I’ve worked in IT for nearly 10 years now.  First as a help desk operator, then a Linux sysadmin, and now a Drupal developer/webmaster.   In that time, I’ve run into a handful of really perplexing problems.  ”Perplexing” meaning after hours (usually, days) of troubleshooting, I can’t figure out why the system is suddenly unstable.

You know those type of problems, right?

The kind that’s so perplexing that you’re sure it’s gotta be a hardware problem, even though your years of admin experience tells you it’s almost never (like 99.999% of the time) a hardware issue.  But you’ve looked at (seemingly) all the possible software causes.

I was just reminded of this recently, and I’m here to remind you:  It’s never a hardware problem.  It’s always a software problem.

PS: If you’re looking for VPS or dedicated server hosting, Rimu Hosting is a great choice.  When they say they have “professional technical support with a personal touch”, they mean it.  Rimu has by far the best support team of the half-dozen hosting companies I’ve worked with. And great support is the only differentiator that matters when choosing a hosting vendor.

Yammer has a new desktop client.

I like that you can pop out threads into new, separate windows.  Handy for keeping track of a particular conversation.  Best of the new features.

The new client feels snappier because your own updates are posted immediately in the client.  The sluggishness of the old client had me looking at Present.ly.

I don’t like that scrolling updates moves the input form too.  Very bad usability.

They got rid of the multiple skins.  That’s unfortunate because I like a darker color scheme and this new version is very bright.  But it’s not a big deal.

While we’re talking about Yammer, I’ll throw out some feature requests for the desktop and iPhone clients.

Desktop client:

• Presence indicator.  Like green for active (typed or moved mouse in last 60 seconds), yellow for semi-active (Yammer client open but no keyboard/mouse activity in a while), and gray for not online.
• Setting to resize text globally (smaller, larger).

iPhone client:

• Landscape mode for easy input.
• Search.
• View threads.