I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE!!!!

Who gets it ;)

Google gets it too. Some excerpts that follow my philosphy:

Sometimes, value can be bought off the shelf, Merrill says, holding up a plastic fork as an example. But there are times when off-the-shelf software won't do. "Our culture is pretty deeply embedded in many of our processes," he says. "So what we don't want to do is buy a tool, which by extension changes the cultural aspects of the way we do things."

It is my experience that off-the-shelf rarely works completely. It can work in some capacity, but what good is using 40% of a product that lacks 60% of the features you need?

What I like about the Google example is, like a plastic fork, the best commercial products you can purchase is simple "blocks" whose value becomes the way it helps you go from A to B. Not A to C,D,E,1,3,5,6,7 but never getting to B or only doing it partially (or too much).

Google's unorthodox approach to managing its Ph.D.s drove its decision not to budget research and development separately, as most tech companies do. "You end up in many companies with this divide between research and engineering," explains Alan Eustace, senior VP of engineering and research. By dividing those budgets, he says, "you're pretty much guaranteeing institutionally that you won't be solving interesting problems."

And it's true where I was previously employed and am employed now. A divide between people who fix problems and those who work on ensuring those problems don't happen again.

"Our goal is to automate as many things as we can because it makes unfun things not happen," Merrill says. "Nobody wants to have a boring job, right?"

Creating automation IS fun! Doing repetitive tasks is not.

Merrill is evasive when asked what kinds of commercial PC software are used at Google. "More important than what we put on each desktop is how we think about what to put on each desktop," he says obliquely. "Goo-gle's philosophy is that choice is always better than control. Tightly centralized control gets in the way of innovation."

He then takes a jab at CIOs--which he describes as a title used by "old-world companies"--at other companies. "Most people in my job try to control. 'Here are the three things you can buy.'" Merrill explains. "I try to control as a little as I possibly can but make it easy to work within parameters that I know how to work with."

Merrill sees a distinction between tools that tell you something and tools that stop you from doing something. For example, he observes that some financial services institutions block instant messaging because of they way they interpret regulations. "We don't think that's the right approach here," he says.

The right approach, as Merrill sees it: Talk a lot; use data, not intuition; automate wherever you can.

That faith in group intelligence manifests itself in the lunch line. Google provides free meals to employees partly as a perk and to enhance productivity, but also to encourage interaction. It's about the pollination of ideas over salads and sandwiches. "If you want people to talk, if you want people to engage, how do you do that?" Merrill asks. "You give them lunch."

Interaction is the bane of all businesses. NO ONE in a business wants to communicate -- you have to force them in some capacity.

AutoCAD is a devil in saint's clothing

Whenever problems arrise with AutoCAD it's a frustrating experience. I'm sure that is coupled with my inexperience with troubleshooting this particular program. It all boils down to two things (in Windows) when a program fails:

1) It's a registry key gone crazy (incorrect permissions, wrong setting, wrong type, etc.)
2) It's a file that's become mangled (incorrect permissions, wrong version)

That's it. Every problem in Windows is related to one (or both) of those two issues.

AutoCAD is intimidating at first having never dealt with it. We have a custom menu that is activated when AutoCAD is run. On one particular user's machine, her AutoCAD was throwing up errors when trying to build this menu (cui file is write protected). In attempting to troubleshoot this, I found the cui file referenced is indeed write protected. But that wasn't the problem. Checking with other users, they could not write to the file so her AutoCAD was trying to write to the file for some reason. Launching her AutoCAD under my user account resulted in success... So it could not have been the AutoCAD program installed on the machine. This left two things:

1) Some file in her profile is causing the issue and AutoCAD calls that file
2) A registry key is incorrectly set

Removing AutoCAD from her HKCU resulted in AutoCAD reconfiguring itself on launch and we did not get the error message but got a very slimmed down menu missing many functions.

This indirectly is telling me that the registry is not the issue. If the registry was the issue, the total removal of AutoCAD from HKCU should have resulted in it coming up no problem. This leaves the other issue... A file is causing the headaches. But, before I continued I had the user log on to another machine to ensure it was not her account causing the issue --> AutoCAD worked fine on another machine under her account. So it was computer specific. Some file in her profile...

AutoCAD keeps files in the following two folders in the users profile:
C:\Documents and Settings\USER ACCOUNT\Local Settings\Application Data\AutoDesk
and
C:\Documents and Settings\USER ACCOUNT\Application Data\AutoDesk

A file or couple of files in one (or both) of those folders must be causing my issue.

Renaming those two folders to AutoDesk--old should resolve the issue if my troubleshooting is correct.

Because I haven't and won't troubleshoot further to determine the exact file I won't know exactly which file caused or causes that issue but the solution is effective and cheap anyways.

Other places preferences maybe stored are the My Documents folder. So watch out there as well if your still having problems.

The Upwards War And Downwards Cycle

Everything you face today is a struggle. Without clout, you ride the coattails of others until you can achieve clout enough to force issues out or complete them. I face that ride pretty quickly. Being with a company for six months and trying to offer new ideas to problems I had faced (and solved) previously can result in resentment. It took me a year to build up enough clout at Voodoo, a company of 25 or so employees, to start enabling changes. Can I do the same working at a company for only 3 months (+ 3 on contract)?

The people around me who've seen my work are sold on it. Unfortunately, it's the people who haven't seen it that make the decisions.

This Friday will tell.

Single Image Hardware Independent Operating System Independent Deployment

HOW TO:

1) Make a OPK share (usually OPKTOOLS)
2) Make a CFGSET and set it to be able to do Media Center / Tablet (use a Media Center 2005 CD's and combine the two CD's) IF possible. (optionalsources=YES under [WINPE] in Winbom.ini)
3) Boot a VM into WinPE and use the Winbom.ini created by the CFGSET to copy all the necessary files over. Once that's done the system should reboot, go back into WinPE immediantely.
4) Kill FACTORY.EXE upon entering WinPE *IF* it's going to "Install Configuration Set"
5) Make an IMAGE of the hard disk and call this "VIRGIN" (or clean or blank or whatever).
6) Copy out winnt.sif located in the $WIN_NT.~BT$ folder to a network share. Within this one single file is the product key that determines what version of Windows you are going to have (Pro, Tablet or Media Center --> as far as I know [but haven't tried] this will not work for HOME).

7) You can now image a machine with the VIRGIN image and then copy over a WINNT.SIF to $WIN_NT$.~BT that has the proper product key using WinPE and FIRM. Since this is before the blue text-mode setup it is hardware independent and Windows will automatically configure itself for the number of processors it can support automatically. As well, because it's before the GUI mode configures itself via the product key, changing the WINNT.SIF file will change the type of Windows it will install itself as!

Single Image Hardware Independent Operating System Independent Deployment (SIHIOSID)

Boom baby! :D

One Image to Rule them All!

Another blog that discusses WinPE!

And other technical things! Finally :)