My Morning Chuckle

[mbarrick]

It's funny in that watching-a-retarded-person-get-stuck-in-a-revolving-door sort of way.

I finally got the MCSE NT 4.0 "Doctor" at former/present/why-am-I-here work to call M$ to get them to do something about the non-functional Active Directory "integration" (in reality it is a scheduled crawl and import into a SQL table - no real-time integration). It's worth noting that the M$ marketing twaddle repeatedly points out the "integration" with Active Directory as a selling feature. One of the reasons Dumbko went with this product (other than their M$ blinders) was to get away from the "lack of integration" with the previous company's intranet which was using Perl to crawl Active Directory and import into a SQL table. I mean, why would you want to use something you already have that's working and requires no license fees and has exposed source for which you can get immediate support from in-house salaried employees that are there anyway, when you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars licencing a Micro$haft product that theoretically does exactly the same thing but doesn't work and costs $350 per incident for support?

So this morning the Doctor forwards M$'s summary of the incident report and action plan to me. Bearing in mind that SharePoint Portal Services only runs on Windows 2003 Server and the response was from the Microsoft support "engineer" assigned to help our beloved MCSE NT 4.0 "Doctor" with this, behold the .sig of the "engineer":

[name removed to protect the stupid] MCSE NT 4.0/2000

Bwaaahahahahaha!

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_disdain_/]

"...using Perl to crawl Active Directory and import into a SQL table..."

Shame they didn't just use an LDAP query to pull the relevant data out of Active Directory at runtime. I use a (non-MS) helpdesk web app at work that does that, and uses a SQL back-end only for data storage.

Still, whatever works... no point in reinventing the wheel, unless job-justification is a consideration ;-)

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Point being, it wasn't a very good way to do it (the guy that wrote it couldn't wrap his head around LDAP) and SharePoint Portal Services can't even get that much right.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_disdain_/]

Yeah, pretty wacky. I'm surprised at SharePoint... that seems like a huge oversight. Having said that (and out of sheer curiosity), is it SharePoint Portal Server 2001 that has been deployed?

While "talking shop", have you ever done any C programming (if not, do you know anyone who does)?

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough C is one of the few (still relevant) languages I have had formal instruction on, but time to take on new work is next to nil. Perhaps logik or thetroll?

Also, on the shop front, the former admin for Lignum, who would will be out of a job at the end of the year when Tolko finishes closing down the Vancouver office, is well qualified to fill your shoes at Storeum. Shall I forward your work e-mail to him. He used to run the mill systems at Williams Lake before he was promoted to the now former head office so he has lots of experience with unusual industrial systems that would be applicatble.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_disdain_/]

Thanks for the possible contacts... I am loosely involved in a side project that may require development in C, which is certainly not my thing. I'll tell you about the project at some point in the near future, on the chance you are interested.

As for filling my shoes at Storyeum... go ahead and forward that email to me. I get the feeling they are not going to fill the position (which is why I haven't approached anyone about it), but I am most certainly going to urge them to rethink that. If they don't fill it, there may be contract work -- I will probably not take every call that comes out of there, at which point passing work on to you (if you are interested), or someone else, is likely.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be full-time at Port Moody for at least the next five months, so I'll be avoiding new contract work until the spring.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

BTW, it's SPS 2003. I shudder to think how messed up 2001 must have been. The marketing twaddle for the next version claims to fix a great many of my gripes, but by the same token, the twaddle for this version claims a lot of things that aren't true, so I'll believe it when I see it.