Sc@-tt3r-ed Thoughts

Today, I was having some issues installing Orchard for one of my schools remotely. the issue was that the software would not allow me to specify a remote network location for the install CDs, it insisted to look for a CD ROM Drive. Well, I then turned to my trustee CloneCD which works great, though payware, unfortunately, for my particular hardware, CloneCD failed every single time, and I wasn’t sure why. 

I have been in the IT field for about 8 years now, and I have dealt with novices, experts, novices who thinks they’re experts, and everything in between. In this article, I’m going to lay it out all on the table about dealing with an IT. If you find that one of those points applies/applied to you at once point or another. I apologize in advance, but sometimes it’s better to be blunt than to beat around the bush .

1. If you ask me a technical question, please do not argue with me when I give you an answer. When I give a definite answer, it is because I am absolutely positive about it. If you are a lawyer, and you have my case, I will not argue about what you tell me regarding the law related to my case. If I didn’t know the answer to your question, I will tell you that I don’t know, or that I will research it and get back to you. Please do not come to me with the question if you just want to argue about it. 
2. When I have to guide you step by step through a process that usually would take me about 2 minutes if I do it myself, but takes you 1 hour because you don’t know what you are doing. Please don’t get impatient with me, or act like you don’t have time to waste on fixing your issue. Remember, I am the one spending my time trying to help you with your problem. If you have to go because you have something to do, I would understand of course. There is always an 80% chance that the problem that you are having is usually extremely simple to resolve, and becomes complicated due to your impatience to go through the steps. 
3. If I ask you what you have done to your equipment prior to it breaking, please don’t lie to me, and say “nothing”. In most cases, you must have done something. I am ok with you making mistakes, but not ok with you lying about it. this only makes the process longer and longer to troubleshoot, as I’d have to guide you through investigating up until we reach the point of finding the change you made that caused your equipment or software to break. this COULD be the starting point of the conversation … Imagine the time saved. 
4. If I tell you that I can’t fix something, or that you have to recreate a document because it has been permanently lost, please don’t get mad at me. it is not my fault, nor am I a magician. (though some people seem to think I am … ). I will do my best to help you resolve whatever issue you have. Sometimes, I won’t be able to, or it’ll be simply impossible, or very costly to the point where it’s not even worth it for you.
5. Please don’t insult yourself before you ask a question (i.e: I’m such an idiot) … that’ll not only make you really sound like an idiot, but it’ll make me not want to help you. Just because you don’t know the resolution to a problem doesn’t make you an idiot. 
6. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I am aware that people’s knowledge skills in technology vary greatly, no question is a dumb question. I’d rather answer questions to teach you how to do things, than to answer support calls to fix things you’ve broken.

I hope these few pointers will be some eye openers to some. again, I apologize for the bluntness, but these are truths about IT support. Look at all the humor sites that are built around IT support, that should tell you something about the lives we live in our IT world

I was browsing today, and I stumbled upon a new site — at least to me — which is very similar to some of the sites that I used to use to upload files to friends, like dropload and YouSendIt. 

Sometimes I find the need to get a friend to see what I’m doing, or show them a section on a website, or guide through purchasing a product, and it would be nice if we could see the same screen and go through the steps. 

Here’s the problem I always see: any solution that may be possible usually requires a lengthy signup, email confirmation, and the works. Of course, there’s sites like… http://www.bugmenot.com which removes the pain from some of these processes, but it’s still a lot of setup instructions. 

Well yesterday, when I was stumbling around, I found a pretty cool site, which is, still in public beta (meaning, still has its quirks) … but is promising. The best part about this one, is that no signup is required, you can go to it, start a session, as an anonymous user, and invite as many other users into it to share the session. The result is just a url that takes the user straight to the session. Granted, this session is public, so anyone may join it if they know the URL. If privacy is required, you would have to sign up for an account, and create a private session. 

Here’s one issue that I didn’t like, though I certainly understand:

• You can only share sites that are outside of an authentication realm. I tried to login to gmail, or my bank account, and non of them worked. Which is ok I guess, but just something I noticed. 
• For obvious reasons, you cannot guide someone through an intranet site (company website, etc …) because the connections are actually made from the twiddla servers to the site, therefore not giving them access to your intranet. 

This is a fairly obvious point, but given the benefit of such a site, I could see people wanting to use it for intranet, and authenticated session. 

Overall, Twiddla is a pretty cool site. I would just give it some more time before they have some of their tools within the whiteboard working correctly. 

Hm I think that title would get the attention of the audience I would want to address in this post. 

I have been using VMWare for a long time now.  most for testing, and workstation use, which has been great. My experience has been limited to VMWare workstation, GSX Server, and VMWare Server. I’m really looking forward to getting to work with VMWare ESX. 

For today, we have 2 sites that have been in competition for me over the past week …
MUSICOVERY and PANDORA.

They are similar where they can taylor music to your taste. the interface of musicovery is definitely sexier than pandora, as you can see below. you can have a visual of any songs that are within your genre list selected on the left, and jump straight to the song of choice. from what I could tell, Pandora does not have that same option, however it does have another option that makes up for the lack of musicovery-like features in that you can input a “Radio station” which is the name of an artist or band that you like, and it automatically taylors the radio station to the music style that is very similar to that artist. I say that’s pretty slick.

You can sign it to both of these sites. Registration is free for the basic membership, and costs a pretty reasonable amount for the hi-def version, and a few more features available. To me, the free version has been working fine. Maybe it will for you as well. Give it a shot, and post which you prefer, and maybe even suggest some of your favorite sites for streaming music?

I am a relatively new Mac user, and I am still learning the ropes. One of the things that I used to be bale to do very easily on the PC was to create an ISO (CD Image file) from a CD. On the Mac, I attempted to do it using DiskUtility, which is a native tool that comes with OS X, but it does not really do the job. So, after a little bit of research, I found a cool way to do it, which is fairly easy. For this to work, you probably have to be a little comfortable using your “Terminal”application. I will try to put the steps in as much detail as possible, so that you can follow along:

Disclaimer: Please note  that the tool used in this article (dd) can be dangerous, and, if used incorrectly, can end up wiping your whole hard drive, so, consider yourself warned!!

- Open “Terminal” : Applications / Utilities / Terminal

- With your CD mounted. (You should be able to see the CD on your desktop, type: 

df -h

The important line is

 /dev/disk1s1s3

This is the device reference to your CDROM drive.This number may vary, and in order to be sure that your CD device reference is the correct one, you can run the following command, and that should give you at lease the first part of the device without the reference to the volume:

drutil status

This /dev/disk1 is the CD Drive.

- Unmount your CD:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted.

- Now create the ISO

dd if=/dev/disk1s1s3 of=mynewcd.iso bs=2048

- When the process finishes, you should be able to mount that image using this command:

hdid mynewcd.iso

Or you can mount it by double clicking on the iso file, and it should show up on your desktop.

Gotchas:

- The main problem that I had with doing this process was to refer to the CD device, instead of the volume that I need to rip. (i.e: /dev/disk1, as opposed to /dev/disk1s1s3). If you use dd and get the final file, it’ll look fine, but when you try to mount it, you will get an error. So make sure you refer to the correct volume.

- Make sure that you are writing the ISO file somewhere within the filesystem that you have WRITE access. The safest place would probably be your home directory, so your dd line would be best that way:

dd if=/dev/disk1s1s3 of=~/Desktop/mynewcd.iso bs=2048

This will actually write the file straight on your desktop, and you won’t have to go looking for it after the process is done.

This ISO can then be burned at a later time.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been contemplating my online workstyle while dealing with a my webhost which has been less than ideal lately, in addition to dealing with WordPress problems that I can’t seem to find a good solution for (not the formatting of the articles being all screwed up). Some say, it’s the theme, some say it’s the browser, I spent countless hours trying to fix it, then last night, it dawned on me…