A screw loose?

This financial year's technology refresh has just got under way and yet another HP ProLiant bargain has made it on to my list. The ML115 G5 comes with a 160GB HDD, 512MB PC2-6400 RAM, SATA DVD rewriter and AMD Opteron 1214 dual core 64 bit processor, all for the princely sum of £94.61 before VAT (£111.17 including). The LO100c remote management card costs £112.99 (£132.76 including VAT), more than the server itself and so tiny it physically hurts me (a Yorkshireman!) to part with so much brass for it.

Like the other ML1xx servers the case is designed to accommodate four 3.5" HDDs and two 5¼" drives and, pleasantly, there are enough power connectors to cater for any combination of Molex or SATA devices. The six SATA channel G5 servers have no IDE channel (the ML110G4s, ML115G1s had four SATA and two IDE) and only one PCI slot, although they do have three (x1, x8 and x16) PCI-E slots (the G4s, G1s have two PCI and two x8 PCI-E). Extra memory is cheap as chips at the moment and this box doesn't need any more disk for its designated role.

Now, perhaps I'm taking this a little out of perspective but my server arrived quite incomplete. In the case there are, as usual, twelve screws for three additional 3.5" HDDs and four for an additional 5¼" device but where's the screw to hold the LO100c in place?!? I even had to suffer the ignominy of having to snap the pressed steel cover out of the way to install the card, presumably left in place to save the cost of the blank and screw that are to be found on the G1, and curiously the ML110 G5, variety. Obviously, I had a spare in my box of tricks but clearly that's not the point. I sincerely hope this is not the start of some slippery slope that will result in HP kit being just as poor as its main competitors. ;-)

Ce n'est pas un Bonjour

This is really getting my goat. More and more I'm finding machines that have Apple's Bonjour (for Windows) service chatting away on the network unbeknownst to the system owners.

The Bonjour service "Enables hardware devices and software services to automatically configure themselves on the network and advertise their presence, so that users can discover and use those services without any unnecessary manual setup or administration.". Well, I don't want that and I object to not having been given the choice.

Even worse, forcibly removing this service can cause problems. On Windows XP the install adds a DLL to the LSP list and if this removed without correcting the list, all network access is lost. (It's good to have a copy of LSPfix downloaded beforehand.) Some good advice on how to remove the service safely can be found here.

Disabling the service in Windows is quick and fixes the problem in the short term, at least until I next dare to install something that may well re-enable it.

But where is it coming from? On my usual work machine I run a local firewall and process checker that catches the installation of Bonjour during the iTunes setup. However, blocking the Bonjour installation causes the whole iTunes installation to roll back so I am forced to accept. A brief Google reveals Adobe CS3 also installs the service, not even an Apple Inc. product, and I seem to remember that the Apple AirPort management utility did the same thing.

I don't need or want to have this service running on my machines. In the immortal words of Mr. Angry (from Purley): "it makes me so angry... I could throw the phone down!". Or even worse - arrggghhhhh!!!!!

More "English (UK)" Google quirks

Today I found myself giving instruction to a young whippersnapper on the basics of using Google Chat. I was very impressed when my pupil started sending me a whole string of increasingly intricate smilies. When I enquired how they might know so many smilie shortcuts they told me they were clicking on the "blue smilie face, to the right of the 'Pop-out' text". Needless to say, one of these I did not have.

I remembered that Google Chat was initially only available when the Gmail language setting was "English (US)". With my language option set to "English (UK)" the Chat functionality simply did not appear. But this was fixed months and months ago.

Sure enough, reverting my settings to US caused me to gain the missing icon. I'm now left with two questions.

1) What benefit does the Gmail "English (UK)" display language option give me?

2) Why is there any functional difference between "English (US)" and "English (UK)" anyway?

Now that I'm using "English (US)" once more I see the mysterious "Older version" option that does not appear under the UK variant. I wonder what that does...

Google Mail goes Northern???

A couple of days ago I noticed that the list of folders in my Google Mail looked odd, although I couldn't quite work out just how. This morning it seems as plain as day. My erstwhile "Trash" folder has been renamed to "Bin".

After the very briefest investigation I've established switching my Google Mail preferences to "English (US)" restores my "Trash" folder and it is my usual choice of "English (UK)" that causes "Bin" to be displayed.

Of course it is very pleasant to learn that someone out there has seen it as important to choose the right word for users in Blighty. Perhaps it is just very miserable of me but "Bin" just does not look right. Surely it should be "Waste paper basket". But then that's perhaps too long for Google's purposes and, in any event, would it be correct to throw electronic mail into a waste "paper" basket?

Then I started to wonder "what's happening to me?". As a proud Northerner I should be delighted at Google's choice. Waste paper baskets are very firmly in the domain of Whitehall offices and the inhabitants of the South. I imagined I would find many pages of the North/South debate devoted to these words but there seem to be none.

I can only conclude that I've spent far too much time south of Watford and have become confused as to my true cultural origins. A trip t'pub is in order so I can seek the opinion of the council of (ex) miners.