TheMadAdmin

Where:

157 Broad Street, Suite 211
Red Bank, NJ 07701

Map

TIME:

Wednesday, May 21^st @ 7pm

Give Away and Pizza/Drinks, and Meet the other Flex People!!!

This meeting will be very “introductory,” and is geared more towards a meeting the other members, rather than an educational discussion.

Next month we’ll start up the speakers.

Please RSVP on www.NJFlex.com to ensure we have enough food and chairs for everyone.

Thanks,

Jason

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I will try to be there, how about you?

The MadAdmin

Tags: Adobe, Coding, Flex // Add Comment »

CBS buys CNET

NEW YORK (AP) — CBS Corp. agreed to buy online technology news and entertainment company CNet Networks Inc. for about $1.75 billion, expanding its access to the burgeoning Internet advertising market.

I think this is a bad thing.  Old world media never gets it right when they buy an internet property.  They just have the wrong mindset.

But time will tell if I am right.

Tags: Something to Talk About // Add Comment »

So as you know I got a new job.  It follows that I need to get a new phone.  I go to sprint for the $99 Simply Everything Plan (It does not include everything) and went to pick out a phone.

I find the HTC Mogul

It is a Winows Mobile 6 phone with a full sliding Keyboard and touch screen.  Has all the toys, camera, gps, internet, email…Everything.  It was pricey but I give in and buy it.  It was fun to play with but the problem was it was not stable.  In 5 days it hung 3 times.  Twice I was expecting a call and never got it.  Then found the phone was hung.
I know what your thinking  “He installed something that screwed the phone.” or “He took so many pictures that the phone crashed.”  Well I didn’t.  Nothing on the phone and I was only keeping a days worth of email on the phone.  It just would lock  up.

Also I got used to the Blackberry being able to lock when holstered.  This phone didn’t.
I killed the battery keeping the inside of the holster nice and bright when I was not using the phone.

Needless to say I returned the phone.  I now have the Blackberry 8830 and guess what.  It works.

I might switch next week to the 8330 Curve.  Adds some features and saves me another $50.

Now I did do a little hacking to get functionality.  I am using three services to get tasks and calender itmes in my BB.

I use Jott to take phone messages from my phone and send them to Remember The Milk or Google Calendar.

Remember The Milk is a task list organizer.  Very cool and very useful.

Google calender is a calendar from Google.

Jott lets me send messages to both of these without logging into the service.  I call 866-JOTT-123 and it asks who I want to Jott.  I say Remember ot Google and then leave a message.  Jott transcribes the message and enters it into my task list or calendar and is smart enough to get the date and time mentioned in the message to place it in the schedule.

Very cool.

Now I only have the I was too lazy and not that I forgot as an excuse.

TheMadAdmin

Tags: I.T. // Add Comment »

Dave and Busters lost credit card numbers.  Hackers got them.

The story is the Hackers used sniffers to get the traffic from Dave and Busters restaurants that was heading to the main office in Dallas.  The traffic contained credit card transactions.  They did this for 5 months and sold the gathered information.  The hackers were caught.

Great the hackers were caught.  Now how about the company?  I am thinking that Dave and Busters were routing their traffic through the internet and not encrypting it.   If the traffic was encrypted, the hackers would not be able to sniff it.  I think the greater crime is the company cutting corners and putting all it’s customers data at risk.  This should be something companies can get in legal trouble for, setting up systems that are easily hacked.

Banks are not allowed to store the money in a card board box on the street   because they have a fiduciary responsibility  to keep the assets safe.   But that is an obvious example and would be easily seen as a bad idea.

Companies that  don’t keep the data safe are doing the exact same thing.  They are putting all your information in a card board box on the street.  The only difference is that you don’t know it.  You can’t see the box but the people that would steel from this box do.  So it is even worse than the bank example because they pretend that everything is in the safe and make you feel like it won’t be stollen but in the end they are doing nothing to stop it.

That is my rant for the day.

TheMadAdmin

Tags: Security // Add Comment »

Yesterday we had some internet connection issues.  We first though Verizon.

Called them they would monitor the line but do nothing (we can’t have them take it down during the day)

Well after a few hours I start checking logs and I find that we are getting port scanned heavily.  We call back Verizon and they tell me to email abuse.  I do.  We also call and get someonee on the line from abuse.
They confirm we were getting saturated. But it was clear by the time we got to them.

We confirm we are working and get the correct number to call if it happens again.

Then an hour later our Administrator gets an email saying there was an abuse complaint about us!!!  It was an automated response from the email I sent to Abuse.  You have to hate love Verizon.

TheMadAdmin

(Not Bad a DDOS on day 3.)

Tags: I.T., Office Life // Add Comment »

Lots to do.

Learn the system.  Find places for improvement.  Brain Drain the last IT guy that is leaving.

But the people are nice, and I am happy to be doing something new.

Back to work now…

TheMadAdmin

Tags: I.T., Office Life // 1 Comment »

The Link

Very good rant.  Not much else to say.

Tags: Comic // Add Comment »

Animoto.com If you have not looked at it yet you should.  What they produce using your images and music is incredible.  What also blows my mind is they are doing it without a physical server.  They are using Amazon Web Services(AWS).  This site lives in the cloud and can expand quickly.

A Blurb from Animoto (Animation Motion)

Animoto’s front end is built on the open source web framework Ruby on Rails, facilitating rapid “Web 2.0″ (Ajax, etc) application development. Animoto has partnered with Amazon to leverage multiple offerings in their Web Services (AWS) platform which, in conjunction with Animoto’s own render farm, constitutes the Animoto web infrastructure.

This is not your Dad’s slide show.  Very cool and I can hardly call it a slide show.

Check them out.

Tags: Something to Talk About // Add Comment »

While I have worked at my current company for many years (on and off) I have just accepted an offer from another firm and will be embarking on a new adventure in my career.

I have taken a position as a Director of Information Technology for a company, a very cool spot.  But what makes this even better is, I get to spend time coding. (Not full time but I hope to get it up to 1/3 of the day).  As anyone that reads this blog knows I do enjoy coding.

So if the post rate drops off, it is probably due to the fact I am learning a new system and coding into the wee hours of the morning.

I am looking forward to this change.

TheMadAdmin

Tags: I.T., Office Life // Add Comment »

From Wired

Photo: Joe Pugliese

Jeff Bezos’ store in the sky is hard to beat for books, CDs, and a zillion other products. It’s also great for quick technology fixes. Say you need a fat HP server for hosting the too-moronic-to-fail Facebook app you plan to launch next week. Only $1,300 and change! Hit 1-Click. Select expedited shipping. What’s for lunch?

But there’s a cheaper, faster, better way to satisfy your hardware jones. Tucked over on the left side of the page, the nerd gnomes in Beacon Hill, Seattle, have embedded an option that blows computer shopping into, well, the clouds. Click on “Amazon Web Services.” Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center’s worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents! — and they’re set to start spitting out widgets as soon as you upload the code. Virtual quad cores are a princely 80 cents an hour. Need storage? All you can eat for 15 cents per gigabyte per month. And there’s even a tool for monitoring your virtual stack with an iPhone. No precious cash tied up in soon-to-be-obsolete silicon, no 3 am runs to the colo cage. Outsource your infrastructure to Amazon!

You do get a lot of bang for your buck on Amazon, the best part is being able to scale quickly.  You can go from 1 machine to a thousand machines in minutes.  No I.T. department can match that.

Tags: I.T. // Add Comment »