Star Trek Movie
I saw the new Star Trek movie last night and I was quite impressed, it certainly seemed more like an action movie then a sc-fi movie and I’m almost convinced that a number of “die-hard” fans where disappointed at that.
It seems like a good way to draw a new audience; I myself have never actually seen a Star Trek episode or movie before this one so it must have worked on me.
Really want to get back into blogging more often.
Man things have been quite, it seems the whole world has moved on with facebook and twitter and god knows what else. I think its great however, don’t get me wrong any technical advance is good particularly when it introduces new people into the IT world (My Mum joined facebook, she loves it).
Still I find myself preferring the blogging platform; I guess I have found memories of sharing experiences with people a few years ago.
I think it’s more that I like the ability to have greater control over how my content is displayed, FB and twitter are rather restrictive in the way that you can display content (somewhat unfair to include twitter considering it’s pretty much an online IM system but hey what are you going to do?)
Have had a few more ideas since my portable web development (Still working on that btw), system tutorials thoughts on stuff etc.
New simpsons opening credits
Channel 10 has been plugging this new Simpson new opening credit for weeks now, I have to ask… does anyone really care?
Development project idea
Hi there,
I know It’s been a while, too long in fact, but I just hadn’t had much I felt like sharing recently. That being said I just had what I consider a rather good idea.
I am a big advocate of web based software, I highly preach and practice the use of it, however there is often one problem, a lack of integration/consolidation. In my own job alone there is a huge amount of software used, including:
- Bugzilla
- MediaWiki
- Mantis
- Dockuwiki
- Open Audit
- Sharepoint
- ReadyDesk
- Dot Project
- Change Track
And most likely more that I’m not aware of!
The problem that is created is that there is such an amount of different sites and login / passwords to remember that it becomes a nightmare to manage, not only that but simple actions often require going to a number of different sites to update information, this is a large pain.
So my idea is simple, create a virtual appliance that runs a light-weight OS that provides functions critical to a SysAdmin with complete and total integration / consolidation. This includes:
- Issue tracker
- Change log tracker
- Network auditing
- Secure password storage
- Wiki
- SECURE
I’m sure that I will think of more to add to this list but I wanted to get my inital thoughts down on paper before going any further.
Looking forward to diving into this one!
Big negative to LogmeIn - Update
So after various negative e-mails and phone messages left to logmein, I finally got a call from the new (What I assume to be) Sales Manager of Australia. He assured me that new procedures where being put in place to prevent such a thing happening in the future.
That being said I think this highlights the need to have and required handling of a positive sales presence rather than un-answered phone calls and e-mails. I will update with the decision of going with Logmein or not.
Big negative to LogmeIn
Quick note here.
I highly suggest that you do not consider any LogmeIn product. I have been trying to contact them since Friday of last week, both via e-mail and phone to the Australian office. I receive nothing back from the e-mails and phone calls are always met with a recorded voice message stating that the sales representative will be back on Monday the 12th (Yesterday).
This morning I decided to go for broke and attempted to call their US hotline. One guess as to what happened. Sales? No response, Support? No no we can’t be bothered answering that either.
If a company can’t answer a simple sales question I can’t imagine that their support would be any good. Logmein? Stick to the free Hamachi, anything else is not worth the risk.
Open AudIT (Network and System Auditing)
Just a quick update (I know It’s been a while since I’ve done any updating but more is on the way).
Open-AudIT is a a nifty little open source application that queries WMI indexes across a network of computers (most typically a Domain). It is run from inside a web enviroment and has some incredibly powerful features, including:
- Hardware querying at HAL level
- Microsoft software licensing querying (It can query other software however it does not seem to be as in-depth as the MS keys)
- Integration with NMAP to scan for open ports and store information in database.
- View installed software, services, keyboards, mouses, any other USB device.
Very useful for getting control over your network, and free. Check out the link on the right for more.
Laugh of the Week
Pee Wee Herman talking to me about Crack Cocaine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agT2GVNQjao
How on earth did this happen?
Direction
Just a quick post to set my future intentions, as you may have guessed by the title of this site I intend to create a focus for Systems Administration at this blog.
I’m still not quite sure what I intend to make of this exactly, with a field as wide as Systems Administration it can be quite hard to get focused on one particular area, and quite frankly I don’t consider Systems Administration (that’s going to take too much to type so it will be sysadmin from now on, grammar Nazi’s be warned) specialized field. That is to say it is a combination of a number of other fields.
I will stop this post here, least I risk rambling about what a sysadmin is and what one is not.
Enjoy.
Simple WAMP Server
A while ago I posted about Uniform Server, which is a great portable web server. Since then I have also found XAMPP which is a fantastic “Standalone” web-server that runs in windows, has everything you could want including installation as services so you can use a box whilst not logged in as a platform, incredibly useful and you can find it in the links on the right.