So, when you show me dating ads entitled “Meet Your Girlfriend” with a picture of a girl who looks suspiciously under-age, this is not just badly targeted or inappropriate, it is actually downright offensive.

STOP IT.

No. No, I really am not interested in this AT ALL.

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.

I think I’ll be the judge of that.

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.

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.

It turns out this cable is not part of the telephone system, as I had previously suspected. Instead, it is mid-way down a length of cable that runs from an RJ-45 socket in one of the floor boxes in the admin office, and at some unknown time was actually cut completely about 20m further down. The end that is terminated is suspiciously labelled with the name of the company that provides our MIS, which gives me even more reason to dislike them.

I’ve known about the floor box and the loose end of this cable for some time, but it was only last week that I realised that the laughable repair attempt above was part of it. This realisation was annoying because I needed to extend the cut-off length of cable back to the cabinet to provide an additional network port in the office, and running a new cable would, for a variety of reasons, involve destroying half the floor.

Normally I wouldn’t ever extend a network cable, even when done properly. This is a something I consider a bodge, even though many do not. And so it came to pass that I, the Angry Technician, invoked my second rule of bodge jobs:

I decided to sacrifice the extra 20m beyond this and bring a new run from the cabinet all the way back to the cellar, where I could join it properly and fix it near the ceiling, instead of at waist-height where it was previously hanging. It’s still a bodge, and I still don’t like it. But its a hell of a lot better than the last bodger did.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The solution was similar, this time the offending file being be71009ff8bb02a2.customDestinations-ms in %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\CustomDestinations  rather than a file in the adjacent \AutomaticDestinations, but deleting the jump list file only resulted in a blank list that was not automatically re-populated.

In the end, I got the default icons back by copying a working jump list file from another workstation. If you don’t have a second workstation to hand, I’m pretty sure creating a new user account on the same workstation and copying the file will also work (in fact its probably more likely to work, since there’s no chance of Office being installed in a different location).

That's better.