To the dark side...

I've been a Mac user for getting on 10 years. I've not owned a PC for that time though I have had to employ VMs/boot camp from time to time. I am now delving back into PC ownership for games. Max support for games is laughable and my PS3 sucks these days. So... PC it is. 

I bought £500 of bits from scan and will blog here the experience, mostly as a record to myself, but someone may be interested. The base is. 6600K i5 in a Gigabyte GA-Z170 Mobo. That chip overclocks, which I'll get to at setup time. 

I've not built a PC for a while and things have certainly moved on. This baby is covered in heat sinks, and sports all the latest interfaces - USB3.1, HDMI, DVI, gigabit networking, and so on. I've decided to mount the PCI and memory to the board prior to putting the board in the case. 

I also bought some thermal paste. In the old days you could cook CPUs of you didn't make sure they were cool enough. These days they "step down" which just means poor performance. The Arctic

Paste helps make a really good conductive bridge between the CPU and the heatsink. 

So, first, drop the country in. Earth yourself first or get a strap, then line the CPU up. It's keyed and can only go in one way. There are two notches on opposite sides of the chip which correspond to two notches on the board. 

In the old days the pins were on the CPU and there was a corner missing which lined up with a keyed socket on the Mobo, but things change. 

The other addition is the star shaped screw. This T20 is there to hold the plate down, so make sure the plate goes back under this when lowering the housing arm. Also, don't forget to remove the plastic blanking plate!

Now the next bit terrifies me. Look at this cooler master hyper 103...

Fitting varies on the chip you bought. I bought a socket 1151 so follow the Intel instructions. It comes with a base that goes under the board and then two mounting brackets you screw to the heatsink, which in turn screw through the board to that base. 

I did all that and tested it dry before putting the paste on.

So, once you've screwed it down...

Then it's a case of clipping the fan back on and plugging in the Mobo connector. 

So the memory pops in easily enough. I went for some nice red Corsair Vengeance chips. A matched pair is quicker than in one stick. 

Now, onto the case. This machine will be sat in the living room so I wanted a more Hifi look than PC look. 

Once it's all there it's time to PXEBoot Windows on there (didn't install a cd drive) and we're done. 

I didn't realize there would be a gaping hole where the cd normally is. I expected a blanking plate. Hey ho!

Family Friendly DNS - easy as Pi

So my kids are getting older, and are now quite happy searching the web and amusing themselves in Cyberspace. I am both delighted and terrified in equal measure!

So, I've got YouTube in Restricted mode, and have the usual Apple related restrictions in place, but I also discovered that Cisco operate a free, family safe DNS. You can read up on it here, but basically you put these settings in your router or computer, and you're done.

So, I want to have these DNS settings applied to the kids iPads and the Apple TV, but nothing else, as that's what the kids use.

As it happens I'm using a Raspberry Pi already for my internal IP DHCP and DNS, to get round some rather lame restrictions on the Virgin router. So, here are some cute settings for dnsmasq, which is easy enough to install on a Raspberry Pi (instructions here):

dhcp-host=b8:78:2e:32:ae:1e,set:specialhosts,192.168.0.18 # Apple TVdhcp-option=tag:specialists,option:dns-server,208.67.222.123,208.67.220.123

The first line is a fairly standard static IP allocation, to lock my Apple TV onto a specific IP. Note the set:specialhosts in the middle though. That means you can then use the second line to provide DNS servers specific to any line with that set:specialhosts.

So I have a dhcp-host line for each of the things I want to use a different DNS, and then define that DNS using the second line.

Yosemite Upgrade - Apple does it again

It bowls me over - every time. From the first OS update I did from Tiger to Leopard I've been amazed how painless an OS upgrade is with Apple.

I know a little about IT and the upgrade of an Operating System is a major big deal. There are many new features, bug releases and updates to consider, and Apple always packs a punch when it comes to new features. Then you have the fact that the file system may have to be upgraded, along with the kernel.

It's not for nothing that a Windows update usually involves several reboots.

However, not only is Yosemite a single reboot (after a 15 minute install which is non too shabby for a 5Gb download!) it remember EVERYTHING.

I mean - what?

It had my settings, my background, my dock icons, my login picture - it even remember which apps were open when I kicked off the install, and where they were located on the screen. If it hadn't been for the fundamental change to styling and the dock I might have thought it had done nothing.

And... it was a free update.

Ok - this stuff costs you a lot when you buy it, but the total cost of ownership and overall satisfaction is superb!

UX versus EX (Employee eXperience)

In the world where I have spent most of my career - Web, and later Digital - we spend a lot of time on what used to be called the Graphical User Interface (GUI), which later became just UI (when it was really more HTML than graphics), and has now become User eXperience (UX). This reflects that the interface is a reflection on the experience - the feeling if you will - that users have when using the system.

Retailers particularly fight for the right balance of cool, easy-to-use, on-brand experience to allow people to shop more easily, in the case of my current employer (unnamed) where I spend much of my time, to actually inspire them to do projects, and therefore spend more money with us.

This is all great - the rub I have is that we, along with many other companies, really misses the trick of the Employee Experience. Our store colleagues are generally more engaged with the brand than the guys in the office. This is not unusual and is the same just about everywhere I've worked. The store colleagues are at the coal face, and are the real face of the brand in front of customers, so like the website we spend quite a bit of time on that. But what of the internal systems?

Let me give you the example that has irked me this morning - I have to log on 3 times in all to book a holiday. I needed to log on twice just to check my email. Why? Because we have provisioned systems based on their functional ability rather than the experience of using them. We don't do this for customers because we want loyalty and buy-in, but we ignore this when provisioning internal systems... why again? We're the same humans, we just happen to be on the payroll, but you can't "buy" loyalty. You can only buy time. 

First I logged onto the machine I'm sitting at - which is a perfectly reasonable hot-desk equipped with Windows 7 and all the usual Office and related tools.

But then I wanted to book a holiday - so I connect to the intranet. Our intranet has been moved to Office365 along with our email - a perfectly reasonable thing to do - but we haven't linked up authentication very well, so I'm required to log in again. I navigate to the HR area and find the link to book a holiday which takes me to one of a seemingly never ending list of third parties with SaaS solutions we use to provide services. Unfortunately none of these services use any form of single sign-on, so to book holidays I have to log on AGAIN. Worse, this third one doesn't use my network username it uses my employee ID, which is on my pass, but that's in my pocket... you get the point. 

The second rub is that the solutions we put in place are functionally rich but interactively very poor. The general web design is a lot, LOT less than we would demand from our own website, or indeed most companies would demand, but because the Employee eXperience is not a factor in choosing a solution noone cares. I'm sure the price is good, and I'm sure that the bulleted list of features is comprehensive, but still - they're terrible to use. I don't mind naming and shaming... Capita Travel's website is pretty terrible, and has forms which a) don't fit in the width of a reasonable browser window (say 1280 across) and b) don't provide scroll bars, so you have to resort to drag-selecting text to force the frame to scroll. Or we could take a look at Northgate, who provide much of our HR related systems. Again, poorly tested in browsers means it's all too easy to have content which doesn't fit in the frame. Apparently for some of these systems (not necessarily the two I've mentioned) Google Chrome is not supported. 

I'm going to say that again in case you didn't realise how fundamentally stupid that is. 

Google Chrome is not supported!

Stick that in your Non-Functional Requirements for a customer facing website and see where it gets you!

If employees are using good quality systems, which make them more efficient and less tetchy then I really feel that engagement with our employers in the office would be much improved, and it really doesn't cost much, but could yield massive benefit in employee satisfaction.

And don't even get me started on our timesheet system...

Securing a node.js app

If you're a relative newbie to NodeJS you may find this interesting - details some quick and easy things you can do to help safeguard the security of your Node.js app.

http://blog.risingstack.com/node-js-security-tips/?utm_campaign=Q4%20Social%20Media&utm_content=8704

Thanks to Gergely Nemeth of RisingStack for this

Net Neutrality should be preserved

If we allow erosion of the basic principles of a peer agreements at the behest of companies who should be serving us we will ultimately be worse off for it.

Applying artificial limits on the services of a certain type or those provided from certain companies does not improve the service for the end consumer. In effect it's like rolling blackouts - they're an emergency requirement to keep hospitals running in times of insufficient power on the grid - they should *not* be used to control the market in the flow of information that we are paying for.

There are already checks and balances in place to stop abusers of the internet (constant maxed out downloading of illegal videos, for instance), and these are a tiny fraction of Internet users, so there is no case there for imposing QoS type filtering on the rest of us, who just want to use Netflix or other streaming services already targeted in the US.

I just signed a letter to Ed Vaizey, the MP for Culture, Comms and Creative Industries here:

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/net-neutrality-protection

If you feel as I do maybe you could do the same.

Forcing Bootcamp installer to build a USB bootable drive

I discovered that as my mac has a built in CD drive bootcamp assistant does NOT give you the option to create a bootable USB drive. This is a pain - who wants to burn one-time DVDs for installation when we have USB drives kicking around.

After banging my head against the wall trying to dd a converted ISO I thought maybe it's possible to trick the bootcamp installer...

...and it is...

Here's a link which explains what you have to do. Either do it all using sudo and a text editor, or tweak permissions and use the editor that comes as part of Xcode. If you're on Mavericks you'll need to run code sign but all the instructions you need are in here.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5479879

Enjoy!

EDIT: It turns out that my mac can't boot from USB anyway... You need to use the DVD, after all that! There may be more hacking you can do, but for now, you can only use the USB key you made on a mac without a SuperDrive.