Unions

I joined a new union over the weekend, after reading about yet another school IT technician suspended from work pending the outcome of an investigation into them that they are not even allowed to be told the details of.

What this usually means is an allegation by a child, and while genuine cases do exist, they are the exceptional minority. Most cases like this are down to the increasingly and disturbingly popular trend of using such allegations as a method for pupils to exact revenge on staff who have reprimanded them.

Unions tend to have a poor reputation in the press due to the more militant unions taking unpopular or unfounded strike action. The recent postal worker strikes in the UK had scant public support, and strikes by London Underground staff make the majority of London commuters decidedly furious.

For school workers, the real strength of union membership has nothing to do with strikes, or even pay negotiations, but in the legal protection and advice you are entitled to if either a student or the school itself tries to shaft you. My opinion is that every member of school staff should be in a union if only for that reason. Think of it as career insurance. Union membership costs less per month than your broadband rental, and you do not need to have a union rep at your school to obtain assistance.

Which Union?

• State sector: UNISON (join) or GMB (join).

  In my last school, which was in the state sector, I was a member of UNISON. Also popular amongst school staff is the GMB. Find out which one is more popular with support staff in your school and join that one.

• Private sector: ATL (join).

  Since my move to the private sector I did not know which union to join, since the above only deal with state schools. Acting on advice found on EduGeek, I discovered that the ATL cover support and administrative staff working in private schools. I am now a member.

You can join any of these unions online by using the links above. It will take you less than 10 minutes and could one day save your reputation and career. Do it now.

Dear Mainstream Press

Your journalists are absolutely diabolical at writing about tech news.

They produce articles so fundamentally logically flawed they are laughable. This week alone you’ve embarrassed yourselves twice without even realising. Firstly, you leapt gleefully onto the fact that the suspect in the aborted French school massacre played World of Warcraft, touting it as irrefutable evidence that he was inspired to shoot people by playing computer games. Despite the fact that World of Warcraft has no guns in it. Or blood.

Then you trotted out some utter tripe about how the Google Chrome OS was going to pose “a significant challenge to the dominance of Microsoft’s Windows franchise”, as if Chrome would somehow surpass the achievements of Linux overnight, just because it’s coming from a company the journalist has heard of, and that the entire media seems happy to fawn over almost as much as they do Apple. Here’s a newsflash, you morons: Google is not the messiah. The way your journalists write about Google, one could be forgiven for thinking that everything they develop radiates the glow of summer sunsets, reduces carbon emissions, leaves daffodils growing in every footprint, and urinates Chanel No. 5.

Worse still, I’m not even talking about second-rate publications here. Both of these were in The Times, along with the usual collection of broadsheets. Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it. Since you can’t be bothered to pay a proper tech journalist, at least have someone with a vague clue about the issues proofread your articles for ignorance. Try those poor buggers you have running the computers. If they don’t bury their face in their hands when they read the copy, it’s at least relatively safe to print — but don’t hold your breath.

Love and kisses,
The Angry Technician

Reckless

I assert than anyone who is retarded enough to install Windows Updates on a customer-facing production server in the middle of the goddamned day deserves everything they get.

They most certainly deserve a prompt phone call from me asking why my entire school’s website (including the hosted MIS) became unavailable while I was in the middle of posting new content, then later writing a pithy blog post about how “we didn’t think it would cause IIS to shut down” is not a valid excuse.

I work late on the evening after patch Tuesday to install server updates, and all of my servers are internal. When I’m paying you thousands of pounds a year to maintain this stuff, I expect that to stretch to some late working.

Milk

It is a sad fact that the easiest, and probably most common, method of destroying a laptop is to spill a drink on it. The fact that I’ve avoided this fate myself is really only down to the fact that I tend to only drink water the vast majority of the time, and water spills are relatively easy to rescue equipment from if acted upon early. In the office, I operate a strict ‘closed container only’ policy.

A few years ago I was alerted by email to a spillage onto a laptop that was not so simple. Worse still, the user had waited several days before contacting me. They had vainly attempted to drain the laptop by simply lying it keyboard-down on a towel, and only sought help when that failed.

The beverage in question was a mug of Baileys and hot chocolate. A large mug. The entirety of a large mug.

I didn’t hold out much hope.

Recovering from a laptop spillage is a relatively simple procedure involving four steps:

1. Stripping the laptop down to its component parts.
2. Thoroughly drying said components.
3. Re-assembling.
4. Praying really hard.

The first thing that struck me when I began dismantling the laptop in question was the stench of rotten milk the moment I lifted the keyboard, a vicious assault on the nostrils the likes of which I had been unprepared. Even if the hot chocolate had been black, connoisseurs of Baileys liqueur will know that it contains cream. It also contains sugar (both in pure and caramelised form) and alcohol, none of which are particularly healthy for electronics. It took me an hour and a half to painstakingly clean the sugar/milk residue from the inside of the laptop, but the damage was done. It never booted again. The laptop was expensive, less than 6 months old, and the purchaser had declined insurance against spillage.

Remember, dear friends; alcohol is hazardous to your laptop’s health. Please compute responsibly.

Health Hazard

This week, I discovered an unanticipated effect of the core networking server rack being in my office. The summer heat and difficulty hearing people on the telephone was expected, but this wasn’t.

Yesterday, when I had a visitor in the office for most of the day, I spent so long talking with a raised voice over the din that by the time I went home, I had a sore throat.

I was… displeased.

“Office Vista”

In the last few years it has become increasingly common when dealing with users for them to refer to the most fundamental software products on their machine by the wrong names. In particular, an awful lot of users seem complete incapable of telling the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office – and it is doing my head in.

Despite what a distressingly large number of plebeians may believe, the following products DO NOT EXIST:

• “Office Vista”
• “Windows 2007″

If I had a tenner for every time I heard the first of those in particular, I wouldn’t feel the need to play the lottery; I’d just volunteer to deliver Office 2007 training in every school in the country, and I could retire after a year. This is partly Microsoft’s fault for having both a Windows 2000 and Office 2000, followed by a Windows XP and Office XP. However, the fact that 8 years later people still seem to believe this pattern is being followed is solely down to their own inattentiveness.

It’s only a matter of time now until someone asks me about “that Office 7″. Little do they know that I have a copy of Office 7.0 ready to install on their machine the moment they ask about it.

Bonjour? Au Revoir.

Lets say you’re using Autoruns one day and the following conditions arise:

• You notice that the Bonjour service has somehow made its way onto your system (usually courtesy of iTunes or Adobe Creative Suite).
• You find yourself incensed that some dodgy and largely unnecessary Apple networking software has installed itself without asking.
• You discover that the Bonjour service in inexplicably absent from Add/Remove Programs, thus further infuriating you over the stealth nature of the install.

Under these conditions, DON’T do what I did and simply delete the references to mDNSResponder.exe and mdnsNSP.dll using Autoruns. All that will get you is a machine that, after its next reboot, can no longer resolve DNS addresses correctly, leading to a short sharp visit to System Restore. Instead, here’s how to remove Bonjour without tanking your network connectivity:

1. Run the following via Start -> Run:"C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -remove
2. Go to the C:\Program Files\Bonjour folder (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Bonjour if you have ended up with a 32-bit version of Bonjour on a 64-bit OS)
3. Rename the mdnsNSP.dll to something else (it doesn’t matter what, my preference is for mdnsNSP.turd)
4. Reboot
5. Delete the aforementioned Bonjour folder from Program Files.

Et voila.

The unwanted guest

Earlier today I had to guide my father-in-law through fixing the functionality of being able to click on links in other programs (i.e. Outlook) and have them open in a web browser, which stopped working immediately after uninstalling Google Chrome.

I have come to the conclusion that Google Chrome is like an unwanted house guest: you’re not really sure why you invited it in (despite looking OK when it arrived), and you soon find it’s not as nice as the other guests you have over. Then it starts trying to convince you that you don’t need to have other people over, and when you ask it to leave, it breaks something on the way out.

The Angry Technician’s Guide to Managing Windows 7, you Idiots

I am tired of hearing people say they don’t want to deploy Windows 7  because they can’t manage it properly on their Windows 2003 domain.

This is utter rubbish.

I heard this all before with Vista, and it wasn’t true then either. Here’s a summary some of the idiocy I’ve seen:

• “You have to have Windows Server 2008 R2 to join Windows 7 to the domain” – UTTERLY WRONG.
• “We can’t use any of the new Group Policy settings because we don’t have Windows Server 2008/2008 R2″ – PLAIN WRONG.
• “We’d have to upgrade our domain schema to support the new Group Policy settings” – UNTRUE.

and along with them, the slightly different but equally ill-informed:

• “We can’t use Group Policy Preferences because we don’t have Windows Server 2008/2008 R2″ – ALSO WRONG.

OK, listen in, morons. I will now explain how you (yes YOU), can manage Windows 7 using Group Policy and Group Policy Preferences with only Windows Server 2003 servers on your domain. This is a technical article, so try to keep up.

Downselling

It seems that the Dell store doesn’t quite understand the concept of what makes one number bigger than another.

Last time I checked, going from a 3-year warranty to a 1-year warranty didn’t count as an “upgrade”.