Richards Blog PHP, food and life

Started work at Mashery last week and although I have only been there a couple days but I have to say its the most exciting company I have worked with in a long time.

No spending weeks getting familiar with things, there system is built on top of the solar framework which I have played around with so I was able to jump right into the middle of it and get some things done my first few days there which really feels great.

I hope that I can continue this trend and help them push bug fixes and features out the door on a consistent basis.

I have left my position at BrokerBin.com part of this change involves moving back to Seattle to be closer to family and friends out there.

The other part of this change is taking some time off from the "7am-5pm if I am lucky" daily grind of being a System Admin/Programmer/Office Support/Handling any and all technical related tasks to spend the next year with my family and watching my 2 year old grow up.

If you have a single drive Centos 5.1 will not install until you go into the BIOS and set it up to use RAID mode.. for some reason in IDE mode it pukes loading the ata_piix drivers.

It also would only install in text mode, it didn't like the 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8300GS DVI/VGA that was on the system it seems, it failed to setup X so I had to download the nvidia driver and install that before I could get a gui up and running

After reading http://www.tonybibbs.com/ it maybe me think about some of the technologies I have dealt with and its been a lot. Being the only tech person at the company I am at for a while made me the defacto programmer/system admin/tech support/if it is electronic its my job go to guy!

This has lead to some pretty interesting projects with technologies I knew nothing about at the time. Pulling phone stats from our Altigen phone system, Putting together a calendar using data from our Timeforce time clock, Integrating our admin area with Microsoft SBS and LDAP.

Verizon just got beat down by the NY State Attorney General for advertising there wireless service as "unlimited" when in fact caps exists and people where terminated for heavy usage.

Thats great! I hate false advertising however if you browse forums like http://www.dslreports.com you will find the bottom of the barrel claiming caps in general are evil, or that use of there line to download illegal music 24/7 is ok no matter what the ISP terms of service says.

So got a new iPhone, get vpn up and running without a problem. Also managed to get the mail client to talk to my exchange server.

The problem? We have a couple users this is not working for it seems if you rename a user in exchange there actual mailbox store keeps the same old name, Every single person who's login does not match there mailbox store name can not use IMAP4 to check there email it just dies for some reason..

You need a snapshot of your database to restore replication but you want to reduce your downtime what can do you?

Backing up gigs of data can take a few minutes, minutes your database is down because you wanted to ensure you get a perfect copy.

Listen guys "Akismet + Drupal" = Go away!! I get the same damn spam comments every single data.

If your using Drupal and have a problem with spam download the Akismet module its worth its virtual weight in virtual gold!

Working on reloading the server to support Xen virtual servers, This site is currently running on 1 virtual server now. Sorry if something is not currently working.

I hope this is just the beginning of short but useful tips and articles that can help you out sometime in the future.

One of the most important things in project management is communication, are all members of your team good at communicating? Does SVN communicate with you and let you know whats going on? If not you might be missing out on what your team is doing.