New switch and SQL reports

Posted on December 9, 2007 by daiohm

Well another day another dollar. (Yes I got a raise). We are ready for the training seminar in sales tomorrow but the ice storm cancelled the trainer’s flight. I am taking the time to upgrade the office building’s main switch. When we put offices into this building there was plenty of bandwidth. These days we have grown eight fold and things are getting tight. Of course there have been users from the very beginning that have said “This thing is too slow.” and just sat there clicking on link after link when they didn’t get an absolute immediate response. Those people will still do that no matter how fast I make the network but that is life. 

We got the estimate back from the company that built and sold our PMS software for the hotels. For one custom built report from our databases they are going to charge 350-400 dollars per hotel.  After explaining to them that since wo owned the database we really did want to know the SQL password so we could query our own info they relented. They tried to talk us out of it so that we wouldn’t “break the database by accident”. A great play in my opinion to keep selling reports. If I could get 400.00 for half an hour work I would take it.

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Vista piracy

Posted on December 5, 2007 by daiohm

I just read that Microsoft announced Vista was hacked half as much as XP. This piracy rate is based on WGA data and other unspecified internal data.

I have to recount my experiences so far with Vista. I assumed that it would be kind of like XP was and not really ready for the first year or so. I didn’t know how unready it really was. My first install was on a machine that was totally compatible in hardware by Microsoft’s list and no software issues as it was a fresh install. As it turned out the “compatible ” sound card  didn’t work so I purchased a new one and then things worked well. At least until I tried to use the computer. I gave it a run with regular consumer use for there days and had 4 hard crashes. Using the knowledge base I worked through them and then started to try all the different software tools I use as a tech. only three of the first ten would run under vista. I tried an install of the management software I use at work. That failed utterly. I checked with the software company that built the property management suite for that hotel chain and they said they would be making a version that would run with Vista in a few months. Our catering software company said they would not be building a compatible version till there was a server option that worked with Vista.

I know I will have to support Vista with my business clients soon so I tried an install on my laptop for portable use. I ran the online tool to find out what was compatible with my machine. It found two pieces of software that had to be un-installed and a few (5) programs that might not work but would not keep the OS from installing and working. I fixed those issues and proceeded with the upgrade. After HOURS of installing it finally came to the first startup of Vista and I promptly got the blue screen of death. I retried four times before giving up. I rolled back to my rock solid XP.

After this I can only respond to the Microsoft news with this. If you were going to steal a produce and you had the choice of one that worked or one that was crap what would you chose? I know Vista is the future and eventually they will fix it and make it a good OS but it isn’t there yet. It is a little soon to call stats on an unfinished project. I think that when it is a better project there will be more incentive for those who pirate to get this product. For now those that want it that bad probably don’t know any better.

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A Great Article

Posted on December 3, 2007 by daiohm

I was just sent a link to this article.

  http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140150/article.html 

I had to take a breeak from the “who-is-sitting-where-and-where-do-we-put-the-tables-and-the-router-for-this” meeting to read it. I totally agree with the article and fondly remember the days of fast computer boots with no registry to futz around with. Programs ran without being installed and you could take them with you. Even with tape drives and less than 640k of ram life was good. That is why I truely love Linux for most of the things I do in the modern world.

Alright…back to the sales meeting.

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Getting ready for the big training session

Posted on December 3, 2007 by daiohm

I thought this would be a good start to the blog. Here you might just get a flavor of what my day is like now. I have been for the last five years working as the System Administrator for a hotel group in Arkansas. I know I could make three times more money living anywhere else but I don’t want to give up the beautiful quiet life here in the Ozark Mountains and the cost of living is pretty good. Anyway, back to the day I am having. We have a training seminar coming up the 10th-12th of December on a piece of software we use here at the hotels. After doing this job longer than our newest sales rep has been alive I am drawing diagrams today of how many tables we can get in each office to see where we will set up.  A long time ago I though this sort of job would involve large technical conundrums and spending my day with a soldering gun and motherboard. (Yes I am from the Unix/Linux world and an era when a hacker was someone who took stuff apart to see how it worked instead of a malicious vandal.) Along with all this I think yesterday’s “emergency” calls let you know a lot about my day. At the restaurant in one of our hotels they use a POS with a touch screen. My emergency call was from the manager telling me that he just found out that for “several days” the touch screen had not been working and the computer in the wait station just had a blank screen. It was a busy Sunday brunch so I rushed to the site and promptly plugged the touch screen back in and turned the computer on in the wait station. Yes that was all that was wrong. They had moved the POS computer to plug in a lamp and pulled out the usb connection for the screen and the waitress’ hadn’t realized that a computer works much better if you turn it on first. Well enough rand for today I have to go measure for tables. 

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