Author: Scott Savage Page 53 of 68

Microsoft Promotions

On March 24, 2008

Ok I don’t want to sound like an MS Fanboi, but there are actually a few cool things Microsoft related happening with me at the moment.

Skydrive

Skydrive is a very cool new file storage service from Microsoft. Really simple, you get 5GB of storage space and can upload any file smaller than 50MB. Sounds perfect for a “My Docs” backup system? The only catch is that there is no shell extension or decent folder upload tool yet. They do however have a nice drag+drop multi-file upload tool, which I guess will do for now. I would love to see a more integrated tool that actually backed your “My Docs” up for you, but my guess that is hidden somewhere in the greater Windows Live skunkworks for now.

Windows Server 2008 + Exchange 2007

Yes, I am migrating my servers at home to the latest and greatest MS enterprise offerings. This also means going to Windows 2008 x64, which is fine since I have been an AMD fanboi for some time, but it would have been nice of them to make the migration a little easier! I know hardware is cheaper than software these days, but it would be nice to be able to easily upgrade Exchange from 2003 to 2007 without having to have a spare x64 machine lying around. Anyway it is all underway, so keep an eye on my Netcraft page.

Predatory Employees

By Scott Savage

On February 12, 2008

In Business

Although this topic has been troubling me for some time, I wasn’t going to blog it until I was prompted by an article on my favourite (and only) management blog. It references a another very
interesting article regarding predatory employees. Basically these are the toxic employees in your workplace; the ones who portray themselves as highly competent, yet this perception is the result of fear and intimidation rather than any genuine ‘respect’.

The article also provides a list of bullet points which help you to identify these people. I would like to reaffirm some of them and add a few of my own:

Seriously and personally insulted if their competency was ever questioned
The creation of friendships in order to gain information and ‘votes’
An expectation that supervisors and co-workers understand and tolerate performance
lapses, combined with an inability to give others the benefit of the doubt
Regular threats against other employees to prevent them speaking out, combined with
an aggressive fear campaign if performance complaints ever reach management

There are plenty of explanations for this kind of behaviour in my opinion, for example:

A highly insecure personality
Poisoned from previous company culture experiences, especially where the companies
were declining into liquidation/annihilation
Personal social issues, a fear and aggressive dismissal of rejection

Should other employees be exposed to this kind of poisoned attitude? No. What are the results if it is allowed to continue:

Other staff will be poisoned, no matter how thick skinned they are
Managers fear that action will generate larger consequences and are afraid of looking
unsympathetic
Employers overlook misconduct and keep people on the job who are highly destructive
to efficiency and morale, undermining their authority and effectiveness

So what are the solutions? Well I will again combine their points with some of my own:

Get them and the office to read a book like this one on Fish! It
sounds stupid, but my employer got everyone to read it when the company attitude was terrible and it worked a treat
The problem needs to be SURFACED and DISCUSSED as early as possible with all parties
Team values need to be set forth and reinforced

Any comments would be great. I suspect that there are a lot of people out there with similar problem people.

Windows November Bug

By Scott Savage

On December 11, 2007

In Microsoft

This white box behind the tabs of IE7 is the first sign that things are going wrong. Soon afterwards the toolbars start to disappear (also seen in the screenshot below). If you hover over where the minimise and close buttons would be these button appear, but the rest of the toolbar remains missing. It is instead replaced by whatever was underneath the toolbar at the time the window was moved! Very strange.

So what could the bug be? Display drivers are a good guess, but that is not the case. I tried different drivers with the same problem. Then the exact same problem occured on two other computers on the network! They had ATI graphics cards, as opposed to my Intel onboard card. Other strange problems manifest themselves:

Network objects like shared drives, printers etc. cannot be accessed, however the internet and Outlook work just fine. Applications start to fail with the above application errors, with the error being the same for any executable. It is also interesting to note that the style of dialog in the second example is different, reverting back to the Windows 2000 style interface. Very strange. Things recover a little if you close programs, however the problem always comes back once you start opening things back up again. The only ‘cure’ is a restart.

Having not installed any significant software in November (on any of the affected computers) I decided to check the Windows Updates for November 2007. The main one that I installed was 943460. The main files affected are shell32.dll and xpsp3res.dll, both pretty core files as far as I am aware. I have uninstalled the patch and it seems that the crash happens less often, but it is definitely still present.

If anyone has any advice I would love to hear it as this has me pretty much stumped. I am going to lodge a support case with Microsoft and see what they come up with.