Jakub Anderwald

I currently use HTC Touch Pro. It’s small, nice, easy to write on, functional. However, I bouyght it 1,5 years ago and since then there have been newer phones, bigger, faster, with more features.

I usually upgrade my phone every year or two, so I thought – it’s the time.

However, there is no good replacement for Touch Pro. There’s a thing called Touch Pro 2, but it’s just a minor refinement. Moreover, I had a look through HTC’s leaked plans for 2010, they don’t have anything with bigger screen and much better CPU and hardware keyboard. I would love to buy “HD2 Pro”, but it seems it’s not going to happen.

So I decided to do a software upgrade instead, to get the new features. However, it’s a pain in the back. If I don’t want to spend weeks tweaking and building my new mobile OS, I have to download one of the “custom built” ROMs, e.g. from XDA Developers. But they do have issues. They hang, they’re not as stable as the original OS, they miss some features, draw weird things on the screen etc.

How come Apple gives you the newest software, no matter if you have 3-year old iPhone or the new and shiny 3GS, and HTC / Microsoft don’t? Do they fear I won’t buy I new phone? Hell, I will buy, just make me a device with WVGA, Snapdragon CPU and hardware keyboad and I will gladly pay whatever ridiculous price you put on it.

If not, just let me upgrade my phone, don’t make me feel like I’m stuck with whatever I have because I bought it a year ago.

A friend of mine asked me for help recently.

His new Windows 7 laptop could not authenticate to access a network share in a workgroup environment. I said “that’s going to be easy” and ran him through the usual troubleshooting – security logs, share permissions and maximum number of users, password synchronisation etc.. By the time all seemed fine and he said that he already reinstalled the OS on the laptop twice, and that all other machines are working fine with the same share and same username, I realised it’s not one of the “usual suspects”.

After enabling the correct logging procedures, we got two nice failed events in security log on the server – 680 and 529. Based on my experience, event 529 never lies. You can tell with all the certainty in the world, that when a user gets event 529, he made a mistake in his password, there is no other explaination. Well, I’ll have to revise that policy.

Password was set to “1234″ for both accounts and we still got the same error. I had to go to office, so I told him to move the hard drive from the new machine to one of the older ones. I came back couple hours later and saw an IM message from him waiting for me. “DAMN, it worked.”

Reason? Failed motherboard.

Somehow it could connect to the Internet, could browse local network, but failed at authenticating a local account.

Don’t ask me how.

Following the examples of Larry Page, Bill Gates and Jeff Atwood I just bought myself 2 additional 21 inch displays.

I can finally keep my email always open (on the left-hand side monitor), put IM communicator, desktop widgets and other trivia stuff to the right-hand side one and be focused on my main task. I had to precisely choose the side displays for my setup, so they match the resolution, physical dimensions (at least visible screen height) and color quality of the center one, which I already had.

I use two NECs at work, so having 3 monitors should be better, right? It is. I don’t have the small gap in front of me, just a wide 24″, 1920×1200 area waiting for me to do something.

Here it is again!

It’s System Administrator (or SysAdmin) day 2009 – today. So grab a bottle of beer (or better a 6-pack) and head to your IT department, give the man a bottle of ale, have a chat – let him feel like a friend, not just a login on your screen.

Virtualisation is coming more and more into our lives.

Right now I’m setting up a “jail” XP virtual machine to install a stubborn application there (that doesn’t work with Vista and is sometimes affected by patches, so it needs a special treatment) and playing around with XP Mode in Windows 7 RC on my laptop. At the same time, I have another virtual machine opened, where I’m connected through Citrix client to a remote access machine at work, which is, guess what, just a virtual box running on some access farm.

I know it’s a bit geeky, but wait 3-4 years and you’ll see the same amount of virtualisation in regular people’s lives.