A little over a month ago I installed Ubuntu Linux ‘s Edgy Eft on my production workstation. I use this machine pretty much all day everyday. I’m a network admin/help desk/server admin IT guy and this machine needs to perform or I can’t do my job.
After a few obstacles, I wouldnt even call them obstacles so much as normal desktop set up routines, I had PDF’s displaying fine, printers printing,e-mails mailing, and file shares sharing. My box integrated into our windows network like a duck to water. The terminal services client let me interface with my servers just like the client in XP and with a little “apt magic” I had wine set up and it was quite content to run the windows ultra-vnc client we use to manage all our remote desktops when a user calls in with an issue.
After feeling very confident that I could do all that I could do in XP in my shiny new OS with a whirling 3D desktop, although some may argue sucks productivity actually aids in keeping me alert during monotonous trouble shooting calls from the field, I had to reset a domain password. I had to reboot to windows. First time in about 2 weeks.
I figured I’d do a little googling for linux active directory tools, then I kept digging and seeing if I could find LDAP tools that would work. No such luck. I was tied to “active directory users & computers”. So I set up 1 of the spare PC’s we have laying around and just leave ADUC running on it and it actually increased the ease of completeing tasks in AD as that admin console takes a a year and a day to open up…but thats another story.

More updates to come….perhaps a top 10 useful apps to know once you switch over.

I took the plunge. I upgraded to Vista. Well I made my first feeble attempt at it anyway. I downloaded the upgrade from Circuit City, backed up my data, and kicked off an “in-place” upgrade. It failed royally. The percentage bar reached 95%, my computer rebooted and I was greeted with a lovely BSOD.
My primal technolust and burning desire to have the latest and greatest came back and bit me in the ass per its usual style…meaning I now needed to reinstall my entire OS and tweak it to my desires. A good 3-4 hour process, maybe less if I’ve done it a couple times in the recent past. I do this exact task multiple times a week at work or on virtual machines, but this was my rig. My digital life boat in cyber-space. I was now hours away from listening to my iTunes music library, and a good 10 CD’s worth of game installs and patching on top of that from indulging in my digital heroin that is World Of Warcraft. I was less than pleased.
I am an admitted technology addict. Despite being burned by my upgrade attempt, I was uplifted by the fact that it was easy enough to click a few buttons and return my $260.00 Vista download. (Yes, I paid that much for a downloaded file.) My “genuine” install CD’s of Vista are in the hands of UPS now and my next attempt at the jump to Vista is fast approaching..

2/8/07

I’m back up and running my OEM copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. For 4 days now I’ve been getting acquainted with my new operating system and there are some perks and as with any major change in OS some growing pains.
For the first day and a half my hard disk was making thrashing noises as if in constant use. This worried me a little so I did a little googling and come to find out Vista is indexing all of my 750GB of HD’s. The iTunes library always campe up big in my books because I could type in any part of a song or artist and boom my library would trim down instantly to what I was looking for, I type “rock” it shows me my rock music or any song with the word “rock” in it, very intuitive. I now have that same type of functionality with my entire hard drive and document library. I tweaked the indexing feature to only index certain folders and the thrashing came to a finish quite fast. I have a good 4 years of IM logs and eerily I can type in almost any persons name or screen name and be staring at every conversation I’ve had with that person on AIM over the past 4 years. Nifty feature.
The eye candy. One of the features touted in many a Vista article is the “Aero Glass” interface. I do admit it is very pretty to look at, but I do think its not all that original. I mean look at beryl…and that is free. As far as responsiveness on the whole its about on par with XP. This will obviously change if you turn off aero-glass or vary dependent on system hardware.
The widgets or gizmos, aka wastes of screen space are very functional, some more useful than others. The clock, CPU, Memory, and HD widgets seem to fit just right in on my 24″ widescreen LCD, but on a smaller screen may just prove to be to much clutter. As of now the “live gallery” has pretty slim pickins as far as selection for additional downloads go, but as with most new OS releases time will remedy this issue.
Driver support. From reading on boards and other sites is peoples most frequent gripe. All my hardware picked up and worked, and if it didn’t have a driver Vista was kind enough to go out and download the ones I needed. For those of you wondering if your system will work with vista, if its less than 1 to 1.5 years old the answer is most likely yes. Anything older than that bought from the consumer market I would say would not provide the best experience with Vista.
I’m going to continue to use the OS for a few more weeks and provide some more impressions as I become more familiar with the environment.2/15/07

• WoW, iTunes (at least for me), BitTorrent, more specifically uTorrent, work without a hitch for me. The 3 major things I use my computer for all work flawlessly. DRM’ed tracks from iTunes play, DivX and Xvid files play in media player fine, and dead-aim works for instant messaging. Things seem sluggish at times but nothing to the point of effecting usability.

• Interface – nice, usable, nothing to ground breaking. Not so much an upgrade as a change of scenery. A welcome one, but still following the Microsoft formula of finding a good idea, stealing it, and then selling it to make a buck.

• UAC – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80sWifG40B0 – the secret service agent in this ad…thats UAC. User Access Control. And it is FREAKING ANNOYING. For any enthusiast user or person that likes to change the desktop to meet their working style it is a major pain in the ass. Don’t believe me? Try changing around your start menu in Vista. It is most certainly a welcome security feature for Mom and Dad using the computer, but for anybody that likes to change things around I recommend turning it off while you get yourself settled and have everything how you like it and then go ahead and turn it back on.

Overall Impressions so far:

I’m on the edge, an early adopter, where I like to be and despite all the annoyances and growing pains I’ve experienced along the way with my jump to Vista I have not been discouraged enough to say “screw it” and go back to using Windows XP. Time, I can only hope, will help to remedy some of my gripes, but for those with the capable hardware and the burning desire to upgrade to the latest and greatest take the plunge…enjoy the OS as it matures. For the feint of heart and those averse to a little change enjoy the rest of XP’s still long and useful life span.

    For the feint of heart or technologically less-inclined you can get a host such as dreamhost that has one-click installs to get you up and blogging with literally the push of a button. I’m contemplating moving on over there as the features seem unbeatable and the host is run and owned entirely by its employees which seem to have been making an honest effort to improve there service quality and avoid, well as much as possible, overselling space on there servers.

On a seperate note these blogs are good reads….

http://www.steve-olson.com — no idea how I came across this one but he has some very original ideas, a few of which but not all appeal to me.

http://www.blogmaverick.com — .Com billionaire Marc Cuban’s blog. His topic are wide ranging but he always seems to be one step ahead of the main stream of just about any business topic, be it marketing, advertising, sales, or technology. This ability to be ahead of the competition is likely what made him the majority of his fortune.

Lately I’ve been reading alot of forums. Mainly regarding two things I love. My car and my computer. And I’ve read both of these forums for a good time, but if I ever get bored I can go read up on just about anything and get what I would call semi-reliable, as in I would verify anything posted by these internet-know-it-alls/experts with at least three reliable sources not connected in anyway to the internet. But I digress..

Recently with the proliferation of photoshop and other basic photo editing software, image search engines , and digital cameras dropping into the price range of just about any body able to hold a minimum wage job the masses have started to create what I’ve come to know ,and usually derive a good chuckle out of, as thread bombs.

The Life Cycle of a thread on the internet usually goes as follows:

• Statement or question, usually of a technical manner at least in the forums I frequent. Another type of thread starter are the look at me’s, which usually just consist of stupid pictures of what someone has bought or done to what they purchased or them desperately seeking attention from faceless people that think alike on the internet.
• Replies. If the question or statement was well formed and in complete sentences once in a rare while useful information can change hands. However, those are the exceptions and not the norm. And if you read forums you know what I’m talking about, but heaven forbid you forget to read the stickies, because if so do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, and proceed directly to receiving multiple replies along the lines of “can’t you read”, “are you retarded?”, or “use the search, jackass”.
• Counter point/example explaining why all the previous replies were stupid/and or wrong. This is the fuse of the thread bomb, so to speak. It usually goes down hill quickly after this.

These are by no means set in stone rules, but if you have ever followed or participated in a forum you can probably relate to at least a few of the points. Now thread bombs are the random gifs interspersed into threads, usually, but not always containing 4 letter words.

Here is a good source for a few examples —> http://www.ondmis.dk/forumpics1.htm

And lately my greatest joy has been including these pictures in my reply-to-all messages, as the images work just as well to the stupid mass e-mails that everyone’s friends usually send out. Don’t get me wrong I like getting them, but I like hitting reply-to-all and attaching a funny pic just knowing what some of the recipients faces/reactions are going to be when seeing them.

Strategies:
===========

1) Make suggestions and recommendations subtlety but with conviction
2) If a product has minimum requirements those are minimum suggested requirements and using anything less in production environment leads to number 8
3) Get other people to back up your recommendations
4) In emails avoid technical wording and if you must provide LINKS to EVERYTHING.
5) In documentation provide directions a monkey could follow and intersperse with screen shots liberally.
6) If you must do something that isn’t the way it should really be done, get it in writing, so when, not if, it goes FUBAR you can drop a number 8
7) Expect no recognition for your work, because ideally if you do your job right most people will ask “What does so-and-so do?”
The proverbial “I told you so”, not always worded as so, but enough to get the point across that you should have listened to someone who knows what they are doing.

In the event that these strategies fail you, and I include no guarantees or warranty of any kind along with them, so they likely will, just reassure yourself that you have it in writing and can always drop a reason number 8 and pass the e-mail with your directions from number 6 up the chain of command to alleviate all responsibility.

I got into grad school. To get my masters of science in Information technology from RPI in Hartford. Along with the acceptance came the realization that I’m about to go about 50k further into debt to accomplish this piece of schooling. I also discovered the so called “tuition reimbursement” for state employees is utter crap. I’ll be lucky if I get enough to pay for the costs of my books, let alone a full credit of course work.

Last weekend was one of the highlights of my summer. Sarah and I spent the weekend with her uncle, who happens to be a state trooper. He took us out on his boat and also to the Norwalk PD firing range.

Thats Sarah packin an H & K MP5 and me with a Remington 11-87 Police Semi-automatic tactical shot gun . We went and shot off a couple hundred rounds and suprisingly I found shooting a hand gun to be quite theraputic. (more pictures)

All things said and done, Life is good.

We are having a house warming party the Saturday of Labor day weekend to break in the new place, and if your reading this you’re invited.

Back Sometime earlier this year I decided to start collecting the gems of these posts and stashing them away in a little text file. Since I’ve started this I can think of three distinct occassions where I have actually been able to use some of the snippets I cut and pasted from Slashdot and Digg.(After checking sources and accuracy of course)

Being as both of the sites are highly technology related most of the comments center around IT, but I thought I’d share them anyway. Most of the notes are in the context of a thread, meaning a post and a response. The majority of which the topics in discussion can easily be discerned, but if not I’ll include comments in italics.

Some time in February:

Them:
“The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year. Additionally, they haven’t been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions.”

Us:
“The non-IT employees at my company (approximately some 5,000,000,000 people) are showing signs of incompetence, and have been ignoring knowledgeable technology input for about a year. Additionally, they haven’t been able to accept needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable computer usage, maxed bandwidth usage, and no common sense have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We geeks are staging a revolt to make users more responsable to IT by creating a group from the company divisions to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our meeting room to beat as many people as possible?”

Sometime in early March:

=== If there is work to be done, then I’d like to dial up the local expert/employee and know that the problem will be fixed *quickly* and efficiently. ===<

Only the fire department and the Marine Corps keep enough people on standby to handle any problem presented to them immediately (and even the Marines are a bit tied up at the moment). Every other entity queues, prioritizes, and triages. Your IT department *could* maintain enough knowledgable experts to answer your difficult questions in depth whenever you picked up the phone – I once worked with one that did. That department lasted a little less than 2 years; once senior management figured out how much it was costing they terminated it and replaced it with an outsourcer at 1/3 the cost. 1/5 the level of service, but that was not senior management’s concern (and perhaps rightly so).

My recommendation: stop demanding Five 9′s of service and stop expecting services to never reboot or need maintenance if you aren’t going to fund it. Stop dicking around at being a business and spend money to make money. Otherwise, save everyone time and bend over to your competition now. You can recommend all the fantastic new upgrades and services, but if your company doesn’t recognize the value of improved infrastructure services, and an educated staff, you don’t deserve to stay in business and sooner or later Darwin will rear his ugly

Many supposed IT problems should actually be solved by HR with a good talking to about abuse of company resources and how that might limit your career.

Calling IT when you forget your password for the 5th time that month or with some dumb question because you are too lazy to crack open a manual is no better than stealing office supplies or equipment. It’s all just stealing resources.

20% of the users create 80% of the work for IT.

3/27/06
I’d call the guy a “dumbass”, but he’s not necessarily stupid, just ignorant and bullheaded. Of course, ignorant and bullheaded do a very good impersonation of stupid when combined.
5/22/06
Now it gets hairy: If I grant for a moment that there’s no such thing as absolute computer security, then all these unsecured windows boxes out there are just the low-hanging fruit. Viruses and worms are only as smart as they need to be to pick those. This is fine with me as it means I merely have to have my fruit hanging higher than everybody else’s. My house doesn’t have to be absolutely burglar-proof — just harder to break into than my neighbors. I’ll never be perfectly termite-safe, but as long as I’m more termite-safe than my neighbors, they will attract all the termites. You get the picture.

If geeks succeede in training the masses in making their machines “more secure” it only means that the malware will become “more clever” and thus that my machine will be less secure than it is now. This is not in my interest. It is not in the interest of anybody who knows a bit of computers that those who don’t become computer-savvy. If I were working at MS, I wouldn’t have any incentive to make the sheeple’s computers “more secure”: it wouldn’t make me any additional money and it would make my own computer relatively less secure. So why would I?

6/20/06

Dont they have an “Complete Moron” clause somewhere that says idiots cant sue for being terminally stupid.

6/22/06
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind – Aristotle

6/30/06

Right after our servers crashed I happend across this little snippet and fell out of my chair laughing.

To the beetles “yesterday”

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data’s gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
Need for backup seemed so far away.
Seemed my data were all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

7/14/06

Schneier’s Law: “any person can invent a security
system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.”
This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering
if you’ve made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart
people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break
it. Without this critical step, you’ll eventually end up living
in a fool’s paradise

7/17/06

“It’s a paradox of abundance,’ said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. If people aren’t pressured to see a movie in a specific time frame, he said, viewers tend to put it lower on their priority list. ‘When you have every choice in front of you, you have less urgency about any particular choice.’”

-Why Netflix makes money

I read that quote in an article I was reading today, and after having recently received two new pieces of shiny technological goodness this week I’ve come to realize the simple yet profound truth it carries

.

I like to tinker and discover how things work under the hood, and I especially love to tweak the technology I own to reflect some of my interests , hence the first thing I did with my Verizon blackberry was to wipe the vendor centric OS off the thing and load the original software from blackberry allowing me to slap my Red Sox wallpaper onto the thing without a giant red “V” strung across the top. But I digress.

The things that I use most, be it software, mp3 player, or cell phone are things that are incredibly simple yet perform their specific functions exceedingly well to the point of them being almost intuitive.Transparent. They become part of our lives and we continue on as if we had always had them available to us. For case studies I would ask people to try using an iPod for music, a blackberry for e-mail, generally although not always the case, a motorola cell phone.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=318

Apparently, every AT&T aggregation switch has fibre connectivity with a seperate network passively monitoring all data that traverses its consumer networks. Data mining software from Narus is then used to sift through what “Deep Packet” reports as about 4 terabytes of data a day. The data mining software used is built around semantics, meaning it can extract usable data from the strings of ip addresses that make up your daily web browsing and e-mail sending routines.
Scary to think that AT&T would be so complicit in handing over customer information to the government. Its unprecedented and unacceptable.

From the case:

This case challenges the legality of Defendants’ participation in a secret and illegal government program to intercept and analyze vast quantities of Americans’ telephone and Internet communications, surveillance done without the authorization of a court and in violation of federal electronic surveillance and telecommunications statues, as well as the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Let your voice be known and help support the Electronic Frontier Foundation in fighting this grave errosion of our civil rights.

From June 6-11, we are staying at the Nassau Beach Hotel, sweet.

In other news:

I’ve become motivated and I am thinking of starting my own business. The budget will be shoe-string for the time being, and hopefully in time I can parlay my IT skills into something useful while holding my fulltime job down.

Not that anyone reads this, but how does the new design look? I switched content management systems from livejournal to something with a little more control, wordpress.