I know I have been guilty of infrequent posting here at times, a frustration often driven by some technical issues amongst others – however soon I will have no excuse.

Podrush is moving soon promising a whole lot more in the way if interaction and usability…(if there is such a word)

please bear with me while we push through these changes

thanks

Graham

If you aren't in conversation with your customers or clients you are going to lose them.

Why?

This is not about nineties marketing yip on the back of the cluetrain manifesto. It is about a reality that unless you are providing something that your clients need, or are somehow enhancing a service that is out there, your clients are going to simply work around you.

Many entities deliberately interpose themselves into stream between a manufacturer and the end user. I should know I work with one. However that intervention needs to be necessary and it needs to add value. Putting yourself in the way where you are not needed, and where you add nothing to the process is downright stupid.
But it is amazing how many companies there are that still do that. they take something, resell it from a vendor or distributor and mark it up in the process.
But they add nothing of real value.

Want to call them for support on a device? – well yes you can, but your question had better be simple otherwise it will be deferred to the manufacturer. Want to replace a faulty part through them, well yes you can, but it takes longer because they don’t have the staff to run the RMA process attentively.

How on earth do such companies continue to succeed? Well mainly inertia on the basis of manufacturers and their current (but unsustainable) ability to put themselves into the middle of a process without adding value.

As of today, we are making a point of routing around these people. Where we don’t get value we will make every effort to get them out the way.

We are also continuing to be our own fiercest critics. We have to be, because if we are not adding something valuable – like knowledge, expertise or experience I fully expect our clients to route around us.

Having spent the day moving several Terrabytes (TB) of data around while doing some management I ran into two really annoying issues.I was getting an error while trying to delete files synchronized from another server by a third party program. As it turns out Windows Server 2003 has a file length restriction, well, it’s actually a file length restriction with NTFS, the file system that Windows Server 2003 uses. File names, including the folder name, must not exceed 255 characters.
The only way around this was to move the files up to the top level of the directory and then delete from there.

Second issue was a related one- I was getting access denied messages while trying to delete a series of folders in explorer even though I had ownership on the files.
I also looked at modifying the permissions in the command line using CACLS files /e /p {USERNAME}:{PERMISSION} in the CLI.
(but having inspected the properties of the files I was the owner so that was not the issue)
Turns out there was a process holding the file open- cidaemon.exe – an indexing service daemon that the windows indexer runs.

Thankfully I found a neat utility called file unlocker – once you install it- there is a shell extension that allows you to right click and choose to view what is going on- (ie what process is holding the file open or what the locking handle is) and then choose a course of action to fix it. Saved me a bunch of time today…

I am the proud owner of an mid 2009 15” Unibody MacbookPro. If you do have one of these machines, DON’T take up the option of the 1.7 EFI firmware upgrade. If you do, your machine will spend a good amount of it’s time beach-balling intermittently while doing just about anything.

I made this mistake, and after some research, found a large group of disgruntled people with this problem too. Found a great fix though. There is an image that you can boot off (after restoring it to a small 1GB flash drive through disk utility) that will allow you to RETROGRADE the firmware. To 1.6 (the default FW that my machine shipped with , under Leopard 10.5.8 )

If you want to download the firmware boot image, you can grab it off my drop here:

http://drop.io/podrush/asset/aluminum-macbook-pro-recovery-dmg

I am now running SL and the beachballing stopped the moment I did this…