I’ve found a tutorial over on the Microsoft Blog for adding items to the Destinations popup for programs in the taskbar… I only wish I knew how the new Remote Desktop software does it, since it seems to manage it without files…

Jump Into Jump Lists – Part 1
Jump Into Jump Lists – Part 2
Jump Into Jump Lists – Part 3

The new kettle is a much faster boiler (I no longer have time for a loo break while waiting for my tea), but suffers from a strange design failure.  For some reason, as the kettle gets hotter, it shifts slightly on the cordless base, losing the power connection long before the water is fully boiled.  It’s easy to get round this though – you just hold the back of the kettle in place for a few seconds until the thermal cut-out kicks in as the water finally boils.

However, I think this kettle would be an ideal interview tool for new developers.  Here’s how it would work: halfway through the interview, you ask the interviewee if he (or she) would mind making a couple of cups of tea while you just answer a call…  Points are then allocated based on how they handle the kettle:

0 points – if he doesn’t even notice that it disconnected rather than cutting out properly.

1 point – for noticing it failed to boil, but just giving up

2 points – if he holds down the “on” switch to get it to boil

3 points – for realising that it’s nothing to do with the switch, and just holds the handle in place (allowing the thermal cut-out to work)

4 points – for figuring out that you can just put a paper towel under the front of the kettle, and then you don’t even need to hold it

5 points – for spotting the paper towel that was already there in place, and realising it has a purpose, so not moving it to start with!

My bet is that most of the people currently in my office would get 3 points at best.

CHOCOHOLICS

Come and try free samples and buy gifts for friends and family, 12pm-2pm today.

Now… imagine the outrage if that had read “Alcoholics” instead… Why are chocolate addicts treated so badly that we don’t care about this kind of insensitive taking of advantage?

Still, in general, we’re good at the step by step instructions thing. We’re also good at following said instructions; okay, sometimes we’re arrogant and think we know better, and can skip a step, but generally, put a programmer in front of a set of instructions, and we’ll follow it accurately and to the letter.

The trouble is, that’s what we assume everyone else will do too, so that’s how we write our instructions. Real people have a strange (to programmers) tendency to wander off from the written guide, and try to do their own thing.
Programmers don’t expect this, so we don’t guard against it. For example, I had this conversation at work today:
Me: So what did you do next?
User: I closed the window.
Me (thinking something is up): How did you do that?
User: I clicked the X in the corner
Me: Why did you do that? The instructions say “Click Accept”
User: Oh, but clicking the X is faster… it takes a couple of seconds when you click “Accept”
Me: Sigh… yes… that’s the program running to do the work you asked for… Clicking “X” cancels it.
User: Oh, well why didn’t the instructions say that?

In the end I changed the program, so clicking the “X” did the same thing as clicking “Accept”… and no amount of arguing will convince either the user that the instructions were right, or me that they were wrong.

At any rate, Monday, my alarm clock signalled that the problems were coming to a head – but that was all it signalled, since it decided that playing music was beyond it. Oddly, I actually woke up just after 6:30 anyway, and was earlier to work than I’ve been in a while. During the day, the phone played up a bit, so I took another backup, and decided to see how it behaved.

Tuesday… the same problem. Despite co-operating all Monday evening, my phone was definitely not happy. It seems most unhappy when it was woken up after being in stand-by for more than a few minutes – particularly overnight, but it also threw a fit when coerced into receiving calls after being neglected for more than a few minutes. I decided that enough was enough, and a reset would be required.
However, just after I reached that decision, I discovered that my Window Sideshow Preview (there’s a new version released now) had just expired, and perhaps that was the cause. One un-install later, and my phone has the benefit of the doubt for a while…

On Wednesday – as if knowing that it was walking on very thin ice – my phone managed to play my 6:30 alarm by 6:35… sadly though, only the first chord of my 7am alarm was forthcoming. By 9am, I had decided enough was enough, and a Hard Reset would be required. I had a recent back-up, so hopefully I’d only be out for an hour or so…

Or not…

Typically, I’d misjudged. Instead of clearing all the data and rebooting with a clean install, my phone (by now generally referred to as “You useless piece of shit”) decided to sit at the WM6.1 boot screen with the message “The device is clearing the storage. Please wait” for a very long time. In fact, it hung there all day; several soft resets, hard resets, powered, un-powered… whatever I did, nothing worked.

On the plus side, less calls to answer all day.

I’d actually known this might happen. It happened last time I did a hard reset, and came back just as I was packing it up to send back to Vodafone (at about 1am). I naively assumed it had got this little tantrum out of its system by now…

Eventually, after much searching, I found someone else who’d had the same problem. He eventually solved it by re-flashing the original WM6.1 ROM from Vodafone. Sadly though, I’m running Vista x64, so I had no expectations of this working at all… Still, I downloaded the file from Vodafone, on the off chance it might work…

While I waited for the file to download, I searched a bit on performing ROM upgrades on Vista. It looked like my best bet was going to be to use a Virtual Machine running Windows XP, connect the device to that, and flash from there. I had all that ready… but decided, on the off chance, to give it a go from Vista. From what I’d read, the worst that could happen was that the device would not be detected.

It worked.

Not only that, it fixed my original problem. The phone rebooted, and worked normally. Sadly, I left my backups in work, so I’ll have to complete the restore tomorrow… but at least now I know how to get a recalcitrant phone to perform a hard reset properly.

I’m going to write up the full details of how to do this as a page on this site – hopefully, later tonight – but to be honest, it’s not needed.

Sadly, it’s not just the news-hounds who hate people having a good attitude. Baroness Shriti Vadera has been publicly shamed today for daring to voice optimism in this current economic climate. According to the Tories (who I supposedly support), saying “I am seeing a few green shoots” demonstrates how out of touch and insensitive she is…

The trouble is, no-one wants to admit the question that this was in response to. According to Sky News, the question asked was when would we be seeing green shoots – so the words themselves were put in her mouth by the reporter. No-one seems to want to discuss that…

Not only that, but it’s true. As I was driving home today, Radio 2 was talking about the thousands of new jobs – a little research finds that both Tesco and Sainbury’s are looking to expand into new stores, creating over 10,000 new jobs between them. That’s surely a green shoot?

The best comment about it I’ve heard was that Norman Lamont said this “at the height of the last depression”. So… that’d be just as it was turning around then?

The Washington Post has a nice, well balanced review of Windows 7. I advise you to read it, since it’s taken a fairly mature approach of looking at how the average user will feel about the upgrade. Instead of looking at one particular feature and either screaming abuse or singing its praises, David Murphy has tried to cover the breadth of changes and how they really impact him.

Part of the problem is that I’ve just got used to Vista. I’m now comfortable with the sidebar taking up a valuable two inches of my screen real-estate, and I haven’t had an un-expected UAC prompt in months (yes, it is still enabled; but I’m used to – nay, demand – the extra confirmation when I perform a proper administrative task).

I’d still like to see what Windows 7 would look like fully powered on my machine – having only run it in a VM situation so far, I haven’t had a chance to play with the proper shiny effects – but it’s not my number one priority. Sorry Microsoft!

One of my regular tasks is sorting out the database on our Support server.  This is a bit of a nightmare, since the users of that server are all – at least in their own minds – admin types, so configurations and usage changes on a daily basis.

Today – we ran out of space.  This isn’t as bad as it sounds, since I’ve put a restriction in place to limit any database file to 8GB (this is a limit enforced by my rather lame backup practices).  I knew the problem – one of our support databases was on the “USERS” tablespace, instead of the appropriate customer-specific tablespace.

Thanks to the guys at DBA Sensation, finding the correct commands to move Tables, Indexes and even LOB Segments to a new tablespace was trivial… But here’s a very useful script that generates a full set of commands to move all of a given user’s data from one tablespace to another…

SELECT CASE
     WHEN segment_type = 'TABLE' THEN
          'ALTER TABLE '||seg.owner||'.'||seg.segment_name ||' MOVE TABLESPACE '||'&TARGET_TBSP'||';'
     WHEN segment_type = 'INDEX' THEN
          'ALTER INDEX '||seg.owner||'.'||seg.segment_name ||' REBUILD TABLESPACE '||'&TARGET_TBSP'||';'
     WHEN segment_type = 'LOBINDEX' THEN
          'ALTER TABLE '||seg.owner||'.'||lob.table_name ||' MOVE LOB('||lob.column_name||') ' ||'STORE AS (TABLESPACE '||'&TARGET_TBSP'||');'
     ELSE '/* Segment '||seg.segment_name ||' is of type: '||segment_type||' */'
     END AS sql_command
FROM dba_segments seg, dba_lobs lob
WHERE seg.owner = '&SOURCE_OWNER'
     AND seg.tablespace_name = '&SOURCE_TBSP'
     AND seg.owner = lob.owner(+)
     AND seg.segment_name = lob.index_name (+)
GROUP BY seg.owner, seg.segment_name, 
     seg.segment_type, seg.tablespace_name, 
     lob.table_name, lob.column_name
ORDER BY seg.segment_type DESC, seg.segment_name;

A word of warning: This will work for all tables, indexes and LOB segments, but will not handle any tables that have a LONG datatype. OraFAQ has a helpful thread about this – the simple answer is that LONG datatypes don’t support the MOVE command.

To be honest though, I think Compare the Meerkat is an entertaining website in its own right (although the annoying voice-over is, well, annoying).  Even if it is viral marketing… I like it!

The question for me though, is which came first – the content or the readership?

Let’s face it – if I set up a site and advertise it, but there’s nothing there, people aren’t going to stay.  It’s one of the mysteries (to me, at least) of sites like FaceBook; how on earth did they get their first 1,000 users?  Obviously, there comes a point when a site has enough momentum to expand on its own, but those first few readers, visitors or members… how do you get them to sign up?

So clearly, content must come first.  Somehow, I’ve got to put together enough Angry Rants, General Musings and useful technical information that someone visiting this site will feel that their time has been well spent – and not only will they come back and check for more content, but they’ll tell their friends to do the same…

On the other hand… Right now, I have a grand total of 2 readers – and one of them is me.  When writing for such a limited audience, it is tricky to get motivated – and even when I am motivated, it feels like the worst kind of shameless egotism.

Maybe – just maybe – a Blog is the wrong way to start a site… or is that heresy against the principals of Web 2.0?