Security The issue with antivirus software I hate anti-virus software. I really do hate the stuff. This is not a mere dislike but an actual hatred. The reason for this is quite simple. In IT security terms any security
Cloud Computing Cloud Computing - Amazon Outage Of course, just as I extol the virtues of cloud computing and talk about how much I've moved into the cloud Amazon suffers an outage. Opps. Well, yes and no to the opps.
Security Renaming local administrator accounts - good or bad? A lot of the time I hear the following statement 'Renaming the local administrator account makes it secure'. No, it doesn't. Renaming the local administrator account just leaves you with a renamed local
Technical Moving into the cloud Without realising it I've found myself moving more things into the cloud. I'm not exactly reliant on the stuff that's in the cloud but I'm certainly using more services out there and it
Administrivia Windows 2008 Course this week On a Windows 2008 course this week. It seems to be a rehash of stuff that I've covered before but it's a week out of the daily office grind. The tea on the
War Stories New goal - We want to be CMM level 3 For those who don't know CMM stands for . It's a set of standards designed to help an organisations software processes to the point that a software project is easily repeatable. What this actually
If you are having a meeting please have an agenda and control your meeting One of my big complaints is that many people do not know how to control a meeting. You see this more in meetings where outside consultants can hijack the meetings and steer them
Security Exporting from Exchange mailboxes to PST files is a false economy I'm sure most network admins have come across that one user who has a huge multi-gigabyte mail file that absolutely cannot have a single email deleted from it. In these instances the answer
Idle Ramblings Next 6 months targets At the start of the year the company I work for sets targets for the next six months. These targets often have no bearing on the overall strategy or direction of the team
Idle Ramblings Sudden Truth It's a rather sad state of affairs when you realise that the greatest achievement you can claim in a day where a meeting wasn't involved is going to the toilet.
War Stories Problem Ownership I've been helping out with some issues found on some development workstations. Fairly simple things like the user not being able to change wallpaper and stuff like that. When the image leaves the
Projects This is the most important project we have ever done I'm sure those words have been echoed in many IT departments up and down the country. With those words at the start of a meeting I was under the impression that "The
Idle Ramblings LASIK Part Two The post surgical advice the laser specialists give you is to go home and sleep but I found this rather impossible to do. My eyes felt like I'd been standing in the middle
Idle Ramblings LASIK Part one Two months ago I underwent LASIK eye surgery to correct my short-sightedness. Several people have been asking for more details and what the downsides of it all are so I thought it might
War Stories Exploring the Job Market So it's that time of year again, appraisals - the part where you sit down with your manager, he tells you just how useful you are and how you don't quite get a
Security New Phishing scams in progress? I think we've all had those emails from the Banks "security" department and which threaten all sorts of mayhem and chaos if you don't go to the site right now and
Technical Common questions - Why doesn't NTP set the time? Because that's not how NTP works. NTP will take the machines current time and compare it against a reference server (or servers) and then work out how much of an offset to apply.
Idle Ramblings Offsite Vendor presentation meeting So I've been meeting most of my targets and have been fairly organised work wise and this has now come back and bitten me because I've been told that I need to go
Administrivia Catching up I've been a bit remiss in not updating my blog for several months. A few combinations of a sudden urgent project, the wife having knee surgery and a flood at home all conspired
War Stories Upcoming Week I already know it's going to be one of "those" weeks, but then I guess it always is, there is always something that turns a nice quiet, productive week into a
Tools TaskCoach There are a lot of little tools out there which can allegedly help you get more organised, better with time management, etc, etc. Personally I find most of the tools are more awkward
War Stories Why change control can be a Bad Idea I'm sure that many people have had to endure the torture that is a change control process. In short, change control is a process whereby changes to a system have to be approved
War Stories Software is not a panacea - Part 2 In the previous article I raised the fictional scenario of a company wanting to automate a timesheet submission process. In this article I'd like to touch on some of the project processes that
Software is not a panacea - Part 1 There have been many times where I've come across situations where people have this mistaken belief that software will fix all their ills. Surely, anyone with a few years experience know that software
Idle Ramblings Company Takeover The company where I work has just been taken over by a much larger organisation. I'm not going to say where I work for now as enough has been plastered over the technical
