* Posts by Dave Perry

63 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2012

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Microsoft books stall at Appule - the Mac expo stiffed by Apple

Dave Perry

Re: Slow new day then....

A PGCE-student ex of mine hated it when she tried Office X for mac a couple of years back. Then her workplace went entirely mac in a new build (bar a few PCs for admin machines as they couldn't stand mac equivalents for school / library administration) and she got a macbook and some training. I use OpenOffice on my mac personally, doesn't always get layouts right but most of the time perfectly usable on the move.

Boy wrecks £22k worth of MacBooks by weeing on them

Dave Perry

I've found second hand Dells to be reliable machines. Put a few in a place that didn't want to buy new ones and they're still running on (albeit with a slight RAM upgrade)

Blackpool ICT boss: BYOD doesn't save money

Dave Perry
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Kinda BYOD

A friend of mine's company were bought by Symantec. They are network security architects and needed customised (read loaded with legitamately-used badware) laptops to do their jobs. Symantec gave them VMplayer and wouldn't let them on their corporate network without using a VM they supplied. They were used to doing this apparently.

Great HR mistakes of our time - Aviva fires 1300 by email

Dave Perry

Re: Does anyone know what HR does these days?

I had to fight for my job in one re-structure (which was known about pretty widely). There was an HR person there, but that one was ok. I knew the other two staff on the panel already, and had good relations with them. Could be seen as a lack of partiality, but one was my (then) current manager and that couldn't be avoided.

Dave Perry
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Re: The Personell Department

As a side job whilst doing my degree I worked in a nightclub. It was part of a rather large company (First Leisure), and head office had a Unit Admin Controller come and do the weekly payroll and accounts type stuff (only for 1, maybe 2 days a week mind). No need to be anonymous cos 95% she did a decent job (we all make mistakes, she made one in 3 years of me working there). Unit hiring/firing was done by management at the unit, but they were all nice people and knew how to deal with people. Paper only came into it for disciplinaries and stuff like that.

India orders 7.5 million Microsoft cloud services

Dave Perry
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Re: Live@Edu...

A tad off topic maybe, but my Gmail pulls in about 10 different accounts. If only they wouldn't say 'delivered for address@externaldomain.net via gmail' - might put my domain that has some of the accounts onto free google apps to avoid that.

SharePoint 2010 now supports Chrome, Firefox

Dave Perry

Cos google started from the web, then kinda deviated into apps with Android (maybe)? MS has always been slow with web stuff. I don't like sharepoint, we run an in house custom one which has had all sorts of extras built in (mainly tying in with different parts of our MIS system)

Shock jocks take NBNCo cash, then trash its ads

Dave Perry
FAIL

Radio professional here

If they were my presenters, I'd be contemplating disciplinary proceedings for that - the public response of 2GB is diplomatic. There's saying "my personal preference would not be to go for this service", and then there's saying "this service is a waste of money". Might have to ask some of my peers how they'd deal with it

Devs spanked for touching vulnerable open-source packages

Dave Perry

Didn't see your comment before posting mine. We get annoyed users if things break due to upgrade, which is why I do as much on VMs as possible. And have a clone to try this stuff out with.

Dave Perry
Stop

One thing not mentioned here

Sometimes new releases of libraries break applications. In the windows world, for example, we have software we rely on (and is very expensive) which breaks if the wrong version or service pack of .NET is installed. That isn't helped by these companies not updating their code very often (we had to wait nearly a year to get IE7 everywhere as the web front ends were only built to work in IE6, sadly I'd get in trouble for naming the company in question).

Another app (I'll happily name) is the Shibboleth Identity Provider. As a tomcat webapp (which I hate as it's complex and I don't understand it) I'm reliant on public information about which versions of Xerces libraries are compatible with Shibboleth. And getting an apache-tomcat stack, with the certificates at each end, that'll talk to secure service providers, is a pain in the backside I'm unwilling to do unless our SAN blows up and the extra backups go boom.

</ramble>

Game closes 277 stores

Dave Perry

Re: Too many stores

Hull too - 1 in Princes Quay (to be closed I read), and another in St Stephens. Less than a mile apart

Electronic patient records rollout cocks up hospital clinics

Dave Perry
Pint

Re: So the actual story seems to be...

Having been involved in migrations where you know the data is crap, some sympathy comes from me - it's a fair point Chris. Maybe they should have sorted out their data before the migration and it would have been less headachey.

And yes it seems odd no-one gets punished. Project management competency probably is partly responsible though, which is less an IT thing. I've been involved with migrations where the company has tried to cut corners for cost reasons (it was a system I didn't know much about, and would rather had the support contractor we pay for annual support pre-arranged to do it all remotely for us - so I've insisted that when we upgrade the hardware next month he is booked in to reconfigure the system and I'm just fitting boxes into a rack and getting them on the network).

Beer as after a hard day's migration a drink always helps the day seem better.

TalkTalk is yet again the most griped about telco in Blighty

Dave Perry
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Having had to setup a router when the company that owns it moved the line this router was plugged in to (I forgot to ask why they moved to them), I can vouch for their BUSINESS technical people. Admittedly I had a very simple 'give me some details based on an account number' call requirement, with the correct password handy, but on top of that the tech watched the connection status at his end to confirm the box was 'online'. Shame they didn't send this stuff out when the account was first created though, or if they did it wasn't very clear to the accountant who had the limited details I used to get through to them.

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