IT Werkz Sometimes

Since I’ve got the 32GB iPhone 3GS and that it can now store quite a lot of music I’ve been able to rationalise all of my devices and stuck three of them for sale on eBay.

I sold a 60GB iPod which was in pretty darn perfect condition apart from a few scratches you get on the back of any iPod which is a couple of years old. I described it as that and I’ve just found a message from the purchaser that it’s not in the condition it was described as. Except it was exactly in the condition I described it as. He hinted at contacting eBay which I assume was to scare me into giving him his money back. I’m not that bothered as I’m not an eBay trader in any form and I can’t see that they would side with him anyway. I think he expected to get the iPod box with the iPod but I didn’t have it any longer and never described the iPod as being sold with the box. Anyway he’ll get his money back no problem.

I also have a 160GB iPod that has just sold and mercifully it wasn’t to the same person. Again I got a good price and this time it did include the iPod box. The purchaser had also asked me, before winning the auction, what the condition it was in and the condition of the box. This one is obviously going to be passed off as new to someone.

Lastly my iPhone 3G was on sale on eBay but I had rather stupidly started the auction at 7am so it would therefore finish at that time. People don’t like that, they prefer finishes at about 8-9pm. I had put it on with a starting price of 99c and no reserve and I had about 12 watchers at one time but this morning with 24 hours to go only had 4 watchers and the price was stuck at $108. So I pulled it from auction and will start again with a far more flowery description and a starting price of $150 just to get rid of the time wasters who think they’re going to pick it up for a song.

I had another go at using the iPhones bluetooth function (with OS 3) and this time tried to pair it with a Jabra Bluetooth Speakerphone and still it wasn’t discovered. I bet the only thing that will be discovered will be some A2DP headphones that Apple will release soon and that will cost $100.

Just been reading about electronic cigarettes which seem to satisfy the craving of smokers by giving them a shot of nicotine and vapourised water as the smoke substitute.

Sounds great. Cheaper than normal cigarettes, you don’t get sick and you are supposed to be able to smoke them anywhere as they aren’t cigarettes but an electronic gadget. OK, so you get a whole loada people who use these things, and remember they actually look like a real burning cigarette, and they fire these things up in cinemas or theatres, bars, shops, planes, trains etc etc and do you really think people aren’t gonna complain. Like heck they won’t. They may not be cigarettes and may not produce any ill effects on anyone at all but they look like cigarettes and therefore someone’s gonna complain and ‘put a stop to this’.

If the only problem is that they look like cigarettes but don’t act like cigarettes then what is the problem? You could use a shortened pencil painted white and with a bit of light brown for a filter and someone sucking on that will probably annoy someone. Will we end up with people getting barred from places for impersonating someone smoking.

Where does that end?

I thought I’d try and sort out the intermittent iTunes problem where the Bonjour service is apparently running but I get a message saying it isn’t running and iTunes doesn’t connect to the appstore.

I did the most basic of tests and switched off OneCare’s firewall and the Bonjour service appeared to work OK as iTunes was able to connect to the Appstore. That’s OK occassionally but not how the PC is supposed to run so I had a look at some of OneCare’s settings, specifically its firewall. What I found was that the ‘location’ for the PC was not ‘Home or Work’ which I expected but ‘Public Computer’ and a whole load of network activity functionality had a status of suspended. Not sure if that alone was causing iTunes problems. I had a look at the allowed programs, according to OneCare, and the Bonjour was set to ‘Allow’. When I clicked on the ‘Change location’ control a windows displayed two network connections. The first was my lan connection which I expected and had a zone of ‘Home or Work’ and the second connection was described as ‘Unidentified network Multiple connections’ and this one had a zone of ‘Public place’. So it seems that the initially displayed zone will be set to ‘Public place’ if any of the underlying network connections are set to ‘Public place’.

Having set the zone to ‘Home or Work’ for the second network connection, and hoping that was the cause of the iTunes connection problem, I rebooted the PC and tried iTunes again. Again it would not connect unless I disabled the firewall. I had a look at the zone OneCare displayed and it was back to ‘Public place’. The question was what were these other network connections?

In Control Panel I started ‘Network and Sharing Center’ and clicked on the Manage network connections link and it displayed three local area connections. The first connection I knew about but the second and third connections turned out to be for VMware and were described as ‘VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet1′ and the third was described the same except appended with ‘8′.

Were these the cause of the problems? I disabled both of the VMware network connections and rebooted the PC. Would iTunes have trouble with the Bonjour service now or would iTunes work OK. Nope, iTunes still wouldn’t connect, the Bonjour service says it was started but I had a feeling OneCare’s probably the culprit here.

I then disabled OneCare’s firewall, re-enabled the two VMware network connections and turned on the Windows Firewall. This is the firewall that comes as part of XP or Vista. This time iTunes connected OK. The problem with iTunes not connecting when the OneCare firewall is running happens most days but not all the time. Still annoying though.

OneCare’s shelf life is coming to an end now that Microsoft are bring out a new free anti-virus application and are no longer supporting OneCare so that’s it for me with their firewall.

Just read the following in a book about how to bust web software:

“We are already seeing a backlash against many of the mainstream waterfall and iterative software development methods in favor of agile and Extreme Programming methods. If taken “to the extreme,” agile development is a completely unstructured, chaotic process that employs unrepeatable processes and bypasses much of the testing and design phases. Although agile development might decrease time-to-market delays and increase the rate at which programmers can write code, whether such an approach improves quality is uncertain at best.”

But agile is still the new kid on the block so we have a few years more with agile before the light is seen.

I have some intermittent iTunes problems which, bizarrely, tend to happen in the early evening. When I need iTunes to connect to the web to update podcasts or applications or just go to the App store quite often it doesn’t actually connect and eventually I get a message that the Bonjour service isn’t running. When I check services it does say it has started. If I get that message then I also get a message when iTunes starts stating that it isn’t the default music player and do I want it to be the default music player, or words to that effect. I also sometimes get a message from the firewall asking me whether I should allow iTunes to access the web.

The last of these two issues make me think that good old Vista thinks that iTunes is being used for the first time and it needs configuring. I have stopped and started the Bonjour service, I have set iTunes to being the default music player and OK’d that iTunes can be run through the firewall. I have then successfully restarted the PC so that the registry settings are firmly applied.

But then if that was the case I wouldn’t keep getting these problems so my thinking isn’t quite right here. So what the heck happens in the early evening that doesn’t happen earlier in the day? Think..think.

Seems that the word agile in IT is pretty popular with some agents these days. They think its the next big thing and if you haven’t got experience of that on your resume, forget it, you’re a has-been.

Well I have got agile on my resume but I don’t really understand why it’s such a big deal. One site which was very agile that I worked at ran one of the biggest project disasters I have ever worked on. They loved ‘lean’, had daily scrums, the whole works but there was fat chance of that bunch of kak-handed coders ever producing a working system however close we worked in the same office. It took them a week to do a build and that always failed, and I mean always. When push comes to something else if the developers aren’t up to the job there’s not much you can do about it and the chances of success will be very slim (Wonder if there’s a ’slim’ development approach? Ed). Another company I worked at used to bandy about the term ‘agile’ quite a lot, and even had an ‘agile’ team but they didn’t do agile they just wanted to be able to use the term in case anyone thought they were old fashioned.

Speaking to agents about agile though is quite amusing as they obviously like the latest technologies which allows them to focus on something and ignore a whole load of other stuff that isn’t peppered with the term agile. I have tried to explain that everyone working in the same office and having more one to one conversations and far less documentation was actually quite an old work practice attitude and had been performed by IT people for a heckuva time but no they ain’t having none of that thinking. Agile is new and woe betide you if they see the term agile on any project on your resume earlier than 2 or 3 years ago as to them you must be lying as agile didn’t exist before then.

One of the better agents called the other day and said how he dares to put an advert for an IT position on any of the job boards because he gets such a flood of unsuitable resumes in response. Apparently 99% of the resumes are no good and he rarely gets to speak to someone where English is their first language. What has happened here, how has this situation arisen?

I noticed that there was a new version of Wordpress out, v2.8 and thought about upgrading to that. I had a look at the wordpress.org site, where you download the software from, and found that it can be updated automatically. Tried that by clicking on a link but it did precious little. It did display ‘Done’ on the page but I was still on version 2.7.1 so I don’t know why it thought it had done anything. Suppose someone tested it and convinced themselves that it worked.