Technology 2009

Technical - Joining a domain remotely

noreply@blogger.com (Braam) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:56:00 +0000

I couldn't wait to get Windows 7 up and running on my decrepit HP 8710w. I am calling the laptop decrepit because of the issues I was having with Windows XP. Let me clarify; I loathe Vista. Biggest mistake since Windows ME. Remember that abomination? I love XP. Awesome operating system. Windows 7 is probably what people have sweet dreams about! So anyway, this post is not to slate Vista or promote Windows 7, but to tell you how I managed to join a domain remotely.

I was at home with a 4Mbps ADSL line. We use Juniper’s SSL VPN (http://www.juniper.net/products_and_services/ssl_vpn_secure_access/index.html). I suppose this will apply to any VPN connection where you need to be in the OS before you can connect. I also got this method to work on Windows XP.

So, after installing my OS, I downloaded my VPN software and connected. I joined the domain without a problem, but then had to reboot. On reboot, I couldn’t sign in to the domain, because I first had to connect. Only way to connect with my token code was to be in the OS... Catch 22.
So I logged in (locally), connected the VPN, did a Ctrl Alt Del and changed my password. When changing your password, you can specify a domain. I specified my domain and changed my password. This seems to have cached the password, so on the next reboot (or log out) I was able to log in with my cached domain credentials. YAY!

And that’s it!

The road not taken

noreply@blogger.com (Braam) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:22:00 +0000

Robert Frost had a point when he said in 1915:

" Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Today, his wood is our concrete jungle and the road is the freeway.

Over the last couple of months, traffic congestions have been particularly bad. It's just as if there are more cars and less road. This has lead me to consider the impact on my cost of driving to work. I noticed a trend with my car's onboard computer, the worse the traffic, the higher my fuel consumption. So I decided to monitor this situation closely. Here are my findings:

In heavy traffic, when I only get an average speed of 20 km/h (about 12 mph) my fuel consumption is 9,5 l/100km (about 24 mpg).

In light traffic, the stats are almost halved. At an average speed of 76 km/h (47 mph) my fuel consumption drops to 5 l/100km (47 mpg). To show you what I mean:

Heavy traffic

Light traffic

To validate my results, you need to know that I drive a 2007 Mercedes-Benz B200 CDI automatic. According to the manufacturer I should be getting 7,8 l/100km in urban driving conditions and 5,2 l/100km for extra-urban. In mpg terms, it's 30 mpg urban and 45 mpg extra-urban.

Now take into account that both my measurement were done on the same road (urban), at about the same temperature and in the same direction.

Now, to conclude. What does traffic congestion cost me, the economy and the planet! In cost, I am not only referring to monetary but also pollution.

I live 26 km (16 miles) from my place of work. Thus, I drive 1040 km per month to work and back. In bad traffic, I am burning up 99 liters of diesel. In good traffic I would be using 54 liters. In money terms (at R 7.80 per liter) it costs me R 772.20 for a bad month and R 421.20 for a good month. But what about the impact on the environment? I read a very interesting study by the University of Cape Town but still cannot figure out what exactly the impact on the environment is. Logically, it should be half the impact for half the consumption.

What to do about this? Some alternatives:

Use Public transport
Use bio-diesel
Join a lift club
Spend less time in traffic

Of all these options, only "Spend less time in traffic" is applicable to me. We don't have safe public transport in South Africa. There is no commercial bio-diesel and once it becomes available I would first have to make sure what the impact on my vehicle warranty would be. Because of my erratic working hours and meetings out of the office I am not able to join or start a lift club. So the only option I have is to spend less time in traffic. Have a look at my blog on this.

It is time for companies to wake up and smell the carbon emissions. Would my boss care about my time in traffic and my emissions? No way - as long as I am the office from 8:00 am to 4:30 pm. Unfortunately the other ten million people have to work the same hours, so this leads to everybody getting on the roads at the same time. My job is actually such in nature that I don't have to be in the office! I can do everything I need to do from home except for one day a week where I could schedule all my meetings at the office.

What a wonderful world that would be. We need to get our companies to move away from the mindset of "if you are at your desk, you are working". Trust me, I know of many people who are "star performers" because they are at their desks from 8:00 am to 4:30 pm, surfing the web, sending jokes, making loads of personal calls and doing about an hours work. Dear boss, focus on my output! Don't worry about me being at my desk, worry about my uploading my research to our SharePoint site, updating my groove folders and making sure my projects get done!

Regards,

Your soon-to-be-fired employee.

Braam.

It don't matter if you're black or white

noreply@blogger.com (Braam) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:41:00 +0000

I thought that I would explain at some stage why I had chosen the black template for my blog. My curiosity got the better of me and that has led to this post.

A year or so ago I saw a post about a site, Blackle (www.blackle.com) which promised to save energy. The basis of their proposal was the fact that their search page was black instead of white. According to a study they quote (Robertson et al, 2002) monitors use less power to display black than white.

It sounded plausible so I believed it was possible and of course, when I created my blog I thought I would add to the saved watts by making my blog black. Yet, the inquisitive person that I am, I needed to verify this, so I grabbed my camera, watt meter and 17" LCD monitor. The results were... shocking.

My monitor specs:

My power supply specs:

First I tested my monitor in standby mode

This produced a result of 9W. It basically means that when my PC stops sending a display signal to my monitor, my monitor goes in standby mode and consumes 9W while in this mode. As soon as I move the mouse the monitor switches on and displays the image. I would have liked a 2W or 3W power consumption in standby, but the monitor has a power supply that converts 220V to 19V. This and every other power supply has an "efficiency ratio" which is basically the overhead that the power supply adds to the total consumption.

The next test was to open Google (www.google.com)

My watt meter stabilized on 50W. This is pretty much what can be expected from a 17" LCD monitor. It is slightly less than that of a 60W light bulb and half that of a bright 100W light bulb. However, it is double that of a energy efficient long life bulb rated at 25W. At this stage I was expecting blackle to come in at 45W.

So, I went to the address bar and typed in www.blackle.com

I let the watt meter stabilize and it stood on 52W. Can you imagine my surprise? So I went back to google and it went back to 50W. Then I went to blackle again and it went to 52W again!

I was dumbfounded, so I decided to read the study as mentioned earlier. It transpired that the major power saving would be achieved in CRT monitors but that there should be a 2 to 3 watt saving even with LCD. I experienced a 2W increase!

The question is, do I keep my blog black to make it green or do I go with white? This is where you must grab your watt meter and test this with your system! They are selling some great watt meters (Kill A Watt) all over ebay, amazon.com and many other online stores.

As Michael Jackson finished off - It's black, it's white, whoo

Braam Snyman.

* These are the views and opinions of the author and does not relate to or constitute the views and opinions of any company the author is associated with.

I will make some time

noreply@blogger.com (Braam) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:43:00 +0000

08:00 to 09:00 - Sales Meeting
09:00 to 10:00 - Project progress update
10:00 to 11:00 - Coffee chat re new SWOT model
11:00 to 12:00 - Discussion on server consolidation
12:00 to 13:00 - *free*
13:00 to 14:00 - HR meeting
14:00 to 15:00 - Team meeting
15:00 to 16:00 - *free*
16:00 to 17:00 - Project meeting

Then, rush off to a PTA meeting, get home, make dinner, feed and wash the kids, and finally at 22:00 you get time to sit down and get some work done!

How often do you have days that look just like this one? Meeting upon meeting upon meeting, check your Blackberry during and between meetings, grab a bite and when you are finally at your desk there is a queue of 5 people who just can't wait to tell you about their date last night, ask you something they could have found on Google or just waste a bit of your time.

Come assessment time, your boss breathes down your neck and tells you that you are not very productive and you miss deadlines because you were a day late with her useless report that nobody reads in any case.

How do you figure out where to "make some time"? Golly, if I had to make time for everything in my day, we would have 200 hour days, and I would still have work left for the next day!

Before I tell you about the application that I found, I need to tell you a bit about my work. That will put things into perspective. I work in Research and Development for a large corporate. Our team looks at technology trends and new technologies and figure out which we can apply in our environment. Once identified, we write a couple of research documents on the technology and its application in our environment and after it's gone through the approval process we move into POC (proof of concept) and then Pilot. So my typical day involves quite a bit of email, some Word, some PowerPoint, some Excel, lots of PDFs (sometimes printed), a whole lot of web browsing and of course the mandatory meetings and workshops.

So, back to the reason you are reading this, I found this really nice website, http://www.rescuetime.com

I installed the little application on my notebook and let it run for 2 full weeks. And WOW! I noticed some really interesting trends...

In this graph you can clearly see that my productivity was very high on Monday (10h20), Wednesday (7h57) and Thursday (11h14). On Tuesday (3h43) and Friday (3h00) it was much lower. My combined working time on Mon, Wed and Thu was 29 hours and 31 minutes, just under 10 hours average per day. For Tue and Fri it was a dismal 6 hours and 43 minutes, averaging just over 3 hours per day.

So why the disparity? I correlated this with my calendar and realized that I worked from home on the 3 productive days. The other two days I worked in the office.

So, just to make sure it wasn't some anomaly I looked at the second week.

This week I was in the office Mon to Fri. It is astonishing! I only "worked" 17 hours and 16 minutes for the entire week, compared to the previous week where I "worked" for 36 hours and 14 minutes.

Now I put the word work in quotes because as I explained earlier, a lot of my work involves meetings and reading. I am not the typical office worker that sits in front of a "green screen" all day and does data capturing. I also spend a lot of time working after hours, so in the evenings between 21:00 and 00:00.

Apart from the interesting data I am getting from rescuetime.com I realized that I am far more productive working from home than being in the office. I can actually show you some tangible deliverables from my first week and nothing from the second week. The second week I only sat in a couple of boring meetings wasting my time. Will these show up when I do my annual performance appraisal with my boss? No way! I will only get rated on the work that can be measured, i.e. output in terms of documents and successful projects.

So, how do you cure this time cancer? What do you do to maintain productivity in the office? How do you decline meetings, yet make sure you are still involved and adding value to a project? How do you tell people to take a hike when they get to your desk without being labeled as a "rude elitist" that doesn't "interact with people" and peers?

I am hoping that somebody can contribute and give a couple of hints on this!

Braam Snyman.

* These are the views and opinions of the author and does not relate to or constitute the views and opinions of any company the author is associated with.