Glancing into the rear view mirror on the way back from a client meeting this afternoon, I was shocked to see the K.I.T.T. car from the 80′s ‘Knight Rider’ series!

Wow!
I was persued like the ubiquitous bad guy for a few miles before losing them in traffic, thanks to my advanced driving skills
(Actually I guess they were going the same way as myself for a while and turned off somewhere but a boy can dream )

It was indeed a full replica of the car from said series ~ Most impressive!

I couldn’t quite see if ‘The Hoff’ was driving but I’d guess not…

Such a shame…

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It still amazes me that some of the funky production machines I get to work with still run on VERY old technology.

As a for instance, today I got to work with an industrial laser cutting machine.
Not quite the same as the famous laser from the Goldfinger Bond film, but it was still cool to watch.

The control system runs from a PC base, controlled using an old MS-DOS system, and some clever ISA slot cards.

These dinosaurs of the PC age are not obsolete to all but a few geeks (I have to admit to installing MS-DOS 6.22 on my new Intel i7 920 based system! ) and, it seems, the manufacturing industry.

The 6.22 version of MS-DOS was originally released in 1994, and became ‘End of Life’ in 2001. The ISA slot system architecture was from WAY back in 1981.
With these two beauties controlling a machine worth many £1000′s,  keeping them running becomes more and more important ~ They simply can’t be easily replaced.

It’s kinda good that the antediluvian engineers who remember how to fly MS-DOS based systems are becoming more sought after though
It means there will be a use for us long after we fail to understand PCs.

Long live geeks

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Tor’s witty response to a client who said I “quite like computers” was “Is the Pope ‘quite’ Catholic!”

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So it took a little lateral thinking but IT WORKS!!

Backtrack a little to the issue I was having with an ePOS system (an electronic cash register).
~ original post here ~
The d**n thing wouldn’t communicate to it’s control software in the head office.

The Head Office being in a totally different part of Leeds.

This morning I got it working
The sense of elation was almost overwhelming
Sad but true…

Anyone wanting ePOS till systems with remote reporting give us a call ~ 08456 340 599

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Did you know that Microsoft are being banned from selling the Word software package?
Microsoft Word and Office ‘sales ban’ begins

Funny or what!!

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It’s sometimes the little problems clients have that make you take stock of just how good (or bad) you are at something.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been advising a client about his Internet site.
In this case he’s purchased a templated website from an “Internet Guru”

As soon as we heard this our panic stations alarms went mad ~ oh how surprised we were when things weren’t quite as advertised!

The guru basically said that copy sells. It does usually, but only when used in a structured way. NOT, as was stated, producing a page of text, inter spaced with one or two images.
The template used simply had one, extremely long, column of text, with a little ‘Buy now’ link at the bottom.

YUCK!

Suffice to say the other components of the site were not up to scratch either.

The product could easily have been downloaded for free ~ simply by cancelling the order at the payment page (which coincidentally had a title relating to prostrate cancer ~ nothing to do with the product AT ALL!!), you were redirected to the thank you page with a link to download the product! A MAJOR programming error.
This being the worst of the problems relating to the site.

We are in process of correcting the errors and producing a better design…

This highlighted the issue of trust for me ~ once the issue was noted, we informed the client and asked him what he wanted to do. There was no thought given to the fact we had the clients full product free of charge, they simply trusted us to do the right thing and delete it (which we did, BEFORE the client even knew we’d found the error).

As IT geeks we also have full and free access in to our client data.
Something else which is taken on trust.

All in all it kinda humbles me to think that all our clients trust us that much, and dismays me that somebody is selling a product which is really NOTHING like as advertised

THANKS GUYS!

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On a more personal note…
We had a ‘who has the biggest belly’ competition in the office today.
I won
Whats worse is Tor is nine months pregnant!!

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Well the Christmas lunacy is over ~ all bar the Shopping silliness that is…
Personally I had a great Christmas. Going away for a few days is HIGHLY recommended!

Nice to see the Snow back again. I had only two Christmas events to attend ~ one pre Christmas, the other post Christmas ~ BOTH of these happened to be on the evenings of the two days the snow started.
Both were cancelled
I HATE SNOW!!!!
Very pretty but causes too much hassle.

Maybe I should move to a warmer place…

Over the Christmas  break I took the plunge into the world of Windows 7: the post Vista operating system from the good old boys at Micro$oft.
It was an emotional story of blood, sweat and tears, with some kind of happyish ending…

On the ‘+’ side, my PC now positively zooms! Internet Explorer 8 64 bit actually works quicker than Google Chrome on this little beastie ~ something that seriously shocked me
It’s not just a little faster either. My page loads are now almost instantaneous!
STUNNING!
The bench marks are all up too – fabulous!!

There are however several ‘-’ points. Mainly that several of the programs I use on a daily basis are not ‘Incompatible’ with this version of Windows.
This is a major P.I.T.A. (If I said the first ‘P’ was for pain, you should be able to work out the rest ).
It’s such an irritation I have to run a Windows XP machine just to use some of these programs.

It’s ALMOST a step forward…

Having said all that, the general feeling is of a working system ~ the best way I would describe it [Windows 7] is as Vista as it should have been. It looks and behaves similarly to it’s predecessor, just in a working form!

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