I’ve been working relatively quickly to try to get everything moved off of one of my servers in Dallas so that I can turn it into a virtual server. One of the things that had to go is my blog. Rather than hosting it inside of a VM (when the space, memory, etc. would be better sold), I decided to package it up and send it over to DreamHost. So far, my experience has been pleasing, and it was a surefire cannot pass-up-this-opportunity thing when they had the 777 deal – 1 year of hosting paid up-front at the amazing cost of $9.24.
I’ll be sure to blog about them on down the line. Not too much though – I’m still a hosting provider too. 
Because of the need to have Active Directory operating over SSL, Active Directory Certificate Services were setup in our environment.
For those unfamiliar with Active Directory Certificate Services, it is essentially a Public Key Infrastructure for a Windows Environment that cleanly ties into IIS, LDAP, and anything else that needs to request certificates and have a parent certificate authority seamlessly sign requests (real purpose is shortened for brevity).
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When you ask most people, the common perception of the role of a university is to teach students, perform research, and help the community. The latter is certainly one that I find many people (especially in university roles) don’t throw up as an answer, despite it being an important role of a university. It’s clear that this mentality runs rampant amongst individuals, especially software developers, at universities because of the lack of open source (or freely licensed) software that is provided by universities across the nation. Certainly, some have contributed more than their fair share (Virginia Tech, University of Washington, just to name a couple). However, many others, especially those who pride themselves on being one of the world’s most premiere research institutions, fail to meet up to the same standards as others. It’s about time that developers start banding together and becoming more creative and collaborative across the campus so that we can keep things moving forward.
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I found an article today that any Gentoo (and likely any Linux user) should look at if they want fonts to look better than either Windows or Mac OS X. Check it out.
I had been scouring the web this morning looking for a way to get the hostname of the server in my e-mails without hard-coding it into my action.d scripts (e.g. mail.conf, mail-whois.conf, etc.). The fail2ban wiki was not much help in this regard. In fact, somebody had posted this exact request on the community page, but it seems as though this request has not gone through. But, alas, I found a solution that’s not ideal, but isn’t the horrible must hard-code my hostname into every action.d script.
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This was an article I began writing several months ago. I didn’t want to abandon it, so I’m finishing it up now. It’s merely an informational and doesn’t contain a lot of depth. It’s meant for the introductory users.
For those PHP developers who have been frustrated with how to create a standard layout for pages other than having to remember to put an opening div block after the header includes and a closing div block before the footer includes, listen up. Things are about to get much easier. In fact, those PHP developers who have done ASP.Net programming in the past, you’re about to get much more pleased with PHP. The only drawback, which is more of a gain anyways, is you have to use the Zend Framework. Note that this topic is for those people who are not blessed withing already using a layout or template engine and are forced to do things the old way. Those of you who are using something like Smarty may not benefit from this, but keep reading anyways. 
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I really don’t think this has ever really been an age-old discussion. Business in the past had never really done much in the line of documentation (and for some businesses these days, it’s starting to show). Employees in the past knew specifically how to perform their tasks because they had become so engrained in the every day routine that it wasn’t necessary to document. I guess they also either had an underling that shadowed their every step so that they could step in, or business just didn’t get done then until the person responsible for that process got back into work.
Today, things are much different. Business moves so rapidly (especially in IT) that it’s impossible to rely on specifically one person to be the only person to get a job done. Furthermore, turnover occurs at a much higher rate, and the typical period that people are around for after they turn in their resignation is a mere 2 weeks (sometimes less than that, depending on the company).
So, documentation has become increasingly important from an operational perspective, as well as a business continuity perspective. Should an employee that had previously setup a particular service get “hit by a bus”, as the situation is called at Texas A&M, can business continue as normal with someone else filling his shoes? With the advent of Wikis (we use Confluence at the College of Architecture), it’s easy to author documentation, and a lot of it.
However, I see a potential problem – the number of new services we are standing up and web sites we are putting together is increasing and occurring faster than ever before. But in order to keep the documentation up-to-date, I find myself spending just as much time documenting my steps and changes as it took me to stand up the new service or web site. At what point should the documentation stop? How much information do I really need to convey through my documentation, and how much reasonable business time should I spend documenting my work?
Today marks what I believe to be the official first day of spring for Bryan/College Station. Despite the Spring Equinox occurring a little over a week ago, the temperatures have only recently begun to stablize above freezing, which is crucial for lawn and yard work. Anyone who’s been to my house in recent months has seen the shape it’s been in. It’s hard, uneven, and as of late has been overrun with weeds (especially in the back yard). This year I’m going to do everything I can to get it into better shape, but not without the help of some local professionals. I’m going to post pics and tricks that I learn that show either amazing improvements (or horribly backfire) so that others who own their own lawns can attempt the same to get it as green and lush as possible.
…that I can somehow feel like a member of the Battlestar Galactica family, even as a viewer? I just watched The Last Frakkin’ Special and can’t help but reflect how I somehow relate and/or wanted to relate with the actors and actresses in the series.
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I heard a story one morning while driving into work regarding one economist’s point-of-view on why the government is going about in the wrong direction in terms of handling business failures (in particular, AIG’s failing). I thought that the solution was very well put that it was worth mentioning (despite the fact that this economist was an advisor to both President Bush and later McCain).
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