Category

IT Administration

• 09.27.07
  Give away your programming books
  Programming, IT Administration (1)

  Most of us have a beginner's programming book that we no longer use. We may also have a book on a programming language (or framework) that we were once interested in, but not any longer. What to do with these? Give them away! Bookmooch.com is a great social marketplace that operates on something very close to the idea of a "gift economy". The site is a social web application that allows people to give away unwanted books and receive books that they do want. I love it! I've (currently) given away 37 books and received 41. Many of them have been programming ...
  
  
• 09.21.07
  Move to Laptop - Continued…
  IT Administration (0)

  I've discovered a productivity increasing benefit to doing all my work on a laptop. I can do my work in the library with the students during study hall. This motivates me to keep on task a little better than when I'm in my work room by myself. I make an effort to look studious and productive because students are watching me. Looking studious and productive usually has the effect of actually being more productive (although not always). This doesn't work when I'm the actual study hall monitor because then my job is to actually monitor students, but it works great during ...
  
  
• 09.17.07
  Changing My Work Computer
  IT Administration (1)

  I'm moving all my work applications to a computer that has one fourth the memory, a fifth the hard drive space, and two slower processor cores instead of the four fast processor cores of my current G5 Quad tower. What am I thinking?! I'm thinking that the slower computer is a laptop and portability is greater benefit than speed or power in most of the work that I do. I'll see how it all works out in a few months, but right now I'm enjoying the freedom of being able to work in multiple places.
  
  
• 08.30.06
  nmap
  IT Administration (0)

  Another unix command line tool. I had a missing device on my network that I was trying to find. I didn't know what IP address a print server was using and I needed to know to get a Windows machine to print to it. Enter nmap. I downloaded the source and compiled it on my Mac G5. Worked great. I can run commands to see everything on my network and what ports are open on each machine. It even makes an intelligent guess as to what operating system is on the machine. Some cool trivia: In the film "Matrix Reloaded", the character Trinity ...
  
  
• 08.29.06
  ssh technologies - scp
  IT Administration (0)

  I'm still beginning to learn about ssh technologies, but I like everything I see. I've used sshfs experimentally and its awesome (more on that later). Today I tried scp, which is a tool that copies files over the network using ssh. I used it to copy our versioned server backup to another machine. The best solution for this would probably be rsync, which I have not used much yet.
  
  
• 08.29.06
  Mail Clients
  IT Administration (0)

  The Apple Mail app comes installed on all our computers by default and it works well; it certainly looks clean and sharp. However, spam is becoming more of a problem and I'm finding that the spam filters on the Apple mail app just don't seem to be as good or as easy to use as the spam filter on Mozilla Thunderbird. I'm a long time user and supporter of Mozilla products and Thunderbird is a great email client. It doesn't look quite as nice on my OS X desktop as the Apple mail app does, but the spam filter is working ...
  
  
• 08.25.06
  IT Coordinator
  IT Administration (0)

  I work as the Tech Guy at a small private Christian school. I love my job. I get to work in education and with computers at the same time. Most of the school computers are Mac OS X, with a few Windows machines, and a PPC Ubuntu Linux server. Since discovering Ubuntu linux about two years ago, linux has become my operating system of choice for just about everything. However, because the school uses Mac OS X so extensively, my main work machine is a G5 Quad aluminum tower. The main reason for this is Apple Remote Desktop. ARD saves me so ...
  
  

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