I’ve been trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 on my Windows 7 machine, but had a strange problem where the running installer would just do nothing. Tried using both the bootstrapper and the full version, both with no luck. After some fiddling, the following steps seemed to fix the problem:
1. If installed already, uninstall the .NET framework via Control Panel – Turn Windows features on or off.
During December, I was out of town and away from my desktop PC, intending to connect to it using LogMeIn to keep working. Although my laptop has enough disk space and is a reasonable enough specced machine, my desktop PC is my main machine and has everything set up already, and remote access software generally works well.
Unfortunately, during this period, the Western Digital Raptor in my desktop PC with all my data decided to fail. This is my first real drive failure, and having it fail while being 4000 miles away in a different continent really magnifies the problem. The first signal was connecting to my PC and seeing two drive letters vanish into thin air. Rebooting the PC ended up in losing connection permanently (which I later learned was because it had hung on boot while detecting the drives), followed by a couple of hours troubleshooting with a friend who managed to get in front of my PC, finally accepting the fact that the problem could not be easily resolved and leaving the machine switched off until I could get back.
Fortunately, the code I needed to work with was in an offsite SVN repository and essential dev tools like Visual Studio and SQL Server are available from MSDN, allowing me to get my laptop in a state that was at least usable. This managed to allow me to keep working, but it did get me thinking about my general backup strategy though.
About a year or two ago, I tried several online backup solutions and although I preferred Mozy’s backup software, the actual backup process refused to work properly on my machine and eventually I settled for Carbonite, in tandem with Syncback SE for syncing changes to an external drive. This strategy worked fine until recently, when I upgraded to Windows 7. Unfortunately, Carbonite’s software had some issues with this, and I didn’t re-install, leaving my PC without form of online backup.
Reluctant to have no backup in place all, I decided to go for a disk imaging solution instead and eventually settled on Macrium Reflect. The pro version offers scheduled backups, and I had weekly full backups and nightly incremental backups for system and data drives. The backup images are stored on a third separate hard disk in my PC and copied over to an external 1TB drive to offer some redundancy.
Once I got back to FL, getting back up and running was mostly a case of getting a new drive and simply restoring from the most recent image created by Macrium Reflect. The whole process took about a couple of hours and was relatively painless. However, the Raptor was partitioned into two drives, one containing utilities. This wasn’t backed up as it didn’t seem like there was anything too important on there. Getting the essential ones back took a couple of hours too and a lot of time and hassle could have been saved by backing this up too.
It seems like Carbonite have fixed most of their issues with Windows 7, but there’s still a conflict with SVN where Carbonite causes the SVN icon overlays to disappear. Generally unsatisfied with Carbonite, my search for a viable online backup solution continued.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve been using JungleDisk (as suggested by Shawn Wildermuth), and so far, I’m liking it. The cost structure is a bit different from Carbonite, with the desktop addition costing $3 per month plus the cost of storage with Amazon S3, which is about $0.10 per gigabyte per month, plus fees for data transfer – though this is currently free until June 30th, 2010. There’s a slightly cheaper version for backups only at $2 per month, but with the added features of folder sync and a mapped network drive in the cloud, the desktop version is easily worth the extra cost.
The software doesn’t look as fancy as Carbonite, though I actually prefer my Windows applications to look like Windows applications rather than having big fonts and bright colors, and JungleDisk definitely offers users more control over their backups. However, it does lack shell integration which would’ve been nice, and I don’t think there’s any way to restore files via the web. But the features all work well and as expected. It’s also great to be able to use the software on multiple machines, with the only additional cost being incurred for the extra storage.
The yearly fee for Carbonite is about $55. My backup is about 60gb, though the first 5gb is free, so this is going to be about $8.25 per month. Adding in the Jungle Disk fee of $3 per month, and the total cost per year is about 2.5 times the cost of Carbonite, but still not unreasonable and given the cost and pain of losing important data, it’s worth it.
Overall, my backup strategy consists of the following now:
Backups every 5 minutes to Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk
Automated weekly full backups of system and data drives using Macrium Reflect to a separate physical internal drive
Automated nightly incremental backups of system and data drives using Macrium Reflect to a separate physical internal drive
Both weekly and nightly incremental backup images are also copied to a separate external USB drive.
Non-automated backup of utilities drive (this hardly changes and is just to ease restoring if another drive failure happens)
Code backed up to offsite SVN repository
This seems like it should cover everything, from a full-blown drive failure to accidentally deleting some important data.
I’m no fan of Experts Exchange and prefer to use Stack Overflow whenever possible (which is actually EE’s arch-enemy) – which is 99.9% of the time. But there’s still that rare occurence when something shows up in Google from their site which looks like it might be helpful, and then they use all sorts of sneaky tactics to try and get users to register, though the answers do display at the bottom of the screen. Fortunately, there’s a couple of ways we can improve the experience and reduce the pain of using their site during those rare moments.
Install AdBlock+. This is an absolutely required Firefox extension.
Click OK, and then OK again to exit out of the ‘RefControl Options’ dialog box.
Quick comparison of a question on Experts Exchange between Google Chrome without any scripts or add-ins and Firefox with the above changes.
Should still keep away from Experts Exchange whenever possible though. Stack Overflow is significantly better and doesn’t use any questionable practices to push users into registration.
After my last blog post where I was feeling quite dismayed with my recent customer service experiences, it’s good to see that not all companies are as awful as the ones I’ve had to deal with. Haven’t returned anything to Staples recently, but it seems like they’ve got their customer experience sorted:
So off to Staples I went, ready with my best pained eyebrows and apologies. Which were swiftly interrupted by the cashier, who asked, “Do you have the credit card you purchased it with?”
“I assume this is the card,” I said, handing over my American Express. She swiped it into her register, confirmed my name, found the ink in my purchase history and promptly processed my refund. No signature required.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my customer service experiences over the past few weeks, and would’ve thought that more businesses would be trying harder to keep customers happy during this economic downturn. However, more and more often, I’ve been seeing businesses that just don’t get it.
Let’s take Bank of America. I’ve got a personal and business account with them and have been using them since I moved to the United States in 2006. Shortly after incorporating my business account, they had an online offer, whereby personal accounts opened with business accounts were exempt from the monthly account management fee (currently running at about $9). Upon calling them up to request that the monthly fee on my account get waived as I had just opened a business account, the customer service representative simply offered a flat no, without any room for negotiation, and told me I’ve have to open the same account online to get that offer. Even after explaining the amount of inconvenience this would be – getting a new account number, ordering new checks and paying in books, updating regular payments, etc – he was oblivious to these facts and offered nothing.
More recently, I went into a local branch to get a money order and was told that the fee for this was $4.00 for customers, despite the same thing costing only $0.60c in Wal-Mart. WTF. I’ve certainly been questioning why I’m still using such an institution for my banking needs when they show me nothing but contempt.
It’s not often that I buy subs from Quiznos, but some coupons in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago made me venture into one, offering a free upgrade to a meal. Upon presenting the coupon, an employee informed me that it didn’t apply to value subs because ‘they were cheap already’. Their ploy worked, resulting in me getting a meal anyway, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
My bigger issue with Quiznos though, is why they choose to hide all of their fillings behind the counter and cover the glass up so that they are not visible to customers. This may not be the case in all branches, though I’ve been to several around the Orlando area and they’re all setup this way. It almost seems like they don’t want to make customers the perfect sub, and could learn a thing or two from Subway, where there’s clear glass windows and a nice organized process with all fillings clearly on display and a big label in the window. I’ve decided to make an effort to stay away from Quiznos, because they don’t deserve my business.
Just a days ago, I needed to send some money abroad and decided to use MoneyGram for the first time. Consulting the website first, I was surprised to find that they charge nearly double to send money online than going to a store. So much for passing the savings of online systems to customers, though sadly this is not all that uncommon. The Florida DMV is the same, and when paying a speeding ticket online a couple of months ago, got charged an additional $7.50 convenience fee for using the online service (!).
But, back to MoneyGram. After using the website to find a a local 7–11 where money could be sent, my wife and I made the trek there. There was a big machine at the back, though upon starting the process to send money via the touchscreen, requested an activation code which had to be obtained by calling a MoneyGram agent!
Using the phone next to the machine, my wife called them up, and after providing them with the details, the agent offered a free membership card or something, and ended up giving us the card number instead of the activation code. WTF.
The other annoyance here was that there was nothing that the agent asked which couldn’t be entered into a kiosk and completely bypass the manual process of speaking to an agent (and an incompetent one at that) to handle the transaction.
But, another phonecall later, and finally getting the activation code, we punched it in, put the debit card in, entered PIN code, and then… got a message from the machine telling us that the transaction could not be processed, without any further information explaining why. WTF.
After consulting my iPhone and finding another couple of locations from the MoneyGram website, we drove to them only to find that they didn’t have the MoneyGram service. WTF. By this point, I was getting really frustrated with these guys.
The next day, we found out that other MoneyGram agents only accept payment in cash and that the majority of places offering the service simply have a phone rather than a machine anyway.
My conclusion – MoneyGram totally sucks at customer service and doesn’t get it, just like BoA (which want to wring their customers of every cent possible), and Quiznos (who couldn’t care less about making their customers a decent sub).
Launching FileZilla several times a day and getting this warning every time the app starts is very annoying.
I’ve checked the options and there doesn’t appear to be any way to turn the damn thing off, which is a total fail. Most of my file transfers are quite small, so this issue doesn’t affect me much and I don’t need to see this warning every time. Sheesh.
I’ve recently been unsubscribing from newsletters and other irrelevant email.
It’s surprising how many website have completely broken systems for unsubcribing from their email communications. One particular annoyance is having to sign in and click through several screens to change email preferences.
Here’s a completely broken message I came across recently when unsubscribing.
“If the box below is unticked then you are unsubscribed. If it is ticked then you are subscribed. To change your subscription please tick/untick as appropriate and click the Update button below.”
These types of messages show completely disregard for the user experience. There’s much easier and user-friendly ways of implementing email unsubscription, and if you need to include a paragraph of instructions to explain when to check or uncheck the box, it’s broken.
It tells us 233,000 people just posted something on Twitter… It seems like Twitter is unstoppable, though it’s been very slow the past few days, and I’ve been seeing the famous fail whale a lot more. Thought their scaling and performance issues were behind them, but apparently not.
As for Sprint… I’m not planning to leave AT&T anytime soon. Love my iPhone too much, though I’m keen to see if the Palm Pre lives up to the hype.
Smarta.com has a great interview with Theo Paphitis. I’m not sure if I believe the story about trying out the parachute idea with a sack of potatoes first, but he makes a good point about taking calculated risks.
Unfortunately, Smarta.com doesn’t offer any way to embed the video, so you’ll have to visit the site to watch it.
This is something I quickly created during a couple of hours this weekend. It’s an about page for ASP.NET web applications, which lists some basic application and dependency information. The dependency information is read by checking the bin folder for DLL’s, and then listing them. Clicking on a file lists the information.
It can still do with some improvement. For example, if there’s a long list of assemblies in the left hand pane, clicking on a pane will cause a postback and the scroll position is lost. Ideally, clicking on a filename should do an AJAX callback to get the assembly information and then populate the right-hand pane, which would get around this issue.
