The Lone Sysadmin

Dear companies who were affected by the 365 Main outage,

That sucks. Been there, done that, and I hope everything came back up okay. I do have one comment, though:

Next time don’t put up a “scheduled maintenance” page. We know it isn’t true. If it is you picked the worst maintenance window ever. :-)

Believe it or not, we understand things like power outages, and how they’re freak, disruptive problems. Even a simple note about what is happening goes a long way to reassuring everybody that you’re on the job, fixing the problem.

Thanks.

…Your Customers

Dear Apple,

I’ve been using a secondhand, older PPC Mac Mini for the last three months at home, replacing my homebuilt PC running Vista. I like it. It is simple, quiet, and small, and exactly what I need at home, where my computer acts more as a terminal and browser than anything. Plus, Vista sucks.

I would buy a brand new one right now if it could drive two monitors. Yup, I’d be a Mac owner if that were true. But it isn’t. You made the iMac capable of dual displays. Can you do it for the Mac Mini, too? PLEASE?!?

…Bob

Dear Dreamworks,

I saw Shrek 3 tonight. It was funny as always. Good work! I’m the sort that watches an animated movie not only for the plot but for the way you rendered the water, sky, grass, hair, and shadows, and I was really impressed. I really liked the thought that was put into the light color, direction, and intensity for the different times of day. I also liked the the way light was cast on the “actors” and “set,” and some of the theatrical moments (like the panning to the light coming in the window when Shrek was in irons). I do theatrical lighting design as a hobby and those sorts of details really help tell the story and make it fun to watch, regardless of whether the touch is real or rendered.

More than anything else I want to thank you for putting your system engineers, administrators, and architects in the credits. So often organizations forget those guys, only remembering them when something is wrong. It is nice to see that they get to share in the credit when something goes right. Even though most people left by the time those credits came along I hope others see it and it makes as much of an impression on them, too. Thank you!

…Bob

Dear Google,

I cannot figure out how to tell you that the sports scores feeds into Google SMS aren’t working. People are posting in the help groups about this issue. Basically the only scores you get are from April 22nd, 2007. It is reproduceable using the Google SMS web page, so it isn’t a carrier problem.

I hope someone sees this post and fixes it! Having to look up the scores somewhere else is so 1998. :-)

…Bob

Say what you will of me, I love Microsoft Excel. I don’t think my life as a system administrator would be as easy without it. Basically, I love it for Autofill in combination with it’s text functions, and also for charting.

There are three things I’d love to see Excel do better, in these regards:

1. I wish Autofill recognized IP addresses. It will increment them now as numbers, but when I get to x.y.z.256 I have to start over. Not a huge deal, just would be nice to see it say “Hey, this is an IP” and do x.y.z+1.0 or something.
2. I wish Excel in general, and Autofill in particular, could handle hexadecimal numbers. And along with #1, IPv6 addresses would be cool.
3. I wish the charts had color scheme options that accommodated people with color blindness. 25% of the people in my group have some form of color blindness. I’d love a series of checkboxes where I could indicate the types of color blindness I’m dealing with (total color blindness, red-green, or blue-yellow) and have it choose better colors.

That’s all. Maybe I’ll see if there’s a way to submit these directly to Microsoft.

Update: I love blogs… Mark Bower has the link in a post, first hit in Google.

Dear anybody who develops an application to play music,

One word: FLAC. It’s free, it’s open, it’s what I’m reripping all my CDs into.

Apple, it would be absolutely killer if you supported FLAC in iTunes, and automatically transcoded into MP3 for my iPod. But I’m not going to hold my breath, since you only add features that generate revenue.

This also means you, last.fm. Why don’t you work with FLAC files playing through WinAMP?

…Bob

I hate things that make my life difficult. Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 does just that. Its installer will not install the product on Windows Server 2003, which is what my desktop happens to be.

I argue that Windows Server 2003 is higher than Windows XP SP2 (for many uses of the word “high”).

This crap drives me nuts. I can see a company saying that they don’t want to support their product on certain OSes, but just tell people “This is an unsupported OS and we will not help you when you have problems.” Then give them the option to install anyhow. Sometimes I can cheat and have Windows run apps in “compatibility mode” where it pretends to be XP. Not in this case. I’d really like to know what 2003 can’t do that XP can (aside from report that it’s Windows XP).

I guess I’ll be seeing what my options are tomorrow morning, since it’s clear I didn’t check the system requirements prior to acquiring the software. In the meantime I’ve plugged the DV camera in to my Mac, and guess what? No bullshit for the import.

You know what Adobe is going to have to do when Vista comes out? Release a new installer. That won’t be a hassle at all. Say that the product actually won’t work on Vista. At least if the installer wasn’t brain dead you could have the users install the product and then download a patch to make the application work right. Way easier than having to go get new install media.

Dear Apple,

Your Boot Camp product looks cool. I applaud you for providing supportable solutions to your customers, even if you are encouraging them to use Mac OS X.

However, I still won’t buy a MacBook Pro. How can I run Windows without a second mouse button? I am not going to shift-click, or ctrl-click, for everything I need, and I use my right mouse button a lot. This is also a complaint I have in Mac OS X, too, and with your desktop models you offer a two-button mouse. I have one on my G5. Using a USB mouse on a laptop isn’t practical in many cases, though.

Could you offer a built-in two-button mouse option on your MacBooks?

Thank you.