Fixed a few commands that haven’t been working with MarzPrime; zodiac, history, define. Tweaked pcworld and will be fixing sciwire and tech soon. You can see a full list of commands @ http://marzbot.marzopolis.com/commands.php
On May 21, 2010, In Marzbot, By t0ta11ed
On May 20, 2010, In General, By t0ta11ed
The Tampa Bay Technology Forum was founded in 2000 as an outlet for local Tampa technology firms and employees to foster networking and help grow the local tech ecosystem through various fundraisers, community outreach, education, and philanthropy. With a goal of making Tampa one of the top U.S. technology markets by 2015, they sponsor over 100 events every year. The board is made up of a who’s who of Tampa CIOs and technology leaders, including executives from Tribridge, Bright House Networks, Peak 10, USF, Bisk Education, the University of Florida, and more.
The group offers membership on a company basis only but hopefully one day they’ll open it to individual membership. However, they’re currently offering a Transitional membership for those between jobs. You can check out their Benefits page to learn about everything they have to offer members.
One of the great things about the group is their huge involvement in helping kids, especially the Boys & Girls Club, who recently named them Corporate Sponsor of the Year. They’ve provided computer labs, mentoring programs, and scholarships to hundreds of local youth. As of last year, they’ve given out 17 scholarships totaling over $54,000. This is already an impressive achievement and they plan to ramp this up in the future.
They’ve held the annual Tech Jam event since 2002, and this year is a return to their original party theme which featured a Battle of the Bands. Dubbed the “Summer Party with a Purpose”, they’ve invited the local technology community to join them August 26th, 2010 at the Ritz in Ybor City starting at 5:30pm. Groups competing in the battle will be playing live music while attendees network and participate in a silent auction, enjoy cocktails and food, and raise money for at risk youth in the Tampa Bay area. The event is sponsored by Bright House Networks, Veredus, and CIBER. Anyone is invited to attend and there will be a door charge that is still being finalized.
Lori Taylor, VP of Marketing and Operations for the group, says they’re getting ready to announce the process for bands to apply and the musicians will be from local technology companies. At least one band member must be a TBTF member. They’re also in the process of collecting items for the silent auction and will know more of what will be available in July or August. She also noted they’re seeking silent auction donations, sponsorships, and volunteers for the event. Those interested in participating can contact Deanne Langton at (813) 341-8283 or dlangton@tbtf.org.
I plan to attend the event for a follow up article on its sure success. TBTF has done a huge amount of inspiring work in the local Tampa area, and here’s to seeing them reach their goal in 2015!
On May 6, 2010, In The Wire, By t0ta11ed
In a testament to the impact technology has had on our lives and the world we live in, research company Millward Brown released a report on the top 100 brands yesterday, with the top four spots taken by technology companies. Google ranked number one, followed by IBM, Apple, and Microsoft, all literally household names cemented into our culture. The top twenty rounded out with other companies such as Oracle, Verizon, Hewlett-Packard, and RIM, makers of the venerable Blackberry. In a sign of the times, it is clear computing and wireless technologies have become cornerstones of daily business and personal life. A few Chinese technology companies also appear on the list, including carrier China Mobile, signifying the value of the rapidly growing Asian market.
Clearly this trend will only continue, with our work and homes dominated by a growing reliance on technology. Only time will tell if this is a good or bad thing of course, with technology providing everything from communication and news, mobile computing , business applications, and ways to stay instantly connected to friends, family, and even work. What will the future hold? What will be the next great technological leap? Will Google take over the world? Will there ever be anything that trumps the mainstay Windows operating system? What will the next killer app be, and wouldn’t you like to be the one that turns it into a household name? Post your thoughts and ideas! Feed the ether!
The top ten is below and you can view the full list here:
| Brand | Value |
| No. 1. Google | $114.2 billion |
| No. 2. IBM | $86.3 billion |
| No. 3. Apple | $83.3 billion |
| No. 4. Microsoft | $76.1 billion |
| No. 5. Coca-Cola | $67.3 billion |
| No. 6. McDonald’s | $66.0 billion |
| No. 7. Marlboro — Altria | $57.0 billion |
| No. 8. China Mobile | $52.6 billion |
| No. 9. General Electric | $45.0 billion |
| No. 10. Vodafone | $44.4 billion |
On May 6, 2010, In Bots, By t0ta11ed
MSN.pm 2.0 (8) – The Perl module for connecting to the MSN Messenger service.
On April 23, 2010, In General, By t0ta11ed
Many system and network administrators are responsible for supporting development, QA, and production systems for sites and web based applications. In simplest form the code/app is moved from one to the other as it progresses through the lifecycle. The systems could be located on different networks, are usually housed on different servers, and can even be geographically dispersed. They can also be extremely large with some shops breaking out environments into UAT, regression, and even business process testing as well. This easily produces sprawl across the infrastructure and can make administration difficult at times.
But how do you know which version of the site/app you’re looking at is if you don’t have a way of identifying it? Worst case scenario, you could accidentally change code for a QA site when it really should have been the dev site if you’re not careful. Using different URLs is a typical choice but that can result in wild variations that are just plain ugly, disorganized, and sometimes end up being ridiculously long or making no sense.
Since users depend on DNS to resolve URLs, a great trick to differentiate between these environments is implementing zones to distinguish one from the other. You can create zones for each part of the process, allowing development and other teams to use the same URL for every environment/system, avoiding different and confusing names. This makes things trivial to identify, for example;
site.lab – Lab
site.dev – Development URL
site.qa – QA
site.uat – UAT
site.reg – Regression
site.com – Production
Match the URLs on the server side and everything is nice and neat. The possibilities are endless and keeps a tidy, organized, uniform URL scheme across the infrastructure that easily identifies things and takes very little time or effort. You can take this a step further with your database designs on the backend, use Active Directory domains for added features and security, and even match your system names. Granted there are plenty of other ways to accomplish this, but the zone method doesn’t require a lot of work and is visually simple for the end user. What methods do you use for this purpose? Post to discuss!
On April 22, 2010, In Marzbot, By t0ta11ed
Marzprime bot is currently offline due to a hardware problem with the server. Will have this fixed and back up soon.
Update: This is fixed and everything is back online.
On April 22, 2010, In Bots, By t0ta11ed
Program O 1.0.4 (3) – A new PHP based AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) interpreter by Elizabeth Perreau. Works way better than the old Program-E and very nicely written. You can find more info at program-o.com.
On March 3, 2010, In General, By t0ta11ed
After letting my domain boxchronicle.com, (which was for a computer history site I originally created in college) expire a while back, I recently decided to register it again and get the site back up and running. It used to generate the most traffic out of all my pages/sites, but I’d run out of a lot of free time to maintain it and had let it go by the wayside.
When I tried to register it again, I discovered someone else had taken the domain name and now posted it as a premium domain for sale at an outrageous price. They basically stole the domain, as it was likely bought due to the high traffic it once got and were either now hoping I’d fork out the money for it back, or idiotically thought someone else would find such a name valuable. It was never the name that drove the traffic, but the actual site content which got nice rankings on the search engines. That’s nothing but good SEO!
I knew that if I got the site back up with a new name, the traffic would come. I decided on using the pluralized version of the original name, which made more sense when I thought about it anyway. So now without further ado, here is the new site boxchronicles.com . This is only one letter way from the original name, and the content itself will bring the traffic back.
Hopefully I can steal the old name back from the organization that took it after it expires in July and simply point that one to the same place…ensuring any old outside links using the original domain name will wind up there. But seriously …who would think such a name would be worth hundreds of dollars?
On March 25, 2008, In General, By t0ta11ed
In a support role the idea is to leave the end user happy no matter how frustrated they are.
On March 6, 2008, In Security, By t0ta11ed
Whenever you’re stuck in a small shop with a limited budget, it can be pretty hard to find a good, inexpensive application that can do five things:
Port scanning
Vulnerability scanning
Some kind of patch level detection
Wrap everything up into reporting that can show all the results by machine.
Doesn’t cost an arm, leg, and your first born.
With little to no budget, my auditing tools are varied and I have to cut and paste most of their results into a single report by hand. I’ve gotten pretty nifty with the report formats using color coded Excel sheets, and I get to flex my writing skills but the manual work involved really is frustrating. However, using a combo of the usual free tools (Nessus, Nmap, Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, Metaspolit, etc.), I’ve managed to audit a small network of 100+ IPs and 5 subnets in around four to five days, complete with the reports. This also includes external auditing of our two public networks. I still wish I had a free or inexpensive tool that does a lot of what I’m already doing manually, especially bringing in all of the results into a single report complete with an executive summary.
Now, I could be lazy and just compile all the output these tools already generate and call that a “report”, but I’m the creative type and believe in clear documentation that can translate to both non-technical staff and IT staff. They should have a uniform look, because Nessus’ output format is an HTML file and Nmaps’ is a text or XML file. Putting them all together into a printed out clump just looks sloppy, and I don’t go for sloppy with documentation.
There are plenty that do that job, but all of them are pretty hefty pricewise, which leaves those with a low budget for such items in the crunch. There is business opportunity in this area, so you would think this market would have a bit more variety. Changes in the security landscape are pushing it in that direction though, as security and compliance are becoming concerns to even some small businesses. If I was a .NET developer, I think I’d start writing something that did what I wanted. Alas, I’m not, but if any of them are out there lurking, get to coding!