Joseph Brower

I work quite a bit in the phpTimeClock project and I’m excited to talk about some of the changes that will be in the upcoming beta (hopefully released some time this next week.)  Some of the features that have been added are:

• Fully div based layout
• Basic plugin architecture
• Cleaner color/date pickers
• Major code cleanup
• Allow one person to be a part of multiple departments
• Improved reporting options.
• More powerful permission system
• Easy Installer
• XHTML/CSS Compliance

I was browsing around on the internet and ran into one of those “IQ Test” advertisements.  I figured that I would take a look and see how believable it looked. Everything looked fine except for a few questions (ones that seemed to test knowledge rather than intelligence).  I could have overlooked those and believed that the test had some bearing on truth.  After looking through the questions, I stumbled on this. (Click to make it larger.)

They could have at least proofread their document, especially since they are pushing so much money into advertising for this.  Their credibility has left.

I had an interesting experience recently talking with someone about their current (outdated) server and possibly upgrading.  I thought that it would be difficult to convince them of the need and that we wouldn’t have much hope in properly resolving the problems that they had been experiencing.  Instead, I found that they were thrilled about the prospect of getting a good server and migrating to it.  I began to wonder to myself “Why?”  The answer was clear.  They had been waiting for us to tell them that they needed it.  Most customers know what they want, whether they admit it or not.  This customer was not an exception.  They know what they wanted, but were second guessing themselves.  As a technical expert, they were hoping that my conclusion would match with their conclusion.  I am always telling myself that I shouldn’t be assuming what a customer wants, but it can be difficult at times not to.  I’m positive that if I spent less time trying to figure out what the customer wants and more time working with them to let them tell me, this wouldn’t be a problem.  I guess we can all improve on that.  This is the second time this month that I had caught myself feeling concern that the customer would not be happy with my “bad news” but after presenting the facts to the customer, they quickly moved forward to adopt a better way of doing things with their technology.

Long story short, don’t be afraid of the customer.  Have enough confidence in the product and services that you provide and the customer will at least understand what you offer.

Before we purchased our DSLR, we had a small point and shoot camera.  As you can imagine, after we upgraded, we didn’t really know what to do with the camera.  We considered selling it, but my wife came up with a better idea.  She gave the camera to our son (who at the time was about 18 months old).  The following is a gallery of all of the photos that he took in one session.  We haven’t removed any and the only editing we did was to resize them to work better on this site. Let us know what you think.

So we had a client that has a server that is using a motherboard (fakeraid) for their raid management.  I have nothing against RAID, but I really feel like people should use a real RAID controller (3ware or areka) when they are going to be using RAID in a production environment for a business.  Anyways, apparently 2 drives got flagged as bad at the same time in a 3 drive RAID 5.  That is bad, very bad.  In most cases, this would result in major data loss.  I found a tool that miraculously saved the day though.  Runtime.org has a RAID recovery bundle that we used that worked like a charm.  I had used their DriveImageXML and such before and wanted to give their tool a shot.  It cost us over $150 but within 6 hours we had spliced the 3 RAID drives together into one larger drive and we have their server back up and running as if nothing had happened.  We’ll be moving them to a true RAID controller soon, but until then, we know what tool we’ll be using for them and other similar cases.  I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for this application, it would have taken much longer and much more money to get their information back to them.

As a side note: have you audited your backups recently?