British Inside

30 days already?

James — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:59:00 GMT

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. There must have been an automatic update last night, I came in this morning to a signin screen and the computer was booting from scratch. Of course, I immediately turned around and went for coffee; it's not a quick process.

On my return, the normal things are running; Outlook, Google Desktop sidebar, Pidgin, Twhirl, SlimTimer. But Outlook looks different. Weird...oh-crap-its-clearcontext-and-its-gone!

Yes, it's 30 days since I installed ClearContext trial version. Two people had recommended it, and once I tweeted it I remember one person saying "I bet you won't have it installed in 12 months" or something. Well, he's an idiot. :)

It's completely changed the way I work with email, and made the switch to being a PM a LOT easier. Here's a list of things that I use and appreciate every day:

The categories are just genius. Every project is a folder/category and since I color-coded every category that means that my email, tasks and calendar are color-coded. Until you see it, you don't understand. I can glance at my screen and see which project I am working with today. Super cool.
I (or CC) automatically assign categories to most emails now. I created some rules, maybe some is automatic, I dunno. It just works. So again, emails are color-coded in my inbox.
FWIW, I never have more than a dozen emails in my inbox. (well, technically, threads, but since they are collapsed it's still not a lot)
..which leads me to the magic buttons (can you hear angels singing?)

File Thread == Awesomeness. One click and the thread gets filed into it's folder. That means (to me) that I don't need to action it.
Make Task. If there is something to do, click this to make it a task. Put the date in. It appears on the bottom of the calendar, color-coded. This is too easy.
I've never deferred, but there's a button for it. Personally I just leave it in my Inbox until I can action it.
But Unsubscribe is my favorite of all. If you work in a company with more than 50 people, this is a lifesaver. We have company-all, telligent-life and a whole bunch of internal technical lists. Someone is always selling a cat, congratulating on getting pregnant or having a baby, closing with a big new customer, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. You get the idea.

AND EVERYONE REPLIES "Congtrats" or "w00t"!

Now, I just hit "Unsubscribe" on the first email - and I never see any replies. If you didn't know what you were doing and didn't use rules or CC, you could get a 100 emails a day into your inbox with just this.. er.. crap.

I haven't used the dashboard much, or probably a dozen other features, but the ones I have used have become truly indispensable. Hell, I'd buy it just for Unsubscribe, and that isn't even strictly helping me with my job.

Oh one more thing I forgot - message actions! Every time that I send an email and *need* an answer, I click the message actions and choose "remind me in 1 day if no reply received". Hahahaha - how priceless is that? My brain can relax - one less thing to try and track subconsciously.

Oooo, another big one. I used to run rules to move things around into folders - which sound like the same thing but really isn't. The key thing here is that if you run rules then your cell phone probably doesnt see them - mine only syncs with the root Inbox, not the project folders. So, now my phone "works" because on day 1 of CC I killed all my rules, and now just file the threads when I return to the office.

See, the world isn't all crappy products and ranting blogs. :D

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UI Fail - disabling Windows Defender

James — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:10:00 GMT

I feel a little silly this morning. When I setup my new Vista box a few weeks ago I installed my CA Security Center that I love and uninstalled Windows Defender - or at least I thought I had. I swear I saw it in Add & Remove Programs and got rid of it.

Well, this morning it popped up saying that an update failed. ??

So I looked again and sure enough when i searched in CP for defender there was still a link to it. So I opened it and it said that scanning was disabled but run-time protection was still on. I looked in Tools > Options but there's nothing much there.

After some googling though, many people were talking about diabling run-time protection in the options page.

And of course, they were right, I'm a bozo. Look carefully below:

Just a few options right? And no tabs, so no more "hidden options" on there? Nope, I'm a dummy because they put *scrollbars* on an options dialog. Silly me. Scroll down and there are loads more options, including checkboxes for disabling real-time protection and even "Use Windows Defender" where you can disable the whole thing.

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Avis - FAIL

James — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:27:00 GMT

If you've even driven in Dallas you'll understand about the tolls. For visitors it appears they are everywhere - you pay to get on, you pay to get off, and you pay when you're half way there too, just for good measure. It's insane.

Locals bypass much of this madness, but visitors like me don't know how. So, the first thing you find when you drive a rental car out of the airport is a toll booth asking you for a dollar....and of course you dont have any change. It really is frustrating.

So imagine how happy I was last week to discover that Avis have implemented a new system now that includes "tolltag" in all their cars! A little gadget that allows us to drive through the fast lanes and the tolls just get added to the bill. So cool!!

This service was promoted all over the counter at the rental desk and I had a conversation with the rep about it. You don't have to do a thing - the first time you drive through a toll it gets automatically enabled and then you get billed $2.50 a day during the rental. A small price to pay.

So, of course, all week I drove throught the fast lane and smiled each time!!

Until the last day. The day I returned the car. I went through one toll that had a light that went green as you drove through. My light didnt go green. It was red. Hmmmm.

Then I got to a tollbooth with a barrier at the airport. The barrier didnt go up. WTF?

I parked at the avis dropoff and told the attendant that the tolltag wasnt working, and guess what? Go on, guess. Yes, my car didn't have it fitted.

So what happens when Avis gets a ticket in the mail? I don't know, but I'm guessing that they'll stick that and an "administration fee" on my credit card. I doubt that they'll ask permission again (I'm sure their rental agreement covers this somewhere!)

No problem, I'll call Avis this morning and clear it up. This is how it went:

Called 800 number. very helpful lady said that I'd need to speak to the local DFW office. She gave me the number (972-574-4130).
Called the DFW number. Chose 4 "customer service". A recording tells me they are transferring me to Worldwide Customer Service. Endless loop to #1.
Called again. Chose "Extend my rental" - got transferred to a busy signal.
Called again. Same result.
Called again. Chose "Make a new reservation" hoping to get to someone who wants my money. They transfer me to worldwide sales people.She was again helpful and said to call local number but NOT choose a number. Just wait.
Called again. Didn't press a number...and was transferred to a busy signal.
Called again. There was a choice for "administrative offices". Oooh, real people? I got into another voicemail system, and was asked to choose from a bunch of peoples names, press 1 for Jack, press 2 for Jill, etc. Also, one choice for "airport manager" so I chose that. I got a voicemail message that - get this - asks me to "re-enter the 4 digit extension number that you were trying to reach". Of course, I dont know, I just picked a choice from a menu. "Or press 411 for a directory".

I started to press 411 - and on "4" a recording told me "goodbye" and I was disconnected.

Oh My God.

Avis, you SO FAILED.

Consider this my documentation when I have to go to small claims court to get my money back.

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Going around again...

James — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:15:00 GMT

I started Telligent as a PM, then went into product, then moved to the Microsoft-specific "sites" team where I wrote and maintained the http://silverlight.net site.

But that ended last week as the sites team transitioned onto other projects inside Telligent. Terri wrote about it here.

So, I'm back into the Services dept as a PM now and looking forward to it. I believe that being a developer gives you a big insight into the development process that "regular" PM's don't have. Telligent has awesome devs, so some of the advantages are moot, but being able to sense developer BS and create requirements that can actually be implemented would be advantages in other companies.

So, I've been reading a lot of articles on PM and Scrum too. Most of these are posted on our intranet (kudos to Evolution) but some are simply referencing public articles.

One in particular this morning I found particularly interesting: User Story Estimation Techniques

BTW, don't write me off just yet, I'm still developing..someway, somehow I'll always be tinkering!

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Lightbox JS and HTTPS

James — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:37:00 GMT

I've always loved Lightbox - it just looks so cool. I've used it to "popup" larger versions of images on a few sites, but only today did I notice that it causes a security warning in IE7.

Unfortunately, this isn't highlighted as an issue on the lightbox page, so I didn't know about it - and this can cause cart abandonment if it happens during the checkout process!

The fix was easy to find on their forums, but I would have preferred to have known about it in advance

So, here's your warning - if you use lightbox or are about to, follow this advice.

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Using OpenDNS.com to protect your family

James — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:39:00 GMT

I was a little surprised that someone I talked to last night hadn't heard of this amazing service, and even more surprised that I hadn't blogged about this before.

If you have a router at home - and surely most of my audience does - you need to set it to use OpenDNS.

Do it today. It's free furchrissakes.

There are many reasons why it's a good thing from a technical point of view, being faster to access and faster to update than your current DNS server. But that's not the biggest reason why you should do it.

You have a family? OpenDNS is a beautifully simple way to stop any bad content getting into your house. There is no setup to do on anyone's computer. Since all traffic flows through OpenDNS you use their control panel to literally stop anyone viewing porn, drugs, gambling, even politics(!).

There's nothing they can do to get around it, unless they have admin access to your router. Although I use Vista's parental controls too on my smallest kids, I wouldn't rely on it. This router-level access means that I can't even view this stuff.

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Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist Todd Chism

James — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:57:00 GMT

One of my fellow moderators on an Entrepreneur forum we both spend too much time on,Todd Chism, just got nominated by his colleagues for Entrepreneur of the Year - and made it to the final!

Todd's a great guy and has built a great company selling patio furniture amongst other things.

Why am I telling you all this? I need your votes to help a friend!

It's very simple, just go here and click the vote button
It requires no registration
You can vote once a day

Firefox Unresponsive Script

James — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:12:00 GMT

After the first few thousand times you get this warning it starts to get old. Real Old.

I always thought it was a badly written site like OnTime or just because I can at times have 20 tabs open in FF3 testing different versions of the Silverlight.net site all running loads of scripts and silverlight.

But today I'd had enough. I googled it, which is what I should have done a long time ago. You'll find a lot of people babbling about Firebug and other add-ins, but it's a bug in Firefox that's the issue.

Jaime explains it perfectly here.

Although Jaime is trying to explain how site developers can help, I really just want my FF3 to start behaving. The nugget is right at the bottom:

Firefox controls its time out based on the dom.max_script_run_time setting, which you can tweak via the about://config moniker; the default timeout in most recent versions is 10 seconds.

Actually, you need to type about:config into FF3 to see this config (I had no idea this existed).

I then changed both dom.max_script_run_time and the one above it (chrome something) to 60 seconds. Hopefully that will fix it once and for all. Fingers crossed.

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JavaScript browser detection

James — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:12:00 GMT

Quick shout out to Peter-Paul Koch at QuirksMode.org for his very nice javascript browser detection script.

Clever, and definately deserved more than a tweet.

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Caricatures

James — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:45:00 GMT

As I was walking around the local Geranium Festival at the weekend (they completely shut down the center of our sleepy little town for a bunch of vendors to set up stalls) I came across a guy doing caricatures. We've had them done for the kids a few times but this time I stepped up for a laugh! I figured I could use it as an avatar if it looked anything like me. It was only $12!

The family thought it was hilarious, so here it is. What do you think?

Personally I think I have a lot more hair.

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Kinda Relative URLs

James — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:23:00 GMT

After developing for *cough* some time it's not often that I come across a new style of URL that I've never even heard of before.

A few days ago I saw a forum post about a 404 message someone got about their geotrust smartseal badge. I followed up and found that the javascript that geotrust supply has a URL style that I've never seen before - note below that there is no protocol!

..and two leading //.

Then I noticed that the Authorize.net badge on the same page was very similar:

Google wasn't helpful for this, but after asking around on some technical lists I got an answer from Adam Sills.

Look at http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial2/3.html and you'll see that..

"A relative URL that begins with // (two slashes) always replaces everything from the hostname onwards."

You really can learn something every day. This is clever actually, because it means that no matter if your page is being requested as http or https the badges will be requested with the same protocol - meaning that you won't see any security warnings.

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Dealing with Mrs Jobsworth

James — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:55:00 GMT

From wikipedia:

A jobsworth is a person who uses his or her job description in a deliberately obstructive way, "a minor factotum whose only status comes from enforcing otherwise petty regulations". The term comes from the phrase "I can't do that, it's more than my job's worth."

You may not be familiar with this term in the U.S. but in England it's a very common phrase. My wife's been involved with one of these people for a few weeks now and this morning I think we're close to seeing a meltdown. Soon this "official" is going to be feeling the wrath, and I'm staying in my office until it's over, thankyouverymuch.

My wife wants a part-time job. She figures the school system is a good place for this, so she applied to the local county school system. After submitting forms, applying for open positions, etc we get this email.

"Dear Mrs Shaw, We need proof of your graduating high school" or words to that effect.

Aaah, well, you see in England we don't graduate high school. You just kinda..leave. You take exams, sure, but no-one here knows what a CSE, GSCE, etc are. Or cares.

So, we contact the old school. They send emails and finally a fax on headed paper to the county saying that my wife had left high school with good grades, passed exams and could have gone to college.

(Apparently, "could have gone to college" is a key phrase here, because only people who graduate high school can go to college)

None of this helped, unfortunately.

Mrs Jobsworth at the Henry County School Administration says that the correct words weren't used. The FIVE emails and letters that have been sent from the English school JUST WON'T DO. Sorry, she spoke to her supervisor but they still need a certificate or something.

We don't want to cause the poor woman in England any more grief, so we're probably going to drop the whole thing. But as you can imagine, my wife is pissed.

It got me thinking though, isn't this a subtle form of racial discrimination? Aren't schools the world over going to have trouble producing a high school diploma?

This is the problem dealing with jobsworth's - you are almost always better off just walking away before you say or do something you regret later..

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Now deleting spam

James — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:19:00 GMT

Until today I have been reviewing my gmail spam folder each day or so, and marking all new spam as read when I've reviewed it. Most of the time that works ok, but I've noticed that there are times when I get spam with a presumably deliberately wrong date - maybe a few years ago.

That's quite clever of them really, in a way, because it means that I don't see it in my first page of spam.

And it's pretty dumb of them in another way, because, well, I don't see it. Not making much money off viagra if no-one sees the email, guys!

In any case, typing in the "in:spam is:unread" to find them got too much for me today, so I switched over to a new method. Rather than marking as read, I now review spam and then hit the "delete forever" link.

As a little bonus, I get a "feel-good" message back from Google each time!

Thanks Google, you old kidder!

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Networking Equipment and how to return it

James — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:25:00 GMT

First, always keep the wrapping, even the little twisty ties that keep the wires tidy. Keep the paperwork and the CD's - and I try to open the tamper-proof stickers with a sharp knife so that I don't rip the paperwork.

I'm getting very good at this because I've returned multiple routers and associated equipment in the last month.

I was trying to move from my very reliable but old and slow 802.11b router you see. It has a huge range (my office is 100 feet and 5 walls away from the router) though. The 11mbps just wasn't cutting it though when I had a couple of RDC's open and my daughters got onto myspace and youtube in the evening.

My first attempt was an N+ router - great, but the range sucked and no expanders are available yet. Plus 802.11n is a draft spec and there were some issues although I can't remember what they were now.

Next was a Belkin G+ MIMO F5D9230-4 router. Setup easily, worked perfectly with all the laptops and desktops in the house. Out in the office there was still good signal and I was getting 48mbps most of the time. Just one problem; every few minutes all my IM windows would go dark and then reconnnect. Same with RDC - continually trying to reconnect - trust me that's just not going to fly in my job.

It's not my setup - it's a known problem with this router. Gamers were all over the networking forums posting about this router because of course it was dropping them out of their games all the time.

Last night I went back to best Buy again, this time I chose a linksys WRT54G2 - new version of the WRT54G which has to be the most well-known router ever. Great, everything worked but signal sucked a little. Down to 1-2 bars and 11mbps in the office. So I got a WRE54G expander which in theory takes the signal from the limits of the wireless router and sends it out again - doubling the range.

In theory.

The first one had issues, I couldn't set it up wired or wirelessly, automatic config or manual. The infamous red light that apparently many people get. Linksys tech support (India division) tried a few things then told me to take it back to the store. "How old is it sir?" "four hours"...

Another 10 miles and back to Best Buy. Another $3.49 in gas.

I got a replacement and it did setup correctly. And it worked - it took a poor signal up to 3-4 bars and 11mbps to 36/48mbps. Awesome!! But I know from experience that "getting it working" isn't the same as "does it work during work hours".

Today proved that yet again - first up, my little google desktop CPU gadget was showing my CPU going up and down. Sure enough, task manager showed that the network card was bouncing between 0-40% CPU, every other second. Hmmmm.

Then I got a popup; "There is an IP address conflict with another system in this network". Uh-oh.

A few minutes later, same error.

In the event log I see this:

The system detected an address conflict for IP address 192.168.1.102 with the system having network hardware address 00:1D:7E:A0:C2:BE

Ok, not sure what's going on here because the router shows the DHCP clients and none of them clash. In any case, I'll set the IP address manually on this PC.

10 minutes later, same popup.

I go and turn off every other computer on the network.

10 minutes later..you get the idea. I google it, lots of would-be nerds giving the same old advice, blah, blah, but then I realize that I can look up what device I'm conflicting with by MAC address.

It's the expander itself. Odd? I thought so, especially since I just changed the IP address 10 minutes ago - AND NOW THE EXPANDER IS USING MY HARDCODED IP ADDRESS

Needless to say, it's back in the box with receipt ready to go back home with its buddies tomorrow.

I'm just worried that one of these days Best Buy are going to stop me buying stuff.

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Today's not the day to read blogs

James — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:20:00 GMT

Don't believe anything you read today. I know better, but I still forgot the date and believed Daniel had sold his company.

His post was very well done, but I still think my old April Fool's Joke was better. Back in 2005 it was more believable I guess. I had a load of congrats emails that day, and I felt quite mean telling people I was only joking.

Hell, I was quite sad myself.

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