There’s a really good article over at the IBM developer site on automating OS Switching. From their site:

Switch from one operating system to another — without manual intervention — by following these step-by-step instructions for enabling a dual-boot machine. Duplicate this setup for running both Linux® and Windows® on your own machine with the scripts provided with this article.

Why would you want to do this automatically when doing it manually is straightforward enough? The simple answer is that an automated process makes it a lot easier to use multiple operating systems. If you test software on multiple operating system platforms, for example, this ability is especially useful.

Makes sense to me, but then I have three oS’s installed anyways. Of course, i need to warn you this is not for the week of heart!

A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.
“House”, for instance, is feminine, “la casa”.
“Pencil”, however, is masculine, “el lapiz”.
A student asked, “What gender is a computer”?
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether “computer” should be a masculine or feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for it’s recommendation.

The men’s group decited that “computer” should definately be of the feminine gender (”la computadora”), because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.
2. The language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
3, Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval.
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

The women’s group, however, decided that computers should be masculine (el computador”) because:
1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data, but still can’t think for themselves.
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem.
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

Note: The women won.

I’m fed up with comcast. We bought my in-laws house from them in January 06. We’d been living in it since 2004. We had transfered all the bills to either mine or amy’s name except for Comcast (cable). The reason we hadn’t transfered it is because it isn’t as easy as it should have been. Now, if I had my father in law’s drivers license I could have taken it and a bill to one of the comcast stores and done it that way…. otherwise, he had to call, cancel the account and then i had to sign up for a new account. You’d think they could just change the name and SSN on the account.

I started this process on Tuesday. I spoke to a nice lady who was able to actually help me. She took the old account down, brought the new account up and even called me once this was done to give me the new account number. However, when I got home, we had no service. Apparently, since there was now a balance due on the old account (for the half of a month’s service) that had to be paid before the new account could be brought up on the existing hardware, otherwise, I’d have to have someone come out to install new service (WHICH MAKES NO SENSE TO ME). So, I pay the balance, call back and apparently, it takes a business day for payments to come up in their system. So we’re with out internet and cable for another day. Or so I thought.

I was able to disconnect the digital boxes from the cable and plug the cable directly to the TV and we had cable tv. w00t. No internet, but at least we could watch our shows. I call back on Wednesday, manage to get the digital cable on and then learn that there is a problem with new internet service and that it could take up to 24 hours. Well, while talking with the support guy on the phone, it turns out he lives kind of around the corner from us (which was nice to hear in this day of outsourced support) and some how we started talking about real estate in our area and how the prices on new houses can vary so greatly from one neighborhood to the next. It was kind of a random conversation to have with a support call… however he was able to get the issue resolved and by lunch on Thursday we had internet! God Save the King!!

There is apparently a bug in the new version of Excel that returns the wrong number when you multiply certain numbers. An ex-MS programmer addresses the issue…

The first thing you have to understand is that Excel keeps numbers, internally, in a binary format, but displays them as strings. For example, when you type 77.1, Excel stores this internally using 64 bits:

0100 0000 0101 0011 0100 0110 0110 0110
0110 0110 0110 0110 0110 0110 0110 0110

The display is showing you four characters: “7″, “7″, “.”, and “1″.

Somewhere inside Excel is a function that converts binary numbers to strings for displaying. This is the code that has the bug that causes a few numbers which are extremely close to 65,535 to be formatted incorrectly as 100,000.

For more: Excel Bug

Its not really tech support, but you never know when it might come in handy…

as seen on Craigs List

Hi! I’m your Technical Support Rep. I have a considerable amount of control over one or more important aspects of your daily life: television, telephone, and internet. Sometimes one, sometimes all three. Before we interact, I’d like to share some thoughts with you:

* I am here, simply put, to fix your shit. My job is not complete until said shit is fixed. Please just help me fix this shit.

* With that out of the way, know that I hate you exactly as much as you hate me. No more, no less. If you are at least relatively pleasant, I’m happy to help you- even to make small talk as I attend to the issue at hand. Conversely, if you are a total and complete jackass, I will make this the worst 10 minutes of your week.

* Neither I, nor any of my coworkers, are out to fuck you. We are not idiots. We are college graduates in technical disciplines, the vast majority of whom are here to work their way up the IT ladder to more fulfilling positions. Sometimes we have off days, sure, but we know EXACTLY what we are doing. Note that this does not apply to anyone outside of our department. They are, in all reality, idiots who are out to fuck you.

* So you’ve already unplugged the “internet box” and plugged it back in? Brace yourself, you’re going to do it again. Most of the time I do this for a reason…unless you’re a dick. Then I do it to see how mad it makes you.

* Don’t lie to me- I can tell you have a router. It isn’t illegal.

* To those who think they are “computer illiterate”: The vast majority of the time, you are lovely customers: Patient, willing to learn, and most importantly, willing to listen. Thank you!

* To those who think they are CompSci PHD’s: The vast majority of the time, you are retarded: If you already cycled your equipment and it didn’t work, why did it work when I made you do it again? If you are so well educated, stay the hell out of the queue so that people who need help can get it.

* Supervisors don’t have a magic wand that they can wave to make everything better. They are governed by the same protocol and use the same utilities as I do. In fact, supervisors are more likely to tell you to fuck off- believe it or not, they have other pressing issues to attend to. If a node goes down, they WILL put those 200 subscribers before you in Priorityland.

* Threatening to cancel does not intimidate us. We have an entire department that is paid to care about that, which means that I don’t have to. Harsh? Sure, but I have more than enough work to do fixing shit, yelling at field techs, following up on cases, and explaining the concept of email to your grandmother that it won’t cause me to lose any sleep.

* It worked fine yesterday? Oh, then I must be wrong. Let me reconsider the 40 minutes I spent troubleshooting your Win98 box. Check it out: Shit breaks (see point 1); If shit did not break, I would be mowing your lawn instead of sitting in this office.

* Speakerphone? Turn it the fuck off.

* Don’t call back and have another rep troubleshoot the same problem. He will read the notes I left about how you spilled coke into your cable box. Even if he didn’t, he would come to the same conclusion, and more people with undiagnosed problems would be stuck listening to that god-awful hold music.

* I am not blowing smoke when I say that I understand how frustrating it is to wait on hold, get transferred, and deal with bad agents. I too have called Dell’s tech support line. The difference is that I actually DO care about your problem, so please just calm down before I kill your family.

* My company has over 20 million subscribers. I handle a region of about 2 million. To this day, none of them have ever called in to say “I just wanted you to know that my shit is working correctly.” Maybe someday?

So what can I help you with today?

How many times have you been working in windows and go to use your *nix commands on the command prompt? I know I have and it always annoys me when it doesn’t work. I’ve looked at installing cgywin to get the commands but its a pain in the ass to make it work. Now I don’t have to worry. Thanks to utools.com, I can have LS on windows with a simple tool. GNU ls for Microsoft Windows is a wonderful tool that will make many a tech happy.

Download it. Try it out. Love it.

I attended a Microsoft technet event today and while I did glean some good information about a program of their’s (have you ever heard of System Center Operations Manager?), I gleaned some information that was even more valuable.

In vista (and apparently in server 2008) the tcp stack has drastically changed. The catch is that the changes, when implemented will improve your network connection between vista and 2008 (and even a little between server 2003). The problem is that its not enabled by default. But I now know what to do…

Open a Command Shell:

C:\ Netsh
netsh> interface tcp
netsh interface tcp> set global congestionprovider=ctcp
netsh interface tcp> set global ecncapability=enabled
netsh interface tcp> show global

Type the stuff in bold

If you did it right, when you run show global, you’ll see:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6000]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\mcangeli>netsh
netsh>interface tcp
netsh interface tcp>show global
Querying active state…

TCP Global Parameters
———————————————-
Receive-Side Scaling State : enabled
Chimney Offload State : enabled
Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level : normal
Add-On Congestion Control Provider : ctcp
ECN Capability : enabled
RFC 1323 Timestamps : disabled

netsh interface tcp>

How much this gains you, I have yet to learn… just thought I’d share…