Homerton IT Department
As both of you know, the Homerton IT Department has a terrible track record. Everyday I see instances of sheer ineptitude, and am aware of a variety of more effective means to solve their problems.
Today was just like any other day. However, I finally decided to tell them about it. Below are copies of a few emails that tell the whole story.
Notice that the claimed PDF file is not attached! Instead there's something called 'winmail.dat'. "What the fuck is winmail.dat?" most would ask. Let's see:
Oh, and James, you'll like this bit from the newsletter (emphasis mine; [lack of] punctuation, spelling, grammar and formatting theirs):
Today was just like any other day. However, I finally decided to tell them about it. Below are copies of a few emails that tell the whole story.
MIME structure of this message, including any attachments:
1. (text/plain), 12 lines Download this text
2. [paperclip] winmail.dat (application/ms-tnef), 271 K
--------------------------------------------
Please see attached Adobe Acrobat .pdf document containing the I.T Department Newsletter.
Regards,
Homerton I.T. Department
--------------------------------------------
Homerton College I.T. Department
http://www.homerton.cam.ac.uk/itdept/
Ext. 7/8009
Notice that the claimed PDF file is not attached! Instead there's something called 'winmail.dat'. "What the fuck is winmail.dat?" most would ask. Let's see:
Hello,Ridiculous, hmm? I wasn't quite done, either.
I feel I should point out a problem regarding the email the IT dept. sent out earlier today. The problem revolves around the fact that most users do not use MS Outlook to view their mail in hermes; rather the webmail interface is used.
It was claimed that a PDF file was attached to the email, but all recipients not using Outlook to view the email only see an attached file called winmail.dat. This is a proprietary file format which contains formatting data, attachments etc., and is not viewable by anything other than Outlook.
Given that most (I'm sure upwards of 90%) recipients use the webmail interface to their hermes accounts, the newsletter that exists as a PDF within winmail.dat will remain hidden and unread by this significant proportion of people.
May I direct your attention to the following web page which describes the problem in more detail, and proposes remedies for the situation:
http://www.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm
Kind regards,
Mark Florian
Hello,It is so relieving to get frustration out in a useful form. I'm telling them how to do their jobs!
After manually extracting and reading the newsletter from the winmail.dat file described in my previous email, I noticed a request whereby the desire for a piece of software to be present on the network should be forwarded to the IT dept..
Therefore I would like to request two pieces of software to be made available:
- MATTER, a learning and teaching package for Materials and Mineral Scientists, and
- Mozilla Firefox.
The former is an extremely useful package for Natural Scientists, and work is reguarly performed using the software. With the current situation, students must travel to the centre of Cambridge to access it.
The latter is a web browser that offers *significantly* increased security over Internet Explorer. In conjunction with this, I would consider including an "Installing Firefox" stage at the start of terms just as valuable as the anti-spyware and anit-virus stages in terms of system security.
Kind regards,
Mark Florian
Oh, and James, you'll like this bit from the newsletter (emphasis mine; [lack of] punctuation, spelling, grammar and formatting theirs):
Twelve Stages for Student Room Connections - Why Every Term ?Love it.
The amount of stages to complete is likely to be significantly less in the New Term but the re-connection process needs to be repeated at the beginning of each new term to ensure Adware, spyware or Viruses picked up from Broadband or Dial-up connections at home are removed before re-connection. We have to enforce these stages to ensure Stability and a reliable service to those already connected. We know other colleges have alternative arrangements some of these have proved to be at the expense of their users PC's
Quote from a UK University I.T Dept allowing students to plug in directly to the internet :
"On our residences network this year we have had support problems far beyond those experienced previously. Within about 20 minutes of a student PC connecting to the network it is likely to be infected by a "Spyware Trojan" and other "Malware" which displays popup web pages for pornographic sites. We have found the problem very difficult to clear from affected PCs."
posted by markrian at 2:13 pm
