Bruce F. Webster

Sorry for the hiatus. Since the end of March, I have been tied up with multiple engagements, one of which is more or less full time, while the others fill up most of the time leftover from the first one. It’s great to be this busy, and I’m learning lots of new and interesting things, as usual. But I’ve lacked the time and energy to keep up here. I will do better. Promise.  ..bruce..

I’ve actually been having this problem for some time, but I thought it might be some kind of hardware problem with the system. Now I think it’s Microsoft and/or ATI.

As noted below, last fall I bought an HP Pavillion desktop (quad-core 64-bit  processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) running Windows 7 (Home Premium 64-bit). It’s got an ATI Radeon 4650 with a chunk of dedicated RAM (512 MB, I think) and a 27″ HD display (1920 x 1080). It all worked more or less fine until a few months ago, when I suddenly started getting random Blue Screens of Death (BSODs), usually while playing a game or watching  a video for a while. Note that some of the games involved weren’t terribly graphic intensive (such as Civ4). Likewise, I had it happen while viewing a YouTube video embedded in a blog. Also note that I had no problems with the exact same games and video applications prior to that point.

As mentioned, I thought that the video card or something else might have gone flaky on me. I do have  a 3-year service warranty on the system, but didn’t want to drag my desktop in to where I bought it. I’ve been swamped for the last month, so I’ve largely ignored the problem.

However, it came up today while I was installing software for a new printer. There was an animated disk icon rotating on the screen, and — kablooey! BSOD! This time I went digging on Google, and I wasn’t happy with what I found. Poking around on several different forums, I found folks describing a variety of problems with ATI Radeon video cards and Windows 7 updates, including in Microsoft forums.

In particularly, I found a couple of posts describing pretty much the same situation I face, namely that things worked well for a while, but random BSODs associated with game and other video-related applications started up after a Windows 7 update sometime a few months ago.

Thank you, Microsoft. I was strongly considering converting over to all Apple hardware and software (with XP dual boot), but was seduced both by the low prices of Wintel hardware and the improvements of Windows 7 over Vista. Between this and my earlier problem, I’m starting to regret it.  ..bruce..

My newest computer (an HP Pavillion desktop, quad-core processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) runs Windows 7, which I find to be a significant improvement over Vista. However, I ran into a problem with it a week or so ago.

I was in the process of copying some files from elsewhere on my internal LAN onto my desktop’s internal drive — I believe I had two sets of copying going on, one from another laptop, another from a network hard drive. I was also downloading a new version of a particular software program that was already installed. The instructions for that program suggested uninstalling the previous version before installing the new one, so I started doing that as well. (Hey — Win7 is supposed to be a multi-tasking OS, right?)

The de-installation threw up an alert box stating that such-and-such a file could not be deleted due to permission issues. I clicked the ‘OK’ button (my only choice) and waited for the de-installation to complete or terminate.  It did neither, but pretty much hung without making any progress on its glowing green progress bar. I finally grew tired of waiting, brought up Task Manager, and killed the de-installation.

At that point, my desktop redrew itself, except that now almost all of the icons were missing. Uh-oh.

I keep most of my work in folders (not shortcuts, actual folders) on my desktop. Likewise, I tend to park files on the desktop until I decide where to to file them. l I immediately looked at the contents of “C:\Users\<username>\Desktop” and saw that it was empty. Completely empty.

I used a couple of different file recovery packages in an attempt to recover what had vanished. No luck. They found no deleted folders or files within the Desktop folder, and my efforts at doing more extensive scans ran for a few days straight — while still being less than 50% done — before I gave up. (Since getting the desktop, I had used it to collect vast file sets, move them onto external hard drives, then delete those sets. There were likely at least a few million deleted files with traces all over the 1 TB hard drive.)

Before you wag your fingers at me, I did have an external 1.5 TB hard drive to which I was running weekly backups. However, I had just a week or so before the glitch (and a few days after the last backup) moved my desktop system from the main floor to my office downstairs and had not re-attached that external hard drive. This means, of course, that I was able to recover the deleted folders, but the versions were about 10 days old. I didn’t lose a lot, but then, I’m not entirely sure what all I did lose.

Yesterday, I discovered that the same glitch had apparently emptied out the  “MyMusic” folder, wiping out my iTunes library. I restored much of that from my laptop (which had an older version of my iTunes library), but lost everything that I had purchased from the iTunes store and downloaded onto my desktop system.

I’m still not sure what happened. I did a fair amount of searching on the web for similar problems and found that other people had had the same thing happen to them. One posting suggested that my user profile may have been corrupted, but my efforts to fix things that way didn’t help.

I bought a second external hard drive for backups and plan to run them more frequently. I also rearranged things so that I no longer have actual folders within Desktop but only shortcuts to folders elsewhere.

Just a word to the wise.  ..bruce..

Click on the comic to see the full-size version.  ..bruce..

My co-author and good friend Ruby Raley pointed me to this posting by Chris Curran over a possible new IT role, that of the “IT Czar”. Chris specifically uses a rebuilding-the-football-team analogy:

What is interesting about Holmgren’s hire is that it is modeled after Bill Parcells role at Miami – The Football Czar.  He’s not the head coach and he’s not the GM (who usually handles personnel).  Instead, he is something else.  It is a role that leverages his expertise as a position coach, a head coach and a GM.  One that sees the bigger picture and is able to evaluate players AND coaches from a fresh and more independent perspective.  It is a position created to drive the “rebuilding” of a program – something Miami and Cleveland badly need.  In Parcells’ case, he took an 1-15 team and got it into the playoffs the next year with an 11-5 record.  Part of the Parcells formula is to bring in a core of coaches and players that he trusts and who know his systems, both offensively and defensively.

Be sure to read Curran’s entire post, plus the robust debate in the comments that follow it.

Of course, Ruby and I also used the football analogy a few years ago in suggesting a radically different approach to IT organization and leadership. As we wrote:

The bad news is that, unlike in football, the business and IT sides of a firm don’t always agree on what constitutes a ‘victory’ (even though both sides can usually agree on what a ‘loss’ is, at least in cases of total or significant project failure). Indeed, sometimes they cannot fully agree on what the game is.

Curran’s IT Czar role could in theory solve that; I like his proposals and approach, and, of course, I like the sports team analogy.

The problem is, it’s hard to see how upper management would treat or perceive it as being any different from the current CIO role. Both as a consultant and as an expert witness, I’ve had lots of opportunity to see just how  constrained the CIO slot can be in large organizations. A lot of the blame for that rests squarely upon the CEO and other CxO leaders, both in terms of whom they select for the CIO job and how they define/constrain that job. CIOs tend to be selected from business-types with some technical background, as opposed to technical types with some business background. Curran’s analogy (e.g., Bill Parcells) suggests that the czar be someone who has been down in the trenches (e.g., position and head coach) and knows what day-to-day IT development requires, but that’s not who usually gets picked.

The closest model to an IT Czar that I’ve seen that has worked were the various corporate Y2K ‘czars’ who were appointed 10+ years ago to save the officers and directors from any Y2K liability, and thus were given lots of power and pretty free rein. (A joke from those times — Q: What’s the difference between a terrorist and a corporate Y2K director? A: You can negotiate with the terrorist.) An IT czar appointed to ‘turn around’ an organization’s IT efforts would have to be given that same power and freedom. That is not likely to happen unless, as with Y2K, the corporate officers and directors see themselves at risk — professionally, legally, financially and/or personally. Otherwise, as noted above, the “IT Czar” would be just another CIO.  ..bruce..