Archives 2009

Trying to not be a negative nancy, I decided to post up a quick article on a great experience I had today with Dell’s customer support.

A client called me saying their server wasn’t booting.  I went out there and to make a long story short (about an hour of troubleshooting), I determine 1 of their 4 sticks of ram was faulty.

I called Dell support and with in 2 minutes I was speaking with a live rep.  I told him I had some bad ram, and he said no problem… took maybe another 5 minutes of him typing things up, and he is over nighting me a stick of ram to replace the faulty one.

I loved the whole experience.  It was incredibly simple and they didn’t treat me like an idiot and make me run a bunch of bullshit diagnostics that I had already done my self troubleshooting and figuring out which stick it was.  They took my word for it.

I wish all service calls went like this.  Simple, to the point, and gets the problem resolved.

I’ve also had similar great experiences with HP’s support.  Dell and HP are both winners in my book for having excellent support centers!

Maybe Acer should take notes and get their act together.

IPCop is a really neat open source project that can basically transform any old computer with 2 NIC’s in it in to a hardware firewall, VPN server, and Web Filter, among many other useful things.

We use it quite a lot where I work and we’re always looking for the smaller, better IPCop box.

The most recent version we went with was a 1U half-depth rack mount server from the guys over at abmx.com.  This unit was both cheap, and met our needs of a rack-mountable IPCop machine.

The slight downside to this machine was there was no CD-Rom drive in it as our past IPCop boxes have had.  In addition, there was no IDE port on the motherboard (only SATA), and we didn’t have a SATA CD-Rom drive hanging around the office, so I set out to figure out how to install IPCop from a USB drive.

After a ton of searching I came across some instructions, which I will post for you in case you ever want to do the same.

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Well, I played around with the Windows 7 beta a while back, but not too much.

Recently the Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 came out, so I decided to pop it in and see what is new, and what I’ve found is painfully disappointing in most cases.

Microsoft is continuing in their tradition of dumbing-down their operating systems to the lowest common denominator, making power users such as myself feeling…  well… feeling like Micorsoft is calling us dumb.

Case and point; first thing I do to any machine I own running Vista (or Win 7 now) is to disable Windows Defender, and Windows Firewall.  These are 2 services I have never ever once found useful, and ALWAYS end up being a pain in the ass at some point, and they generally slow down your computer.  So, I went ahead and axed both of these services as usual by first disabling them in the control panel, then disabling their actual service from starting up.

So, a while after I did that I was getting stuff set up, and went to enable Remote Desktop, and what do I see when I try and enable it…

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Hahahaha, oh Acer, you make this too easy.  Their top of the line gaming system, costing well above the $2k mark, failing brand new out of the box.

In Acer’s defense though, it could’ve happened during shipping.  Turns out the video card had come lose and wasn’t seated properly any more.  Ryan took it out and put it back in correctly and the system booted ok.

Still funny though 🙂

Note:  I’ve had this written since last week, just hadn’t posted it yet.  I kept going between posting it, or splitting this article up in to 2, 1 comparing hardware, 1 comparing software, because I feel like this article kind of meanders all over the place.  But I decided for my little blog site, this 1 massive post will do just fine.

Well, here it is.  The article thousands of people have been waiting for!  Ok, well probably no one… but here it is any way, my Fuze vs. iPhone comparison.  I wrote previously about why I went with another Windows Mobile phone over the iPhone, and now here is the comparison.

I’ve had the Fuze for over a week now and had time to get used to it and play with all of its features.

The iPhone is running 2.2 Firmware and has been Jailbroken.

The Fuze is running a custom Firmware.  Basically I’m running the AT&T leaked rom that is been modified.  The rom is the official AT&T update that is coming soon, but it was leaked out and people already have it.  I’m running a customized version that removes AT&T’s bullshit from it, an XDA-Developers member NotATreoFan (NATF) created.  It’s version 4.5 of his rom, which is Windows Mobile 6.1

My general feelings on the Fuze as of right now:  I LOVE IT.  This is one seriously kick ass phone.  It finally feels like a Windows Mobile device should be.  It is very fast, you can multi-task like crazy on it and it has a very nice, easy to use interface utilizing HTC’s TouchFlo 3D (which comes on the device, stock).

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Saturday became the day to install a new ceiling fan in our dining room.  It was quite an adventure, and ended up not going so well because we apparently bought the wrong type of fan.  We needed a flush mounted fan, but the one we bought can only be mounted with a down rod.  Frustrating to say the least.

What’s this have to do with a crashed MySQL database?  Well…

To wire up the fan I needed to cut the power to the upstairs, since that was the only place we could tap in to power.  Well, one of the many stupid stupid stupid things the guy [JACKASS] who owned the house before us did was make sure that the breaker panel in the basement was as inaccurately labeled as possible.  There were no breakers labeled anything close to upstairs so I had to play the flip the breaker and see what shuts off game.  During this excitting game I managed to flip the breaker my home server runs on.  Power was restored a minute later and the server booted back up, no problem… or so I thought.  I must have killed power to the server the exact second this ping logging script was doing it’s thing.

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I recently bought an AT&T Fuze, the latest Windows Mobile powered device in the US.  It is in the mail right now and should be here next week some time.  When I get it I plan on doing a full on Fuze vs. iPhone comparison.  But before I get it, I just wanted to give a look at the history of the WM powered phones I’ve been using for the last 4-5 years and what made me decide to get another, even while around a year ago I wrote that it is broken beyond repair.

My first was the Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard).  It came with Windows Mobile 5 and I loved it at the time.  It did everything and did it decently.  When Windows Mobile 6 came out it was an excitting time, getting the latest hacked WM6 roms for the Wizard and all that entailed.  Over all I really liked the 8125 and I still believe that it was a BETTER device then the 8525 is.

The only issue I ever had with my 8125 is the screen drift issue, where you had to align the screen about every 2-3 days.  I eventually cracked the screen on it due to my own stupidity/anger at the drift issue.

I bought an AT&T 8525 (HTC Hermes) after that…. and this device has really turned me off of windows mobile in the last year or so.  Couple that with the fact that my work phone is an iPhone, I really had a hatred growing inside of me for WM.  I still believe in the post I wrote and that Windows Mobile is broken beyond repair.  What I mean by this is that if Microsoft wants to compete seriously with the iPhone, all WM base needs to be thrown out and they need to start over.

I don’t know what went wrong during the hardware design phase of the 8525 but someone some where really screwed the pooch.  This phone has really been nothing but problems with me since I first got it.  The device has always seemed to run SLOWER then my 8125 did, and it always seems to be having issues, ESPECIALLY lately.  Most recently the phone is locking up ALL the time on me and some days I’ll miss multiple calls and text messages because of this.

I believe part of the issues with the 8525 compared to the 8125 are due to the 8525’s under powered single processor.  The 8125 actually had 2 processors in it.  1 for the OS related tasks, and 1 that managed all the phone’s radio related tasks, like calls, data, and text messaging.  The 8525 does both OS and radio tasks on 1 400 mghz Samsung processor, and I believe this is where the 8525’s shit-factor really comes in to play.

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Acer, quite possible the shittiest, yet most popular, cheap ass computer company out there.  Why are they so popular?  Because their systems are dirt cheap.  Unfortunately you do get what you pay for.  You pay for shit, you get shit.  Acer shits on it’s customers all day long.
I’m pretty sure that e-machines put out better garbage then Acer’s crappy computers.
From the amount of Acer systems I have seen fail, I believe that it isn’t a matter of if your system will fail, it’s simply a matter of when. 1 year? 2 years? 3 years? Who knows…  I’d be willing to guess your Acer computer will fail with in the first 3 years.
I recently wrote about how OEM preinstalled software needs to stop, and Acer was the driving force behind that post.

Today, I bring you another reason why you should never buy anything from Acer.

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