deKay’s Blog

Perhaps the title for this post should contain a question mark, because, as you’ll see, I have no idea.

We needed a new server at work. We always buy Dell, but The Powers That Be request that all purchases over £3000 require at least three quotes. So off I went to Dell’s website, where I spec’d up a server and they gave me a price on the screen there and then. I then emailed a Dell reseller the same spec, and he emailed me back a price in a few hours. Easy.

For the third quote, I decided to look at similar servers from other companies. HP was temporarily out as their site was playing up, so I thought – IBM do servers, lets look there. That was the first problem, as they pointed me at Lenovo. I went to lenovo.com, and chose Servers. Chose a rack server, and clicked View Models. Then spec’d one up. Easy enough so far, but then what?

There’s no “Buy” button. There’s no price.  There’s no “add to cart” (even though you have a cart). You get given a configuration code, but then what?

In the top right of the servers page, I found a phone number labelled “Buy now from a Partner”. So I rang them, and they told me their system was down so they couldn’t access the sales department via computer, but they’d ring sales and get them to call me back in 10 minutes. Four hours later, I rang back, to be told that they had no record of my call, and it was usual for me to be just put through to sales directly and they didn’t know why I hadn’t been.

They put me through to sales. After being on hold for ten minutes, I got to speak to someone who told me that “this isn’t server sales, you’ll need another number”. They gave me another number, and I rang it. Again, I was put on hold for ages, only to be cut off as soon as someone answered. I rang back, and after another wait spoke to someone.

Turns out this particular department only supply servers to resellers.

They gave me another number to try, which was busy when I rang it. I called back the next day, eventually getting through. Only to be told I’d come through to the wrong department. Sigh.

This department gave me another number. Which, unsurprisingly, was the same one I’d run originally. This was going really well. I rang them, to be told – again – their system was down and they couldn’t contact sales. But they took my name, number and email address and would “get right back” to me. That was over a week ago.

I therefore declare it IMPOSSIBLE to buy a Lenovo server, and, by inference, I simply refuse to accept that Lenovo servers physically exist. I find it astonishing that a company of Lenovo’s size can be so disorganised and incompetent, and completely unable to even provide me with a price for something listed on their own website!

For what it’s worth, HP’s site came back up and took me less than 5 minutes to obtain a price for a similar product.

Today, I was pleased to see that online music “experience” and music streaming service Last.fm were doing their bit for carbon dioxide emissions and bandwidth reduction by pausing the radio if they detected I may have been eaten by a bear.

After all, there’s nothing worse than letting the creature who has devoured you waste your precious internets.

Google Buzz was unleashed on the world this week. I can’t see the point yet – it’s like a more accessible, but clumsier, Google Wave. Brought to you in the form of a clone Twitter feed. Sort of.

The mobile version lets you add your location. Unlike Twitter’s map reference, Buzz displays your position as an address; a street name, shop, or business. Or for me, it thinks I might be inside a man.

The thing is, I know Shaun Conway. He was my driving instructor 10 11 14 years ago. And although he did have very nice hands, I don’t think I’d take it as far as Buzz is suggesting.

Yesterday, Apple announced the iPad. Not that anyone was really surprised, as all bar the nitty gritty specifics had been leaked already over the last few weeks.

And, although I was looking forward to the reveal, I didn’t think I was going to be especially interested in the product. After all, I’ve had tablet PCs and PDAs and an iPhone and laptops and netbooks and stuff in the past. So it wasn’t going to be anything new.

I was wrong. I really want one. I’m right in that it does nothing new, but that’s not the point with Apple kit – little of it is actually new. The iPhone did nothing new. The iPod did nothing new. But Apple are masters of mastery; Of doing things right. The proof is there: mp3 players didn’t take off until Apple’s iPod, and now half of the competition are trying to duplicate the iPod. Touch screen phones had been around for years before the iPhone, but now every phone is an iPhone wannabe. So it is with the iPad.

Everything it does, has been done before. But it’s how it does it. How easy it is to do it. How powerful it is in doing it. How slick, smooth, seemless and shiny Apple have done it.

I can see the naysayers and iPad haters already making complaints and rubbishing it. It might well flop yet – after all, every other similar PDA/tablet/touchscreen device before it have already flopped – but this feels different. It gets so many things right that even if some of it’s functionality doesn’t take off, there’s loads left.

Take iBooks. It’s just Kindle mixed with Delicious Library. But then this is Kindle which can also play films. And games. And surf the internet.

Or it’s a portable movie player. That lets you read books, check your email, and do your online shopping.

Or it’s a games console. That doubles as an electronic photo frame, lets you view YouTube and plan a holiday.

Or it’s all of those things, and everything else the App Store can provide for you. As with the iPhone, it’s all the “value added” stuff that will make the machine. The iPhone without the App Store is a basic, but pretty and functional, smartphone. With it, it does everything you can imagine. If you can think of a need, there’s a pretty good chance (as they say) there’s an app for that.

If you’re the sort of person who wants a mobile office desk, with your desk diary, email, internet, notepad and so on, with features for when you have “down time” or are travelling (that’s your music, books, films and games then) it’s great. If, like me, you love the iPhone but when playing games or reading web pages you just want something… bigger, then it too is great.

Imagine playing the sort of games Microsoft were showing off with Surface – only without having to spend ten billion pounds to own one!

My only concern with it is the lack of a camera on the front. This would be ideal for Skype, but I’m betting there’ll be a camera add-on for the expansion socket available at some point.

Will I be getting one? I’d like one, certainly. But I might just wait until the second revision. If I can.

For reasons I don’t understand, Spotify just went a bit mental and started playing everything at double speed. Even closing the app and opening it again doesn’t seem to have helped.

Shame I can’t do the same with live TV. By tomorrow morning I’d know the lottery results!

Horror of horrors this morning: the wireless on my MacBook disappeared. It didn’t get physically removed, it just… vanished.

The icon I have on the menu bar just kept saying “No Airport Card installed”. I thought two things: either it’s physically fried, or my daughter’s “tinterneting” (that is, banging the keyboard) has made it pop loose. Both would require a dismantle, and it isn’t a job for the impatient.

Thankfully, there was another, less intrusive, thing to try first – zapping the PRAM.

Turn off the MacBook, then turn it back on and hold Command-Option-P-R. Keep them held down until you get three startup chimes, then let go.

As if by magic, the card “reappeared” and all is well with the world once more!

We all know that when you want to do conditional formatting in Office, you use Excel. Right? Or maybe Access. But what if you want to merge some data from Excel into Word, then conditionally format some of the fields? Word doesn’t do conditional formatting!

Except, of course, it can.

For this I’m going to assume you have some data in Excel. Two columns headed “Data Number” and “Letter”. The Data Number is just 1 to 10, and the Letter is a, b or c.

Now in Word, I want to merge this data in. Only I want the letter to appear formatted with a red background (if it’s the letter a) and a green background (if it’s not). We create a new Word document, and set it up as a Mail Merge letter. Point Word at the Excel file as the data.

You can insert the fields as normal with the button on the toolbar, and get this:

But how to do the formatting? You need to manually enter the field and make some changes to it. To enter a field yourself, press CTRL-F9 and you’ll get a pair of braces { }. These aren’t normal ones, as you can tell by their formatting. Inside these, you’ll need an “if” command. The format for “if” in Word is:

{ if [CONDITION] [DO THIS IF TRUE] [DO THIS IF FALSE] }

so we can do the following:

Which will show the Letter field if Letter = “a”, and the Letter field if Letter != “a”. Which doesn’t do anything we couldn’t do already. However – you can format individual bits of that command, like this:

Can you guess what this does? Try it and see! Of course, you can also change the fonts and weights for the true and false. I’ve attached a file with the data and template I’ve used. Click here to get it!

I’ve created a helpsheet for everyone who has ever wanted to create digital dress-up dolls! This shows how to import images to use as fills for clothing, so you can scan in some material and use if as a dress or something!

(Download the PDF here: Creating Dress-Up Mannequins)

I realise this may seem like a bit of a random thing for me to produce, but it was something I was asked to do for work. So that’s my excuse. And nothing to do with my desire to dress up dolls. Er, or something.

I tried to format a Buffalo 1TB external hard drive on my Mac today, to HFS+ (journalled). But it failed, over and over again with the error “Volume Erase Failed with the error: The underlying task reported failure on exit”.

It was a brand new drive, already formatted as FAT, so I assumed it was faulty. Turns out, however, there’s a simple reason for it not working: you can’t format HFS+ partitions on certain external hard drives if the boot sector is set to Windows-style “Master Boot Record”. In Disk Utility, when you choose your partition setup, there’s an options button – under which there’s a setting for boot sector. If you choose GUID or Apple Partition Map, you can format without any problems!