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CBC’s I.T. department is extending its “Detox” program until May 18 (four extra weeks) and have prepared some FAQ‘s that should answer your questions about our upcoming archiving system.
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| Asides, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 12:54 am (16 Apr 2008) |
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Back aches, eye strain and carpal tunnel syndrome are just a few common work-related injuries. Find out how to set up your work space to avoid these and other injuries.
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| Health and Wellness, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 4:25 pm (30 Mar 2008) |
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The volume of spam messages received by CBC/Radio-Canada has grown from about one million messages each week in 2006 to near seven million today. That accounts for over 90% of the 1.5 million messages processed by our e-mail servers on a daily basis.
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| Asides, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 8:39 am (18 Mar 2008) |
Just a quick note for those of you (CBC employees) who work in Toronto and use or work with Linux. There will be a CBC Linux Users’ Group on Thursday, April 10th at noon in 3G200 (the “Idea Room” near the blue elevators).
April’s topic will be “Using Linux to Access CBC Corporate Services: What Works and What Doesn’t”. They’ll review known methods by which Linux users can access GroupWise, Novell Netware shares, other Windows applications, Contivity VPN, etc. and what Linux distributions have been known to work well.
The meeting will be followed by an escorted tour of the National Data Centre for all those interested.
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| Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 8:31 am (18 Mar 2008) |
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If you work in the Vancouver plant, please trash or Archive (burn to CD, save elsewhere) DaletPlus items that are not absolutely necessary for production. In the past week or so Dalet’s storage has increase from 70% full to over 90% full. Contact the Dalet Lama, Doug Lane, for help.
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| Asides, Vancouver, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 11:31 am (17 Mar 2008) |
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CBC’s spam filter launches Monday and IT staff say it should all but eliminate “false positives” – those valid emails inadvertently blocked by the system. Messages sent from legitimate sources will now get through, which should spell relief for reporters working on stories requiring reference to words that might otherwise trigger the filter.
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| Asides, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 1:57 pm (29 Feb 2008) |
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As someone who only works inside the Vancouver plant a couple of days a week (most of my work is outside the building), I was thrilled to discover that you can reach people through our in-house Groupwise Messenger system — even when you’re not in a CBC building.
To do so, you’ll need either Groupwise Messenger installed on your PC.
If you’re on a Mac, you can connect to our instant messenger network from the outside world as well — just download Adium (it’s free), go the Adium/Preferences, and enter your Novell username, usually your last name and first initial (e.g., maffint).
You’ll need to know the server name and port — email me (Tod Maffin) from your Groupwise account and I’ll give you the deets.
And feel free to add me to your Groupwise Messenger contact list. 
UPDATED:
Check the comments for some updated information about this.
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| Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 3:27 pm (26 Feb 2008) |
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Later this year, the CBC’s I.T. department plans to assess whether it should switch the corporate web browser standard to Firefox 3.
Firefox is a free, open-source web browser which has gained a solid following in the past few years, notably for its stronger security and better ability to render web pages accurately. It also has “tabs” which make it easier to keep multiple web pages open.
CBC standardized on Internet Explorer 6 more than two years ago (it came pre-installed with Windows XP). Windows 2000 users were upgraded about a year ago. Still, says Dean Mannella, CBC’s senior manager of workstation services, “We still have a portion of the population using Netscape and a growing footprint for Firefox.”
“From a security perspective, Firefox has gained much support in the industry and offers great flexibility through extensions,” Dean told me. “As such we will be considering this a possible standard, but we will be reviewing IE 7 and Firefox 3 equally.”
But it won’t be an easy decision.
Microsoft’s web sites don’t play nice with Firefox (or any other non-Microsoft browser for that matter). Some Microsoft sites, like those for updating Windows, simply won’t work at all on Firefox. Also, the CBC has a number of web applications that would most likely have to be re-coded to reduce their reliance on ActiveX, an IE-only technology.
Which web browser do you prefer?
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| Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 11:14 am (08 Jan 2008) |
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CBC’s network briefly blocked employees from from visiting social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace this morning. Also, some personal blogs, like John Gushue‘s and the popular anonymous Teamakers blog were not accessible.
John Mang, operations manager for B.C. radio said: “It looks like was was a technical glitch. It was certainly unintentional. One phone call and it is being fixed.”
Ray Carnovale, head of CBC’s I.T. confirmed that and said the blockage “may be something going on external to us.”
All regions should have access to all those sites again.
What I think was interesting was just how fast news spread in the Corporation. I was on-air at the time and was getting dozens of CBC folks emailing me within the space of an hour. It spread quickly within the Vancouver radio newsroom and, presumably, others.
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| I.T., Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 10:27 am (31 Oct 2007) |
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CBC archives staffer Paul Gorbould has written a great parody of a CBC memo (I actually thought it was the real thing for a moment):
Next GroupWise purge: Saturday, October 20th, 2007
On October 20th, 2007, we will purge all GroupWise accounts of non-archived mail dating from prior to October 19th, 2007.
We realize that the inability to store messages for more than 24 hours may cause some minor inconvenience to employees. To minimize the impact of this new policy, please follow these steps:
- If you think you may need particular details at a later date, please commit them to memory, or write them down in a three-ring binder. But please purge the pages from your binder at least once a week, as binder space is expensive. NOTE: Information Technology is investigating an upgrade to 3″ binders, but these may not work with all applications and are not supported.
- If you intend to be on vacation or sick for more than 24 hours, please set up an auto-delete rule on your GroupWise account. A simple automated reply message should be created, such as: “I’m sorry, I’m not around to receive your e-mail right now, and have deleted it. Please try again when you know I’m at my desk.”
You can read the rest of it on Paul’s blog.
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| Fun Stuff, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 4:26 am (12 Oct 2007) |
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There are 1,163 CBC employees and regular freelancers who have accounts on Facebook as of today. That’s about 12% of the CBC’s workforce, including Radio-Canada.
Today, IT security firm Sophos said that 50 percent of workers are being blocked from accessing Facebook by their employers who are worried about the website’s impact on productivity and security, and have therefore put policies or access controls in place to ban its use in the workplace.
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| I.T., Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 1:35 pm (21 Aug 2007) |
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Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on reducing spam from Groupwise.
First, a bit of background.
Junk Mail Handling located in the Tools menu can help you decide what to do with unwanted mail from the Internet. This includes all e-mail, appointments, or tasks where the sender’s address is in the form or name@domain.com, name@domain.org, and so forth.
Junk Mail Handling does not apply to internal e-mail, appointments, or tasks. Internal items are e-mails, appointment, or tasks where the sender is part of your GroupWise system and the From field shows only the name or the sender, not an Internet address as explained above.
Let’s Get Started
First, pull down the Tools menu and select Junk Mail Handling

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| Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 3:45 pm (17 Aug 2007) |
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One of my first jobs as a journalist was working for a small newspaper on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. (Just up the road from The Beachcombers’ famous Molly’s Reach, actually.) Computer layout software had just been invented and was quite buggy. Every couple of hours or so, it would pop up a blank dialog box — the only thing in the box was an “OK” button.
We called it the Sanity Checker. It was like the program was concerned about us — “Are you okay?” “Yes, thank you for checking in again. I’m ok.” Click. Then we could go back to work.
Seems DaletPlus has a funny little bug that’s similar. You probably won’t see it unless you’re an administrator, since it’s not in the regular users’
Pierre-Hugues Pelletier in Desktop Radio Support in Montreal noticed it this morning:
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| Bloopers, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 11:20 am (03 Aug 2007) |
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UPDATE: Turns out, CBC isn’t behind this at all. Someone is just scraping the CBC’s RSS feed and posting the content there. I thought it might be too good to be true.
Purely by happenstance, I stumbled onto CBC News’ Twitter page. (Right now, only 30 people are following the feed.)
If you haven’t used Twitter before, it’s sort of hard to describe, but imagine having CBC send news updates to your computer screen whenever there are updates. (You use a third-party app to have it send directly to your screen.) Here’s some more information about Twitter.
Lots of the digerati are using Twitter, sort of as a way of broadcasting short little messages about their day out. My Twitter page, for instance, has notes whenever I post a new blog entry, and sometimes I just ramble a bit on it.
It’s nice to see our news group playing with some of the new tools out there, though it would be easier to find these kinds of experiments if we had some kind of cbc.ca/beta web page that aggregates our sandbox-playing, like how Google does it or how Yahoo does it.
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| Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 4:28 pm (01 Aug 2007) |
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So Vancouver, what do you think of the new DaletPlus?
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| Vancouver, Workstations and Desktops | Posted at 3:47 pm (25 Jul 2007) |
CBC Twitter Feed