If you run Linux a lot, like me, no doubt you’ve encountered one of the scourges of closed systems: Windows only BIOS flash utilities.
That’s right. We’ll sell you hardware, and technically you can run whatever you like on it. Except if you choose anything other than Windows, you can’t flash the BIOS, because we only supply utilities for Windows or DOS. Yeah, our BIOS has bugs, but you can’t fix them unless you shell out a coupla hundred bucks for a proprietary operating system.
Fuck that.
There’s a way around it, with one caveat: your system must support booting from a USB drive. Most nowadays do.
Using the instructions there, you can create a bootable USB drive that boots into FreeDOS. Copy your DOS flashing utility onto it, and you can flash BIOS by booting from your thumb drive. Problem solved.
I just used it, with great success, after trying a couple of other slightly more complex ways involving grub. The method in the above link was dead simple.
One more way to be free of proprietary lock-in.
And now hopefully my Asus laptop won’t lock up in X.org any more.
HUGE kudos to the folks at FreeDOS and whoever wrote that page, because it’s clear, simple, and works!
The short version is that I added some Javascript to enable dynamic collapsing of report sections. I also changed the layout so that errors of a specific level and type are grouped together, along with a count, so you can quickly see what sorts of problems you have, and can then use the collapsing feature to drill into the areas you’re most concerned with.
There’s some work to do now with adding descriptive text into the rulesets so they work with the new report format, but I think this is an excellent improvement to the usability of the reports.
I’m very impressed with the jQuery library. It’s suprisingly easy to add some powerful UI elements to pages, particularly compared to the state of the art 4 or so years ago when I last tackled Javascript in any real way.
My first real job was manually sorting printed superannuation statements. I had to go through about a dozen boxes, each with about 2000 pieces of paper, and separate them into piles: single-page statements, and multi-page statements.
Why? Because the program that printed the statements just printed them all at once, so you ended up with the single-page statements mixed in with the multi-page statements. The mailout company needed to know whether a packing run was to have single-pages folded into envelopes, or 2 pages, or 3. Otherwise, someone might get 2 pages; 1 page of their financial info, and 1 page of someone else’s. Bad news for a financial company.
So they gave the job to a 16 year old wanting 2 weeks of holiday work. Go figure.
Mind numbingly tedious? Hell yeah. Also: paper cuts.
Industrial Robots
Fast forward a few years, and I wanted to do Computer Systems Engineering, because that meant I could build robots and program them to do stuff.
I learned how to write the software that runs the ticket barriers in train stations (no, I didn’t work on Myki). I also learned a lot about magnetic hysteresis and calculus in three dimensions, which I’ve mostly forgotten.
Then I got a job in IT, and still haven’t built a robot. Yet.
Why is IT So Awful?
I’ve writtenbeforeabout my thoughts on how and why IT sucks for business. Watching those videos has crystallised why it annoys me so much.
We’ve been automating factories for decades. All that work going on here used to be done entirely by humans.
We’ve been systematising production for centuries. Adam Smith wrote about division of labour back in 1776!
And yet every large company I’ve worked for in the past 10 years has been universally awful in the way they use IT.
Car companies re-tool their automated factories to produce a new car model every year. Some companies still have critical business applications running on Windows NT 4.
That pancake manufacturer has a robot that stacks pancakes automatically for them, but some companies are still manually typing in commands to their routers over telnet.
The humans in IT are making mistakes, breaking production equipment, and producing an endless supply of hand-crafted, unsupportable, poor-quality products. IT projects have a failure rate of well over 50%, and people just shrug their shoulders and say “Ah well, what can you do?”
The only reason it hasn’t been done yet? You’re not trying hard enough.
My Ultimate Goal
Now I’ve finally got a clear, concise way of explaining what I want to do for IT. The next time someone isn’t grokking what I mean, I can just say:
