Nick Park (the guy who created and made these characters) is from my home town - Preston, Northern England. He did a talk at our college about 12 years ago. *very* tedious man (monotone as hell) but very clever. He would chat for a bit, rolling some plasticine around his fingers, then five minutes later he's done a little Gromit without even looking and tosses it into the audience. Mine might be worth something one day...
I worked on contract for a large Zurich based financial company(..) till recently and an edict came down from the Grand High Poobahs in Desktop Support that all machines were to be centrally controlled, with *no* local admin rights even for us developers. So I asked them two questions:
1. How can we develop and, specifically, register activex controls when we can't write to the registry?
2. How do I debug when I can't use my debugger?
Which was met with an embarrassed silence. Once I prodded and threw toys out of the pram their justification was:
"As we are rolling out NT4 as the standard desktop we need to know all machines have the same config and system files"
... so rather than the Desktop Support team actually *supporting* the users and developers, they were actually restricting what we could do - if they were a third-party outsourced firm we would have shown them the door long ago.
Obviously we all told them to sod-off, and just logged on locally to the box with one of their admin accounts (user 'rm06'-anyone who works there knows that account!). But it didn't half annoy a lot of developers.
Then it got worse... any install packages we came up with were delivered to the desktop by sms. So anything we did was checked by them first before being fired off on a monday morning. Nothing wrong with that.
Except that their way of verifying a correct install package was to run it on one of the DS teams machines, with a tool (name escapes me) which created a log saying which files were updated/added and the same for the registry etc. *only* the entries in this log were delivered to the desktop. Do you see the flaw in this?
Well, a standard desktop isn't standard - even though they were all run off the same image, different teams had different images (cos some used excel for example). Even worse, DS being DS were immune from the lockdown - they had all sorts of shareware/warez/pr0n crap on the machine that my installshield was tested on. So come Monday morning, of the team we rolled out to we found approx. 50% of the pcs wouldnt load many of their apps due to the way they had butchered the MDAC portion of my app.
By all means lock down user machines. Provide developers with standard user images to dump onto test machines. But don't p*ss with a developers machine - it's like a mechanic not being able to open the hood of the car.
Slashdot Mirror
Nick Park (the guy who created and made these characters) is from my home town - Preston, Northern England. He did a talk at our college about 12 years ago. *very* tedious man (monotone as hell) but very clever. He would chat for a bit, rolling some plasticine around his fingers, then five minutes later he's done a little Gromit without even looking and tosses it into the audience. Mine might be worth something one day...
seany
I worked on contract for a large Zurich based financial company(..) till recently and an edict came down from the Grand High Poobahs in Desktop Support that all machines were to be centrally controlled, with *no* local admin rights even for us developers. So I asked them two questions:
1. How can we develop and, specifically, register activex controls when we can't write to the registry?
2. How do I debug when I can't use my debugger?
Which was met with an embarrassed silence. Once I prodded and threw toys out of the pram their justification was:
"As we are rolling out NT4 as the standard desktop we need to know all machines have the same config and system files"
... so rather than the Desktop Support team actually *supporting* the users and developers, they were actually restricting what we could do - if they were a third-party outsourced firm we would have shown them the door long ago.
Obviously we all told them to sod-off, and just logged on locally to the box with one of their admin accounts (user 'rm06'-anyone who works there knows that account!). But it didn't half annoy a lot of developers.
Then it got worse... any install packages we came up with were delivered to the desktop by sms. So anything we did was checked by them first before being fired off on a monday morning. Nothing wrong with that.
Except that their way of verifying a correct install package was to run it on one of the DS teams machines, with a tool (name escapes me) which created a log saying which files were updated/added and the same for the registry etc. *only* the entries in this log were delivered to the desktop. Do you see the flaw in this?
Well, a standard desktop isn't standard - even though they were all run off the same image, different teams had different images (cos some used excel for example). Even worse, DS being DS were immune from the lockdown - they had all sorts of shareware/warez/pr0n crap on the machine that my installshield was tested on. So come Monday morning, of the team we rolled out to we found approx. 50% of the pcs wouldnt load many of their apps due to the way they had butchered the MDAC portion of my app.
By all means lock down user machines. Provide developers with standard user images to dump onto test machines. But don't p*ss with a developers machine - it's like a mechanic not being able to open the hood of the car.
seany.