Tuesday, June 29

My Opinion:- Why Email Signatures are wasteful

For today's post I will be serving a dish that is heavily saturated in my personal opinion.

I am of the firm belief that email signatures (as they are currently being used by 99% of businesses and private consumers) is entirely wasteful and is exceptionally redundant.

Before you disregard me as a heretic, let me explain why I believe this is so...

The majority of email messages that are sent (not including unsolicited advertisements) will include some kind of message signature, which depending on the company or organization that you work for may include some logo, accreditations and even perhaps a legal disclaimer.

So email Sig's are trying to fill these basic needs
- Tell the person who you are
- Who you work for
- How to contact you
- Legal disclaimers

Telling the person who you are, well the very first time you communicate with someone this could be quite useful to confirm to the other person who you are, but it's certainly not necessary to include your life story.

Regards,
Karl

Who you work for, for most people this should be pretty obvious, if I have a message from Joe@Blogs.com it's pretty likely that Joe works for Blogs.com. Only exception could be very large companies with multiple branches, however that could be explained in one line.

Regards, Joe Blogs
Accounts Team
Blogs.Com

How to contact you, do you end end every single call with "if you want to call my mobile number is, if you want to call my office number is, if you want to email my address is...", probably not (and if you do, it's likely you wont have any friends) and the reason being is if the person wishes to return your call its a good chance they will have your number, with email they will definitely have a way to contact you (reply address) and if they need to call you can simply provide the details in the body of your email.

Hi Joe,

Can you please call me on 040x xxx xxx, when you get a chance so we can discuss the project.

Regards,
Karl

In my current job the policy is to include the company logo, contact details amongst other things in every email. This doesn't particularly take up that much space (~13 kilobytes) but I would estimate it is on the lower end of the scale.

Using some simple maths, I know that company wide we sent approximately 4,000 emails in the last 2 weeks. Based upon that small sample my 13 kilobyte sig would count for a massive 1.3 Gb over the course of a year.

What does that 1.3 Gb email tell you that you don't already know (or can't easily find out)... extra downloads from your ISP that you probably don't really need.

If this is scaled to the entire Web with the millions of emails that are sent every day, the simple email sig starts to add (in my opinion) an unnecessary overhead.

Do your bit for the environment and don't send me your email sig!

Saturday, June 26

Letting off some Steam™

Digital Distribution gone wrong?

I guess that I'm not afraid to admit that I am a pretty "hardcore" gamer, in that I like to play games a lot. With my current Steam stats showing approximately 49.2 hours in the last 2-weeks (and a life-time total of 550+ hours in Team Fortress-2 alone)

If those numbers shock or surprise you, then I should explain that before I quit World of WarCrackcraft I had clocked up a ridiculous 130 days of /played (which worked out to about 3200 hours of continuous play!)

So now that I've covered off my addiction hobby I can explain why I felt compelled to write this post in the first place.

Other gamers may have noticed the portmanteau in the title of the post, with me letting off some Steam and Steam being amongst other things a games portal & digital distribution client.

So as usual Steam was having one of it's regular sales, only this time the specials they had on offer actually convinced me to whip out the credit card and place an order (or two or five...) alas at the end of it I now have a veritable butt-load of new games.

One game in particular I was looking forward to playing (and quite pleased with myself that I was able to get it cheaply) was Warhammer® 40,000™: Dawn of War® II and after setting my computer to download it overnight (yay for 6.5 GB downloads) I figured I'd fire it up and hopefully confirm my bargain purchase.

Game loaded fine, intro movie piqued my interest in what laid ahead, and then... Games for Windows kind of just happened. Essentially the game wanted me to sign-in with my Games-for-Windows account to get the most out of the game, such as online ranking, achievements, community etc... wait a second... isn't that exactly what Steam does already?

Obviously THQ the developers of the Warhammer games have some kind of deal with Microsoft (perhaps to ensure better Xbox publishing rights?) to use their online connectivity suite (or perhaps the Steam API is just too difficult for THQ to implement?).

At any rate I couldn't remember if I had ever signed up for a Games-for-Windows account, so I plugged in my trusty gmail account only to be told, "yep this is in use, please give us your password to login" after about 20 minutes of frustration I determined that no my gmail account wasn't actually a login but my @hotmail account I hadn't used in ... 5 years was and my gmail account was linked (but the login script didn't inform me of this in any shape or form) and so my attempts to login with my @gmail account were in vain.

After trying my best to navigate the Games for Windows horrid site (it is obvious the site has been built for Xbox users and then attempted to ported over to Windows) I realised I couldn't even change my Windows login from my @hotmail account at all and so I have given up.

What I don't understand is why the developer would force its players to use such a inhibiting tool that is Games-for-Windows when the alternative (Steam) is much better?

Now I still haven't actually been able to "play" the game that I purchased but I expect that without using the Games for Windows plug-in I will probably be missing out on a large proportion of the game, which is quite disappointing and leaves a bad taste for any future THQ purchases.

Monday, June 7

Empire Avenue

So it seems that I have been sucked into yet another web-based social networking game...

This one in particular is called EmpireAvenue and is about buying/selling shares in your friends. With the share price being determined by what the site believes your influence is.

I think the long term goal of the site is to link advertisers to people with high influence to do direct marketing.

I'll give it a decent go and report my findings here...

Oh and secret code is EAVB_QUDLDSDIEH

Thursday, June 3

An unashamedly honest recollection of my Terrible Thursday!

To say that my day has been a disaster would be a massive understatement...

Now I was fairly nervous this morning before work as today marks my 90th day or put another way today was my 3 Month Probation review. I wasn't expecting to be fired or be told off or anything, but still found myself quite nervous regarding my position in the company.

In my typical morning routine, shower/dress, breakfast & morning news I was interrupted by an urgent report from the HR manager... (this I would realize would be just the beginning) ... it seemed that for some reason the MS Exchange server was down which resulted in everyone's emails being unavailable (about a 9/10 on the oh-shit meter)

And so I skipped breakfast and rushed (possibly breaking a few traffic rules to do so) into work to asses the situation and try and resolve it as promptly as possible. On my arrival I was presented with not just one problem but a magnitude of multiple (in hindsight minor) issues, but fixing the Exchange was top priority.

The exchange server/server was configured entirely by someone else as was the scheduled back-ups and the hard-drive configuration, while this is the case I am obviously hamstrung in what I can and can't change

Okay so it seems that the disk partition that the exchange public folders was residing on was at capacity and so exchange wasn't able to steam/load up. Now given that this partition is only used for the public folder database files it was peculiar that it was now full as it was quite happily at 95% for the past few days...

I have to admit right here that my experience and knowledge of MS Exchange administration is quite rudimentary, however I am fairly intelligent (or so I have been told) and research as diligently as the internet will allow

Upon inspection of the hard-drive there seemed to be an alarming number of 5,120 KB text documents (log files) in the format E000000x.log where x was a different number. I say alarming because I hadn't seen these particular log files in the past and they seemed to be the exact reason that the disk partition was now full... and so I deleted most of them (there was a few that were write protected)

Pleased that I had identified the cause of the problem and had also rectified it I re-mounted the Exchange Database files (innuendo much ?) and as expected the companies emails started working again. Yay little pat on the back for me and back onto trying to solve the million + one other issues staff were having...

Day progressed as typical with my probation review being quite anti-climatic as I had half-expected, with the exception that for some reason those log files that I had so brazenly cleared out previously (I would soon realize the error of my ways) were constantly being re-made, only with ever-increasing numbers...

I soon determined that as I was accessing the Public Folders more (I was attempting to reduce the overall size of the public folders by copying emails to my personal store and then using Outlook to Archive them to a .pst file to be stored elsewhere) the more of these log files were being made.

Now I didn't want the disk partition to fill up again and cause the exchange database to fail (in hindsight that would be much preferable to what actually occurred) so as I was moving/archiving old public folder emails I would watch the folder where these log files were being propagated and as I had done previous, remove them without a second thought.

I must admit I was curious as to why these log files were appearing and for what reason and in hindsight should have investigated that before doing anything further, however I felt that I was making good progress on archiving the ridiculously old (from 2007!) emails.

I had finished copying over one section of the public folders into my personal mailbox and had an archive process starting up, so I did what I had been doing for the last hour or so and deleted what I thought redundant log files.... and this is where it went haywire...

About 30 seconds after I had deleted the log files my email client stopped responding (it's about this time I started freaking out) so I attempted to re-create the steps that had seemingly saved the server this morning, un-mount the exchange server & re-mount, only this time when I attempted to re-mount I got a wall of nasty error code.

I had hoped that rebooting the server itself might re-create the necessary log files and then I'd be able to resolve the problem and get on with reducing the public folder stores, unfortunately this was not the case and I soon discovered that I was in much deeper shit than I first expected.

And now I am sitting here almost 9 hours later still trying my hardest to recover the database files on the server, and I expect it will likely take 9 hours more before it is even up and running, and this is IF I'm very lucky and the repair utilities actually work... if not I have a feeling that the information stored in the databases is quite possibly totally lost.