Technology

As part of the?Tech Field Day Extra?crew at?Interop 2016, I got to sit in on a great presentation by?Avi Freedmanfrom?Kentik.

I?d?never heard of them, which is not surprising given my Australian-based SMB world, but I sat with an open mind as Avi talked about Enterprise (and larger) networking concepts. It?s always so great when a presenter makes it ?real world? enough that you can see the benefits, without necessarily understanding all the tech under the hood. Seems that the world is hearing about Kentik though as their customers already include yelp, Pandora, Box, and openDNS.

We?ve seen some strange ?attach file? behaviour in Outlook 2016 installed via Office 365 ProPlus.

Specifically, when you click on the Attach File icon, the dropdown menu of Recent Items and other locations disappears, rolling back up. You can?t actually attach a file.

This behaviour appears when Outlook updates the Recent Items list.

As part of the?Tech Field Day Extra?crew at?Interop 2016, I got to sit in on a great presentation by?Avi Freedmanfrom?Kentik.

I?d?never heard of them, which is not surprising given my Australian-based SMB world, but I sat with an open mind as Avi talked about Enterprise (and larger) networking concepts. It?s always so great when a presenter makes it ?real world? enough that you can see the benefits, without necessarily understanding all the tech under the hood. Seems that the world is hearing about Kentik though as their customers already include yelp, Pandora, Box, and openDNS.

Warning: This is an opinion piece and quite honestly, a rant. You have been warned.

Our business has been supporting the technology needs of SMBs for 12 years now, after we stepped out of the corporate world. The early years were comparatively easy � a business wanted I.T. support, we�d upgrade a server or two to newer software and bigger hardware and the addition of remote monitoring and management tools consolidated our efforts across our customer base. Nothing really extraordinary there.

The catalyst for this post was a conversation with a bunch of great, smart people in IT about IoT. The general consensus was that the term meant different things to different people and had fallen victim to its own hype. Sound like any other computing term you know � (Cloud)?

It was then followed by a ton if hilarious examples about the weird things being connected to the internet (see�Twitter:Internet of Shit) and the inherent security concerns with all of this (see�Hello Barbie privacy fears�and also�Skynet)

Flipped your Windows 10 screen?

I?m laughing because I just managed to flip my screen while writing the title of this post.

The keyboard shortcut for rotating your Windows 10 display is Ctrl +Alt + one of the arrow keys.

Sometimes I manage to trigger this by accident. I?m not holding down Ctrl + Alt, but if I press an arrow key to go back and edit a typo, I?m suddenly looking at things on my screen sideways or upside down:

We had a customer�s Windows 7 computer running AVG 2015 Anti-virus, managed by AVG Cloudcare, that was refusing to update its virus definitions database.

Update failed.

The update control file is missing.

Note: This error has been reported on non-Cloudcare versions and earlier versions too.

Even getting tough and uninstalling the software with the AVG Removal Tool, rebooting and reinstalling .. left me with exactly the same problem. Other computers at the site were unaffected.

Sometimes it�s great to sit down for a presentation with no preconceived ideas. It makes it interesting to listen to a guy up the front in a company t-shirt, who you�re not viewing as the �Vice President of Marketing & Product Strategy�. The title doesn�t actually do justice to Neil Holmquist from Spirent Communications.

The internet would tell me that Neil has a 15 year career with Spirent, beginning as an engineer. It would also give me a ton of information about the telecommunications testing company itself, founded in 1936 and listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Blogging this one from a colleague in case anyone else hits the same symptoms.

User was logging�into Mail in Office 365 using Firefox.

The page was completely blank.

Instead of the browser tab label saying Mail � Username it just said CONTINUE.

Worked correctly in Internet Explorer.

Could access the same Office 365 account correctly from another computer on the network using Firefox.

Troubleshooting things that didn�t work:

• Opening Firefox in safe mode
• Resetting Firefox to defaults
• Clearing cache
• Deleting cookies
• Removing save password

The fix was to create a new Firefox user profile:

I have a whole new appreciation for Netflix.

It should be pretty simple, right? I turn on my smart TV. The Netflix app authenticates me & checks I’ve paid my subscription fee. It delivers content suggestions based on my profile & my previous viewing choices. And it does this on an enormous scale, globally. So you assume they have some pretty big, redundant networks and servers.

That’s the problem with consumer technology that’s this good – we assume it’s simple.