As I mentioned previously, I am continually scouring for tools to make my life easier. Every now and then I find one that after a while I wonder how I functioned without it. Accountants can’t imagine how they’d live without Excel and Carpenters can’t imagine how they would live without their hammers. Well, IT professionals are no different! This posting focuses on the tools I use nearly every day (in no particular order).
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While listening to the popular audio show DotNetRocks a couple of years ago, one of the guests mentioned a great up and coming version control system that had the potential to steal some thunder from the ever popular open source version control system CVS.  The system was called SubVersion (SVN) and has several client interfaces that are available to interact with it. I ended up doing some experimenting with it and was amazed at the simplicity of how it worked and how intuitive the interface was. We have been using this system internally for over two years now.
I had experimented in the past with CVS and some other commercially available packages at some clients I had worked at, but these systems were all hard to get setup and work with and some of them were very expensive. It just didn’t make logical sense a lot of times. That’s where SVN is so very different.Â
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I recently partnered with Life on the Road. They are a collective blogging group that is geared toward a variety of trucking topics. I will occasionally make posts in their forum in addition to the Trucking Nerd when it makes sense. While the Trucking Nerd is more focused on technology from a companies perspective, Life on the Road has a strong driver following, so I’ll try to post in the forum that best suites the post.
My inaugural post over at Life on the Road discusses the time zone conundrum we face not only in trucking, but across this planet. Â
With the flattening of our economy in this day and age, I fail to understand how we can continue to have so many different labels for a single point in time, all based upon the location of the globe you happen to be at for that particular point in time. This is particularly perplexing for the trucking industry, in addition to the computer industry where time is an integral part to how both function.
I pose a few questions and delve into the topic deeper in my post there, if you are interested, here’s the link to the post.
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Everyone has probably heard the hype about how bad unsecured wireless networks are. As tools become more sophisticated for exploiting wifi vulnerabilities, it is probably important to remember the importance of taking protective measures when plugging into an unsecured hotspot.Â
An article over at the truckthis blog caught my eye which basically demonstrates exactly how one would perform a technique where packets are sniffed and data contained within cookies is then replicated on a rogue machine basically granting that machine whatever access you have at the associated site. Many sites use cookies, sites like popular webmail accounts for instance! Imagine you sign onto your gmail account and then 5 minutes later, someone else is signed on as you with complete access to your email account.
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I think of my children anytime I get some new piece of hardware or software…I can’t wait to get it out of the box and toy around with it. The day I received my action pack subscription with my copy of Microsoft Vista Business Edition, I had to dive in head first.
I of course had been messing with the beta releases all along in a virtualized environment, but I thought now that it was live, I might as well make the jump and load it as my primary operating system.
I decided to take a Friday afternoon and eagerly make the jump. I made an Acronis copy of my work machine (thank God I did this) and started down the path of doing the upgrade from Windows XP Pro to Vista. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, then all of a sudden I got the blue screen of death. When it rebooted, things just continued to go south, it wouldn’t boot anymore and the installer wouldn’t continue, I was completely hosed. After an hour of googling and trying different things, I gave up, since I had to be operational by Monday.  I ended up restoring my machine back to XP Pro. I wasn’t about to let one bad install stop me from persevering though. Read the rest of this entry »
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This article is the second in a series discussing our document imaging workflow system. This article discusses the batch workflow processing. The TOLIA Batch Entry imaging module adds a method of mass upload of images to the TOLIA document imaging system built on top of TMWSuite. Even with the image upload capability of the TOLIA Image Viewer, there are times that we need to mass upload images in a batch process.
This need arises several times a week actually since we rely on the TripPak overnight service that allows our drivers to send in all of their signed bills of lading, toll and fuel receipts, etc. It would be too cumbersome to try to individually scan and upload these images, so an efficient batch processing tool was developed, aka the TOLIA Batch Entry application.
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We received a notice from TripPak regarding their drop locations at Pilot Travel Centers across the country. They are indicating that due to some contractual issues they may be removing the Pilot locations as drop locations for customers using the TripPak express services.Â
They indicated that this is not final, but as of now at the turn of the new year could likely be the case assuming some resolution is not reached between Pilot and TripPak. They also indicated they expect to have 60% of the pilot locations covered within a 1 mile proximity with an alternate drop location. What we are not sure is how convenient or well known these alternate locations will be.
We are still assessing the impact this news will have on our usage of the service. As of today, it could be used as high as 20% of our overnight envelopes originate from Pilot locations from some quick queries we did today. Hopefully all works out and something pans out, but it will certainly be another topic I’ll be keeping an eye on the next couple of months. I assume we are not alone.
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Normally when you apply a service pack, you’re just getting a batch of stability patches and bug fixes mixed in with some small feature enhancements, most times nothing to exciting. Microsoft Exchange Service Pack 2 however offered one huge addition that can be easily overlooked if you are not paying attention. The IMF (Intelligent Message Filter) version 2.0 is a greatly enhanced spam and mailbox protection system.  If you installed service pack 2 on exchange, you need to ensure you have properly configured the IMF, it is not uncommon admins may overlook this.
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This weekend I did a lot of research around the blogsphere, and found myself stumbling on to all kinds of good reading. I’d read one thing, then stumble onto five other things that peaked my interest…soon I found myself growing tired and wishing once again for more hours in the day to continue my studies. Being in a small IT shop at a trucking company and a developer at heart, this seems to be a common daily request, too many tasks, too little time. I’m sure this is something not unique to my situation.
I always think that maybe I should try to wake up earlier than I do and use this time for specific activities. It seems my day starts with me rushing to get to work and then once I’m there, it’s general IT mayhem until the day ends…not much time for deviations, tangents or keeping on any sort of track. As I was pondering this thought, a post caught my eye for two reasons. 1) it’s title was “how to become an early riser” and 2) the author is one that I have read a few posts from in the past, Steve Pavlina.
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The statement “You get what you pay for” I have found to be mostly true, with two exceptions, 1) freeware and 2) open source software. With these, many times the return on zero dollar investment can be huge!
Being a very frugal person, I am always looking for deals. I don’t like to spend money trying to do something if there is a relatively painless alternative that costs less or even better yet is free. Being a computer nerd, I find many times, I have very specific needs for a particular technical challenge at hand. I often think to myself, “Surely, I am not the first person to run into this,” and I quickly start a search for a tool to help me out. I constantly am on the search for nice to have little utilities and tools, in addition to finding low cost options for family and friends who have home computers and don’t have a lot of funds to spend on software.
I found a great posting a while back over at a site called TechSupportAlert.com. Here, they have a posting that is invaluable. The posting is called “Best Free Utilities.” I stumbled onto this list which they keep up to date often, way after I had already done my fair share of comparisons, and I have to say, their conclusions on many of their comparisons between utilities is spot on.Â
If you have never visited this site before, check it out, you will find a few “cool” tools for your virtual toolbox you didn’t even know existed!
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