Proprietary Software (this may be a rant)

[Dymetrie]

At work we use Digital Video Recorders (DVR) from a company called Dedicated Micros (DM) all in all then the units are pretty good, can record decent quality footage which can be downloaded and passed on to the Police, Housing Officers etc. We've even had some stuff used by the Police to put bad guys away (murderers, drug dealers, etc) and I've been involved with this and it's a good feeling to know that you're doing good.

Up until a 18 months ago the model of DVR we were using had a nice, simple, easy to use software package which allowed you to capture Jpeg and Avi files which would work on any computer, anywhere (y'know, within reason, let's not get carried away here)...

Unfortunately we then bought some of the new super dooper brand spanking new units. Which, to be honest, are really good. More storage, less degredation, the unit itself is easier to configure.

However. DM, in their infinite wisdom, decided that these spangly new recorders would 'work' with only 2 pieces of software. Either IE (which doesn't work properly with it anyway, you try and grab an image and it distorts the picture, no timestamp, nada) or Netvu Observer (hereafter known as 'that piece of ****', or '****' for short).

This new software means that any images or video you download can ONLY be viewed using the same software. Combine that with the fact that the software doesn't even work properly and I can't scan to the desired time/date by typing it in, I have to rewind the footage...

WTF!

So I download hundreds of images for the Police and hand it over saying "by the way, you'll need to install this bloated software on your computer which has such high requirements you probably either can't do it or your IT department will laugh at you, or you can't view these images which could potentially put a dangerous person in prison."

un-be-smegging-leave-able

The main reason for my current state of pissed-offedness is that this afternoon I was asked by the Police to capture some images/footage of an incident.

Now, because the software is so **** I'd taken to
using IE to navigate to the correct time and date then using a screen grab (which I then refined in paint... yeah... paint... I works for the government :/) so that I could get a decent image with the time/date stamp, and if I needed video footage, sending my engineer to the actual unit to manually download it onto CD. Unfortunately something has happened on the Camden network and I can no longer log into the DVRs this way... But I could at home... Until I tried today...

I'd promised the Officer that I'd look into it when I got home and would call him/e-mail him with what I found. And now I'm stuck. Because of this **** proprietary software which causes more problems than it solves.

/me puts his brain to work on figuring this out to get something for the Police tonight and then passing the problem over to IT tomorrow who'll just say "we don't support that" and annoy me even further

/end rant

/apologies for rant

[Mark]

Don't take no for an answer. If IT don't support it then they'd jolly well better get supporting it, and pronto, and if they don't, then whatever fool purchased hardware without getting IT agreement to support it had better get on to the manufacturer, also pronto. :)

[Dymetrie]

Amusingly, Camden IT doesn't support M$ Office (yet the full suite is installed on every computer Camden owns) which makes me laugh.

I've found an updated version of the **** which is slightly better (and combining that with the snipping tool in Vista I've actually managed to get some images which will hopefully be of use to the Police) so I'll be harangueing IT to install that for me tomorrow.

I shall also be discussing the option of making my disgust about the proprietary format from this software made known to the company that produces it (although looking at the updated software it might actually have already been taken onboard from one of my complaints 18 months ago :p) I'll just have to set aside some time to run through the software a bit more. I'll not be doing that unpaid like I am this evening though....

[Garp]

At the college we didn't support Microsoft Office. Install it, sure, and make sure it still ran, sure, but beyond that nothing. Staff were expected to be capable of handling their own needs when it came to Office (training was available). It was a highly unpopular change to policy when it came in (at the same time I started), but within 6 months started to bear fruition in that staff became a lot more competent and learnt to search online for answers to "how do I" style questions.

We have a backup solution which uses Legato Networker as software, and there isn't a NOC engineer that doesn't despise the software with a vengeance. Its supposedly the best out there, but has all these lovely little quirks. You have just two ways of interfacing with the server end software, a horribly bloated win32 GUI, or an ugly ncurses based, next to useless, Solaris command line tool.
Loading the tool up on one of the standard 3Ghz P4 machines in the NOC office takes 1 - 2 minutes. Connecting to the server takes another 2 - 3 minutes from there. Once in side any operation you take (adding a client to a backup group, moving it, triggering a test run etc. etc.) takes a further minute to trigger. The status output is frequently misleading, telling you its backed up successfully when whilst its backed up the data its forgotten to write the indexes, for example. I had that today, one of several cases that NOC were handling, but only one was a sysadmin managed server. Everything was setup fine, I finally managed to prove. Eventually after digging around in the legato agent, which I had to use through an RDP to a windows machine from my Ubuntu based workstation, I figured out that whilst its been saving a couple of hundred Mb of data each week its not bothered indexing it so its completely and utterly useless.
The interface itself won't tell you how much data is stored for any one client either, which can get to be frustrating.
It didn't used to like symbolic links all that much, we used to have to create ignore files for any that could potentially be a loop.

Supposedly its the best software on the market. If that's the case then the market is in a very, very sorry state.

[kaiowas]

I've now got this crazy thought in my head of these images being used as evidence in court with highly incriminating comedy MSPaint additions such as big bags of swag, bundles of cash etc :p

[Dymetrie]

I've now got this crazy thought in my head of these images being used as evidence in court with highly incriminating comedy MSPaint additions such as big bags of swag, bundles of cash etc :p

So you saw the episode of crimewatch that my evidence was used in :D

Updated software has now been installed, unfotunately I can't configure the image servers properly (to be saved by the program) as I don't have admin rights...

*sigh*