Justin James' Critical Thinking

Why are video drivers so hard to get right?

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:12:00 GMT

I (finally) wrapped up a 6 or 7 month long struggle with my video card. See, some time ago, some update or another did something... odd... with my video card (an NVidia 7600 GS, for the record, the best passively cooled, dual DVI output card I could find when I put this PC together). It started doing this "thing" where major portions of the screen would be transparent to the layer beneath. Oddly enough, it only occured when a game was running full screen. Let me tell you, it was quite odd going through Half Life 2 (I know, I am WAY behind the times) being able to see through walls if I get right next to them. In many situations, there would be some odd "snow" in areas too. To make it even more strange, the games would work fine the first time they were run after a reboot, or if I started the game in a window and then told it to run full screen. Needless to say, it really sucked.

(continu

Review of the Mitel 5340 IP Phone

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:50:00 GMT

I recently had the opportunity to take a look at one of Mitel’s latest devices, the 5340 IP telephone with an integrated Sun Ray 2 client. The device is part of their push towards unified telecommunications with the Mitel Unified IP client for Sun Ray. What is interesting to me about this phone is the linkages between the phone and the Sun Ray system, and the way that they have leveraged each device.

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Book Review: ISA Server 2006 Unleased

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:15:00 GMT

For the last few months, I have been working with ISA Server 2006 in our corporate network. Before I got started, I purchased a copy of ISA Server 2006 Unleashed by Michael Noel, published by SAMS Publishing. I was hoping that this book would be a valuable asset in working with ISA Server, particularly since Tom Shinder has not updated his ISA Server 2004 book. This book missed the mark, and badly.

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Do we really want "wetworks"?

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:52:00 GMT

I love to read stuff from Microsoft Research. Say what you willa bout their shipping products, their research items are just plain fascinating, and I have learned a lot by reading their papers. I came across an item today, an interview with a guy there working on human/computer interfaces, Desney Tan. It was interesting; he talked about "wetworks" (merging the brain and the machine) fairly casually.

Now, I am all for technological progress, I am certainly no Luddite. But the idea of wetworks somehow bothers me in a weird way. Not really moral qualms, per se. But practical issues. Things like, "if my brain is wired up like this, what happen

More Vista-isms in Windows Server 2008

formortals@thesophist.com — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:06:00 GMT

I keep finding more and more places in Windows Server 2008 where I get the distinct impression that someone desparately needs to do s/Vista/Windows Server 2008/ on it (regex for "replace 'Vista' with 'Windows Server 2008'"). Everywhere I look, some part of the system is referring to itself as "Vista". These are not items being driven by the Windows version number, this is documentation and so on. It's just plain sloppy, and shame on Microsoft for releasing it in this condition.

J.Ja

Email Security Webcast, now available "On Demand"

formortals@thesophist.com — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:24:00 GMT

The "on demand" recording of the Webcast I did yesterday for TechRepublic is now available. Registration is required, but it is free. I hate to admit it, but I enjoyed myself immensely, and it was great to put a voice to the names & faces of Chad Perrin and Michael Kassner. Overall, we surprisingly agreed on all of the major points that I recall, and only had a few minor

Email Security Webcast - Today!

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:45:00 GMT

I know it is short notice, but I will be participating in a 1 hour Webcast today on the topic of email security. You can sign up for it at TechRepublic. Hope this isn't too short of a notice for you to listen in!

J.Ja

We are still in the Middle Ages of IT

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:35:00 GMT

The above video makes me laugh every time I see it. Everything in it is a perfect parody of our industry... from the clueless user to the help desk worker struggling to be patient and professional, to the fact that the object under discussion is far too hard to use. We have come a long way folks, from a technical angle, but we are still in the 1970's in terms of deploying usable systems. All of the "Web 2.0", AJAX, and so on (preceded by client/server, mainframes, green screens, etc.) in the world does not make computer applications easier to use.

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Beware of Intel NIC driver updates

formortals@thesophist.com — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:49:00 GMT

I had a pretty harsh experience tonight. I have one of Intel's server grade NICs in my ISA server at work. It has a lot of IP addresses bound to the external adapter. We updated the NIC's driver due to some odd behavior we were seeing (some of the ports were not being detected sometimes after a cold boot). Well, the installer decided to pick one of the IP addresses assigned to each port to make the primary IP address, and to drop all of the other IP addresses bound to thew adapter. So instead of the 5 minutes of downtime we expected, I got to spend an hour re-typing the critical IP addresses, and another hour tomorrow typing in the non-critical IP addresses. Let this be a warning: if you plan on updating the drivers for your Intel NIC, plan on possibly needing to re-configure it afterwards!

J.Ja

Windows Server version Vista?

formortals@thesophist.com — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:16:00 GMT

I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard in a VMWare Server VM today. Before I installed the VMWare tools, it did not recognize the NIC. Well, that obnoxious "why your PC doesn't work right" wizrd came up a bit later... and as you can see in the screenshot, it seems to think that I am using Windows Vista! Obviously, someone needs to go through the database and change the problem summaries; the full description had a more generic, "your version of Windows..." message.

J.Ja

Backing up: Why don't I ever learn my lesson?

formortals@thesophist.com — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:58:00 GMT

So I finally got my FreeBSD machine up & running. I spent all of last night updating all of the installed packages (all to get PHP working right) now that it compiles correctly. And then, I decided to go for broke, and upgrade from FreeBSD 6.3 to FreeBSD 7.0. Immediately before I started, I made backups of everything but I did not test those backups to see if they were good. From the italics, you can see where this story is headed.

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System problems: sometimes, it's the little things that matter

formortals@thesophist.com — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:04:00 GMT

Last night I re-learned an important lesson for the zillionth-time: check everything when it comes to system problems!

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Watch your fat fingers

formortals@thesophist.com — Thu, 29 May 2008 05:49:00 GMT

So, after literally dozens of man-hours trying to get the VPN working in ISA Server 2006, the end culprit turned out to be... my fat fingers. When I entered the IP address for the domain controller in a "Computer" network entity (which I later added to the network groups used by access rulles), I typed it in wrong. As a result, traffic to/from the docmain controller didn't go through in the cases where the rules should have judged it based on that incorrectly typed IP address and not some other criteria.

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Someone from Cisco makes sense

formortals@thesophist.com — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:58:00 GMT

For a change, I think that someone from Cisco is making sense:
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-1009_22-202297.html?tag=nl.e622

He's sadly right. The only way I'd work with a blacklist anti-virus system is if it did not use signatures, but worked very similar to UAC on Vista or sudo on *Nix. In other words, certain behaviors were blacklisted. And even that is risky, because the bad guys are always finding new ways to abuse even relatively innocent system commands. Malware is a war that we're losing, and losing badly. The only answer are systems that are either thin clients (or effectively thin clients) that the IT department can lock down on the server side, or clients that are so limited in their usage that they can't do much other than the basics.

J.Ja

Isn't this Phun?

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 21 May 2008 03:46:00 GMT

A few months ago, I discovered a neat little toy/edu-game/app called "Phun". I have to say, it really lives up to it's name! The gentleman who put this together is named Emil Ernerfeldt as a Master's Thesis. I'll tell you, give this guy his MA today, he's earned it. The shop that picks him up post-graduation will get someone who not only knows how to code, but someone who knows how to put a piece of software together that is enjoyable to use, has an intuitive interface, is practical, and at the same time, provides a sandbox for educational exploration.

J.Ja

"Fake RAID" + *Nix = Abject Disaster

formortals@thesophist.com — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:04:00 GMT

This weekend, I had the chance to try to install a wide variety of OS's on my server here. Now that I got the last paying customer off, I decided to see if the problems were OS/driver specific, or hardware specific. Unfortunately, I only got to actually install 2 OS's. What went wrong? Linux still has lousy driver support.

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Go Daddy: a company that "gets" customer service & support

formortals@thesophist.com — Sat, 17 May 2008 13:29:00 GMT

I started using Go Daddy as my registrator ages ago, because they had domain names super cheap. If I recall, Network Solutions was still using "management by email" at the time, and I hated that as well. Over the years, I only had to call Go Daddy once, and it was to get the information I needed to set up some DNS stuff on my end. Even from that one call, I was pretty impressed with their support and service people.

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Why is it always uphill both ways to school?

formortals@thesophist.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:12:00 GMT

I can't wait until JMJ 2.0 (my son's name is Jarrett Marshall James, aka JMJ 2.0) is old enough for me to sit him down and write his first program. To give him an idea of what it was like "back in Daddy's era", I will give him some completely crippled language that is missing useful features like eval() (yes, I am hung up on dynamic languages), with libraries that are poorly documented (you know, where the "DoRoutine() method is described as, "Does the routine" without explaining what the routine is...), and having to follow someone else's spaghetti code to get anywhere.

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Sometimes the "wrong" way is the "right" way

formortals@thesophist.com — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:24:00 GMT

I like to do things right. Sadly, sometimes doing things "right" gets in the way of doing them well, or doing them at all. In my most recent case, I needed to stop trying to set my network up "right", and do it "wrong". Now, instead of looking like an enterprise network like I wanted, it resembles a residential network on steroids. In reality, it actually makes sense... it is founded on residential technology (Verizon FiOS), after all, which just does not support the networking schemes that enterprise networks use. All in all, the question really is, "does it meet our needs?" And in this case, I'll take the 30/5 service for a few hudred dollars and a residential-style networking scheme over 1.5/1.5 and an enterprise-style networking scheme any day of the week.

J.Ja

Guest Post: Jaqui Greenlees on Linux Standards Base

formortals@thesophist.com — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:32:00 GMT

During the last few years, I've found a number of people who are consistently thought provoking through the forums at TechRepublic. George and I discussed a few times the idea that we wanted this site to be able to give a voice to people who might not have a venue. Sure, anyone can get a LiveJournal or WordPress blog somewhere, but that does not mean that it will get read, even if it is worthwhile. In an effort to give a good airing to some of these people, I will, from time-to-time, run a "guest blog" post. Today's guest blogger is Jaqui Greenlees.

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Q&A with Scott Abel of Spiceworks

formortals@thesophist.com — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:23:00 GMT

Over the years, I've periodically touched based with Scott Abel from Spiceworks. I did one of the first reviews of their initial release, and was quite impressed. Scott and I also collaborated on a trio of articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about starting a tech company. And I've talked to Scott before about their development process. Toda

Is Sun the Columbia House of servers?

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:54:00 GMT

I cannot imagine any other IT vendor offering to ship, for free, a server (even pay the shipping & handling both ways!), provide support on it, and let me hold onto it for 60 days. And after all of that, give me a 25% discount if/when I decide to keep it.

Sun is.

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Open jobs: Columbia, SC

formortals@thesophist.com — Tue, 06 May 2008 03:31:00 GMT

I am aware of two open positions for people in Columbia, SC, or who are willing to relocate. One is a junior/mid level Windows system administrator (seems a step up from making user accounts, resetting passwords, etc., but nothing too complex). The other is for a Web designer/developer; the emphasis seems to be on HTML and CSS, not the backend stuff. Let me know (or comment back) if you are interested, and I can get you in touch with the right people. Mind you, I don't know much about these positions, a recruiter friend of mine told me about them, and the positions she reps are usually very good ones (indeed, she landed me into my previous position).

J.Ja

"Business class" ISPs not ready for prime time

formortals@thesophist.com — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:16:00 GMT

Over the last few years, a lot of consumer grade broadband technology has been marketed to businesses. Usually the ISP will call it "Business Class" or something like that, and charge a big markup. To justify the markup, they will do something like add a pittance of an SLA (like promising an onsite tech dispatch in 4 business hours), or maybe some guaranteed bandwidth, or possibly offer blocks of static IP addreses.

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Freedom: so close!

formortals@thesophist.com — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:20:00 GMT

For the last umpteen years, I have been functioning as a Web host for a few companies. The income was decent, and basically paid for me to have a static IP and a machine dedicated to being a server. But it was a real headache too. The biggest problem was that server problems would cause me to drop everything and respond to them, since live, production customers were on the box.

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The best antidode for the Apple MacBook Air Kool Aid

formortals@thesophist.com — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:16:00 GMT

I think that this video says it all:

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Dear Cisco CEO:

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:07:00 GMT

I would like to see you try to configure one of your routers. Go ahead, I dare you. I triple dog dare you. See, your routers lack any kind of sensible tools as far as I can tell. See, I am not a full time Cisco admin. I do more with my time than play with your equipment. In fact, I would prefer it if I never have to mess with your routers again. I would be happy using a $50 Linksys doodad for my network (I know, you own them too), but I can't, because I have a gazillion public IP addresses and a T1 that we use for redundancy. But still, I fantasize about it.

I really need to downgrade my image

formortals@thesophist.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:04:00 GMT

You know, I thought I was the only person who thinks that for too many of the pioneers of Comp Sci dress like dorks. Someone else has noticed too, and put up a great series of pictures with commentary:

http://www.codethinked.com/post/2007/12/The-Programmer-Dress-Code.aspx

http://www.codethinked.com/post/2007/12/The-Programmer-Dress-Code---Part-Deux.aspx

My favorite is probably Alan Cox. He really does look like a wider version of Gandalf, with a slightly less pointy hat. Looking at these pictures makes me doubt my chances of ever becoming legendary in this ind

Steampunk? Try "Constructionpunk"!

formortals@thesophist.com — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:03:00 GMT

These guys put together the "Robopault", a catapault using a giant robotic arm to sling bowling balls quite a distance with fairly high accuracy:

http://www.manapotions.com/robopult.html

I know, it's a bit old (I found this in January, and kept forgetting to post it), but anyone who hasn't seen this should see it. It's the steampunk "build it yourself ethos" applied to construction equipment.

Microsoft's Achille's Heel

formortals@thesophist.com — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:08:00 GMT

I have a like/dislike relationship with Microsoft. I am reluctant to call it "love/hate", since I don't really feel very strongly about them either way. I like an awful lot of their technologies (particularly .Net), and I dislike an awful lot of the details of those technologies. And it is the devil in those details that is Microsoft's biggest weakness.

Nice to be here!

formortals@thesophist.com — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:04:00 GMT

Hello to all! By way of introduction, my name is Justin James, and I have been writing over at TechRepublic for some time now. Over there, they like it if I keep my posts strictly related to programming and development, but the bulk of my days are spent with things that are distinctly not that... things like systems administration, network engineering, and so on. I was looking at my options for expanding my writing a bit, like it was originally at TechRepublic (when it was my personal blog, instead of me being one writer under "Programming and Development") when George started this up. I jumped at the chance to expand my topics a bit, and I hope you enjoy the posts!

J.Ja