Adam Pash over at Life Hacker has a great tip for using Skype to do automated reminders. You can also use a script to send a text message to your phone as a reminder in much the same way. You just send an email to your number followed by the domain for your carrier. Here is a list of the most common ones.

• Verzion - vtext.com
• Nextel - messaging.nextel.com
• TMobile - tmomail.com
• Xingular - cingularme.com
• Virgin Mobile - vmobl.com
• Sprint - messaging.sprintpcs.com

If I have missed any carriers please let me know and I will gladly update the list. What is your favorite automated use of Skype or SMS (text messaging)? Thanks for the idea Adam!

Technorati Tags: Skype, Text messaging, Reminders, Automated alarms, Life Hack, SMS

Over at Coding Horror Jeff started a conversation about dialog boxes, specifically the modul dialogs being disruptive to the user experience and workflow of an application. At the time I didn’t agree with Jeff that it was the boxes themselves, but that it was their misuse. I still believe that, but I think the issue is an even greater one than that particular control. Let me illustrate. In a previous post I talked about a website that had a poor UI that made it difficult to figure out what I had done wrong. Since then, the bank has made changes to their online banking that just got in the way.

I understand the need for confirmation but after going through several steps of going to make a transfer from linked accounts, it gave me the confirmation message, Please make sure that there is enough funds in the from account to cover this transaction….

Is this really necessary? The program should have checked before and/or after to verify the amounts. This is just very basic design here. When designing a website or an application. Start with the end results and work backwards. From there think of the tasks that user will perform and walk through them with someone from your target audience. 9 times out of 10 they will do something or ask you something that you didn’t think of and will make you rethink how things flow. If they have to stop and go some place else to look something up, you have mucked up the workflow and stand a very good chance of frustrating and alienating your user.

Technorati Tags: Audience, Design, Workflow, UI, Usability, Software, Web, User Experience

Albert Einstein once said, “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” I look at the progress we have made in the past 20 years and especially in the last 5. We have gone from technology being in the hands of geeky privileged few, to it being common place everywhere. It is no more apparent than watching how people view and use the web. We live in a world where people can not go from place to place without a GPS; Google is now considered a verb (much to their chagrin); email is now passe amongst 20 somethings; and anyone can interweave services from Yahoo, Amazon, Google, and the likes of Zillow to create some scarily accurate and inaccurate pictures of us.

This generation or iteration of software and the internet is one of openness and transparency. This means as technologists and corporations, we have a responsibility not only to our shareholders and employers but also to our user community. We can still be socially responsible and still make a profit. Even if that responsibility means that we only create a trail of how people are using our hardware and software. Some are going to scream about Privacy. Others will call out that we are just feeding big brother and making him into an ever more aware beast. We need to do something to protect us and yes perhaps help big brother and the authorities.

Just look at what is happening all around us. Go to MySpace, Facebook, Google a friend or colleagues name, or choose your favorite topic and find a forum on it; you’d be surprised at the amount of personal information you will find, most of it is posted out in the open. Molly H. found out that a lot of her personal info was posted on Aboutus.org. Some that she may not have chosen to be posted. My 13 yr old niece set her away message on AIM to be her cell phone number. Whether or not if its voluntary or not, there is a lot of personal information out there that can be pieced together pretty easily and quickly. Until the public and the government is fully educated and appreciates the ramifications of such transparency, then we are obligated to assist them when possible.

Should we keep detailed records, with names and personal records available? Its not necessary, but we
can keep an auditable trail for a time period and insure that it is purged on a regular basis. This we have in our individual abilities. Through my career I have emphasized this with my employers and customers. If something ever happened like on MySpace, then we should be able to help them when necessary.

Storage space is cheap. The required computing power is minimal and the technology required to create is very straightforward. In a subsequent article, I will detail some of the steps that I have done to do this (programmatically in VB) and what I am using today achieve this (SQL triggers). If we are going to make the Axe and WMD, then let’s at least try to make it difficult for the psychos to use it.

Technorati Tags: Albert Einstein, responsibility, MySpace, SQL, triggers, Google, design

Recently, I posted about How to swap out hard drives in a Windows 2000 soft mirror. In this post I am going to talk about making the choice between adding to an existing RAID 5 array or creating another one and how to do it.

A customer, got an email stating that the latest version of their client management software was out. When I called the vendor to see what was required, I was told that they would need more memory and storage space. This is a small business running a single server. The server acts as a data repository, a domain controller and their DNS/Wins server, so anything done to it has to have as part of the plan.

I cracked the case to see what was already in there. It was a 3 year old server and still quite serviceable, with dual Xeon 2.3 GHz CPUs; 512 Mb (2 x 256 Mb) of memory addressable up to 8 Gb; and a SCSI Raid controller with 3 x 18 Gb UltraStar 10k rpm drives and could support up to 7 drives; and enough power to support more.

Choosing which drive configuration to use:

The drives were a little out of date. I had three options:

1. Add some modern drives to the array.
2. Swap out the array, in a similar manner as I did for the soft mirror.
3. Create a 2nd Raid 5 array just for the data.

Adding to the existing array is just a waste to put 70 Gb drive on only to have 18 Gb of it used. There is also the possibility of the controller not liking the mismatch of drives. The drives are also 3 maybe 4 years old by now with at least 3 years of spin on them. Its a doctor’s office, so anything to minimize damages is a definite plus. Let’s not go down this route.

Swapping out the array has some nice advantages to it. It replaces the existing array with lots of wear, thus removing one possible point of failure. It also lets me grow the storage at the same time. Besides using the a fore mention method to swapping the drives, Acronis’ True Image backup now makes it even easier to do.

Creating a new array wouldn’t solve the issue of the aging drives, but it does give me storage and added performance. Remember this is a do it all server, so everytime someone hits the network it has to hit here first. I always try to make my servers have at least an o/s disk/array and a data array. This allows an added way to recover, upgrade, gives some performance improvements over having it all on one device.

Either option 2 or 3 would do work nicely, but as this particular application is known to be resource and network intensive, I chose option 3. The idea of isolating the data and adding some performance was the most logical to me. Also Raid 5 gives you that extra security if a drive fails you are still in business.

How to add a 2nd Raid 5 array to a controller with an existing array on it in a Windows 2000 Server

I called on a friend and colleague, Matt Bennett of Occam consulting to help me do the job. Matt has helped me out before and has been working with servers and hardware for 8 years now and likes to make sure things work. We chose Hitachi’s 73 Gb 10k rpm they got good reviews and had a nice price/performance point.

This machine already had a Raid 5 with drives on it.

1. Open and dust out the case. This is either an obvious step for most or one that seems trivial, but while you are there it will help to keep the troubles down.
2. If your system has a small cable or one that doesn’t have enough connectors, replace it with the new cable. We had to replace ours with one that supported 7 drives.
3. Secure and install the new drives. Make sure that you have enough power and airflow to handle the additional drives. Be sure to set the address of the SCSI drives correctly. The Hitachi’s were addressable up to 8 bits, but the card could only handle 8 drives. All of our drives are numbered sequentially and installed in that order in the case and labeled so that we could tell which drive failed in the inevitable.
4. Boot up the system.
5. We choose to use the Controller’s firmware to initialize the array, but you could always go into Disk Management to do the same thing. We selected the three new drives. Defined the array and said go.
6. We then exited the firmware and let the system boot up normally. It will take a bit longer for the system to boot, so be patient. Unlike I was. If you aren’t it may take longer depending upon if the firmware can/does decide to do a non-destrucive initialization.
7. You can monitor the progress in Windows Disk Management tool, by right clicking on “My Computer”, selecting manage and finding Disk Management under the Storage section.
8. Once the initialization is done, right click on the new disk and select convert to basic. We found that while dynamic disks have some advantages to them, replacing them has some issues.
9. Follow the steps to create the primary partition, accepting all the defaults. The format should go quickly as there are many heads involved and its 10K rpm.
10. Copy over your data to the new drive. Again its Raid 5 to Raid 5 it should fly.
11. Remember to change your backups and any shares to reflect the new array.
12. Now you are done. If you haven’t done so already, button up the system and be on your merry way.

Once I did the upgrade and copied over the data to the new drive, the office had a significant increase in performance. The cumulative effect of the additional memory and array made the server heavy a sigh of relief and the office cheer. With 2.5 Gb of memory there should be little or no disk swapping and what little swapping there is being done to the o/s array which isn’t being hit hard now. We saw the O/s and services grow in memory usage to almost 700 Mb of memory. There is little I/O back up with the 2nd array handling all of the data needs.

If you have the resources and requirements in the server, adding a 2nd array is the way to go.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Raid 5, Upgrade, Hardware, Tutorial, How to, Drive, Configuration

Originally when I was thinking of this article it was going to be about bleeding edge technology: the pros and cons of being on that edge and how to deal with it in a production environment. The latest Microsoft updates and the rumors flying about how they have or haven’t broken internet connections for different groups of users. Microsoft has formidable task in trying to test such updates. Millions and millions of pcs some with more than one user on them. These PCs also have a multitude of applications on them, many of which aren’t public and/or are not popularly known. I am not a large fan of the MS giant. Their past dictates that we take caution, but this article is not a slam nor support for or against them. It’s a comment about the average user.

In a business environment, it is easy to control. IT installs the updates on their desktops and runs with them for a set amount of time. The updates either get blessed or not; relatively simple and straightforward. The average user on the other hand has auto updates turned on, as it is the recommended way to setup XP. All is usually well, but what if they wake up in the morning to user their PC and it doesn’t work? Even scarier is it works mostly, but things work subtly different or what is broken isn’t obvious. These machines that are an everyday part of their lives no longer work as expect. This where we techies come in. We are asked to troubleshoot, recommend, and sometimes fix their machines. Their options are limited: ask you; bring it to someone like “the geek squad” for a large some of money; try to fix it themselves; or not use it. Take pitty on them. Set them up as you would your office. Make them get protection, educate them about spam, phishing, etc, and turn of auto updates. After you have run with the updates, email your friends that it is ok to install the updates. It will save you time and hassle and it will make them forever grateful.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows Updates, Windows, Support, Friends, Techies