Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • TED Talk: The Internet’s Immune System

    I really enjoyed this TED Talk on hacktivists the first couple times I watched it a year ago and a few months ago. Not sure why I have not yet posted it. The beauty of hackers, says cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari, is that they force us to evolve and improve. Yes, some hackers are bad…

  • Snow Storm Effect On Traffic

    Tuesday afternoon a bit of snow hit Georgia. We get them occasionally even down here in the southern United States. Usually they hit the mountains. Everywhere else, we just shut down for a few days. Unfortunately, we do not have all of our Atlanta schools on one system or all of our south Georgia schools…

  • Leading Zeros In A Batch Timestamp

    As “plumbers” for 17 databases and over a hundred application servers, we really do not have the time to sit there and watch them all. We design things so problems are pushed up to our attention. We are still getting point of predictive alerts to failures like we were on RHEL/Weblogic/Oracle, so usually we only…

  • SQL Server Alias Naming Breaks Convert Function

    The vendor installs the application which includes creating the database and schema (SQL Server 2008 R2). The schema defined a certain column as varchar(128) that the application code expects to return an integer. If one of the entries for a client is a non-integer value, then HTTP 500 Internal Server Error failures prevent users from…

  • Amazon Cloud Player Confusion

    When I hit the play/pause button the keyboard, a completely different song starts playing while the one I wanted to stop pauses. I kept hitting the button and listening to them alternate back and forth. Very odd behavior until I figured it out. Apparently both my normal MP3 player software and Amazon Cloud Player (ACP)…

  • Counting Folders

    Back in June, after a whole seven months in our system, one of our clients hit Microsoft’s limit in the max number of folders within a folder. They are on track to do it again a year later. I lost the first script I wrote to figure out which directories were affected, so I wrote…

  • 10.2 Upgrade

    Later this week both of our production systems will get upgraded from Desire2Learn 9.4.1 to 10.2. This will be an epic effort. Over several days a few dozen people will work on various aspect of the databases, application servers, and testing. Good ‘ole clean IT fun just in time for Christmas. Finding the magical gap…

  • WP to G+

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    WordPress Jetpack finally enabled publishing to Google+. So, I guess my blog posts will finally head there. UPDATE: Google permissions are hard. The first test post showed it was “Shared privately” which by looking closer appeared only to myself. My default permissions for approved applications is “Only Me.” I had to go into Settings > Manage…

  • Stop Processing More Rules

    By default Outlook adds “stop processing more rules” to message filters. Eventually I run into the error: The rule has a condition the server cannot process. The action ‘stop processing more rules’ will prevent all remaining server rules from being carried out. Are you sure this is what you want to do? Well… That is…