Took me a while to work this through. It should have been pretty easy but the Jitterbit Formula Builder syntax is just different enough to be a little bit of a challenge. Basically, I had a need to take multiple fields from a Jitterbit connection and map them over to a multiple line large string text field. We were taking some data parsed into separate fields and just moving them into a big text...
NUT ups.conf configuration for OMNIVS 1500XL USB
The Tripplite OmniVS 1500XL is a great home/SOHO USB UPS that is expandable with external battery packs. But, the NUT support on Debian-based linux distros is no bueno. They support Redhat-based with some software, but Debian users are stuck with NUT and tripplite_usb driver support. The unit doesn’t dish a few variables via the tripplite_usb driver so you kind of want to add a few...
Standard WordPress Attacks Visualized
Everyone that runs WordPress or any website knows there are thousands upon thousands of servers across the Internet doing nothing but looking for vulnerabilities and trying to hack sites. Logs directly don’t give you the sense of what is really happening in a nice visual way. An old favorite of mine, Logstalgia, is a fun way to see what all those servers trying to take you down, hack and...
Thoughts on Airtable from a Longtime Smartsheet User
After kicking the tires for ~72 hours or so on the recent funded Airtable here are some thoughts on it vs. my go-to for similar functions around project management and collaboration, Smartsheet. By no means is this comprehensive, but just some notes on some time with the tools. The Good about Airtable over Smartsheet: Airtable is more fun: Playing with data is much more of a pleasure in Airtable...
Dr. William New Jr. 1942-2017
Obituary:
Bill New was a longtime mentor, friend, and inspiration. We all miss you Bill.
Above is a video Bill recorded many years ago is connection to one of the many schools he supported and advocated for while below is something I worked on with Bill as part of the Natus IPO roadshow circa 2001.
Blocking garbage gTLDs with postfix header_checks
In looking at my Postfix mail.logs, I only see the new ICANN vanity gTLDs really generating garbage spam. Lots of press on the mess this all is causing. I got kind of sick of even dealing with that, so here is the header_checks lines I use to block them via postfix if you want to do that on your setup. There are a lot of articles on the internet for this, but I here is what works for me. YMMV...
Fixing a damaged Jitterbit Agent setup on Windows
God knows what mess I made with all the updates and installs of Jitterbit on my main laptop running Windows 10 insider builds. But, whatever happened, things got pretty messed up. Jitterbit installers have not been kind to me so when updating the agent or studio, I’ve typically had to uninstall and reinstall. I hit a wall though recently and was stuck. The Jitterbit Agent would not install...
Microsoft Excel Trust Center and File Block Settings Craziness
Just spent far too long on an issue with a user on Excel. The Trust Center and File Block settings in Office 2013 can be quite confusing. No matter what we did we had issues saving an older excel file format and all alerts kept pointing us back to Trust Center and File Block Settings. The mistake that we kept making was around checkbox and leaving boxes unchecked in there. If you restore...
Fixing the Windows 10 Pre-Login Background Screen
Perhaps, it was in Windows 8 or when I was getting early builds of Windows 10, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get Windows 10 to change the pre-login background screen that was selected at some point. It was stuck on the stock cave beach image of img100.jpg and it eventually drove me crazy. The image I was stuck with on boot in Windows 10 for many months… the dreaded img100.jpg...
Batch Inserting Pages into Multiple, Separate PDFs with Adobe Acrobat
We had a need recently to batch insert a pdf into hundreds of other PDFs prior to distribution. There are a lot of slimy PDF applications out there that seem to be able to help compile merged PDFs, but I wasn’t happy when I tried a bunch of them. The good news is Adobe Acrobat XI has the Action Wizard functionality that can do this pretty easily. Here is how we did it. 1. Put all the PDFs...