Very nice!

As part of my asset acquisition process, I have to document serial numbers and assign an asset tags to each new asset. When I turned the monitor around, though, I ran in to a problem:

WTH?

Hey, uh, Dell? Did you forget something?

Well, actually they didn’t. Apparently all of the required labeling is too much of an ‘eye sore’, so Dell has decided to hide it:

Pretty Sneaky, Dell

I would have appreciated it if Dell would have made more of an effort to point out where it is (I actually had to refer to the unpacking diagram to show me), but that’s it. Hidden with the USB ports is a small little pull-out card. Now that I know it’s there, though, it does make it easier to get a serial number off of a monitor when I have to figure out which asset belongs to which program when someone has inevitably pulled off the asset tag.

Fun Fact – Number of times the word ‘ass’ appears in this post: 6.

ERROR: BIOS has no flash information available

As it turns out, this message doesn’t actually state than the end of the world is near, or that you’ll never be able to update your BIOS. In fact, all it means is that the laptop isn’t connected to AC power and is running off the battery. Simply plug in your laptop and the update will run without issue.

Now why couldn’t they have just said that in the first place?

While updating other parts of my account today, I decided to double-check the marketing settings, and found this:

Click for the full-sized image

Err, that’s great Rogers – you’re not going to have anyone call my work number, but why isn’t my cell phone in the list, and why can’t I add it?

A quick call to Rogers (meaning twenty minutes of hold time) later and I had an answer (sort of) – the rep that I got instructed me to http://www.rogers.com/optout and enter the relevant details to opt-out of all marketing on that number.

After doing this, my cell number still isn’t listed in the Marketing Opt-Out in my Rogers My Account section, but the site did say that it may take 1-2 weeks for the changes to take effect. Only time will tell, but next time the telemarketers call, there will be a few more questions as to how they got my number.

I’m no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I’m even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It’s their service, and there’s no opt-out link on the page.

Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different — you’ll need to alter them as applicable).

To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):

1. Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
2. Assume root (su command).
3. Remount the system partition in to read/write mode —  mount -o rw,remount /system
4. Browse to /system/etc.
5. Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
6. Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file — 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
7. Save and quit!

You’re done! You’ve just manually opt’ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you’ll just get the normal ‘Not Found’ errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you’ve entered doesn’t exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn’t running a webserver.

TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers’ Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

Update (05/01/2011): You can now officially opt-out using this link: http://searchassist.teoma.com/templates/rogers/optout

Fast-forward to the present. I had to do an OS reinstall on the users computer, and instead of installing Acrobat 7 first and then upgrading, I opted to do it my way and directly install version 9. The install went smoothly, and on first launch it asked for first my version 9 product key, then my version 7 key after determining it was an upgrade SKU.

Here’s where the problem occurred. After entering the Acrobat 7 key and selecting the correct SKU from the list, the installer spat out a message saying that the product key was invalid, or I had selected the wrong SKU. After double-checking both and finding they were indeed correct, I turned to Google. For once, Google couldn’t help me, so went to the last resort: calling Adobe support.

Surprisingly, after quickly jumping through their IVR menu, I was immediately put through to an agent. After describing the problem, and providing my contact information, he had me read off both product keys. I waited on hold for a few minutes, and then was told the problem.

During a normal upgrade, the installer simply checks for the presence of an old version of the product. If it’s there, you’re good to go. However, when you do a clean install and then enter an upgrade product key, the process changes. Now not only does it check to make sure that you have a valid product key for a valid SKU, it also checks to see that each product channel matches (read: if you had a VLK channel product, you must upgrade using another VLK product).

My problem was that while my original product key was from the VLK channel, my new upgrade was a Retail channel key. As such, it wasn’t being accepted as a valid upgrade path.

Fortunately, I was informed, there is a workaround for this. After launching Acrobat 9, it prompts you for the version 9 product key. After you enter that, you’re presented with a screen asking for the product key of your older version. At this point, we deviate from the normal path.

On that screen, hold CTRL and SHIFT, then double-click the window. A new window will appear, and you’ll be provided with a Challenge Code. After providing that to the agent on the line, and waiting on hold for a few minutes, he read back a Response Code which allowed me to bypass the product key check altogether.

So while I was able to get everything working, I really have to wonder, why include a channel check? If the normal upgrade process works, and if you can call in to support to get around it, why put it in at all? For me, it means that ever time I want to re-install Acrobat I’ll have to call in for support.

It really doesn’t make any sense to me. But then again, it’s pretty par for the course for Adobe….