Daylight Sucking Time
Daylight savings this year has been a major pain in my ass. Not just because the dates changed from April 1 to March 11 but because Microsoft really didn't handle the change very well. I've known about the change for a pretty long time and I assumed that Microsoft would release patches via windows update way in advance since they did know about it back in 2005. Not only did they not release updates way in advance, they only released them for the current versions of windows (XP and Server 2003). What about windows 2000 you ask? Well you can purchase an update from MS for $4000 (!!) or follow an MS knowledge base article that tells you how to create a couple scripts to patch your system. So if they released an article that tells you exactly how to fix it (which didn't work exactly), why couldn't they just create an update for it? Because they didn't consider this a "critical update."
The workstation updates weren't that bad, but some of the server updates were kind of a pain. We use Exchange server at work for our groupware, and it was a bit more complicated to patch. There was an update for the Server OS, there was an update for Exchange itself, and there was a tool to fix everyone's calendar items that fall in the change period (between the old and new DST times). Then we also have Blackberries to add to the mix. So each Blackberry device needed an update, the Blackberry Enterprise Server (which I'm running on 2000 Server) needed as OS update, a patch for the send-as permissions, the exchange update and probably something else I'm forgetting about. Confused yet? I didn't mention that all this stuff has to happen in a certain order and that order is different depending on who you're asking. MS had one order and Research In Motion (the Blackberry company) had a different order and some steps had prerequisites such as having to run from some third computer (a workstation) with only Office 2003 or 2007 installed (we use Office 2002 of course).
I read as much as I could about this and waited as long as I could to see what problems people had, but since the time changed this morning I guess I've either done it or not. We'll see how many people complain Monday morning if anything is screwed up.
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As for the captcha, yes I moved it to the textbox background. I had never seen it done that way before and thought it might cool. I tried to make the script generate it so that you could still read it while leaving the text you write more dominant. Do you think it would be better to put the "enter the numbers" box above the comment box? That way you wouldn't have to look for the numbers after you already wrote your spiel.
anyway, it took him like, 6 hours last week to put the daylight savings time patch on my computer and i am still an hour behind. i like to think he's really incompetent, though, and it's not the fault of Microsoft.
Betsy: I love hearing about completely incompetent IT guys. It should take all of about 30 seconds to update a single computer. If you have the rights, double click on the clock in the tray, hit the "time zone" tab and make sure the "Automatically adjust clock for daylight saving changes" checkbox is checked. I found a couple computers this week that were missing that.
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