Guy's Blog Blog from May, 2008

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My PC has secretly entered a Whiskerino contest without my consent...

Written in the style of a 6th Form physics experiment essay.

Introduction

I've been offline for about 6 or 7 hours because my Dell PC got so clogged with dust it overheated and chimped really badly. I should have known it was about to go pyriform because of the ever increasing noise coming from the fans whenever I did any processor intensive work and also when I didn't do any processor intensive work, but always when the computer was turned on for more than 30 minutes.

At first I thought it was just the usual Alzheimer disease that affects all Windows machines as they gather increasing amounts of cruft (viruses, trojans, spyware, security patches, etc.) but when the thing started hovering and moving round the room because the fans were working so hard I knew that something else was to blame.

Before long, I was overjoyed to see the "blue screen of death" and subsequent reboots resulted in the machine frantically trying to communicate with me in morse code - the number and duration of beeps on startup apparently indicate what sort of disaster has occurred.

Luckily, I had already guessed what the problem was - my PC had grown a beard.

Equipment Required

The following equipment is required to carry out this experiment:

A dust-filled Dell PC, various screwdrivers, patience (lots), tweezers, biscuits, fridge, bathroom sink (kitchen sink, bath or shower would also work), water, soap, sponges (clothes or flannels would suffice, but you can't beat a good sponge IMHO), anti-static wipes (lots), various types of vacuum cleaner, cotton wool buds (lots), teabags (Earl Grey), cup, milk (semi-skimmed, stored in the fridge), sugar, spoons, kettle, large vocabulary of profanities, plasters, ample floor and desk space, hair drier, more patience, at least two waste paper bins, trial and error, ability to ignore minor issues, eye wash (or goggles or other form of eye protection - but not a welders mask as that would make it hard to see what you are doing), power outlets (220-240V AC, 50-60Hz), Vitamin E body butter, shower or bath, clean set of clothes (including underwear and socks), towels, shower gel (or equivalent), shampoo and conditioner, a dustbin, outside halogen lighting, a piece of string tied to a fridge magnet (remember to return the magnet to the fridge afterwards), sellotape (or other suitable adhesive), anti-static bag(s).

A working knowledge of morse code may be useful.

Also, remove any scruffy hamsters from the immediate vicinity before carrying out this experiment so as not to confuse them with piles of dust.

Removing the cables (10 mins)

In order to get to the PC, I had to lift my Mac Mini off the top of it - I paused for a moment realising that the tiny Mac Mini was indeed more powerful and far easier to use than the great hunk of a Dell PC on which it was perched. The Mac Mini was also £200 cheaper than the Dell PC.

The Mac Mini had just three cables attached - power, keyboard/mouse (USB) and monitor. It was unplugged and sat on my window sill within about 10 seconds.

The PC, however, had about 12 cables attached - power, USB keyboard, USB mouse, USB printer, network (because PC's don't do WiFi for some reason), 2 monitors, external HDD (because the internal bay's are too hard to get to), audio stuff, etc.

Most of the cables were quickly removed, however one of the monitor cables did not want to let go of the PC. Like most monitor cables, it's firmly attached to the socket by two long screw type things. Unfortunately the nut that it was screwed in to was loose causing both screw and nut to turn at the same time. It wouldn't have been a problem had the nut been on the outside of the case, alas it was inside the case in one of those places you can't quite get your fingers to to hold it in place whilst turning the screw.

Tip: Use a screwdriver to wedge the nut in place!

Removing the case (45 mins)

Opening the case was surprisingly easy - you just pull a springed latch on the top of the case and one whole side of the PC comes off allowing you to quickly get to the innards of the machine.

Unfortunately, while this immediately allowed me to see just how much dust was in there (it was literally like peering in to a vacuum cleaner bag), actually getting to the dust ridden areas proved somewhat more of a challenge.

There's no way to remove the other side of the case as far as I could tell. The back of the case is part of the chassis as is most of the front of the case (where most of the dust-filled air vents are). In order to remove dust from the vents on the front, large swathes of internal components had to be removed - the hard drives, CD, floppy disk, etc.

After spending almost an hour trying to remove the front panel, I gave up. By now, I had component parts of the PC scattered all over my desk and floor.

Assess the situation (15 minutes)

Using an Intel Pentium chip, the machine obviously has a heat sink and accompanying fan that are so large you could build houses on them. I dread to think how much power this thing is using but, luckily, it's days are numbered thanks to the smaller and more efficient Mac Mini that I'm slowly moving over to.

Then there's the fan next to the hard drives that provides air flow for the rest of the machine and finally the fan in the power supply unit (PSU).

Nice cup of tea and a sit down dot com

At this point, I decided to do what any self-respecting engineer would do when assessing a problem. I went downstairs and made a nice cup of tea and sat down to drink it. Realising I was likely to be covered in dust for the rest of the evening, I also took the opportunity to have some biscuits, one of which broke in half and fell in to my cup of tea thus requiring careful recovery using a small yet long-handled spoon. Should you not have such a spoon to hand, you could alternatively use a sieve and pour the tea from one cup to another cup (via the sieve) thus catching the soggy biscuit mass in the sieve. I'm not sure what you would then do with the soggy biscuit in the sieve as sieves are not designed for eating from. But I digress...

Finish assessing the situation

All three fans plus adjacent vents, heatsinks, circuit boards, cables and casing were coated in approximately 5mm of dark-brown fluffy/furry/hairy dust. Nasty.

It's a pity I didn't take a photo as many people would have mistaken such a sight for a small woolly mammoth or possibly a rodent such as a long haired hamster that doesn't have very long hair.

De-bearding the computer (about 4.5 hours)

So, this is where the fun starts. There I am, sat starring at a PC that's literally grown fur on the inside. How on earth should I de-beard this thing?

Method one - shake it out

I tried the obvious thing first - I carefully lifted the PC over the bathroom sink, turned it over so that the side with no panel was facing earthwards and shook the whole thing - gently at first, then slightly harder.

I tried several shaking motions - sideways, diagonal, up and down, circular, sine wave, etc. No joy.

The only thing that fell in to the sink was a moderately sized piece of light blue plastic - the sort of artefact that looks like it was a key component within the construction of the chassis.

Method two - use a vacuum cleaner

My next port of call was to try and transfer the dust from the PC to a device whose sole purpose in life is to gather dust. This initially seemed like a really good idea.

Starting with the smallest hover in the house I was able to encounter my first problem - there's simply no way to get something the size of your average hover attachment in to the nooks and crannies inside a Dell PC.

However, I could get it fairly close, it just didn't have enough suction power to dislodge the dust (even after my earlier moderately vigorous shaking attempts).

So, I then brought in the most powerful hover in the house - it doubles up as a carpet cleaner and is one of those cyclone things, surely enough to dislodge some dust!

Unfortunately, even with all the extra power it was unable to shift much dust. I did however manage to accidentally stick it to my leg at one point and it also sucked in a small black cable, disconnecting one end from the motherboard (although I could not find for the life of me where it had been connected).

Method 3 - Blow the dust out

Out of desperation, I tried to blow the dust out. I don't know if you've ever tried to exhale really hard in the general direction of a dusty computer, but after about 3 minutes trust me... you'll feel feint and have aching lungs. As an added bonus, some of the minute amounts of dust that dislodged landed in my eye thus requiring me to bathe said eye with eye wash.

Method 4 - Use anti-static wipes

Having failed miserably to shift the dust with air, I decided to tackle it head on with some antistatic wipes.

I managed to quickly de-dust some of the less beardy areas within the PC - such as cables and the inwards facing parts of fans and heat sinks. However, the majority of the beard remained - trapped between fans and outer casing.

Method 5 - cotton wool buds

If you ever try to de-dust a PC using slightly damp cotton wool buds, take my advice: Don't do it!

After using half a tub of cotton wool buds, I was still nowhere near complete in my mission to rid my PC of dust, although the PSU was now de-bearded to my satisfaction. One down, two to go!

Method 6 - Pull everything apart

There was only one choice left - to literally pull the whole PC apart in order to get at the last and largest reserves of dust.

Due to some evil product designer, several cables had to be removed first. If you've ever unplugged cables from inside a PC, you'll know that you can never remember what they were connected to afterwards. However, I had no choice so one by one the arteries within my PC were disconnected.

I decided to tackle the smaller airflow fan near the hard drives first. Unfortunately, to remove it the hard disks first needed to be removed (as they still had some cables attached) so out they came. It was at this point that I realised that the small fan was going nowhere because the motherboard was blocking it.

In order to remove the motherboard, I would first have to remove the brick like CPU fan and heatsink. Joy.

Again, this proved to be a decidedly non-trivial task. The CPU fan couldn't be removed without first removing the heatsink. The heatsink couldn't be removed without one of those really, really, really long screwdrivers that you can poke down in to the holes to get at the screws.

After almost 45 minutes of searching (by this time the house looked like it had been burgled by someone who likes to take things apart and distribute them across the floor in neat piles) I finally managed to find such a screwdriver and remove the screws.

The heatsink was then fairly easy to remove and after unplugging some more cables the huge fan that was attached to it followed shortly afterwards - with a jolt. Said jolt managed to dislodge a large slab of dust directly on to the CPU and motherboard, sticking to the heat transfer paste on top of the CPU in the process.

Luckily, I had an excessively powerful vacuum cleaner to hand and quickly sucked up all the dust. I was feeling quite pleased with myself up to the point where I heard a rattling sound - one of the screws that was holding the heat sink in place had decided to go on a little excursion and could now be seen dancing around the inside of the clear plastic dust compartment within the vacuum cleaner, occasionally disappearing amongst the dust that accompanied it.

Not deterred I set to work on the heat sink - a quick hovering followed by an attack of anti-static wipes and cotton wool buds quickly sorted it.

Next, the fan. It was held in to it's plastic casing by rubber pegs and thus quickly removed using nothing other than excessive force, sending yet more dust flying in all directions. Having quickly washed the casing in the bathroom sink (with some soapy water and a sponge), the fan was then cleaned fin by fin.

Next, the motherboard was removed (placed on to an anti-static bag, not to be confused with an anti-static wipe) and the airflow fan was finally extracted. It too was quickly de-bearded and placed in it's component parts for it to dry.

All that was left was the front grills on the casing. I tried everything to de-fluff them, but to no avail. As a last resort I decided to forcibly break the plastic clips holding the front panel to allow the vacuum cleaner to do it's work, followed by some anti-static wipe action to finish the cleansing.

Disposing of waste materials (approx. 2 mins)

By this time, two waste paper baskets had been filled with dusty anti-static wipes and cotton wool buds. The more powerful vacuum cleaner was also sporting a trendy new beard.

The waste was disposed of in an outside bin, followed by a "Doh!" moment and prolonged profanities. The screw from the heatsink was now in the bin.

Retrieving the screw (approx. 30 mins)

To retrieve the screw, I used a fridge magnet on a piece of string which was gently dragged through the pile of ex-beard in the bin. After several attempts, and with the aid of outdoor halogen lights, the screw was retrieved.

Putting it back together (about 15 mins)

Finally, the computer could be put back together. To reduce the amount of time taken, items that had been washed were dried using a hair drier.

The front panel was carefully re-attached using sellotape and the motherboard added and removed twice because the first time I'd forgot to put the airflow fan back in first.

The CPU fan was pushed in to place and the heatsink reassembled and carefully positioned on top of the small clump of dust that had stuck to the top of the CPU.

The hard disks repositioned and various cables connected to any connectors that would accept them.

I was unable to find where the piece of light blue plastic came from and the black wire that got disconnected by the hover was carefully hidden behind a metal plate as I could not work out what it was attached to.

The side panel was re-attached and after gently kicking it several times the case finally snapped back in to position. Various cables were then attached, with the exclusion of one USB cable which didn't have anything attached to the other end.

The hair drier was used to quickly blast the air vents in case any of the internal components were still wet and the computer was turned on.

It worked!

Admittedly, the lights on the front panel don't work any more and I think the internal speaker is also broken (or possibly just covered in sellotape), but so far the computer has remained stationary and no longer increases the room temperature by 12 degrees Celsius per hour despite the CPU being separated from the heatsink by a layer of dust.

Final tasks

Having been exposed to copious amounts of dust during the experiment, I took a quick shower and put on a clean set of clothes. I also used some Vitamin E body butter on my hands as they'd become quite dry due to prolonged exposure to various cleaning products.

Conclusion

Dell PC's grow beards.

I've never really liked the Clickr theme that's bundled with Confluence, but now I know why...

When I first saw the theme my thoughts were something along the lines of "looks distinctive, but the navigation is painful" and I left it at that. I know a lot of people use it in personal spaces for a blog and then dump the blog-posts macro on the home page, which is possibly the theme's only legitimate use.

I've just been trying to explain to a customer how the Clickr theme works (in terms of how to use it as an end-user and how to find content and collaborate in spaces that use it) and now I know that I really hate it. So much so I'm writing this blog post at 3:30 AM!

First of all, the child pages aren't shown at the bottom of pages. This instantly leads to a "mystic meat" navigation scenario whereby people add pages and then can't find them again because they seemingly disappear from the on-screen navigation.

Sure, you can click the "pages" link in the grey panel at the bottom of the page to get to the alphabetical listing of pages but that doesn't quickly show you what's attached to this page. So you click the "tree view" link and you get an unexpanded tree view because it doesn't know what page you were previously looking at (the last page it saw was the alphabetical list) forcing you to wade through the tree view manually – which is kinda hard if you don't know where your page is in that tree – to find the damn thing. Rargh!

Then there's comments: They aren't displayed by default, so you have to find the "add comment" link in the grey panel at the bottom to add the first comment. It's obvious when you know what to do, but the first time people encounter the Clickr theme they struggle to work out how to add comments because there's no link in a "zero thought" location. When adding the first comment to any page you keep getting the same sense of "this sucks" because you first look in the most logical place for the link, only to find it missing and then have to look in the least intuitive place - the far bottom right for the most commonly used links! Insane!

Because the theme has almost no config options (in fact, I not sure if it has any at all!) you can't do anything about the usability issues.

A while back I made a Clickr-like layout using our Theme Builder plugin just to see how long it would take (about a day for the majority of it then another day or so over time as we made various tweaks). The benefit of Theme Builder is that if you want to display child pages at the bottom of the page it's a simple case of adding the {builder-children} macro (or even the common {children} macro if you so desire) to the footnotes or footer panel in the Layout Tab. If you want to force the comments area to be displayed even when there are no comments you simply tick the "Force comment display" option in the Options Tab.

Anyway, I digress...

The key thing I've noticed is that the Clickr theme that comes with Confluence is a barrier to collaboration because people spend most of their time working out where things are and how to add content rather than just getting stuff done.

The customer was using the Clickr theme to encourage adoption within the organisation – but it's had the complete opposite effect because it makes adding content and collaborating deeply painful.

So, a word of advice: Feel free to use Clickr theme on your personal blog but never use it in a space intended for content or collaboration because it will kill adoption of your wiki stone dead.

If you do want something that looks like the Clickr theme, consider getting our Theme Builder plugin and installing our version of it - then you can edit the navigation to make it usable in a collaborative environment.

If you know what's involved in employing people in other countries, I'd really love to hear from you...

Adaptavist are growing pretty quick. We're struggling to fill all positions with staff located in the UK so we're now looking worldwide.

However, we've hit one huge brick wall - nobody in the UK seems to know what is involved or required to employ someone in another country - eg. Canada or Australia.

For example, we have to pay very high taxes on UK employees (for every 3 or 4 members of staff we could hire another person if the taxes weren't so high). Also, our employment contracts and employee handbooks are all based on UK law, as is our outsourced HR agency. What happens for employees outside the UK?

So far we've been unable to find anyone that knows really how to employ someone in another country, it's crazy! The UK is a little island in the sea so I would have imagined lots of companies needing to employ skilled people in other countries, but apparently not.

Dan Hardiker just sent me this little paragraph over IM – and my Sleep Shark has been visiting me regularly for a long time now...

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can't pay, he'll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

That's my life right now.

It's not that we like beer or anything (moi? beer? meh non!) but we're organising a post London Atlassian User Group pub crawl to discuss Confluence and JIRA in the Enterprise / Education markets for anyone who is interested...

For details on the AUG in London (22nd May 2008) click here – the AUG itself is mainly about Atlassian's developer tools but our pub crawl will be more about Confluence most likely.

We've already got a small herd of our larger customers attending and welcome anyone else who wants to join. In usual Adaptavist (and indeed Atlassian) style, there'll be a dollop of "beer vouchers" so the first few hours of beer drinking discussion about Confluence and JIRA will have free "refreshments".

Whether it'll be a proper pub crawl or more of a "first bar we found was nice so we stayed until 4am" is a complete unknown, we'll just see how it pans out.

EDIT: Hrm, maybe we do like the occasional drink...

New recruits find working for a distributed online company somewhat strange at first...

Here's how Emma Rush described her first few weeks:

I was only saying to someone the other day that working for Adaptavist was like playing Zelda. In the way that you have to figure stuff to do out and ask one person, who sends you to another person until you eventually find the answer and you can solve the puzzle and move to the next level. Picking up new weapons on the way. Eh? OK, not so much weaponry at Adaptavist.

It's been a general theme from all the recent recruits - they find themselves in at the deep end, knowing that there are vast numbers of tasks to do, but not being able to find them.

There's some weird hive mind thing going on at Adaptavist - once you've tuned in to it you just instinctively know what needs to be done. Until that point, it's all a bit Zelda.