David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
This is inspired by a comment I received a couple of days ago. It’s one of those questions that if you know to ask, you probably already know the answer. But I’ll say it anyway.
No, it’s not OK to staple an SD card, a compact flash card, or any other kind of flash media to an envelope, a piece of paper, or anything else.
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One of my former classmates sent out a query, asking what we’d tell someone who was thinking about studying journalism today. Predictably, a lot of people wrote “Don’t do it!” or “Newspapers aren’t hiring anyone,” or something similar. I never had time to change careers; my IT career essentially started a week after I started taking journalism classes and I was working full-time in IT a good three months before the dean of the school shook my hand and gave me my diploma.
Although I’ve had to explain my education virtually every time I’ve been interviewed for a job, I don’t regret it.
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You may have a question about open-source licenses on your CISSP exam. I don’t remember the specifics and wouldn’t be able to repeat them anyway, but I had a question on my exam where knowing the differences was helpful in finding the right answer.
And I had to deal with an issue this past week involving open-source technologies where the licenses made a big difference.
I propose a new rule. I think it’s a very modest and very reasonable proposal. It has two parts.
1. No meeting can last longer than 6 hours (the length of the CISSP exam)
2. Material presented in said meetings may have no more than 250 items (the same number of questions in a CISSP exam)
It was 1997. I was working my first full-time job, and my phone rang with my first crisis.
“What happened to the K drive?” the caller asked.
I glanced over at my network drive cheat sheet, which listed all of our shares and what server they were on. In those days, most of our servers still had 300-400 megabyte drives and that meant every file server hosted, at most, a couple of shares. There was no K drive on our list. I was afraid this was about to get interesting. Read more
My wife found a dining room table she really liked on Craigslist. But the logistics of me picking it up just weren’t good because I’m going to be really busy the next few weeks. If I couldn’t get it done on Sunday the 29th, it wasn’t going to happen.
The deal ended up falling through because I couldn’t get enough cash on a Sunday, and they wouldn’t take $400 in cash and a check for the rest because everyone knows everyone on Craigslist is a scammer (I’m paraphrasing, but he pretty much told me that only scammers use checks). I won’t have time any other day this week, and next weekend I’m taking my boys to a train show (you gotta keep your priorities straight, you know). But as it turned out, it’s probably for the best anyway.
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Last week, John C Dvorak wrote about technical duds. And it’s unfortunate about what happened to Word macros, because at times they can be extremely useful, and not terribly difficult to use, either.
Here’s my favorite macro–a method to join single lines. You’ll wonder why it never became a standard feature in Word. You won’t use it often, but when you need it, you need it badly.
Christopher Mims argues that 3D printing is the next Virtual Reality. I think he misses the point. I see 3D printing as having a bright future, but not because I see it as necessarily the future of mass production. I see 3D printing taking over the fringes, because it makes small-scale manufacturing practical.
Five and a half hours ago, I turned in my test and departed the CISSP test site. It took me four hours to answer the nastiest 250 test questions I’ve ever seen in my life.
I felt better about it than the other guys milling around the lobby, but….
It was like ordering Chinese takeout.
I wrote yesterday about how I needed a motherboard to try to solve my ongoing webserver issue. I don’t live or work anywhere near Micro Center. The computer store near my house closed, and I don’t like the one near my workplace anymore since they jerked my friend around. Frequently I order computer equipment online, but Micro Center’s pricing is really good right now, so I asked my wife if she would mind trying a pickup order.
It worked. Splendidly.
I went to the web site, created an account, then added the items I wanted to my cart. I’ve known for a couple of days that I wanted an Asus P5G41T-M LX motherboard, a Pentium E5700 CPU (two cores of 3 GHz goodness for 65 watts and 50 bux0rZ), and 8 GB of Kingston DDR3. I also added a 32 GB SDHC memory card for my wife’s new camera, to make the trip worth her while. I added my wife as an authorized pickup person and created a PIN for her.
Seven minutes later, I received an e-mail message saying my order was ready.
She went to the store, walked right up to a sign at the front of the store that read Internet Pickup, handed them her driver’s license, told them her PIN, and they grabbed a pile of stuff with my name on it, put it in a bag, and handed it to her.
And I know now that you can place your order and pick it up any time within three calendar days.
I already have a 40 GB SSD and a Corsair power supply I’ve been saving for the project. Now I just need to find an ATX case to gut, put my pieces together, install Linux, and I’ll have a new web server.
