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.

I made a custom Wii case today. I’ll make you one, if you like: just £49.99!

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 had an unusual query this week. A member of staff wanted to create a line graph that showed the chart position of a song over a number of weeks.¬¨‚Ć It’s an easy thing to do – two columns in the spreadsheet, one for “Week” and one for “Position”.

Problem is, in a chart, the low numbers are at the top and the high numbers are at the bottom, so the graph comes out upside-down. You can’t just make the chart position numbers negative either, as the x-axis would then be on the top of the graph.

Thankfully, there’s still an option: right click the y-axis on the graph and choose “Format Axis”. Tick the boxes for “Values in reverse order” and “Maximum axis value”. While you’re here, you might want to change the Minimum value to 1 from 0, as there’s no 0 position in your average pop charts!

See:

You can also download the Excel file, if you like.

Over the summer at work, we changed the way staff profiles are stored on the network. Having finally got around the “redirected Application Data breaks Internet Explorer” problem (see here for my fix) in Windows XP, we rolled it out to all users. And all was well.

Until they brought their laptops back from the break, and we found they then can’t run various programs or access certain things when not connected to the network. This is because the laptop needs access to the Application Data folder – which is no longer on the local machine.

So you’d think the fix would be to create a new group policy for the laptops where the folder isn’t redirected, right? Well, yes, of course you would. Unfortunately, that won’t work.

You see, the Folder Redirection settings are a User based setting, not a Machine based setting. So if you assign a Machine GP to not redirect, the User GP to redirect runs anyway and takes precedence. Looking around t’tinternets, there were a few solutions – including a second (local) logon for the laptops or nasty registry hacking – but nothing that actually fixes the the problem satisfactorily.

Until I read about Loopback Processing.

Microsoft’s help pages go into great detail about the technical aspects of what this involves, but the overall effect is simple to explain: instead of the User settings “overlaying” the Machine settings and taking precedence, the reverse happens – so the Machine settings dominate.

This worked well, but had a few side-effects. Some of the User GPs we’d set up didn’t “trigger” any more on the laptops. After some tracking, it seems that the “overlaid” Machine settings were wiping them out. Adding the same User GPs to the laptop OU fixed that. Phew!

Oh, and just one last thing – we also had to delete the user folder in c:\documents and settings on the laptops, before getting users to log in twice (once on the network, once off) to ensure all the group policies and everything were applying and being set up correctly.

Well, I did in the end as I didn’t have a choice.

I read it carefully. Very carefully.

After what seems like a year of aborted attempts, this week I’ve made a concerted effort to deploy Adobe CS3 Design Premium on our XP network. This morning, I was successful!

There were several problems to overcome, including lack of MSIs, inability to “roll your own” MSI due to the Adobe Licencing Service throwing a wobbly if you do, inserting the serial number, forcing it to install on machines with under a gig of RAM, coping with the sheer size of the install files, and assorted other issues and nonsense.

1. Create Your Network Install Folder

On the server I use to install files from, I copied the contents of the CS3 DVD to a folder called AdobeCS3. This folder is shared as \\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3. I didn’t use a space in the folder name as this was reported as causing problems, but it may not be important.

2. Create The XML files

You need three XML files. Firstly, there’s the “application.xml.override” file, which contains the serial number:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Configuration>
<Payload>
<Data key="Serial" protected="0">00000000000000000000</Data>
<Data key="Registration">Suppress</Data>
<Data key="EULA">Suppress</Data>
<Data key="Updates">Suppress</Data>
</Payload>
</Configuration>

Replace the 000000000000s with your CS3 serial number (without spaces or dashes). The three “suppress” lines stop some info boxes popping up for end users during install. To find out where to put this file, you need to look at the Setup.xml file in the AdobeCS3\payloads folder. There’ll be an entry for¬¨‚Ć “Driver folder=”, and it’s the folder name after that you’re looking for. In my case, it was “AdobeDesignSuitePremiumen_US_Volume”, so the override file went in AdobeCS3\payloads\AdobeDesignSuitePremiumen_US_Volume.

Next you need the install and uninstall xml files. These can be created automatically by running setup.exe from the command line with the record option. Make sure you run it from a workstation, and make sure CS3 isn’t installed already!

\\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\setup.exe --record=1

You then run through a “fake” install of CS3, where you can choose which components to install. We didn’t need Vue so unticked that. Once completed, it puts two XML files in the c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Installers folder. In my case, they were called “Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium.install.xml” and “Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium.uninstall.xml”, but the actual name may vary depending on which CS3 package you’re installing.

I renamed these files to “install.xml” and “uninstall.xml” respectively, and then copied them to the \\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\deployment folder.

3. Test The Deployment

You can now check CS3 will install using these settings using the following command (all on one line!) from the Run box:

\\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\Setup.exe --mode=Silent --deploymentFile=\\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\deployment\install.xml --skipProcessCheck=1

Nothing will appear to happen because it’s running silent. You can check that it is, however, by opening Task Manager and looking for active setup.exe and mesiexec.exe processes, as well as monitor that files are appearing (and in some cases, disappearing) in c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\ and c:\Program Files\Adobe\. This install may take a little while (like, an hour, depending on your network, setup options, and machine). You may need to reboot afterwards before the CS3 apps will work.

Note that you also may need to open something other than Acrobat (such as Photoshop or Illustrator) before Acrobat will work. You also need to open Acrobat before PDFs are associated with it.

4. The Install Script

Now for the VBS voodoo. You see, you could just run the install command on PC startup (using Group Policies), but this would mean that a) it’d install every time, and b) you get no error logging if it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. So you need a script. And here it is: InstallCS3.vbs

If you have any scripting or programming experience, you should be able to figure out what this does. If not, here’s a brief outline:

1. Checks to see if C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Photoshop.exe exists. If not, it triggers the install. If it does, it skips the install and finishes. Note that if you chose to install somewhere else, or didn’t choose to install Photoshop, you’ll need to edit this line (e.g. to look for the Dreamweaver exe instead). I chose Photoshop as it’s the last bit of CS3 that is installed.
2. Logs the start of the script, the attempt to install CS3, any CS3 installer errors, and the end of the script, all to event viewer.

Put this file in as a computer startup script in a group policy. (Almost) done!

5. Just One Last Thing

Unfortunately, because CS3 takes aaaaaaaages to install, the default domain group policy setting for startup script timeouts kicks in and the install fails. Oops! The default is 600 seconds, but you can change it in a group policy. You can find the setting in Computer Configuration > Admin Templates > System > Scripts > Maximum wait time for Group Policy scripts. Set it to enabled, and increase the value from 600. I chose 6000, as it’s well over an hour.

And that’s it! The install is still time consuming, so you might want to schedule the rollout for some sensible time when nobody is using the network, and you probably don’t want to apply the deployment group policy to all your computers at once.

Phew, eh?

There was just a little bit of thundering, lightning, and rain this afternoon. The Sky Gods were upset, it seemed. Lightning hit the building at least twice, frying the wireless network and killing my fax machine with magic blue fire.

And it was wet. Oh, was it wet. The “puddles” had waves.

Our school was billed this week for entering into a “membership” contract with teaching-resources-uk.com. Except, of course, that we didn’t.

Or did we?

It seems that the email they spammed one of our teachers with contained a link which read “Simply click here to access your 14 day free trial of these resources”. So, this teacher clicked it. And so we were billed.

The small print (and it is pretty small print too) says that clicking the link starts a “free 14 day trial”, after which the school is automatically invoiced. To not be invoiced, you have to contact them by email asking to cancel your trial. Not illegal, but this “opt-out” method is decidedly underhand, and very strange for an educational supplier. Not least because most schools have a finance system in place where orders have to be signed in triplicate, goats need to be sacrificed, and stars need to be aligned before any order can even be placed, let alone stuff paid for.

Be warned then, if “Teaching Resources UK”, otherwise known as “PDC Education” and “Gapwork”, contact you. They’re not strictly scamming you, but they’re not exactly clear about what they’re offering you “for free” either.

Some stuff for Google to find relating to this:
PDC Education, Leeds, 0113 266 0880
Mention on the TES forums.
Referenced on CanYouTrustThem.

At work, I get a lot of phonecalls from those recorded messages offering me cheap mortgages, help with my debts, free international calls, discounts on badger feed and that sort of thing. You know the ones – you pick up the phone and say hello, then after a couple of seconds a recording kicks in explaining the offer then asking you to press a number.

Of course, on my own phone I’d hang up before they even explained who they are, but at work it has become a game. Or rather, several games. Games I’d like to share!

Hello? Hello?

The aim of this game is simple: keep them on the line as long as possible by pretending you can’t hear them.

Bonus points are given for interrupting them mid-sentence, with something like “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? This is stupid. Why would you ring me, to sell me something, then, when you’ve convinced me I want it, not be there?” and listen to them frantically try to fix their phone as they think they might have actually caught a fish.