One in a million is next Tuesday
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Larry Osterman: Gordon’s response was simply: “In our business, one in a million is next Tuesday”.IT Work
What I Want From Tech Support
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
I’ve been working with a software vendor on the same support case for 15 days now, and it’s driving me crazy. It would be unprofessional to rag on the vendor here, but I will share a few thoughts on what I want from tech support that I consistently don’t get.
Windows Batch Gotcha: Use REM Inside IF Blocks
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Normally I comment out lines in a Windows batch script by prefixing them with “::"—it just looks better to me than “REM”. But today I found out the hard way (of course) that you can’t do that inside an IF block, or the script dies with… The syntax of the command is incorrect. http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=43604How to Override IE's Compatibility View Behavior On Intranet Sites
Thursday, October 11, 2012
To force IE to edge mode (even on intranet sites, where IE would otherwise use compatibility mode), the server needs to send X-UA-Compatible as an HTTP header. Using a meta element in the document head doesn’t work reliably. I found the answer buried in this Stack Overflow thread. In my case, I was working on a WordPress theme, so I added header(“X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge”); at the top of header.php. You can also do it at the web server level with Apache or IIS (I haven’t tested either of those methods).Single Sign-On Epiphany
Friday, October 5, 2012
When I wrote about my experience setting up AD Single Sign-On for Linux, I said the next step was to extend the transparent SSO experience into WordPress. The biggest reason for that—I thought—was so that the WordPress server could then impersonate the logged-in user to pull resources from our SharePoint server (using SharePoint Web Services) and include them on WP pages. Basically a WordPress front-end with SharePoint doing some Digital Asset Management duties on the back-end.Active Directory Single Sign-On for Linux Intranet Servers
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
I mentioned a while ago that I have a Linux web server set up with Kerberos SSO in our AD domain. Setting it up was a lot more tedious than it seems like it should have been. I found bits and pieces of useful information here and there, and some step-by-step guides to help with specific sub-tasks, but I couldn’t find a good, intranet-specific guide to help me understand the big picture—what pieces I needed (and didn’t need) and how they fit together. So here’s part 1 of my attempt to rectify that situation (part 2 will be the WordPress integration—I’m still working on that part).
Intranet Milestone: Transparent Authentication
Friday, January 20, 2012
I’ve started a project to move the front-end of our intranet from SharePoint to WordPress (SP is just too icky to do any serious front-end work with). The plan is for WordPress to become the front-end and CMS for news-type content, keep SharePoint for file library and calendar-type stuff (at least for now), and use the SP web services to integrate the SP content into WP. All of the various authentications involved must be transparent to the end-user.When Low Tech Is the Best Tech
Thursday, March 18, 2010
We’ve been thinking about developing a quick application to replace a paper HR process—should be a simple state machine with four possible states: Submitted, Accepted, Rejected, and Completed. But then we realized we would need email notifications and a coherent security model. These requirements—workflow, notification, and security—happen reasonably well in the old paper model. Not perfectly, but well enough. These mechanisms are ingrained in the way people do their work, but to implement this in a computer application would require us to build it from scratch.The Spam That Got Through
Monday, July 27, 2009
All of my company’s inbound and outbound email goes through a security service that scans for spam and viruses. From time to time I get an email from someone saying that they got a message that they consider spam. I see that as a good sign. Here’s why: Spam filters are machines, with some human input to fine-tune the filter criteria, doing the best job they can. The algorithms are ever-improving, but they’re still just computer programs.