Vendor-Tech - Operational Excellence with Technology

Have You Backed Up Your On-line Life?

gregg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:26:11 +0000

I am a huge proponent of backing up. I know from personal experience that hardware fails, usually at the worst possible time and as far away from your last back up as possible.

I use local drives for daily back ups. I use network drives for weekly backup. I have important data burned on DVD’s and “stored in the cloud.”

A recent item in my RSS feed got me thinking (and acting)—What about my on-line life? I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (not supported yet), Plaxo (not supported yet), Delicious, Flickr, Picaso (not supported yet?), Google Docs, who knows how many places I have parts of my life scattered.

So I was intrigued to read that Lifestream Backup had re-branded as Backify, not for the rebranding, but for the reminder I don’t have a back up of my on-line data.

I’m now a trial user of Backify (with the disclosure I hope to talk them into providing a premium subscription “upgrade” to this blogger for blogging about them).

Signing up was quick, although I wonder what the mailing address might be used for.

Connecting Backify to my various on-line accounts was simple and fast, the hardest part being remembering passwords I’ve had stored in my password manager for a long time.

In the next few hours I expect Backify to back up all my on-line data to Amazon’s S3 service.

I wish they supported LinkedIn, Plaxo, Picaso, Twine, etc. which I assume they will add as time goes on.

I also wish they had an option to let me make a copy of my backup on a local drive (or if they do have that option to make it a bit more obvious on their website). It’s not that I don’t trust Backify or Amazon’s S3, but look at what is happening to a similar service storytlr, they are effectively going out of business by the end of the year. At least they have a) announced it in time to do something about it rather than orphan their users and b) they have committed to giving their users a way to export their information.

Even with my long wish list, I’m glad I have started to preserve my on-line life.

Desktop 4 Reincarnated

gregg — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:39:22 +0000

It’s hard to believe it was only last June (2008) when I had multiple systems failures, two desktops and two notebooks. One notebook never recovered (it was dropped and the extended warranty just refunded the purchase price so I didn’t replace it). I’m typing this on the other notebook, repaired by HP under warranty. The desktops, Desktop 3 and Desktop 4, were part of a 4 computer cluster I have in my office connected via the network and sharing a monitor et al via a KVM switch. I ended up replacing both with a single new HP desktop, which has been Desktop 3 ever since. It is a dual core processor with 3 GB RAM, dual 500 GB hard drives (one operational and the other as a backup using Bounce Back Professional) and Windows XP 32 bit.

A friend wanted to upgrade his system so I’ve been watching for a suitable computer. Over Labor Day, Micro Center had a sale on a Dell 435MT that was 80% of his ultimate computer configuration at 20% of the cost. He deferred, then agreed this week we should go ahead and get it. Fortunately it was still on sale. The old system had a Passmark system score of 356. The base 435MT we got for him had a Passmark score of 1680. I replaced the installed hard drive with a Western Digital VelociRaptor, using the "old" 640 GB drive as a back up drive. The Passmark score is now 1970. We’ll upgrade RAM later.

While buying his system I noticed an open box unit of the same computer so I got it. I didn’t upgrade the hard drive, so I have a system with a Passmark score of only 1680 versus the 410 of Desktop 3. It’s got 6GB of RAM now, and is running Vista, but my contacts at Kingston are working on their recommendations for more RAM and the end of this month I’ll upgrade to Windows 7. My unit had a 1TB main drive and I’ve added an internal 500GB drive for back ups. Total cost was less than $750, which is an amazing price for that much RAM, storage and a quad core i7 processor.

Vista’s Easy Transfer Wizard is currently calculating how much information is going to be transferred and I’m guessing that 200 GB is going to take a day or two to transfer across the network.

Then the “fun” of reinstalling all the software I use on the new primary desktop will begin.

But I find a new toy lots of fun.

Verizon Customer Service Fail

Amanda — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:43:57 +0000

One of the “deals” websites I get via RSS had a nice offer on a blue tooth headset from Verizon, so I ordered it.

Got my confirmation email and left for Arizona for a week.

When I got back today, I’m going through my mail and parcels and didn’t see the headset.

So I check the order status on-line. Status is “cancelled.” No reason why. Nothing.

And no notification. If I hadn't gone on-line to find out where my "will arrive next day" shipment was, I would never have known.

Think I’ll be switching to Verizon anytime soon?

Neither do I….

My Health Care Quick Fix

gregg — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:20:40 +0000

I usually watch political debates like the current one on health care reform with amusement and frustration—frustration about how facts get distorted by both sides, especially those “end of the world” TV ads.

I was at my doctor’s office this past week, visiting my physicians assistant (I can’t remember the last time I actually saw my doctor) for my annual visit so I can get my prescriptions extended for another year. It takes less than 5 minutes. Since I have an HSA, high deductible health plan, I saw the actual cost of my visit when I paid it--$140.00!

My PA and I briefly discussed health care reform while I was getting my blood pressure checked, she listened to my lungs and heart and wrote the two prescriptions.

All this leads me to a proposal for health care reform the government can implement immediately for basically zero cost (at least by government standards). It has two parts:

Pass the Association Health Bill that has been floating around Congress for the past 5 years. That bill would exempt association’s from the ERISA laws that currently require an association health plan to meet each and every state it is offered in and offer a national plan to its members. That would create the buying group/cooperatives discussed already.
Sponsor, perhaps to the tune of $50 million or so, the development of an open source practice management application system for doctor’s offices with an emphasis on electronic records storage and electronic data transfer.

I am always amazed by the fact there are as many people doing paperwork in any doctor’s office as there are people providing medical care.

And why do I have to do a health history for every doctor I visit, or for that matter several times for the same doctor? All they get are my current memories of my history, I’m certain that no two histories I’ve completed are the same.

When I mentioned this to my PA, she objected to the costs of automating for their relatively small practice.

This is a case where having a universally available (for free) practice management system developed by, or at least sponsored by, the government makes a lot of sense. Even if the development cost were $50 million, that’s a drop in the bucket and could be justified just on Medicare claims savings alone.

Make that practice management system run on relatively low end hardware (aka netbook specifications) and be easy enough that doctors, et al use it themselves. From what I have been reading, there will be tablet computers with netbook specifications for way under $1,000 by the end of this year. Eliminating just one of the clerical support people in a doctor’s office would pay for those tablets in a matter of a couple of months.

Couple freely available practice management software with cloud computing for records storage and electronic data transfer and the savings will be significant.

Why do they make it so hard?

gregg — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:20:10 +0000

I have been helping a friend with a website that is exploding in popularity, was developed in HTML/CSS and has no intention of switching to a CMS, and has a registration/supporters page that has grown too fast to maintain with copy and paste.

I did a quick Excel formula that generated equivalent HTML to what GoLive produced and switched the registration form to a Google form that leaves the results in a Google Apps spreadsheet (eliminating data entry).

I have Excel 2003/2007 on my PC, she has Excel 2008 on her Mac, the thought was to write an Excel macro that would automate the maintenance of that page, so I did.

Whenever I got stuck, I had code examples in the Excel VBA help file and loads of examples via Google.

After a day of playing around with the macro (mostly learning how to dynamically identify how many rows are actually being used in an Excel worksheet), I had a fully functional pair of macros (one to facilitate preprocessing the updates before integrating to the master list, the other to covert the master list to HTML).

Guess what? Excel 2008 for Mac doesn’t have VBA support! Shame on you Microsoft!

I would never have expected Microsoft to leave out a major feature in the latest version of Excel.

In searching around for a solution we came up with the idea of using the latest version of Open Office, which had the same macro support across platforms.

While most of Open Office is absolutely compatible with Microsoft Excel, it would appear macros are not.

I did find a reference to Option VBASupport 1 that is supposed to enable VBA support in Open Office macros. While it did prevent the macro from being commented out, when I tried to execute it, I kept getting errors every time the code reached a VBA object. I presume some library wasn’t loaded (either during installation or at run time) and even the might Google search didn’t uncover an answer. Plus I figured if I couldn’t make it work “out of the box” my Mac friend wouldn’t be able to either.

So on to Plan B, convert my relatively simple VBA macros into openoffice.org Basic macros. Sounds like a straightforward process, right?

The documentation for the openoffice.org object model sucks! It really sucks.

Where VBA has lots of code examples in the help file, and even more via Google, I found there was virtually none for openoffice.org Basic (I’m sure that comment will generate lots of flames). Plus the documentation appears to have been automatically generated, consider this example:

While I’m sure this is useful to a bit head who lives with the interface every day, I don’t write programs all that often any more, so it is virtually useless.

And, sadly, there isn’t a lot of example code on the web (at least that Google found), and what is there looks pretty brute force.

So I struggle with figuring out obscure ways to do simple things (like select a column of cells)…

Looking Forward to DrupalCamp

gregg — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:06:45 +0000

This weekend is DrupalCamp Colorado 2009.

I use Drupal for several websites I have built.

Daughter Amanda and I went to a Denver Drupal Users Group meeting 18 months ago. Since there were several Drupal “newbies” the group kept it basic. I understood about half of what they talked about. We decided this group was way too technical for my level of use.

Last summer I went to DrupalCamp Colorado 2008. It was a great experience. A highlight was a presentation from Warsaw, done via remote access and Skype, and done by a 14 year old. There were enough non-technical sessions to make it a very worthwhile experience.

So I’m looking forward to learning new things about Drupal.

Excel 2010 Feature Request

gregg — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:27:42 +0000

Microsoft’s Excel 2007 added an amazing new command not present in previous versions, Remove Duplicate Data (its just right of center on the Data ribbon).

Removing duplicate data before 2007 involved either Visual Basic programming or a manual comparison after sorting the data. Both solutions are time consuming (and error prone in the case of manual comparison).

Remove Duplicate Data can search unsorted tables with thousands of rows in less than a second, pulling any duplicates that match in every column, or in a user defined group of columns.

However, Remove Duplicate Data is scary. You click on the button, decide what columns must match, and almost instantaneously its done. Your only confirmation is the number of rows deleted.

I know Excel 2010 is about to be released to early testing, so here’s my wish list of improvements to Remove Duplicate Data in order of difficulty to implement:

Give an option to put the deleted rows into a new worksheet after they are deleted. It can be a checkbox on the columns to check dialog. That lets you do the removal, some other processing and still recover (or review) the deleted items.
Give an option to review the duplicated records, like Microsoft does in Access. All matching duplicated rows would be put in a new worksheet, I can decide what to delete/keep and then copy the remaining records back to the original worksheet.
Give an option to perform arbitrary processing on the matching duplicates. For instance I might want to sum the values of one or more column, or do comparisons to decide which value of one or more columns to keep.

Remove Duplicate Data is amazingly powerful and simultaneously scary. I hope the next iteration in Excel 2010 can be made even better.

Post from Linux

gregg — Mon, 18 May 2009 00:02:44 +0000

I got an ASUS eeePC 900A for $150 and have been playing with it.

With only a 4 GB SSD "hard drive" it doesn't have a large capacity.

I can see why so many have been returned and show up now as refurbished units, after about half the updates that were downloaded automatically when I booted the machine, it was out of disk space so the rest of the updates wouldn't install (and the error message wasn't clear why, just it wouldn't work).

I reformatted the SSD and installed an eeePC Ubuntu configuration with Open Office 3.1 and have about 900MB left.

I'll also install Windows XP (without a lot of options) on a SD card so I can dual boot either to Windows or Linux

Speed DOES Matter

gregg — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:28:19 +0000

I got a DXG 581V in February, just in time for a trip to Bangkok!

It is amazing. 1080p, and so tiny…

DXG 581V

I have to admit that up until now I’ve pretty much viewed flash memory as a commodity that is purchased largely on price. I also have been very lucky, I haven’t had a flash memory failure that included any information or pictures. If I got a bad memory card (or drive), it either didn’t work from the start or it worked fine as long as I used it.

So I was a little surprised when a 4 GB SDHC card I put in the DXG581V worked for a little while then gave me a memory error when I was recording a video. I tried reformatting the card and that worked fine. The card worked in another camera. But after 10 seconds in the DXG581V I got the error. Another SD card worked fine.

When I thought about the “failure” on the flight home it dawned on me what the issue was. 1080p video is a lot more data per second than a digital still or 640x480 video I’ve recorded before. My memory errors weren’t a failure in the card, they were the result of the SD card not being able to keep up.

So I switched to a Kingston SDV/8GB, Kingston's SD card optimized for video. Once I inserted it into the camera I had no issues with the SD card keeping up, even at 1080p. I’ve done 20 minute recordings with absolutely no issues. And the video comes off the card onto my computer faster as well.

The moral of this story is speed does matter, especially with HD video.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

gregg — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:29:07 +0000

I saw a Google Blog post about their new toolbar labs.

Since I love the Google Toolbar in Firefox and less frequently Internet Explorer, I clicked on the link while in Firefox. I got an interesting message so I opened Google Chrome and tried the same URL, that’s when I got this:

Ok, I know Chrome isn’t supported by Google Toolbar (which I find odd because I love my bookmarks and autofill), but still to have a message that the toolbar is only available for Microsoft Internet Explorer…