Category: Techspeak

Today, I had a client’s T1 line go down. Unfortunately, FairPoint Communications has had a mixed track record when it comes to telling us that they have (or more often, have not) fixed the issues.
So I wrote a simple bash script to ping the IP address of the router on the down T1 line, and email me when it came back up. Think of this as the ultra-poor man’s Nagios. Continue reading “A Quick and Dirty "It's Back Up" Bash Script”

Ever since I got my Asus eeePC 1000HA, it’s had one very annoying quality. The keyboard, under Windows and Linux, would repeat keystrokes, so if I typed “Peter” I would frequently get “Peeter” or “Petter” or something else with extra characters. Very annoying. Continue reading “Fixing Annoying Keyboard Repeating on an Asus eeePC 1000HA”

I bought this book, Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes, years ago, and read it back then after not being able to completely digest O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions (a much larger book). While the O’Reilly book has a lot more content, more examples, and covers several different languages’ regexp parsers, I found the SAMS book a lot easier to process. As the name implies, each chapter is designed to be covered in about 10 minutes, so if you have a couple of hours to kill, you can easily plow through the whole book and try out its examples to get a decent working knowledge of regexps. Continue reading “Book Review: SAMS Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes”

Ensure that the third party who has developed your key software will continue to support that software, provide updates in a timely manner, and can provide you with source code in the event that the third party can no longer support the application.

Source: Recommendations from the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool. ?Okay Microsoft, I’ll take that source code for Windows NT and Office 2000 now, thanks.

Last year, Ubuntu added Likewise to their repositories. Likewise is a set of programs which allow you to leverage Active Directory on your Linux desktops. I experimented with Likewise when it first appeared in Ubuntu, but was never able to get it to work. Today, I did. Continue reading “Login to Active Directory From Ubuntu with Likewise”

Following in the foosteps of Comcast and their Twitter account, MyFairPoint is now following me on Twitter. Perhaps this customer service move will help them provide better response times and problem resolutions. Sadly, given my past experiences with Fair Point, most of which I’ve documented here, I’m not terribly optimistic.
However, I encourage anyone who is having problems with FairPoint, whatever the service, to contact them and see if you get a better response than the traditional channels.

It’s no secret (is it?) that sales guys and IT guys often don’t get along (see this link or maybe this one for classic examples). Today, I add my own recent experience in dealing with sales. Continue reading “Adventures in Sales”