Is working in retail something you do while looking for a real job?. I am constantlyamazed by the lack of product knowledge displayed by retail staff. I was once looking at a coffee machine that used the Nespresso pod system. The salesman advised me that I could purchase the pods from New World. If he had opened the book sitting on the shelf right next to the coffee machine he would have known they came from Nespresso via mail order.

That aside, I was absolutely astounded when I visited a shop in Manners Mall in Wellington recently. Here was a nice display of Laptops, all with information boxes wanting input on them.

This is the same store whose staff complained about not being able to sell Apple products anymore, I wonder why?

I thought six months down someone at Telecom or HP might have actually fixed this. The apn incorrectly reads internet.telecom.nz.co

Spot the typo

The clever folk over at Geekzone have a workaround here. I am going to start annoying people at HP and will post the results.

Apple have released the iPad and apart from the fact that I don’t have mine yet, I just can’t understand the people that buy them to smash them up. What is that all about? If you don’t like it, how about not buying one? A perpetual exemption applies to Tom Dickson whose work has provided significant enjoyment over the years.

April fools day this year marked the closing of the final chapter of the unfortunate experiment of working with Advanced Networks Group. The restraint of trade period is now over and we look forward to the opportunity of working with you again.

SEATTLE (Reuters) – A U.S. court of appeals on Tuesday upheld a $290 million jury verdict against Microsoft Corp for infringing a patent held by a small Canadian software firm, and affirmed an injunction that prevents Microsoft from selling versions of its Word program which contain the offending software.

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I find it mildly annoying when you buy a piece of HP kit that it comes loaded with a number of programs that HP deem it important for you to have. One by one I find them disappear as the stock favourites take over. The latest piece of HP inflicted garbage to be relegated the waste pile today was PDF complete. It seemed like a perfectly acceptable bit of software until today it started locking up at the bottom of a page.  Remove, replace with Acrobat Reader and Cute PDF. Cute PDF is actually really cool because if you load it on a Terminal Server and your client PC will auto create on login. Then you can print to your client PC directly. CutePDf also gets around the dodgy PDF crator in MYOB

Solid-state lighting won’t supplant the light bulb until it can overcome the mysterious malady known as “droop”

A recent IEE Spectrum article is certainly worth a read. Richard Stevenson discusses the phenomenon known as droop which has the best minds baffled. LED’s at low current well out perform incandescent lights and even fluorescent but at commercial light levels droop kicks in plunging their efficiency. This is a serious setback in LED technology grabbing a significant share of the 100 billion lighting industry. I found it particularly interesting that white LED’s are actually blue.

I was asked to assist with an all too common occurrence; a full Exchange server drive. Exchange has to be one of the most frustrating and misunderstood of Microsoft’s products. In spite of having quite a bit of experience with exchange this problem nearly knocked me of my perch. Smart money would be on adding some hard drive space. In this case it was not an option. Shifting the streaming files and pub stores freed up enough to get it running.  A defrag is what was needed.  Here is where I came unstuck. A 250Gb USB drive was connected (formatted in NTFS as FAT32 only allows 4Gb files) and launched eseutil /d. Nine hours later there was no difference in size. In spite of the customer having a jolly good cleanup the retention policy was preventing the space being freed up. So either change the retention policy to zero or wait the set number of days. Next you need to run the cleanup wizard. Then run the eseutil / d. Good Luck, you’ll need it.

Its good to see that there are still stupid people in the world to keep us IT geeks busy. A recent attempt to steal your msn identity in the form of www.whoblocksyou.com is doing the rounds.  It asks you for your MSN login to show you who is blocking you. Your MSN name then changes
www.whoblocksyou.com – Figure out who’s blocking you in MSN!. Always keen to see how the attempt works I clicked on the link and Firefox displayed

Internet Explorer blindly took me to the site!

It was only a matter of time. I remember visiting ihug when it was run by a bunch of cigarette smoking geeks and there were shelves of shrieking 14.4 and 28.8 modems. They were demonstrating audio over the internet. As a person who had spent hours adjusting tape machines to +- 1/2 a dB from 20Hz to 20KHz I was less than impressed.

Tuesday will be the launch of Ziln, an internet television service that will try and squeeze pictures as well as audio over the internet.  Admittedly we now have broadband.

Users will be able to watch 13 foreign business and news channels and seven lifestyle channels for free on their computers

Among the channels that will be streamed online are business channel Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, EuroNews, Russia Today, Spain’s TVE and Zee News from India as well as locally made programmes relating to travel, shopping, interior design, outdoor activities and aviation.

The advertising-funded service has been developed by Auckland firm E-Cast, which provides an educational TV channel for universities and schools, and partner Netside TV, at a cost of more than $1 million.