rants

An open letter to both sides of the student bussing issue

2010-04-12

Dear everyone with a child in public schools, Hi there. So the BIG STORY today on the news today was how the largest school district in the state of North Carolina has decided to stop bussing students all over hell and creation, and to start having kids go to the schools in their neighbourhoods. [...]

would you like to know more?

An open letter to Microsoft’s Hyper-V Team about USB

2010-03-22

Dear Hyper-V Team and Program Manager, First, let me commend you on what is a great job overall with Hyper-V. It’s a lean, mean, hosting machine and runs 2008R2 VMs flawlessly. It also does a bang-up job with 2008 and 2003R2 guests as well, but I like to run the latest and the greatest [...]

would you like to know more?

Eleven signs that television is going straight to hell

2010-03-15

Well the networks can do it, so why can’t I? This post is based on one I wrote back in 2006, posted to my MSN/Live Spaces page, and promptly forgot. I just tumbled across it today, and figured it was worth extending, rearranging, and re-releasing. We call this post "Eleven signs that television is [...]

would you like to know more?

An open letter to DirecTV

2010-03-08

Mr. Robert Caiello, Director of Marketing DirecTV Dear Bob, Can I call you Bob? You’ve written to me so many times, I feel like I know you well enough to call you Bob. Hope you don’t mind. So listen Bob, here’s the thing. I cancelled my service with DirecTV over a year ago, October [...]

would you like to know more?

Five things the news should never mention again!

2010-02-24

There was a time, when I was younger, that I quit watching the news almost completely. My morning ritual would consist of turning on CNN as I fixed my coffee (mmm, coffee….) to see if Wolf Blitzer was live outside the White House. No Wolf, no war, and that was good enough for me. [...]

would you like to know more?

Channeling my inner Sam Kinison

2010-01-13

So we are doing a lot of things in parallel at work, including an implementation of Solar Winds and a deployment of Windows 7. Today, they came together in a particularly craptastic fashion. Seems like every single web page on the Solar Winds Orion application threw a UAC prompt on Windows 7. Even just sitting [...]

would you like to know more?

An open letter to web app developers

2009-07-07

Dear web developer, Congratulations on creating a wonderful web based application to assist your company’s customers with registering and accessing your site. I cannot help but admire your use of concise, compliant code, the choice of fonts and colours, and other little niceties that went into your work. It seems a shame that you did [...]

would you like to know more?

SYN, SYN ACK,…RST. RST? WTF?

2007-12-28

There is a problem with Receive Side Scaling and Windows 2003 SP2, when you are doing one of the following…1) using NAT….nat is what? come on, say it….EVIL!2) you are using ICS.3) you are using the Microsoft Firewall service…like when you are an ISA Server. This will first manifest as REALLY SLOW logins. Then you [...]

would you like to know more?

Enabling IPSec VPN connections to ISA 2006

2007-08-09

One part of my current job is to manage VPN access to the corporate intranet. This fortunately does NOT involve user access currently, as that is outsourced, but it does involve third party access, and since our outsource solution doesn’t support user password changes, I am in the process of evaluating alternatives. One of the [...]

would you like to know more?

God I hate NAT

2007-07-17

Well, in truth, this is not NAT’s fault per se, but since it was involved, it takes the blame. I am setting up MS ISA 2006 to serve as a VPN concentrator…I’ll post more specifics on this soon. Suffice it to say that I spent a couple of hours getting everything set, to include having [...]

would you like to know more?

im in ur datastreams, fixup’in’ ur protokols

2007-06-06

So the other day, I found myself involved in two different attempts to fix the same problem, which had apparently been an issue for over a year for these guys. They both wanted to use FTP to move files from a host on one segment, to an FTP server on another segment. Sounds simple, right? [...]

would you like to know more?

Next Entries →