said that whenever I go searching for Oracle tips/workarounds, I am always bound to find links to utterly useless results at Experts Exchange and any of the bazillion domains hosted by Don Burleson.

There have been browser extensions you could install to block things from the Google results pages by domain, but they’ve always been something you had to remember to install -and if you changed browsers, you were potentially back at step 1.

Today, Google have announced a game-changer: an option to block an entire domain from their search results, merely by clicking a link! Brilliant!

For example, if you’re doing an Oracle installation and come across the all_no_orcl linking error, you’ll do a search and end up with results like these:

The first two results there are from different domains owned and run by Don Burleson. If you think, as I do, that it would be useful to remove those two domains from any future search for reliable technical information about Oracle, you can now just click the Block dba-oracle.com and Block dbaforums.org links now helpfully included in the search results above. You’ll get a little ‘cloud puff’ animation as that particular domain disappears into thin air!

If you ever do the same search again, this time those blocked sites won’t appear in the results:

Now, the Oracle forums are the first results listed.

This feature works in all the major browsers (IE8, Chrome, Firefox), though I’m not sure it’s working reliably in Australia yet. It also, unfortunately, requires you to first visit a site on the domain you want to block and then to back-click to the original search results page. Only then does the ‘block’ link appear.

Currently, Google promises that the new feature won’t actually alter the Page Rank for any domain that gets blocked, but that might happen in the future.

At the bottom of any future search results page, you’ll see a count of how many links to blocked sites have been suppressed, along with an option to display them anyway. There’s also a management link, so you can unblock domains should you decide to:



All this means that you can make search results less full of stuff you know from bitter experience is likely to be a waste of time or, worse, downright misleading -and that’s a great thing to be able to do.

(Incidentally, if you want to stick to managing your own blocks using extensions, the plugins are still available: Personal Block List for Chrome and OptimizeGoogle for Firefox).

Handbrake Excellence!

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Ripping Blu-ray discs has always been painful, despite the RipBot264 program doing its best to simplify things. It’s therefore excellent news to hear that version 0.9.5 of Handbrake has now been released -and that one of it’s key new features is that it finally understands what a Blu-ray disc is and how one is layed out. Being able to interpret the source disc correctly, it’s now able to encode a rip from one directly, too.

Handbrake itself is not the simplest software in the world to master, but it comes with a variety of “presets” that have long made it possible to rip good ol’ DVDs in as simple a manner as I can imagine. And once you did ‘master’ the thing, you had enormous control over the quality and speeds of your DVD rips. To have the same capabilities finally extended to Blu-ray discs has therefore made me very happy!