Posted by David Carter-Tod on October 30th, 2009 — Posted in Blacksburg
I really want to like Comcast, but they’re very incoherent. I’ve had cable/internet service with them for several years and just moved, so I’ve been interacting with their customer service quite a lot.
So a couple of things:
1. You call their customer service and I’d swear that within the first 20 seconds you hear about 5 different (automated) voices. It really gives you the feeling that you’re being shunted around.
2. I had a lot of connection problems yesterday (originally wrote this a month or so ago). I waited forever to get into a customer chat and failed, so I sent an email. Got an email response this morning telling me to call because they couldn’t solve the problem via email. About 10 minutes later I got an automated phone call to tell me that known problems in my area had been resolved. Oh and about 15 seconds after I sent the support email I got a call from someone verifying that my original install had gone well and all was fine. They were a bit unsure what to say when I told them I was having problems, which plainly didn’t fit with the script.
3. At the second try I did get the service hooked up at the new place, but the TV signal has been bad (no HD at all). The service guys told me that the line to my house would need replacing and it would be done on Monday. Nothing better by Friday so I call and there’s no record of that being scheduled or needed, so now a tech has to come to my house, probably to confirm the same issue that another tech already identified.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on August 31st, 2009 — Posted in Work
Per http://crad.tumblr.com/post/73308257/gdata-python-client-mappings, I don’t know how I would have known if I hadn’t run across that post. Working with a user_entry object, you access and change the family name using user.name.family_name (even though the xml has familyName), e.g.
user_entry = service.RetrieveUser(username)
print "user entry: " + user_entry.name.family_name
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on April 12th, 2009 — Posted in Work
Just for the record, presented at this Chronicle conference as part of a panel on Google Apps. Got a Google watch and Google netbook case out of it 
.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on April 7th, 2009 — Posted in Work
Just had to unpublish something. My Google “juice” is evidently still enough that my (not quite neutral enough) comment on a project of ours turned up as the second result on searching Google for that project name.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on March 10th, 2009 — Posted in Work
Real innovation from The Guardian with a positive response all round (via OLDaily).
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on January 15th, 2009 — Posted in Work
We are looking for an Oracle DBA.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on December 18th, 2008 — Posted in Work
Really enjoying reading the latest Journal of Footballing History.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on November 17th, 2008 — Posted in Blacksburg, Virginia, Work
It seems to me that a fairly well-hidden feature of Google Apps is that you can map a Google Site to a “regular” url, like www.example.com.
In essence this means that if you get all the features that you want with a Google site and the other integrated services (email, calendar, docs, etc), then you can use Google for all your hosting needs. Obviously if you want Wordpress or some custom component, it’s not going to meet your needs, but it will work for a lot of people, and it’s free (and obviously very reliable). It’s also got excellent documentation, ease of use and in the long-term a web site design contractor doesn’t have to worry so much about those endless requests for support or upgrades.
I’ve just more or less finished setting a friend’s business up like this and they couldn’t be happier. It’s a site for a rehabilitation service for pets.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on September 22nd, 2008 — Posted in Work
Virginia Tech has a Learning Management System RFP that could apply to any institution in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Jus’ sayin’ that’s all 
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on September 21st, 2008 — Posted in Work
I’ve written about Google Apps before and they have continued to expand and improve the service.
This weekend I’m in charge of moving 300,000+ users from our internal email system to Google Apps for Education. Fundamentally, I suppose, I’m in charge of the whole project. I’m excited about it because of the fantastic expansion of services it offers our students, faculty and staff. At the same time, it’s another high profile project, so the risks are magnified should something go wrong. Go Live is tomorrow morning first thing.
We’re not only creating the accounts, but have to get single sign-on (via SAML) right, account synchronization, and we are also migrating all the students’ old email via IMAP from the old system. That’s what is taking the big chunk of time right now. It’s sufficiently big enough that I’m getting some server errors on our migration history page, so although I feel pretty confident that things are going okay, I don’t actually know for sure.
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