What is Web 2.0?

I ran across this great video titled “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University that presents the concept of Web 2.0 in a very interesting and informative way.

New Electronic Records Rules

I’m looking for some help from loyal readers (all 3 of you). If you were not aware, on December 1, 2006 new rules for storing and archiving electronic files went in to place. I’ve been looking for a relative concise document/article that explains in clear language what I need to do at work to insure [...]

Microsoft Tries to Persuade Linux Users

In an interesting move Microsoft recently flew out some leading anti-Microsoft people to a press briefing at their headquarters for an in depth look at their new Vista operating system. Check out the following articles for their reaction and reviews:

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker’s Q&A with Microsoft about Windows Vista
Robin Miller of Linux.com’s Microsoft desperately wants [...]

Like a Gunshot In the Server Room

I’m told that’s what it sounded like when the power supply in our NetApp FAS 3020 dramatically failed last week. One of my administrators got a message saying there was problem with one of NetApps when he was home during the holiday weekend. He immediately called NetApp tech support which had already opened a case [...]

Syncing Files Between PC’s and Mac’s

I don’t know how I missed this, but Microsoft has a really great product/service that allows you to synchronize files between multiple computers (PC’s and Mac’s) across the Internet (thanks Mike for pointing this out). In addition the product also allows you to share files with your friends. This communication happens in a private peer-2-peer [...]

Graphing Sonicwall VPN Tunnel Usage

I have the need to track the network usage between each of our offices. We currently use IPSec based tunnels across the Internet for connectivity between all of our offices (we use a full mesh configuration). I looked around for way to monitor and graph the data for these tunnels off our Sonicwall firewalls, but [...]

Managing Your FLEXlm Licenses with Cacti and phpLicenseWatcher

So you are tasked with managing multiple FLEXlm based software license managers, but you want more than a dump of the current license information into a text file or in some horribly written and truly user-unfriendly Windows GUI. Then I have a couple of web based open source products for you, and while the installs [...]

MySQLImport Error

Just a reminder note, when using mysqlimport and you are getting an Error 13 you then probably need to use the ‘-L’ (local) flag. It tells mysqlimport to load data from a local file.

Lost in Translation

Computer based language translation has been out of quite a few years now. I often use when I run across a web page that I need to translate. Most times is does a good enough job to get the idea across. But what happens if you translate a phrase from English, to something else and [...]

Parsing Names in Excel

I was in need of parsing out the first, middle, and last names from a single field in Excel. The following site had the formulas necessary in order to make this happen: ITS Software Tip – 04/29/02 – Parsing Names in Excel. Note there is one problem, the coded listed for last name parsing on [...]