MATTly

I spent the morning of my day off taking care of some long-overdue server upgrades. All of my Linux servers are running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but I decided I’d like to give them all an upgrade to the latest 11.10 (although 12.04 is due later this month). Of course, this simply meant executing do-release-upgrade a [...]

Did you see the movie Social Network (a.k.a. the Facebook movie)? It was about the founding of the most popular social networking site, and in it was a term used many times: “plugged in”. Well, I’m under no illusion that I am or can be among the elite when it comes to software programming, but [...]

I’ve been developing a new employee portal application for my employer, Ener-Tel. The project started out as a new sales estimate tool, and then evolved into a concept of an all-in-one web portal which will host various tools for all employees, not just salesmen. At Ener-Tel, we use Active Directory, so it’s important for this [...]

I have a binary clock on my desk, and like most other [normal] clocks, it loses time during power outages. Resetting the time easy enough, but I always forget how to change it to 24-hour format (a.k.a. Military Time). I figured it out, and decided to post a note here in case it helps anyone [...]

I’ve recently been tasked with developing a new application for our sales executives. It will be a project estimating tool, and it will replace the Excel spreadsheet they currently use. Actually, the concept of this application, named Moxie, has evolved to become a central web portal for all employees where they will find all sorts [...]

Wow. I’ve been running my own servers for years, now, and I’ve never suffered an outage as bad as the one that just occurred over the past week. Starting about Wednesday of last week, I discovered that I could not access my email one evening after work, yet I had just accessed it right before [...]

VMware has bumped it’s ESXi to version 4, and although I’m not familiar with all of the improvements over the previous 3.5 release, I am happy to hear that version 4 requires a 64-bit system. However, in my ventures to upgrade my ESXi server, I have learned that both vSphere Client (formerly Infrastructure Client) and [...]

I’ve written many applications in various languages, and most are web-based. As far as web-based, my language of choice is PHP because it’s easy to use, can be object-oriented, free of charge, and supported by nearly all web servers. I really like ColdFusion, too — the tag-style syntax is really slick, but it’s expensive. This [...]

I’ve had Windows 7 RC installed for a week, now, and even though i only get to touch my ‘puter a few hours a day, I have to report that I’m really liking it. And if I’m liking a release candidate, then the final version ought to be GREAT! No crashes and no hinderances, which [...]

Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista has been in the works for several months now. The release candidate was available for download from Microsoft a few days ago. There are unlimited downloads and anyone can get a key. The operating system is not gratis, though — the license will be good until June 1st, [...]