Any who claim that DOCX is "good enough", right now is not the time to present such claims. I just lost a couple hours fighting translation issues because of the lack of clear documentation of DOCX format so that no tool can write it the same way.
I have been nursing along two FBSD 8.x file servers for several years. A few years ago we de-emphasized commodity servers running FBSD in favor of NetApp filers but they were/are still needed for the labs that use them. Recently, a third lab has decided to replace an old/failing Solaris 10 box with a new…
I’ve finally admitted to myself that I need a single place to archive online all of my conference presentations, workshops, tutorial materials and such, because I've unfortunately been rather scattershot about that in the past. So, now there's adeleshakal.com. I'm looking forward to March and April, because I'll be presenting (remotely) at CrabbyAdmins in Baltimore,…
One of the common jokes about mathematics is that you can easily get four mathematicians in the room and none of them knows anything about what the other studies, even though they agree they are all mathematicians. System administration is rapidly approaching the same point. I have worked with several others in the field who…
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Having now been a Board member for officially six months, I've got to say, it's definitely a strange creature. It's not that the organization is big so much as it's diverse, and spread out, and right now, largely undocumented. That should not be meant to imply that there is no documentation, though. The early founders…
Much digital ink has been spilled over the Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard (PCI-DSS), the standard security rules that any vendor that accepts credit card payments agrees to follow. Many of the articles try to find a way to criticize the standard. "PCI wouldn't have stopped this breach, it's worthless!" being the normal battlecry….
The recent announcement of a third major retailer that has lost credit card information drives home several points I've tried to make over the years. Security cannot be an afterthought. Some of the complaints I've heard many a time is that security "gets in the way", or "doesn't make money, we can just absorb the…
The 2014 Cascadia IT Conference schedule has been published. We’re ready to welcome people to another great conference. Join us for two days of training and technical presentations on lots of IT-related topics. If you do any kind of IT support this is a great conference for you. Head on over to the registration page to sign…
So, yesterday I published a book via Amazon's direct publishing program for the first time. It's fiction, has absolutely nothing to do with system administration, but it works for me. I consider it a pointer to how sometimes a project can take a very long time. I worked on this book for around twenty years….