General Rambling

Everything is Covered in Everything

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Quick Public Service Announcement: I’ve noted a resurgence of “OMG POOP SMARTPHONE” stories lately (there was a streak of them a while ago, too), and I’d just like to point out some other things that have bacteria on or in them: Everything on Earth. This becomes pretty clear if you are, or involved with, someone who is pregnant, as pregnancy’s effect on the immune system makes people temporarily suceptible to listeriosis (among most other things). What is listeriosis? It’s an infection caused by Listeria bacteria. Where does Listeria live? ON ABSOLUTELY ALL OF YOUR UNCOOKED FOOD.[0] Nasty? Perhaps. But I liken this to the junior sysadmin that first types “free” at a UNIX shell prompt, and discovers, OMG OMG, that …

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How To Find Your iPad/iPod/iPhone's UDID Without The Device

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Sometimes you need the UDID for your iPad, iPod, or iPhone and you don’t have the device. Or you do have the device but it’s b0rked, like from installing development iOS and forgetting to add the device to your account. And you’ve got a Windows desktop, so all the Mac instructions out there don’t help a ton. It’s simple. Start->Run, then: %appdata%Apple ComputerMobileSyncBackup The folders there are named according to your device UDIDs. You can probably use the folder dates & times to figure out which is which, or if you need to get more detailed open Info.plist or Manifest.plist and look at the applications that were installed. If you need your device’s serial number check this post. Good luck!

Digital IRS W-9 Forms

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The more consulting work I do the more I end up scanning and FAXing forms back & forth. The United States’ Internal Revenue Service has done us a big favor and created PDF versions of commonly used forms like the W-9. However, there’s no provision to sign and date them electronically. Here’s what I’ve been doing to avoid having to FAX or scan printed copies: 1. Grab the form you need from the IRS’ “Forms and Publications” index. 2. Sign a blank white piece of paper with a black pen or Sharpie. Take a photo of your signature with your smartphone so you can only see the white background and get it to your PC (mail it to yourself or …

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vSphere 5 Update 1 and vCenter Agent Upgrades

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We applied vCenter 5 Update 1 on Sunday in my environment, which is earlier than we often do because there’s some bugs we needed fixed (namely the issues with Fault Domain Manager/HA and SSL certificate replacement). We’ve been running Update 1 in our test environment since its release, and it looked solid. But as any experienced IT person will tell you, production isn’t test. Ever. After the upgrade none of the hosts were connected to vCenter, and there was a task for each cluster entitled “Upgrade vCenter agents on cluster hosts” that did not proceed, did not terminate, and was uncancellable. The hosts themselves had a warning message on the summary tab indicating that a manual upgrade of the agent …

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Good Uses For Old Technology

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I was just telling Alex Barrett of TechTarget that I’ve been feeling very grumpy lately, and a few of you have poked fun at me over the last week for being kinda negative. Sorry about that. To make it up to you let me share with you 42 seconds of what I spent my lunchtime watching: people making music with 3.5″ floppy drives: He’s got a bunch of songs on his YouTube channel and is actively adding more. There’s another guy, MrSolidSnake745, that’s got some songs posted, too, using the same code, and appears to be collaborating with Sammy1AM. I think my favorite floppy-song of his is “What is Love?” I hope the rest of your day is as enjoyable as …

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"When in Rome, be a Roman candle"

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“Never be afraid to change the circumstances in which you find yourself.” – Maitri Erwin, in her eulogy for her friend Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and ostensibly the father of eBooks. The title quote appears to be from Mr. Hart himself. It meshes well with what Guy Kawasaki wrote over the weekend, in “What I Learned From Steve Jobs.” Particularly the part about “changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.” I like that, perhaps because I’ve never been apologetic for changing my mind. Or for occasionally being the Roman candle. 🙂

Bleeding Seven Colors

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My first meaningful computing experience was on an Apple IIe in grade school. From the moment I first used the machine I was hooked. I’d find ways to stay in from recess, and stay after school, to play the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium’s “Oregon Trail” or “Number Munchers.” I even had a subscription to ENTER Magazine, for as long as it ran. Friends and I, on their IIgs’ and IIcs, would dutifully type in the BASIC programs that they printed, just to see a moire pattern or explore a very limited dungeon. And oh. my. god. Print Shop. I would have borne Brøderbund’s children, if I’d only known where babies came from. The summer before my seventh grade year my …

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LSI Security Question Fail

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I was trying to register for access to the LSI download center and in the process I ran across a very interesting security question: Gee, guys, if I knew what my password was I wouldn’t need the security question. I also enjoy “What is your mother’s last name?” Consider that a disproportionate number of IT staff are men, and that, at least in the USA, women of my mother’s era usually took their husband’s last name. It’s highly probable that my mother’s last name is the same as mine… This is all on top of the fact that it’s asking for passwords and such without SSL. I think it’s safe to say that your security is not their priority.

How to Fix Google Chrome Font Rendering Issues

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I’ve been having a heck of a time with terrible font rendering in Chrome. In fact, it’s been my biggest complaint about that browser. I get fonts with missing pieces, fonts that don’t render completely, text that is completely absent, and text with severely pixelated edges. I don’t mean to be a snob about it, but I look at this thing many hours every day, and I’d like it to work right. Here’s a severe example. The image on the left is what I saw in Chrome, and the image on the right is what I should have seen when visiting a particular web site:         That’s like WTF levels of crappy, right? It was happening all the time, on …

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Two Things I Really Would Like From Mozilla Thunderbird

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While I was on vacation I noticed that the Mozilla Foundation released Thunderbird 5.0. From the release notes it’s clear that a lot of cleanup work happened with this release, improving “speed, performance, stability and security,” but not very many new or revolutionary features. I like Thunderbird a lot, and I like that they’ve focused on stability more, but I still have two feature requests for future releases. Multi-client synchronization The promise of IMAP is that you are able to check your email anywhere, and it can stay on the server. There are also some nice things about thick email clients, like better searching, easy junk mail processing, offline modes, etc. The problem lies in having two copies of Thunderbird …

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