After work today we had the opportunity to visit the Great Pyramid of Cholula, which is the largest pyramid and monument (by volume) in the world. The huge structure is actually 5 overlapping structures that were created over a period of 10 centuries. The pyramid looks rather unimpressive from the outside, it resembles one of the many other small mountains or hills in the area, but archeologists have excavated miles of tunnels into it. Discovered in 1910 during the construction of an insane asylum, local legends say that the pyramid was so sacred that the people covered it with dirt to protect it from the Spanish conquistadors. But, it was probably covered by dirt from neglect or volcanic eruptions long before the arrival of Cortés.
I don’t yet have an Apple computer to develop on, but when I get one I would like to write some applications for the iPhone. Maybe I could make some money off of them, but more importantly I could customize my own iPhone to do things that I want it to do in the manner in which I desire. Here are some of my ideas, I am sure many of them have already bee implemented in some form, but here is how I would like to see them work:
I am always trying to remember the exact format for querying active directory using T-SQL, so I decided to document it here for posterity’s sake. If any one else is interested in using this code, our domain is na.company.com, so you would just have to change the “DC=” statements to match your company’s domain.
SELECT [name], company, department, mail
FROM OpenQuery( ADSI, 'SELECT name, company, department, mail, adsPath FROM ''LDAP://DC=na,DC=company,DC=com'' WHERE objectCategory=''Person'' AND objectClass=''user''')
WHERE department IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY name
Dear Chris Stoll,
CSME and ISEB hereby certify that you have participated in the examination:
Examination: ITIL
Student Name: Chris Stoll
Student Number: xxxxxxxx
Result: Pass
Today at work we experienced a very serious network issue. Initially it seemed that the network just went down, we couldn’t get outside of our facility, neither to the internet nor to our other facilities via the MPLS connection. But, nslookup (domain resolution via UDP) was working. We noticed that we could get to things on the network as long as they were in the same network (10.x.y.n/255.255.0.0 could connect to 10.x.z.n/255.255.0.0), so it seemed that the core switch was not able to route requests. I opened up a simple network monitor and saw that there were two devices flooding the network with broadcasts (10.x.x.x port 138 -> 10.x.255.255 port 138 and 10.x.x.y port 1985 -> 224.0.0.2 port 1985). The networking group found that the core switch was running at 100% processor. So, they identified which ports on the core these packets were coming from, then unplugged that cable. From there we tracked it to the next closet, and to the next closet. From there it was narrowed down to a room with thin clients that were not turned on. In the process of trying to identify which hardware might be causing the problem they found a small switch with an Ethernet cable plugged into it in an unussual manner.
At my company I have seen a lot of bad software development practices over the years, so I have created a set of software development guidelines to help establish a set of best practices and baseline software requirements. I am publishing a series of experts from those guidelines here so that I might get some useful feedback that will help improve them.
Configuration options should be separated from the program. A program should be able to be configured using external configuration information whenever possible. This is especially true for file paths and network locations.
At my company I have seen a lot of bad software development practices over the years, so I have created a set of software development guidelines to help establish a set of best practices and baseline software requirements. I am publishing a series of experts from those guidelines here so that I might get some useful feedback that will help improve them.
Any software written for use in the Company should not only perform in a consistent manner, but it should also perform reliably and in accordance with the users’ expectations. In order to accomplish this programmers must plan how the software should work, continually test the application as it is developed (unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, etc.), and must thoroughly test the application to ensure that it is operating as planned before it is released into a production environment.
At my company I have seen a lot of bad software development practices over the years, so I have created a set of software development guidelines to help establish a set of best practices and baseline software requirements. I am publishing a series of experts from those guidelines here so that I might get some useful feedback that will help improve them.
There are several layers of security used in the Company’s computing environment, none of which is likely to change for any single applications, so it is important to have at least a basic understanding of some of the general constraints. This section provides an overview of IT security concerns across multiple IT groups, check the intranet or ask an IT analyst for more detailed information on any of the following sections.