Posts made by WingCreative

I would definitely be interested to hear how that machine handles games - I'm similarly concerned with the overheating potential, but I suppose using SSD vs HDD might help out with that a bit.

@scottalanmiller said:

@WingCreative said:

Also whoa my gravatar just changed, am I a space invader now?

Looks that way. It's just a place holder. You should set up a real one

Yeah I have been entirely too lazy on that front. I actually kinda liked the old pattern, but I guess gravatar went all "phase two ugly color combo" on me to encourage a switch.

Also whoa my gravatar just changed, am I a space invader now?

Trying to decide if I'd rather add Imagick to PHP on one of my WordPress sites or give HHVM (where it's preinstalled) another shot.

Leaning towards HHVM because I've learned enough since the last time I tried to know that the problems I ran into testing it weren't actually HHVM's fault.

It's like your DR plan being "Fire whoever caused the disaster. You're all done!"

There are two things that I keep coming back to in the source story:

1. They thought a kid brought a bomb to school so... they arrested the kid without evacuating the school. If I were any other student or a parent of a student at that school, I would be horrified to know that the school won't do anything to actually protect anyone in the event of a bomb threat - just punish who they think is responsible.

2. The statement by the police where they say Ahmed was "handcuffed for his safety". What? No. I get that whoever prepared that statement was on a tight deadline to translate their racial profiling into standard procedure, but that line is just infuriating to me.

If a critical requirement for the application is compatibility across all operating systems, then I assume you don't have full control over the systems that will be accessing it.

If there's any chance that people will be uploading things on a WiFi connection then SFTP/FTPS/some sort of encryption should be a critical requirement as well. Jussayin.

@Reid-Cooper said:

@johnhooks said:

@Reid-Cooper said:

@johnhooks said:

Trying out the free avast business cloud antivirus.

How many users is it free for?

Says unlimited. https://www.avast.com/en-us/avast-for-business

It looks really nice so far. Centrally managed and free.

What is the business model there? They must need to monetize this somehow, right? This looks a bit too good to be true.

I've been running this for a few months now in a limited deployment and had a phone meeting with an Avast sales rep yesterday.

He mentioned offhandedly that whether or not we pay them, Avast is happy to have us as a customer - we're either paying them for extra features, or helping to grow their network of protected computers and adding to the "herd immunity" in a sense.

So I think the free offering could work out very well for them if it works the way they think it will - a combo of "foot in the door" sales strategy, along with being able to rapidly grow out a number of endpoints that they can learn from and adapt their business AV for.

They also have a 50% discount for qualified nonprofits that sign up for a year or more (I think that was the deal)... The difference between free and $1/endpoint is a lot more justifiable than going to some $50/endpoint solution like MBAM.

OwnCloud or Pydio may fit the bill in that case.

Also discovered this band today and have been digging them ever since.

Daikaiju - The Trouble With Those Mothra Girls

I decided to upgrade to Windows 10 after work today... now I'm I'm sitting here surprised at how smoothly the transition has gone. All the games I've tested so far have worked without issue, some a little faster even

@gjacobse said:

@coliver said:

First day at new job... waiting for some account credentials.

First days are always filled with waiting, paperwork, waiting, introductions waiting, more paper work and here's your office.

Congrats!

I wish - one of my old jobs was labeled as an "assistant" position and I applied hoping to learn from whoever I was assisting. I had some skills from doing a similar position for a college group, but nothing formal or extensive. My first day was a group orientation going over general employee manual stuff, then we separated to go into job-specific training.

Turns out I was "assisting" the organization as a whole by being the entire department. My training was "here's the account password, good luck and this is what we need by the end of the week!" My predecessor had already moved on, and as I frantically searched for documentation I mostly just found their plans to eventually write documentation and be there to help transition. Neither happened, so I got to spend about a year straight furiously googling how to do various aspects of my job.

On the bright side, they were one of my first freelance clients as soon as I left, so I guess it turned out okay

@scottalanmiller that all makes a lot of sense, and is probably also why I've heard that Debian is more popular among the open source enthusiast crowd where having OEM support isn't as much of a critical requirement. Thanks for the clarification!

Is Ubuntu preferred over Debian in enterprise environments? I've just always heard that, in a lot of ways, Debian is essentially Ubuntu with a bigger focus on stability and security. On the other hand, I suppose there's more probably more professional support available for Ubuntu.

Funny, I just saw this thread as I was reviewing the anti-Lenovo post I just wrote up over at SW. Normally I wouldn't trash a brand like that but there were just so many people trying to convince the OP to switch from Dell to Lenovo

My stance is that they very well could have decided it would be too risky to include their crapware in their business-grade stuff. But based off what I know about huge, ethically questionable technology companies, it's at least equally possible that they are just using more subtle methods to hide their unwanted software that won't be discovered for months/years.

Either way, I haven't met someone who prefers their keyboard layout, their trackpoint, or their overall design over any other company's... so it's not really a sacrifice to say "No more Lenovo purchases" and grab popcorn the next time they get caught doing something shady.

@MattSpeller said:

@anonymous $10/mth to do wordpress

Just so you know, you can definitely make a small WordPress site work well on the $5/month option. There's some stuff you will want to be able to do in Linux/WordPress before doing it on a production VPS, namely swap file management in Linux and site caching in WordPress, but once you have those down you might be able to save some money on hosting

Might be worth trying out if and when you do a test restore of your site. If you do want to test it out, keep in mind you'll have to do the restore from a WordPress-level backup and not a Digital Ocean server snapshot/backup - they don't let you restore those to a smaller-sized VPS.

With all that said, their $10/month option is what I would pick if I were planning on hosting a forum on the same server.

A Small Orange and SiteGround are the two I hear about often when people talk about top notch shared hosting. Note: ASO is now owned by a big ol' webhost conglomerate (EIG) but apparently they're still pretty good.

I am not terribly impressed with Hostgator. No major issues so far, but when we were scanning for vulnerabilities we found they still hadn't patched the BIND vulnerability on our shared host. This happened about a week ago, so they let their servers sit around unpatched for about a month.

I do strongly recommend using Linux if you're wanting to do web hosting. Few places offer Windows hosting, and support/tutorials for IIS webservers is severely lacking compared to Apache or even Nginx. On top of that, most places offering Windows hosting does so at an increased cost as you need more powerful servers to make it do the same stuff Linux does. Even with Windows admin skills in the bag already, it's quite possible that you would end up spending more time and money learning how to effectively serve websites + forums on Windows than you would learning how to do the same thing on Linux and Apache or Nginx.

Depending on how fancy you want to get, you could really jump in headfirst and sign up somewhere like Digital Ocean for a VPS. This is almost guaranteed to be faster than what you would get with a shared hosting setup, and you have root access to the server to install software as needed. Their smallest $5/month server is more than enough for a website, even a CMS like WordPress, and it could probably run the forum software as well as long as you don't have a ton of people using it all at once.

Speaking of forum software, Vanilla Forums is a nice system with a free open source edition!

@MattSpeller said:

Just finished cobbling together a quickie wordpress site for a lark with a friend.

Now onto a nuke/pave with a macbook pro for the first time ever. I should be throughly entertained this afternoon.

Watch out, I cobbled together a quickie wordpress site for a small nonprofit about a year and a half ago and now I'm building about one every other month for people that need them! It can get addicting.

@mlnews said:

Where are you based normally? How far from the Oregon coast?

To belatedly respond to this now-ancient post...

I'm about an hour away from Portland, OR so the Oregon Coast is a longish drive away but definitely day-tripable. The big trip I just went on is in Bandon so it was a few hours away but definitely worth the drive! Especially when so much of it is on the 101...

Got back into the office after a wonderfully relaxing vacation about 3 hours ago.

Just finished locking down the account of an executive that got spear phished this morning after their account started sending out shady wire transfer requests.

At least the attacker waited for me to get back, and no one actually transferred anything! I will call that a win overall.