Gobán Saor » eadestown

PowerPivot & The Parable of the Snow Sock

gobansaor — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 20:41:36 +0000

For those of us in North West Europe this winter has been one of the coldest on record; not only cold but early, in this part of the world winter usually only kicks in after Christmas. The beauty of a perfect White Christmas Day did make up for the previous month of extreme cold and inconvenience but only just; and would not have at all if I had not invested in a simple piece of relatively new technology; a pair of snow socks.

For it was this pair of snow socks that enabled our household to continue to get to work and school, to Christmas shop, visit a sick relative and drive on Christmas Day to the winter wonderland that was a frozen Blessington Lake.

As the cold spell continued the main roads (and eventually the motorways) became hazardous to travel on; minor roads and housing estates became close to impassable for many normal cars. As the ability of the county council to keep roads functioning decreased (due to an early winter catching it on the hop with insufficient salt stocks and no Plan B) so my family and our neighbours realised than self-help was our best bet. People started investing in snow shovels, sand and salt, and hiring JCBs; gritting hills, clearing school and community hall carparks, helping dig out neighbours’ and strangers’ cars. And I invested in a pair of Weissenfels WeissSock Snow Socks (from http://www.micksgarage.ie/tyre-snow-socks.aspx).

Snow chains or even winter tyres are not seen as necessary by most drivers in Ireland or the UK; our winters (including this and last year’s nearly as cold one) are not that severe. Most are unaware of the alternative, the snow sock, a relatively new concept; in effect, a fabric snow chain. A fraction of the cost of winter tyres; easier to use (and nearly as effective) as snow chains.

Having a pair meant we had our own self-service road treating device, insuring we could safely get to the local town or nearest motorway and when the M7 motorway was backed-up being able to use the old un-treated N7 road to bypass it.

PowerPivot is to Excel what a Snow Sock is to a car in a snowy winter. The ideas and a lot of the technology used in both products have been around for some time, but the accessibility, low-cost and “good enough” packaging are game changers.

Like our neighbourhood waiting on an over-stretched, under-funded county council to solve our “last mile” problems, countless small companies, departments and individuals in large organisations are likewise awaiting their IT Godots often in vain and if delivered, often too little and/or too late.

Two technologies that I’ve been introduced to in the last 12 months:

PowerPivot and the
Snow Sock;

both liberating, both having the ability to make aspects of my life much better and much easier. I expect to see a lot more people adopt both in the year to come.

So if you’re stuck for some New Years’s resolutions this year:

Buy some snow socks now; i.e. do NOT wait until the next “snow event”!
Learn PowerPivot.

Happy New Year

UPDATE: Looks like Marco & Alberto are doing one of their PowerPivot courses in Dublin this March, so no excuses for not learning PowerPivot http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2011/02/15/new-powerpivot-workshop-dates-copenhagen-dublin-and-zurich.aspx

Trying out Vodafone’s 3G service.

gobansaor — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:36:29 +0000

For over a week this month our local OmniTel wireless broadband was out of action (the 3rd major interruption of service in the last year). As usual I had to revert back to my 64Kbps ISDN line which is not as bad as analogue dial-up but it’s still a shock to the system! Being within 3Km of a telephone exchange which is due to be broadband enabled we should eventually have a more reliable alternative. A 3g mobile signal would also be an alternative but alas our local Vodafone signal is still GPRS only (and O2′s signal is non existent); living in the countryside can be idyllic but it has its drawbacks.

Nevertheless, my wife’s new Nokia n70 is 3G enabled, and as we were visiting a 3g enabled area this bank holiday weekend, I decided to install the N70′s modem drivers on my laptop to try it out. Two hours later, I eventually got it to work, I pity any non-technical person who attempts to set it up. The Nokia PCSuite installed OK but when the Modem was detected on the USB port the drivers failed with a “Windows could not load installer for modem. Contact the hardware vendor” error.

Likewise, when I attempted to un-install existing Bluetooth / GPRS modems I use with my own Sony Ericsson in case a conflict was the cause of the problem I got the same error but this time with a message saying Windows 2000 couldn’t remove the drivers (I’m on XP SP2 !!).

Eventually I discovered I was missing a mdminst.dll from my windows/system32 folder, took a copy for another Dell laptop, REGSVR32′d it ( getting the message “The module ‘c:\windows\system32\mdminst.dll’ was loaded, but the entry-point DllRegisterServer was not found.”) and , hey presto, it worked. Why was I missing the dll? I guess I’ll never know but thanks to this www.driverguide.com thread for pointing me in the right direction.

The modem connected with a speed of 460.8Kbps, but my actual download speed was about half that with an upload speed in the mid 50s. Well ahead of ISDN download speeds and much cheaper (taking into account ISDN has a monthly fixed charge AND is charged by the minute ,while 3G is traffic based). So for those of you in a 3G area, if you still depend on ISDN for either backup or for your main internet service, throw it out and replace it with either a USB modem, router or even a member of your family’s mobile; don’t you just love having alternatives!

Rathmore Exchange to be broadband enabled…

gobansaor — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:30:59 +0000

For the last year and half I’ve been connecting to the internet via a wireless service provided by a local firm Torque Internet (recently taken over by Callidus Telecom). While the service has its ups and downs (the downs sometimes lasting 2 or 3 days at a time!) it’s a huge improvement on my previous ISDN based service (which was both expensive and slow – not as slow as dial-up admittedly).

Due to the unreliability of the service I still maintain my ISDN line and I revert back to it at least once a month; I find if the network goes down on a Friday afternoon it will not be fixed until Monday morning. Here in Eadestown we really could do with a more reliable broadband service but of course other than the afore mentioned ISDN and various Satellite based services (don’t go there – ask any rural school!!) the choices are limited as the local exchange is not ADSL enabled and the mobile phone companies have not yet rolled out 3G in the area. But hey, there’s light at the end of the tunnel as Eircom (the former state monopoly and now privately owned near-monopoly telecoms’ provider) has announced the enabling of a further 319 – mainly rural – exchanges over the next two years and Rathmore, Co. Kildare is on the list. Yipee….

UPDATE:

Of late the service from Callidus has been much more reliable, even to the extent that when the Grange Hill relay went down on the Friday afternoon before a long-weekend, it was back up and working by Saturday morning, in the past we would have waited until the following Tuesday afternoon for the service to be restored.

UPDATE: Jan 2008

I spoke too soon, since last summer the Omnitel (I know, another name change) service in Eadestown has taken a turn for the worst. Not only have we had 3 major outages last year (one lasting more than a week), the new year looks like continuing the trend (down since last Wednesday, now Monday 14th). Also, the 172.19.20.1 transmitter (aka Fr. Ryan’s) is either massively over-subscribed or faulty (high latency >500ms, lots of timeouts at peak times), I’m going with over-subscribed. At this sort of latency, satellite is starting to look like a viable alternative.

As I tend to get hits on this post during such downtimes driven by Google searches on either Omnitel, Callidus or Torque, here’s their support telephone number: (01) 8263546.

Update: Sunday Feb 02 2009

Gone again, four days and counting, this time the Grange Hill node was knocked out of action by last Wednesday nights storm. No point ringing as the help line (3) no longer answers, I managed to get some information by dialing 4 for accounts, but by Friday afternoon that and the free phone sales number were ringing out! What a shower, I suppose they could be gone out of business but I suspect they had simply all gone home or gone down the pub. Thankfully I still have my ISDN line.

Tom Gleeson – datasmith, Eadestown, Co. Kildare, Ireland

gobansaor — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 11:38:28 +0000

I’m an Excel guru and a BI/ETL expert, operating from rural County Kidare in Ireland, with a deep understanding of business processes and data; I can quickly, and cost effectively, craft, or help you craft, final-mile solutions to your BI/reporting, data and Excel related problems. Read more about Tom …

tom@gobansaor.com
+353 87 2055018
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If you have a specific problem that needs solving or a complete project specification, I will quote a fixed price and work to a target delivery date if the price is approved.

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