Why you don’t want to link your work email to Facebook

One of the more interesting new features that was introduced in Outlook 2010 was the Outlook Social Connector. For those of you who haven’t used Outlook 2010, it’s basically it’s a small window below the reading pane that collates information about all the people involved in the selected email conversation. As well as mining your Outlook folders for related messages, calendar items, etc., it can also pull in updates from social networks.

If you install the addin that lets it link to Facebook, you’ll see Facebook updates for those people you are friends with on Facebook. Thing is, it will also look up information even for people you aren’t friends with.

Normally you can’t search just by email address on Facebook, but the Outlook Social Connector does just that. It won’t show you anything that you couldn’t see anyway if you found that person on Facebook manually, but it does find them for you, seamlessly, just based on the email address. So if you have your work email registered on your personal Facebook account, your sexually suggestive profile picture will show up at the bottom of the reading pane when you send me an email:

I went and checked this profile on Facebook (purely in the name of research for this article) and can confirm that the profile did not have the person’s email address publicly visible. However, many of this person’s photos were set to public, and the photo album that had a blow-up doll as the album cover did not encourage me to investigate any further. Nor did it encourage me to do business with the person who had emailed me.

Needless to say, our staff AUP has a strong recommendation to refrain from adding a school email address to Facebook.

You do not need to defragment this volume

I think I’ll be the judge of that.

Easiest. Install. EVER.

I have a policy that any software purchase by anyone in the school has to be done through the IT department. There are several stated reasons for this:

1. To check that the software actually works on a domain with a non-admin logon.
2. To check it doesn’t have ridiculous copy protection measures such as having to have the CD in the drive (our lab machines don’t have CD drives).
3. To ensure we shop around for the best price (instead of being suckered by a single overpriced supplier who happened to send a mailshot to a teacher).
4. To make sure we actually buy the right number of licenses (we’ve all had requests to install single user editions on an entire lab – or more – and refusal often offends).

However, there are also some unofficial reasons. One of these is to make sure we’re not wasting the school’s money on utter junk. Another reason is to prevent the situation we had this week:

• I was passed some new software for install that had just been bought by a department head.
• I looked at the CD case and realised I’d installed software from this manufacturer before so it would probably be nice and easy.
• I looked a bit harder and realised it was in fact the same software I installed before, that we had owned a site licence for since before I worked at the school, and that was installed on the department head’s computer in 2010.

A quick visit to the teacher in question revealed that the software was in fact on the Start Menu under their department folder, and was working just fine.

They had just forgotten it existed, and never actually used it. Still, it made for an easy install.

Bodge

Like any self-respecting professional, I hate bodge jobs. I have two simple rules relating to bodging a job:

1. Don’t bodge it.
2. If you really have to bodge it, make sure you do a better bodge than the last bodger did.

Of course, different people have different ideas of what constitutes a bodge. Let’s establish a baseline:

This is a bodge. In fact, it is a monstrous bodge – and frankly, anyone who doesn’t agree can just stop reading and bugger off now. When I first spotted it in the cellar of our admin building last year, I was glad it was nothing to do with me or my network. Whoever did this needs to be savagely beaten with their own shoes.

Especially because last week, it became my problem.

How to fix a ‘User information is disabled’ error on the Canon imageRUNNER Remote UI

This was a pretty weird one, and Google didn’t turn up anything useful, so hopefully this will help anyone with the same problem in future.

Issue

When logging into the Remote UI of a Canon imageRUNNER in System Manager Mode, I got the following message right after entering the System Manager ID and Password, and could not proceed any further:

The problem affected 3 out of 10 of my new printers. All the new printers had replaced existing printers, and I had reused their IP addresses and hostnames. I soon realised that the 3 affected had replaced the 3 Kyocera Mita printers I had, and that all the unaffected printers had replaced different makes.

When I logged in using a different browser, the problem did not occur, so I realised it was something specific to my normal Firefox profile.

Solution

I discovered that the web interface of the previous Kyocera Mita printers had set a cookie named rtl which was the cause of the problem. Removing this cookie for each of the affected printers immediately resolved the problem.

Restart

Following the network outage yesterday, I spent most of today restarting computers for people who didn’t bother reading the message about restarting their computers if they were having problems after the network outage.

The message took up 1/4 of the screen, was on a bright yellow background, and they had to click past it on their way to opening a ticket.

Powerless

Sitting in my darkened office at the moment, now in hour 5 of a power outage affecting half the site. The UPS batteries drained long ago, all servers cleanly shut down.

Teachers are slowly adjusting to having to take a lesson without their computers.

A few minutes ago the caretaker said he needed to find a 160A fuse (not a typo). He was amused by my offer to wire up a dozen 13A fuses in parallel, but declined.

All I can do is wait. I am literally and figuratively powerless.

Unravel

A little while ago, our MIS provider did some work for us to resolve some performance issues with their product. When I got the code back, I took a look over it as I needed to make some further small adjustments myself to make it completely fit our needs.

Since then, I have found myself unravelling almost every aspect of the code. I’ve found data queries that use a SELECT DISTINCT on 500 records to return 8 values that exist as unique items in a different table of 30 records. WHERE clauses with 2 different parameters that can only ever return data if they are identical. Even code that I looked at a week ago and thought “huh, that’s an odd way to do it, but it seems to work” is slowly proving itself to be mindnumbingly dumb the more I dig into the inner workings.

It doesn’t disturb me that I’m finding these errors. It’s a complex system. What disturbs me is that I’ve had no formal training on this system, and the person who did the work is the MIS company’s expert on it.

There are times – increasingly frequent times – when I seriously wonder how they have survived in the market this long.

Fixing a broken Outlook 2010 jump list on Windows 7

As I’ve blogged about previously, fixing a broken jump list on Windows 7 is normally just a case of deleting the appropriate cache file and letting the affected program rebuild it. Unfortunately, that second step doesn’t always happen.

For a while now, the Outlook 2010 jump list on one of my workstations has looked like this:

I find your lack of icons... disturbing.

The menu items still worked, and I never use them that much anyway, so it didn’t bother me nearly as much as when the Explorer jump list was trashed. Eventually though, those blank icons gnawed away at the back of my mind. Five tiny, empty voids that taunted me every time I saw them.

I NEEDED MY ICONS BACK.

Cut-off

Last term we had a lot of problems with missed deadlines for school reports, which resulted in almost every single form’s reports having to be rerun from our electronic reporting system. This caused a lot of hassle all round, even for me, since at the time the software was up the creek and would take about  half an hour per form even when run on the fastest computer in the school.

Guess whose computer is the fastest in the school?

Today, I suggested that for this term’s reports we implement a hard cut-off date for report writing, with the condition that “cut-off date” means “if you miss the date, we will cut your head off”.

I’m not sure the suggestion was well received.