Invasion Plans

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!

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!

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?

In a support role the idea is to leave the end user happy no matter how frustrated they are.

I’ve decided to use this spot to post various stuff, mostly related to my job as a system administrator. Along with the new purpose comes a new look and I think it kicks ass.

Some of the first things I’ll be putting up will be about Exchange 2007, I’ve had some adventures putting it into production the last month. There will also be various other ranting and raving in between all the technobabble as well I imagine. So enjoy…or just click off..