Posts made by jasonh

I'll be updating my laptop this weekend!

Cool ; they finally copied FreeBSD Jail technology this is one thing I've been missing on Linux.

But why not leave a voicemail? If I were in his shoes, I'd leave a voicemail. And/or e-mail. And if for some reason I couldn't leave a voicemail/e-mail, I'd probably call the company's general phone # and talk to a secretary or some other live person (sales lines are usually a good route to find a live person) and make sure they relay my message to the person I'm supposed to be interviewing with.

To me it's a bit unprofessional to not leave a message. I could forgive having to delay an appointment, but I don't see how there was no way to leave a message (even if it was 5 minutes before 3PM.) Unless your voicemail system was down?

I stopped using them years ago when I switched my personal domain to to Easy DNS; their DNS Hosting package includes dynamic DNS. I'm sure many other DNS/web hosts also support dynamic DNS.

On Friday I wrapped up coding/testing on some new scripts for our shop floor production reporting system. It uses this proprietary language with a dialect similar to VB. One of my primary tasks was to modify our PO Receiving process so it utilizes ASN data from EDI-enabled vendors. Now, rather than operators having to type/scan details off the paperwork (and inevitably making mistakes), I coded it to automatically key the entire transaction based on an ID # that's scanned off our vendor's inventory barcode label. The operator's new procedure (at least for vendors we're receiving ASNs from) is to simply scan the barcode label, verify the data on the screen, our inventory label prints, and the transaction done. Should be very slick. I also did a number of workflow improvements based on feedback from the operators on the shop floor. All of this will roll out Tuesday morning. I did an overly cautious amount of testing so it should go well (knock on wood)

Also on Friday I received approval for a new phone system so I will be getting the ball rolling on that next week. We're going with Switchvox (commercial Asterisk system from Digium.) 50 handsets across the office and manufacturing plant. This will yield us about $1,000/month in immediate savings thanks to conversion from PRI to SIP trunking, elimination of backup analog lines for the PRI (because it randomly drops calls due to the poor quality of our underground copper lines which Ma Bell refuses to replace), and elimination of our third-party conferencing service. Should also be a fun project. I can't wait to get rid of our old Nortel BCM 400. This project will fully utilize last summer's project where we ran fibre backhauls from all the key points in our facility to the server room (eliminated all the daisy chaining between switches on Cat5), put new managed switches in all the locations, a new core switch, and implemented VLANs.

I have a couple friends who play every Monday night and they've been trying to convince me to join them.

What edition do you play?

My fiancee is coming up on her last week at an office admin job with a psychotic boss. This is a small business with only 4 employees. Probably one of the most extreme examples of the B.S. she has to deal with is when verifying the deliveries before they get loaded on the truck. She is supposed to circle the quantities on the packing slip as the product is verified. Her boss gets upset if the circles touch/overlap the numbers or any of the text. He will also lecture her if the circles are "too big" or "too small" but won't specify what that means (he just says "you know, not too big, and not too small" ) Another employee told her the previous employee she replaced used to carry a washer in his pocket so he could draw a perfect circle every time.

This is just one example of why it's her last week on the job

Good find! Coincidentally, I was planning on taking the SQL MCSA soon (intending doing MCSE: BI), so I guess I'll be doing it sooner rather than last (seeing as the offer expires May 31st and the tests have to be written before that date)

For fiction, I'm about 70% of the way through Storm of Swords (third book in the Game of Thrones series, which is actually called A Song of Fire and Ice but most people don't seem to know it by that name.) I finally caught on to this series within the last year, after 2 previous failed attempts to get past the first 100 pages of the first Game of Thrones book. I've resisted the urge to watch the series until I'm done the books are done.

My current technical book is Training Kit (Exam 70-461): Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (I'm working my way towards some certifications in MS SQL Reporting Services; I've used the technology every day for the last 10 years and I'm still surprised by how many little tidbits and shortcuts I'm learning from the books)

@scottalanmiller said:

There is Appian.

This one looks interesting; thanks!

@scottalanmiller said:

Does Alfresco have what you need?

For some reason I forgot about Alfresco .. yes, that was also one of the ones we looked at. I'll have to go look at my old notes, but I think we didn't explore it too deeply because it's primarily a document management system so it's forms and workflow features were not as strong as other BPM/Forms systems. However maybe it deserves another look.

Can anyone recommend a non-Sharepoint solution for a software system that lets users to fill out electronic forms?

Sharepoint is the first recommendation we often come across, although I'm trying to avoid Sharepoint/Windows/Microsoft if possible.

We've been testing jBPM and Activiti. jBPM is currently the top contender, although it appears to have a steep learning curve (I haven't looked at it too closely, my colleague has been dealing with it.) If anyone is currently using either of these systems, I would welcome any comments/feedback on your experience with them.

Our requirements are:

• Web-based
• Self-hosted on our own systems
• Stores form data to SQL database (doesn't matter which SQL but ideally PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL)
• Able to pull data from SQL databases (e.g. for populating options in drop-down boxes)
• Handles some basic workflow (e.g. certain fields are required based on selections in other fields, section A has to be completed before section A can be completed, authorization levels to control which users can fill out certain sections/fields)

Nice-to-have's are:

• Runs on Linux server (the less Windows servers we have, the better)
• Active Directory integration (almost a must-have, but if it stores the users in SQL then we can just do some custom integration)
• Single Sign On (LDAP or Active Directory)

@Bill-Kindle said:

How well does it work with other software. Lets say I had another app I wanted to push, like Office or some other app?

It works quite well. We use it with a few pieces of software that PDQ doesn't pre-package (GoodSync, ScreenConnect, Sonicwall VPN Client, Scan to PDF, PDF Split & Merge) and it handles them all. The nice thing with PDQ is you can do scripting as part of the deploying, which is particularly useful for software that requires you to uninstall before installing the upgrade. We also use that feature for copying configuration files and changing registry settings after installation.

In PDQ we have a "New Workstation Setup" package that deploys all the packages in one shot. It has made deploying new workstations (and reinstalling existing ones) so much easier; join it to the domain, add it to the security groups, deploy software in PDQ, run Windows Updates, and it's done.

We also started using PDQ a couple months ago and it has worked quite well. It makes deploying/upgrading software much easier than Group Policies. Well worth the money.

I use Fedora on my primary laptop, mostly because I'm so used to CentOS/RedHat-based distros on servers and Fedora hasn't given me too many problems over the years. For the last few weeks I've been running it with KDE rather than Gnome 3 (the default) and overall I think I like it better. My other laptop has FreeBSD 10 with XFCE, although I'm planning to try PC-BSD 10 on it soon (it previously had PC-BSD 9.)

I recently installed Ubuntu on my desktop (despite telling myself a long time ago I would never do that again) due my friends roping me into playing Rust on Steam and Steam giving me all kinds of weird problems on Fedora 20 (video driver issues causing the game to freeze, and some shortcuts in the game not working properly.) Ubuntu 12.04 with Steam has been working quite flawlessly, so I'm reluctantly running it on there. I actually don't mind Unity, it's Canonical as a company that I'm not as fond of.

I haven't tried Mint/Cinnamon although may give it a try the next time I find myself reinstalling one of the laptops.

@technobabble said:

Does anyone one else trust the system restore?

At the office we disable system restore via group policy because it never seemed to actually fix anything and tied up valuable storage space (we use SSDs on all our laptops, so sometimes space is a bit tight.) Also we have a couple users who know enough to be dangerous and would run system restore a dozen times to try and fix their own problems, and in a few cases it caused problems for some of our applications.

We've been using ScreenConnect at the office for a couple months, ever since the whole LogMeIn pricing fiasco; we were a Central subscriber and not actually affected by the change, but I decided to find a new solution just out of principal on the way they treat their customers.

Here's the things I like about ScreenConnect:

• The server AND viewing client runs on Linux (which means I didn't need to add more Windows servers at the office, and I don't have to boot up a Windows VM when accessing things from home; the client is Java so in theory it could run on a lot of devices, although I haven't tried it on anything else yet.)
• The agent that runs on the workstations is extremely light-weight (around 1MB I think) and easy to install (MSI for group policy deployment)
• Their tech support has been very responsive and easy to deal with; I even threw a few "best practice" type of questions at them and they gave me great answers.
• The server operates perfectly behind NAT
• Great pricing (2 concurrent technician/host licenses was the same price as 1 year of LMI Central)

The only surprise I've had so far was finding out that Active Directory integration is not currently available when running the server on Linux; but they said it's coming "very soon".

If you're not worried about losing any data on the drive and just want to wipe the GPT table so you can start over from scratch, run these two commands:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk2 bs=512 count=2
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk2 bs=512 count=2 seek=$(($(blockdev --getsz /dev/disk2) - 2))

The first one wipes the GPT table from the beginning of the disk. The second one wipes the backup copy from the end of the disk. GPT keeps two copies, in case one gets corrupted, so you have to wipe both.

Are you able to ping the server from your desktop?

I'd probably have to say Blues Brothers. But it's a close call between that and Pirate Radio, American Graffiti, and Dazed and Confused. I love movies with a good sound track.