November 2nd, 2007

Windows Mobile and extended Daylight Savings Time

Ryan Somma recently blogged about software glitches due to the extended Daylight Savings Time that was introduced by the US government’s Energy Policy Act of 2005. One of the issues that he experienced was:

My cell phone has been waking me up an hour early all week because it thinks that Daylight Savings Time (DST) began last weekend. I can’t change the time because it’s managed by Cingular, so it’s the fault of their systems.

My cell phone’s been wrong this week, as well. I know I applied a DST patch back in the spring, but I think I must have installed a new copy of Windows Mobile on my phone since then, and it didn’t include the patch.

At first, I tried setting my phone’s clock manually, but then I experienced the same automatic time setting that Ryan did, care of Cingular. Yesterday, I finally got tired of seeing the wrong time, so I changed my time zone to Atlantic (GMT-4), and then went looking for the Windows Mobile Extended DST patch.

You can find the necessary patch(es) and instructions for Windows Mobile devices here, if you still need them. My phone is back to the Eastern (GMT-5) time zone, now, and is showing the correct time. Hopefully it will adjust properly on Sunday, too.

On a humorous but not directly related to DST note, I accidentally set my alarm clock one hour ahead when attempting to turn it off, earlier this week. Later that day, I was sitting in my room, working on my laptop, and tried to see what time it was. My laptop said one thing (the correct time), and Lacey’s alarm clock showed a similar (+/- 5 minutes) time, but my alarm clock was an hour ahead, and my cell phone was an hour behind. That was rather confusing. :)

Posted by spugbrap at 09:01am EDT 2 Comments 

Categories: cingular, patch, mobile, annoyance, time, windows

March 2nd, 2007

LANDesk Security and Patch manager is not as friendly as it first seemed.

This afternoon, at work, a dialog popped up from the LANDesk Security and Patch Manager. That’s fine, and all, I don’t mind having the IT people making security patches automatically get installed on my work laptop, when I’m at work.

But, what pisses me off is the dialog that it gave me:LANDesk Security and Patch Manager dialog

At first glance, it looked like it was giving me up to 2 hours to get to a stopping point in my work, before it would force the update to take place. I’m not thrilled with having a deadline before a forced upgrade, but I understand that the sysadmins have tens of thousands of workstations to maintain security on, and the laptop belongs to the company, and so forth. At least this was nicer than forcing the update to happen right away, right?

But then I tried to go back to my work, and it showed its true colors. The stupid LANDesk countdown window (and its parent window) are “always on top”, and do not respond to Minimize messages. There is no minimize icon on the window’s title bar, and the “Show Desktop” shortcut (which usually minimizes everything, even things that don’t have ‘minimize’ options of their own) was ineffective against this LANDesk dialog.

Without getting this dialog to go away, getting any more work done was going to be difficult. :( I did figure out that I could drag that window out of the way, so the leftmost edge of it was just barely visible on the rightmost edge of my screen. Also, my TextPad window had an Always on Top option, which allowed me to bring it above the LANDesk window. But I was already distracted from my work, so I decided to take a couple screenshots, blog about this, and tell it to go ahead and install.

Posted by spugbrap at 02:58pm EST No Comments 

Categories: security, patch, sysadmin, automated, user_interface, usability, update, annoyance, software