Dave Beauvais’ Web Site

After getting to Bowling Green, Ohio for the the conference I mentioned in Thursday’s rant, I found out that I was only about ten minutes away from a good friend of mine. As I had never been to Bowling Green before, I used my XV6700 and Bluetooth GPS receiver with Mapopolis to guide me and track mileage for reimbursement next week. On the way up, I listened to some Fair Game podcasts in Windows Media Player on the PDA via an FM transmitter on my car’s stereo, while Mapopolis and the GPS guided me safely to the hotel with accurate directions. As I drove, someone called me, Media Player paused itself, and I answered the call on my Bluetooth headset with the press of its button. When done, the call ended, and Media Player resumed right where it left off.

After I got some time away from the conference at the end of the day Thursday, I arranged to visit my friend and his family at their house. As I’d never been there before I was not familiar with the area, he gave me directions, but I decided that I wanted a little technological backup. I fired up Microsoft’s Live Search on the phone, told it to use the GPS, and asked it to generate directions to his house from the current GPS position. It worked perfectly, downloading map data as I drove via the EvDO connection and updating the display with the next turn as I approached it. While it doesn’t do text-to-speech, spoken directions, rerouting in the case of a missed turn, or many other driver-friendly things that Mapopolis does, it definitely shows where navigation technology might be headed in the near future. As wireless data becomes more ubiquitous, things like this will become much more useful and common. I look forward to devices having built-in GPS receivers so the need for a separate receiver is a thing of the past.

I went to his house again after the conference ended on Friday afternoon, this time giving Google Maps for Windows Mobile a try. I found it to be much more clumsy than Live Search; it lacks the finger-friendly features of Live Search which make it simple to locate things with a minimum of typing. The GPS position indicator is small, hard to see, doesn’t indicate the direction of travel, and I found that it often didn’t center on my location automatically after switching from map, to directions, and back again. I do like the large finger-friendly zoom in/out buttons on-screen, which seem easier to use than Live Search’s method of zooming.

The one thing I did notice is that Google often has more current, and much higher resolution satellite imagery than Live does, but Live Search wins in just about every other way in my book. Neither one is a full replacement for dedicated navigation software — yet — but I do see myself using Live Search more than Mapopolis in the future.

Hmm, somehow this became a product mini-review… The point of this post is that my trip was a technological success. My gadgets all just worked with the exception of my laptop and the hotel’s Internet access which never worked. Except for when I was on my friend’s wireless network, the laptop never got used and in retrospect, I could have just left it at home and not had to tote it around the conference. I was able to keep up on e-mail, listen to some fun podcasts, read my RSS feeds via Google Reader, and was able to find new places and meet up with friends because of my PDA, a reliable phone network, and mobile technology that did what it was supposed to do. I was very impressed!

So it’s almost 21:00 EDT on Wednesday night and I haven’t had any of my Exchange data available for five days. At this point, after reading comments and posts in a couple forums following this ridiculous outage, I’m not sure I’ll be staying with them as a customer. “Absurd” does not even begin to describe this fiasco and I’ve had just about enough.

The latest e-mail:

Thank you for using 4smartPhone and for your continued patience.

You are receiving this email because your mailbox is in the last remaining database store to recover (we have completed 3 out of 4 total) and that process has started.

Because of the nature of the outage on one server which required us to go back to an earlier backup, we have used a “dialtone” restore technique which allows to restore email flow quickly, while we are restoring the rest of your mailbox (including contacts, calendar, tasks, and old email folders) over a longer period of time. Nothing has been lost, and it will all be merged back into your mailbox, however as we have hundreds of large mailboxes to restore, we estimate that this process will take up to another 48 hours to complete.

When approaching the end of the process, you will receive another notification/update email just before we make your entire old mailbox available, process that will be followed by the automatic merge of everything you changed since last Saturday.

Once again, we appologize [sic] for the inconvenience that this is causing.

Best regards

The 4SmartPhone “Recovery” Team

So I might be waiting two more days? That would be one entire week with no or very crippled service. I find it oddly amusing that they put the word “recovery” in quotes. I am trying to be patient and understanding, but I can’t help but think that if a major system I am responsible for was down or users’ data was unavailable for almost a week my continued employment would be in jeopardy. I realize that large amounts of data require significant time to copy, especially from backup media, but a week?!

It seems only fair that since I bitched about 4SmartPhone’s Exchange server being down that I should post that it’s back up. Mostly. The server is back, new mail is being delivered, but nobody has any of their old content; no e-mails, no calendar, no tasks, no rules… nothing except any new messages that arrived after the server came back up. They say they’ll be restoring everything from backup over the next day or two. It’ll be interesting to see whether my PDA, which has data from before the crash “just works” or if I’ll end up with hundreds of duplicated appointments and contacts after the mailbox is restored from backup.

I want to thank the techs and server admins who must have had a really crappy weekend. I know this kind of thing sucks and it’s what all of us in IT dread the most. (Even more than meetings with our pointy-haired boss.) Thanks for your hard work!

So I’m happy the service is back, but I stand by my original complaint: they should have at least updated their Web site to let their customers know what was going on. Since they weren’t responding to e-mails or phone calls, they should have communicated something via their Web site. The free month of service is certainly appreciated, however, and I’m excited to see they are going to be moving to Exchange 2007. I hope this will be the last major unplanned service outage.

Here is the e-mail that was waiting for me when I logged in:

Dear 4SmartPhone Customer,

Over the past two days we have experienced a rather serious crash on one of our Exchange Servers.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience this problem has caused you, but we are pleased to report that we have fixed the problem and taken all steps to ensure it will not happen again. Here are some things you will notice in the next few days:

1. Although it is now possible to connect to your mailbox again, it will only contain your new emails.
2. You can now send and receive emails.
3. Within the next few days, we will bring all original emails back on the Server.
4. Pro & Enterprise Clients can use their local copy in Offline Mode, and you must switch to connected mode to send & receive email. We will send a link to help you understand in a following email.
5. In addition, we are taking the following steps concerning the current Exchange 2003 servers: 4SmartPhone is rolling out more reliable Exchange 2007 on a brand new architecture; The fact that Exchange 2007 is more robust and combined with the new architecture, any failure are less likely, simpler and faster to recover from should we have to.

4SmartPhone sincerely appreciates your business. To demontrate [sic] our appreciation, your patronage, patience and trust in our service, we would like to extend a free month’s service to you. We will automatically add the free month onto your contract. If you have any additional questions, please email us at support@4smartphone.net ,

Thank you.

4SmartPhone IT staff.

It’s about 14:45 EDT on Sunday, March 25, 2007 as I begin this post. My hosted Exchange service from 4SmartPhone has been unavailable since about 22:00 EDT on Friday, March 23, 2007. Sometime Saturday afternoon, all pages on their Web site were redirected to a page which states the following:

4SmartPhone is experiencing technical difficulties. This is causing inflated loads on some of the machines, as a result making our website unresponsive.

Our technical personnel are diligently working towards resolving this issue. Due to these issues, the 4SmartPhone website will be temporarily unavailable.

We are well aware of the situation and so we ask you to not send an email to support. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We will keep all of you updated as often as we can.

That message has not been updated since. Customers have no idea if mail is still being received by the backend server and the frontend is what’s down, or what. People who have called to leave voicemails have not had calls returned, e-mails have not been responded to, and there is no way to get any kind of status aside from just trying to connect. You can still connect to the Outlook Web Access login page, but attempts to log in are met with a “503 Service Unavailable” error.

Fortunately, Outlook 2007 is running in cached mode on my laptop, so it has all my e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. as of Friday afternoon, which I have just exported to a backup PST file. But since Friday afternoon I have been without e-mail, can’t update my calendar, can’t sync my PDA, and don’t know if I’ll ever see messages that were sent to me this weekend. I’ve spent the last hour or so researching other hosted Exchange providers, but I’m not sure if 4SmartPhone will refund any of my pre-paid year of service or not if I cancel my account with them.

This is not how good customer service works. 4SmartPhone, at the very least, please update the message on your Web site. Let your customers know that you haven’t closed up shop and that you’re actually working on whatever the problem is. Clearly it’s more complicated than “inflated loads” on your server. Let us know whether messages are still being delivered to our mailboxes. Tell us something so we know there’s some hope of service being restored. At this point, any loyalty I had for the company has been destroyed and it’s going to take a lot to earn it back.

All I can say is that I must have done something to offend the technology gods. As I type this on my PDA, my broadband service is out and my hosted Exchange service from 4SmartPhone has been unavailable for one full day. I first noticed that last night when I tried to sync two new appointments from my PDA and got the oh-so-cryptic ActiveSync “Support code: 0×85010014″. So since it was raining, I decided to pop in the first of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 DVDs and discovered that my DVD player is dying.

WOW, my broadband ISP, can’t get anyone here until next Tuesday, but when I told them my neighbor, who has home phone and Internet service through them, is also down and has no usable phone, they said if she calls, they can get someone out today. I just got a call from her and someone should be to her house within the hour. It’s interesting that a tech is available on short notice when phone service is involved, but they can’t come out for three days for plain old Internet service, even though it comes in on the same cable, through the same modem, and is handled by the same techs. This has been a recurring problem for over a year. They come out, “fix” something, it works for a month or so, then goes out again. The last major outage lasted about four days and got us a ten dollar service credit each month for a year. The next outage will result in switching providers to Time Warner RoadRunner… which may not be any better, but at least it’ll be different.

Okay, thumbs are tired now.

Update: Service was restored at about 21:00 EDT Saturday night after being out for approximately six to seven hours. We got a call from WOW this morning asking if everything was okay. They explained that there was an outage in the area and that it had been fixed. Thanks, WOW, for the follow-up call, but you’ve got to do something to fix this for good. These monthly outages are just unacceptable.

Are people stupid? They must be stupid. That’s the only explanation for a Microsoft Knowledge Base article like this.

I’ve recently been playing around with a PowerBook G4 and OS 10.4.x in order to become more comfortable with the OS at a lower level. While I can support it on a basic level, if there’s anything wrong under the hood, I struggle a bit; I just don’t know it inside and out as I do Windows.

While using the Mac, I started up iTunes and began poking its buttons. On my PCs I use Windows Media Player 10 or 11 to sync multimedia content with my XV6700 and my iRiver H10. As I play with iTunes, I’m very impressed by its built-in podcasting support and the ability to customize the MP3 format audio ripping. While WMP can rip to MP3 format, the options are pitifully limited. No VBR, you can’t define the type of ID3 tags, etc. iTunes lets you do all that.

Additionally, Windows Media Player 11 — even though it was released long after Podcasts were popular, and at least a year after iTunes natively supported the downloading of Podcasts — still has no built-in podcasting support. That’s just sad. Instead, I’ve been using Juice, a third-party application that downloads podcasts and injects them into WMP’s media library. While it works, it’s very kludgy. This should be an integral feature of any major media player released in late 2006.

If iTunes would sync content to my PDA and non-iPod audio player, and if I didn’t already have an extremely large media library in WMP, I might consider switching. Oh! iTunes (and the iPod, for that matter) also remembers where I left off in an audio file and resumes there the next time I start playing. It drives me nuts that WMP — both desktop and mobile — don’t do this. Listening to ripped audiobooks or other lengthy content is very frustrating in WMP. It can’t possibly be that hard to add a field to the library database to “bookmark” the last stopping point in audio playback.

Thus concludes this, the first rant of 2007.

This post was inspired by Ed Bott’s recent post about his troubles dealing with Shuttle technical support when he had a problem with a Shuttle system he purchased.

I bought a Shuttle SB86i barebones system a couple years ago, happily added my components to it, and began setting things up. I got the OS installed, some apps, and finally installed SpeedFan… which told me my hard drive was running at 67 degrees Celsius! See, the SB86i encloses the hard drives in a little metal cage with little cutouts for airflow, but there is virtually zero airflow over the drives. This takes an already hot drive and essentially encloses it in an oven that concentrates that heat and radiates it back into the drive. I mounted two little 30mm fans in the case to blow air over the drive, but that lowered the temp by only about five degrees, well above the drive manufacturer’s maximum temperature rating for that model. And the little fans’ whine was irritating as it was a frequency I could hear over all other ambient noise. I contemplated cutting ventilation holes in the case, but finally decided it was just a flawed design, and returned it to my vendor.

I then replaced it with another Shuttle box, an SB95P v2, which was much more intelligently designed in terms of thermal management, but the two 60mm exhaust fans at the top back of the case began making rattling noises after about two weeks of use. I e-mailed Shuttle — who I have since given a new name by replacing the first vowel with a different letter — to request replacement fans. They sent out another set of fans which also began rattling within three weeks of use. I got another set of fan, and those, too, failed. My last request to Shuttle never received a reply. That barebones system currently sits in another room back in its original box. I don’t know what to do with it. Other than the exhaust fans, I didn’t have any significant issues with it.

At work, one of our vendors supplies “custom” (read: “expensive”) computers for use with their software. These systems are — you guessed it — Shuttle boxes. Within the last four months, many of them have suffered a complete failure of the primary system fan which serves as both the CPU and system exhaust fan in this model. This causes the P4 CPUs to overheat and throttle down to the point of being unusable and internal system temperatures rise to the point that the computer either resets or shuts down. We have a service contract with them, but we have to ship them back to the vendor at our expense, wait up to a week to get them back, and all the while, a system is out of service which affects workflow in the affected department. (The lack of spare systems is a problem which we’re working on taking care of.)

Pointless post for the day: Gmail’s virus scanner rejected an e-mail with an attachment named “Expedia.com Itinerary.pdf” because it contained a potentially malicious attachment named “Expedia.com.” Uh, what was wrong with the ” Itinerary.pdf” part? I hate stupid keyword filters. Granted, a .com file attached to an e-mail is almost certain to be a virus or worm, but this was a PDF file which just happened to contain “.com” in its name; why doesn’t the Gmail filter look at the file type instead of relying on a keyword filter which looks for “.com” in file attachments?

Since sometime last year, many downloads from the Microsoft Download site have requested that I validate my copy of Windows to ensure that it’s “genuine” before granting me the right to download the file. Very soon, in order to to download many files and updates from Microsoft, that validation step will become a requirement, not just a request. I was actually forced to do it a couple weeks ago — it wasn’t an option — to download a stupid Word file documenting differences between Windows XP x64 and Windows XP (x86) Service Pack 2. Why do I need to validate my copy of Windows XP Professional to download a document file dealing with another version of the OS? What happens if I use a Mac or Linux machine as my primary workstation and need to reference such a document as part of my job because I have to support hundreds of Windows machines? Am I out of luck because I’m not downloading it from a PC running Internet Explorer with ActiveX? (For the record, I only use a Mac or *nix when I have to; Windows is my OS of choice.)

BetaNews has an interview with David Lazar, the Director of Genuine Windows at Microsoft. This guy clearly has a background in marketing and public relations. I have no other way to explain the following exchange between him and the interviewer when describing WGA:

BetaNews: Why is WGA needed, is Windows Product Activation not successful?

David Lazar: That’s a great question Dave. So there are a couple of reasons that WGA is helpful. Number 1 is kind of the reminder thing. Sometimes you take things for granted and forget the value of the good things that you have in your life, so Microsoft comes back with a reminder to check and see if you are running genuine software. And then you receive benefits to thank you for continuing to run genuine Windows. You activate once and you are done with it, so this is kind of a lifecycle reminder.

That kind of marketing-speak almost makes me gag a little. I have never — not once — thought to myself, “damn, I’m glad they reminded me of how special it is to run a genuine copy of Windows!” Instead, I think “these people are forcing me to jump through a few hoops to re-enable ActiveX controls in their insecure browser just to get my job done.” Thanks Microsoft! I feel special now.
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