Recently a Client brought in a System with a dying video card. The instal presentation was Video Artifacts on boot and the freezing when it went into high resolution mode during Windows Startup.

This case only two of the Capacitors where blown. Rather than replacing the $125 part, I thought I would take the opportunity to replace $1 worth of Capacitors. However, I had to FIND two of the correct capacitors first. I called around town, but no one had the parts I needed. Not being deterred, I deiced to rummage through my spare parts, and I discovered that an old and obsolete motherboard had two of the very part I needed. So I decided to salvage those Capacitors off the old mother board and get them new life reviving a dead video card.

Using my Soldering Skills I swapped out the two bad Capacitors on the Video Card for the two good ones I pulled off the old Mother Board.

Finally, I fired up the system…. and it worked!!!

At the end of the day, this project was a win-win-win. First, my client won by saving money. The new Video Card and Labor would have cost around $150. Using salvaged Capacitors, the only cost was $50 for my labor. Next, I won because I made more money fixing the card rather than replacing it (yet it was still less expensive for the client). In the end, there as also a win for conservation/environment, because there was on less dead electronic component that had to be disposed of.

I was so pleased by all of this that I made a short movie about it.

Once upon a time, I had a career in IT in the Travel Industry. Durning this phase of my life, I did quite a bit of traveling for both work and pleasure and refined my skills at navigating airports, train stations, and cultures which sometimes had very little in common with my own. From this period of my life, I developed a love for getting to know other people in other places, and seeing how they view themselves and their society.

One way to learn about a people and their culture is to look at their money. Currency is one of those elements in a society that strongly bonds it together. Paper bills and coins not only serve as elements of value exchange, but are also small monuments to what people think are important about the country they live in.

Over the years I have made habit of keeping a few small bills and coins from all the places I have visited. Most of these end up in envelopes in my desk labeled as to the place and date they came from. I’m not a “coin collector” per-say, I have no knowledge as to their deeper meaning or value. (Though with the falling US dollar value, I say my collection is worth more now than it was 2 years ago.)

Every so often I open one of these envelopes and reminisces about the time and place when those bills first entered my wallet. A day or two day, I happened to open up the envelope from a trip I made to Grand Cayman. It happened to be from my last trip there in 2003.

Of course, The Cayman Islands are part of the British Overseas Territory System, but they print and issue their own money. What struck me when I picked up this bill was the “fine print” in the lower right hand corner.

It is the International Copyright Symbol, followed by “Cayman Islands Monetary Authority”.

I just had to laugh, what a wonderful abuse and misunderstanding of copyright law that a government feels the need to “copyright” their money. I wonder if you counterfeit Cayman Island Currency, are you charged with Paganism as well?

By shear coincidence I’ve been working two cases involving software with really draconian copy protection systems. As it turns out, my biggest problem with BOTH these peaces of software was not some technical issue, but rather it was navigating the burcracy they had erected to insure they got the maximum revenue from their software. As a result, I can’t say that I will be working with these software products again. So here’s a lesson to all the small and specially software developers out there: If you make your copy protection PART OF THE PROBLEM, you will LOSS MONEY in the long run because IT CONSULTANTS like me wont recommend your product a second time.

The first case involves a Food Service Management System from Aldelo Software. These guys are classic case of “what not to do” when it comes to software. There business model seems more based around forcing you to purchase their yearly maintenance contract. Now this in and of itself is not necessarily a “bad” thing, there are quite a few companies (me included) that encourage their costumers to commit to service contracts. What make Aldelo so bad is the brutal nature in which they enforce their maintenance contract. Basically, if you do not have one of these agreements, then there NO support after 30 days, even on issues which are clearly driver, database, or other wise low level software related. The funny thing is that Aldelo wanted me to purchase a maintenance contract before they would even confirm if a problem was software related.

In most cases when a software vendor pushes this hard for annual maintenance agreements the front-end cost of the software is kept low to encourage a high rate of adoption. But Aldelo’s font end costs are still highly elevated ($900ish per station).

Aside from the maintenance contract foolishness. Aldelo also has some pretty harsh “Software Activation and Registration” hoops you have to jump through. To it’s credit Aldelo does offer a 30 day demo of it’s product, but you have to provide them with quite a bit of personal information (so that can market/harass you later) before you can download the demo. The demo version is a complete running version, except it’s impossible to tell how your receipts and kitchen chits are going to look because they have “DEMO DO NOT MAKE” and “DEMO NOT A REAL RECEIPT” plastered over everything and on EVERY OTHER LINE of the receipt. Also, do not attempt to load a backup of your database into the demo version, because when you do that all bets are off, and the software locks down waning you to activate it. (so much for testing or having a back up system on standby should something crash)

The software activation is pretty straight forward if you have an internet connection. There is an on “over the internet” registration and activation scheme. However this convenient system only works once or twice, after which you are force to call Aldelo and registrar and activate manually. This means that if you have hardware failure (which is common in a food service environment) then your stuck having to call them. The manual system involves A LOT of very long alfa-numeric codes and of course messing up a single digit in that code means you have to go back and do it all over again. Not something you want to do from a touch screen only terminal. In my one case of having to do this without internet (so far) it took over 40 minutes to register and active manually. Not something that can be done during an dinner rush.

This system of registration and activation presumably prevents someone from installing 3 terminals when they only have license for 2. But if you ADD additional terminals to your network, then you MUST go back and re-registrar and re-activate EACH of the terminals to accommodate the new ones.

Needless to say, I have not been impressed with Aldelo. It is hard for me to recommend a product that frustrates it’s legitimate users in a draconian (and ultimately futile) effort to stave off piracy. What makes this completely bizarre is the MASSIVE hole in their “registration and activation scheme”, which makes sealing the product much easier than dealing with the headaches Adelo puts you through when you try and do the right things.

The ONLY number Aldelo asks you for on a new installation is the “serial number” that can with the software. In fact, it is the ONLY number of note and differentiation when you purchase the software. When you are talking with Aldelo you give them this serial number. If this number is unused they will then “bond” that number to you in their registration and activation system. The ludicrous thing is that this number is printed on the OUTSIDE of the retail software box. Twice now, I have had situations were I have purchased copies of Aldelo new-in-box still with the shrink wrap on it, only to discover that someone else had used the “serial number”. I’ve been lucky. I both cases I was working with a software vendor who worked with Aldelo to fix the issue. In one case I know the software vendor had to buy a new license from Aldelo then resell that license to me at a loss so he could honor our purchase agreement.

Now I DO NOT condone software piracy. But is seems a little disingenuous of Aldelo to make the end users suffer in a effort to “fight piracy” (i.e. squeeze every last dollar out of their software market), and yet do something as inane as put the most important number on the outside of the box.

Other than the registration and activation nonsense, and the constant badgering for a maintenance contract, the software does a pretty good job. It uses a Microsoft database back-end, so it is subject to needing constant reworks and compressions, but the Back-Office part of the software allows for that. Back-ups are also a must when using the MS databases because they are not very crash tolerant.

The Menu building in the software does have a learning curve, but once your done a couple of items with multiple modifiers, it becomes easier.

Back-Office reporting is about what you would expect.

At the end of the day, Aldelo is not a “bad” program, and the service staff who use it seem to like it. But the vices of getting it up and running outweigh whatever ventures it has in daily use. All the more annoying because those vices are artificial introduced on top of whatever normal problems occur when you are setting up a new point of sale system.

It’s been a busy couple of days here at TCG. We have been on top of a wiring job at the Crossville Chronicle. The Chronicle’s corporate owners are in the process of a fairly substantial hardware upgrade for all the systems in the building. Durning this process it was discovered that the buildings Ethernet infrastructure was woefully sub-standard. We discovered that in some cases Cat3 2-pair phone line was being used as network cabling, and in many places, 10-BaseT Hub where being used to provide additional network connections. These two elements alone were absolutely killing overall network throughput. We determined there was also a need to drop 30+ new runs of Cat5e for additional work stations and printers and to accommodate those being served off the old slow hubs and Cat3 lines.

It’s important for us as IT managers to realize that we are the support staff to the real “business” that we work for. After all, IT is not what makes a business money. IT is only there to help drive whatever function of a business that DOES make money. As outsourced IT guys, the line becomes somewhat fuzzy. For us the money making element “is” IT, but to our clients it is not. Because of this, it’s part of our internal philosophy that we do all we can NOT to interrupt work. Most often this leads to non-standard work hours. This way we can accommodate our clients by not trying to do major projects while they are trying to do the real work of the business.

This philosophy came into full effect this past Labor Day weekend as we brought to bear our team to complete this massive job in less than 2 days. We ran just under a mile of cabling. We completely rewired a wiring closet installing racks, patch panels, and switches. We wired in wall boxes and jack plugs to all the stations. We did all of this with our “do it right the first time” attitude. We did all of this and the Chronicle opened for business on Tuesday morning without a single network glitch.

In all fairness, the project isn’t quite over. While we were doing the network wiring we discovered some issues related to the phone wiring that are going to be addressed, and some of the very old phone plugs did not co-locate with our new network plugs, so we had to go back and “neaten” things up with new hardware. But that was just cosmetic, and a point of pride for us.

I’m looking forward to the next phase of this hardware upgrade. We are redoing the Server Rack to bring a total of 3 Apple Xserves online with redundant power and better routers. We’ll have a multi-terabyte redundant storage system with automatic failover should a drive stop working. We are already doing a massive automatic offsite backup that keeps 100% of the Chronicle’s priceless digital assets safe.

While we all tossed in our efforts on this project, a few really came together to pulled this off. Thanks to Liz, Daniel, Shawn, Heather, Owen, Boon, and Delmer, we could not have done this without them. Thank You!