TheMadAdmin

OK I have the Sprint Simply Everything plan.

Data, GPS, Phone, all unlimited for one price.

Today I call to add Phone as a Modem (I need it for work).  The price on the site says $50.  I Call and ask.

30 minutes later.  "Sorry we can’t add it because it won’t work with your everything plan."

This is pissing me off.  Maybe because I am tired. maybe because it is stupid because they are loosing money.

If I need a modem I will go to Verizon, just cause I am pissed.

Sprint you are my fucktard of the week.

Tags: Fucktard, Fucktard of the week // Add Comment »

Life Hacker

HABIT #1 - BE AWARE YOU HAVE A CHOICE

The most common reactions to politics at work are either fight or flight. It’s normal human reaction for survival in the wild, back in the prehistoric days when we were still hunter-gatherers. Sure, the office is a modern jungle, but it takes more than just instinctive reactions to win in office politics. Instinctive fight reactions will only cause more resistance to whatever you are trying to achieve; while instinctive flight reactions only label you as a pushover that people can easily take for granted. Neither options are appealing for healthy career growth.

Winning requires you to consciously choose your reactions to the situation. Recognize that no matter how bad the circumstances, you have a choice in choosing how you feel and react. So how do you choose? This bring us to the next point…

HABIT #2 - KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO ACHIEVE

When conflicts happens, it’s very easy to be sucked into tunnel-vision and focus on immediate differences. That’s a self-defeating approach. Chances are you’ll only invite more resistance by focusing on differences in people’s positions or opinions.

The way to mitigate this without looking like you’re fighting to emerge as a winner in this conflict is to focus on the business objectives. In the light of what’s best for the business, discuss the pros and cons of each option. Eventually, everyone wants the business to be successful; if the business don’t win, then nobody in the organization wins. It’s much easier for one to eat the humble pie and back off when they realize the chosen approach is best for the business.

By learning to steer the discussion in this direction, you will learn to disengage from petty differences and position yourself as someone who is interested in getting things done. Your boss will also come to appreciate you as someone who is mature, strategic and can be entrusted with bigger responsibilities.

HABIT #3 - FOCUS ON YOUR CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE

At work, there are often issues which we have very little control over. It’s not uncommon to find corporate policies, client demands or boss mandates which affects your personal interests. Bitching and complaining are common responses to these events that we cannot control. But think about it, other than that short term emotional outlet, what tangible results do bitching really accomplish? In most instances, none.

Read More

Tags: Office Life // Add Comment »

Yep totally off topic.

Went to the park on Friday.  Got there at 10:30AM and stayed until 10PM.  Took my daughter and two nieces along with my wife.  (Only the kids were riding).

We got the Flash pass so there was no waiting in line.  Makes it a lot more enjoyable.  Kids got to ride 22 times.

They Rode almost every coaster Except Kingda Kha (If I am spelling it right.)  They did not want to go straight up 45 stories and then down.  Can’t blame them.

Everyone had a great time and the park felt cleaner and safer than it’s felt in years.

Now back to work.

TMA

Tags: Fun // Add Comment »

Very Cool Little Robot Toy coming out from Tiger.  I need it to run around my office and make me look all techie.

Tags: Something to Talk About // Add Comment »

Sorry for the lack of posts but I have been busy.  But it has been an education.

Here are a couple of links to things I did not know before starting this new job.

SPLUNK  Managing data centers in silos used to make sense. Things change. Distributed, scale-out computing, complex web-based applications and virtualization defy the old ways. Splunk breaks through the silos, indexing data from every component. Search, alert and report on all your IT data from every application, server and device — all in one place. Finding and fixing problems, following the trail of an attacker or tracing transactions is a whole lot faster and really easy.

Nagios  is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

Centreon is a network, system, applicative supervision and monitoring tool, it is based upon the most effective Open Source monitoring engine : Nagios. Centreon provides a new frontend and new functionnalities to Nagios.

It allows you to be more efficient in your network monitoring, but also allows you to make your supervision information readable by a largest range of users. Indeed, a non technical user can now use the Centreon/Nagios couple to easily understand your network infrastructure thanks to charts and graphical representations of the gathered information. Skilled users still have access to specific and technical information collected  by Nagios though.

Those tools are very cool and should help you I.T. geeks out there.

Have fun.

TheMadAdmin

Tags: I.T. // Add Comment »

Facebook has caught up to Myspace in the number of unique hits/month.

This was reported today on TechCrunch

I am not surprised.  Facebook is way better than the old and ailing Myspace.  As people move to Facebook, sooner or later their friends will move.

Right now I feel that Facebook will become the standard "My Page" site on the Internet.  Until the next big thing comes along.

This is not only because I have joined the Facebook Developer Group in NY either.  I really believe it.

What do you think?

TMA

Tags: Internet // 1 Comment »

I was looking at the code for an LDAP/PHP phone list that my boss did in the office for the intranet.  So where does my mind go???  You guessed correctly, "I Can Do That In FLex!!!"

So I have started (Helped by the code already written in PHP for the address list.

I have

1. Converted the PHP into a class that is used by AMFPHP to get the data using AMF3.0.
2. Set the frame work to use EasyMVC.
3. Hit my first error.

Ok the error is a simple one  dealing with custom events

and I will be past it soon enough.  But it feels good to be coding again.

Once I get it nailed down I will publish the source code.

TheMadAdmin

Tags: Flex // Add Comment »

So AOL was not accepting mail from us.

my smtp tests worked fine.  Connections were good no noise on the line.  We did change IP ranges and that is what killed us.

The ISP controls the reverse DNS records for the IP range.  So when AOL does an auto reverse dns lookup and does not find an entry for our server we are dropped.

A couple of calls and emails later I got the ISP to make the reverse DNS entry and we got the mail flowing again.  I spent a day looking at other causes, packet sizes, error logs, smtp logs.  No errors were sent back from aol ONLY THAT THEY DROPPED THE CONNECTION.

I know it is simple but sometimes they are harder because you overlook them.

Next time I will know.

Tags: I.T. // Add Comment »

Article

MediaDefender, using illegal tactics.  Took down Revision3 last weekend.  Revision3 is a company founded by Kevin Rose (Digg Fame) that produces video for the web.  Mediadefender did not like that they also had a Bit Tracker host running and launched an attack.  These guys need to be taught a lesson that they can not break the law because they want to stop copyright violations.  You don’t do a denial of service attack, you go to court.

I wonder home many small sites or users they have knocked off the web.  I doubt this is the first.

Well I hope they go to court this time.  As the defendant.  What they did is illegal and they should face the penalties.

Tags: Something to Talk About // Add Comment »

We got the T3 turned up last night.  We have it via RCN and it is like night and day.  THe internet is now enjoyable at work.  Very cool.

I also got to play with an image stream Rebel router. The device is nice and packs in a lot of functionality but what is better is the support.  They have always gotten back to me in one hour and were very helpful.  THey even told me what I did wrong in the wan config file and sent the new one over to me via email.  And it worked.

Very cool.

Tags: I.T. // Add Comment »