A tip of the hat to sysadmins everywhere. We keep the bits flowing no matter what!
Sysadmins
March 10th, 2010Autopatcher and how it saves me work…
March 9th, 2010I am currently on the second windows xp box that I have reinstalled for the week and just wanted to write a quick note in support of a great little tool that has saved me a fair amount of time. Even after you have installed the latest service pack for windows software, Microsoft releases a ton of patches, security updates and other junk that can take several reboots worth of windows update to be fully secure and up to date.
This is where autopatcher comes in, it will download all of the updates that have happened since Microsoft wrote it’s last service pack. From there you can either dump them onto a thumb drive or other storage and just run the autopatcher application every time you need to reinstall a computer. It also is easy to keep up to date with a nice little update script.
Autopatcher is also handy if you have a computer that is on a slow or no internet connection and you want to keep it up to date.
Microsoft Onecare Scanner
March 6th, 2010
At work I have noticed that many of the computers I support have had issues with hard drive fragmentation. Of course these are windows xp machines that have seen heavy use. It is a pain to have to go around to each user and explain how to use Disk Defragmenter MMC to clean up the mess. Thankfully Microsoft has created the Onecare Scanner that preforms a brief anti virus scan, spy ware scan, temp file cleanup, and disk defrag.
The one thing I have noticed is that it works best using internet explorer.
Live Onecare Scanner can be found at http://safety.live.com
Balsamiq Mockups
March 4th, 2010When I worked for the USDA as a student programmer, Steven introduced me to a rapid prototyping tool for software development. Now that I am out in the “real world” I occasionally need to mock up websites that I am developing.
In the little time I have used Balsamiq I found it easy to use and quick to get a rough sketch of what you were looking for to show the client. My only complaint is that it defaults to the crime against humanity that is MS Comic Sans. This is modifiable (kind of) to use your standard system font.
As you can see from the above video from the Balsamiq people, it is easy and quick. I could talk about it all day, however words can only do so much… they have a web launchable demo that is very usable at http://www.balsamiq.com/ .
Future plans for the product include a web app version that would enable users to not have to even install any software. Which should be fairly low hanging fruit as it is already an adobe air application (and one of the only ones that I have seen that are useful). The fact it is an air app also is a benefit as the developers are actively adding features all the time.
Car Problems…
March 3rd, 2010
For several years I have had a wonderful 1989 New Yorker (no that is not it in the photo). It just rolled through the 160,000 mile mark yesterday. As cars go it has been a good car, has run like a tank with few problems until now. Unfortunately as cars age parts wear out… and they seem to all fail at once. This winter has been a rough one on cars with the many potholes all forming at once.
The first failure was my transmission. Thankfully after consulting with a local shop (more about them later) they recommended that I take my car to Cottman Transmissions after replacing the transmission and two half axles, I asked the question… I should be good for a while now, right? To which they answered well your struts are a bit soft but yeh you should be good. Well, little did I know that I would be replacing the struts in under a week. In their defense they did a good job of replacing the transmission for a good price, but knowing the added expense of replacing the stuts I may have reconsidered fixing the car.
Next a couple weeks later I noticed a bit of a wobble on the front passenger side. Thinking it was a bad tire I took it to the local sam’s club to get my tires looked at. Turns out that yes they needed rotating and balancing, but it was the struts that were causing the big problem. Sam’s is good at what they do, but it is limited to the basic tire and battery stuff.
So then next stop was a shop that a coworker of mine sent an email about getting a 10% discount because he was friends with a manager there. Heartland tire and auto informed me that the front struts and back shocks were shot and that my Sway bar was broken. Unfortunately they do not make sway bars for my car anymore so we just will have to do with out. Heartland Tire and Auto also did a good job, but I hope that this is the end of my car problems for a while!
New Upgrades to my local network
March 3rd, 2010
In the this is way overkill for a small home network I have been messing around with using a unused computer as a router-firewall-proxy. Today the final piece of the puzzle came into place.
I currently get internet from Qwest DSL, unfortunately because I am out on the edge of town and am not a priority it is only a 1.5 Mb line. It works but is not as speedy as I would like. For my configuration I have a 2wire dsl modem set in bridge mode. On my side of the DSL modem I have set up a HP/Compaq ProLiant DL360 that I got free from a fellow LUGer. It is running a copy of Karmic Ubuntu server edition. I configured it to connect to the DSL using PPPoE using ppoeconf. Finally on the lan side of the network NAT is provided by shorewall. I also configured the server to provide DHCP service and transparent proxying via Squid.
The final part of the local network came today via UPS, a D-Link DGS-2208 gigabit switch. So far, the move to gigabit Ethernet has been nice between my file server and desktop. To round out the network, G wireless is being provided by a WRT54G router with its routing features shut down.
All total it has been a nice little exercise in server configuration and network management. The next project will be configuration of an openvpn tunnel for remote system access. But that is a project for another day.
Microsoft announces out-of-band patch
January 21st, 2010If you haven’t been living under a rock the past week you have surely heard of the Chinese hacking of Google and several other firms via a browser hole in Internet Explorer.
The bug reported in MS Security Advisory 979352 will be patched tomorrow in a rare out-of-band patch that does not follow Microsoft’s standard patch Tuesday schedule of once a month. The flaw supposedly only affects ie 6 on up, however IE 6 is the only browser that has a known exploit. More information is available in the advisory. There also will be a webanar tomorrow where Microsoft will announce further information. If you run Windows be sure to run windows update tomorrow and apply this critical patch and upgrade to the newest version of Internet Explorer
It also may be a wise idea to follow the advice of Germany, and France and leave IE entirely. I recommend looking into one of several alternatives including:
Happy Holidays
December 31st, 2009I know that this is a bit late, but it is that time of year again… Time to wish everyone a “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!” This year was the year that I almost didn’t make it to my Grandparents house due to the weather (as it was Jess and I braved the freezing rain, a low tire, and etc…). Unfortunately Dad got stranded in Algona and was unable to make it, but we did have Tena’s new husband and Jess so that helped a little bit 
Here is a picture of everyone, for more photos of Christmas see my Flickr page. The highlight of the night was the Candle light service (yes they had it even though the children’s program was canceled) where Grandma’s new knees allowed her to play her bells and tear around the whole church.
This is also the time of year for Christmas cards, I am still finishing up mine but have mailed most of them. This year Jess and I did a joint mailing with each other’s letters on one piece of paper. We also saved on postage by including our “Save the Date” cards for our wedding. Below is our Christmas letter:
Abbot and Costello in a modern day “Who’s on First”
December 29th, 2009I got this from a friend today and figured that I would pass it on…
If Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were alive today, their infamous sketch, “Who’s on First?” might have turned out something like this:
Another Free AV option…
December 5th, 2009Quite a while back, I wrote about free anti virus options. Well since then there has been a major entry into the market by the folks responsible for all the security holes in the first place, Microsoft. With a security suite named “Microsoft Security Essentials” they provide free anti virus and malware protection for windows xp and higher. I have used it on several machines and it preforms as advertised, however I still wonder if Microsoft is trustworthy enough not to screw up anti virus as much as they have screwed up their OS. If you want to give it a try it is available at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx