Applied Trust has been producing The Barking Seal for our clients, supporters, and friends since 2003.
One of the greatest features of being consulting IT infrastructure engineers is that we have the opportunity to see, touch, and experience a wide variety of technologies and their successful (and sometimes, not so successful) application. We have the opportunity to solve problems that have never been solved before. And, every once in awhile, we make mistakes that provide good lessons. It's our hope that sharing some of these experiences will better our community as a whole. We hope you enjoy it!!
Feb 01, 2012
Recently I ran across a problem on my Windows Desktop that I would have thought was related to a beta version of Windows 7. Big mistake on my part. Turns out, sometimes icons get corrupted in your task bar, start menu, or desktop and, well, it's really annoying!
After a few minutes of Googling (which always seems like...
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Jan 31, 2012
At AppliedTrust we really like our logs. We've written about them plenty in the past, including articles on how to get the most out of your centralized logging and on the difficulties of event correlation. Logs allow us to do everything from analyzing incidents to spotting misconfigurations in software. Logs can also...
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Jan 25, 2012
I have lived in Boulder almost half my life and never realized how many resources we have to keep our city and the world clean. Since global warming has been on the forefront of our news for the past 10 years, cities have really stepped up and gone from recycling basics such as bottles and cans to recycling... well...
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Jan 21, 2012
As the 2012 Presidential Election heats up, a lot of money and effort is being put into technology infrastructure. I thought it would be fun to do a quick survey of what technology various organizations, on both sides of the aisle, are using so far this campaign season. I spent a few minutes fingerprinting the web...
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Jan 19, 2012
In the wonderful networked world of Windows and Active Directory (AD) services it may seem like a logical step to separate the user account that is used to check email from the administrator account that is used to install a new application on a server. However, I have seen a number of organizations that do not use...
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Jan 11, 2012
This post focuses on some fundamental network troubleshooting issues that may be most helpful to less technical readers such as new administrators and small-business owners. It was inspired by the fact that I’ve had a number of experiences involving basic network troubleshooting “in the field” over the past month,...
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Jan 09, 2012
These days, static or outdated web site content can give the impression that a business is stagnant or behind the times, and thus organizations are increasingly feeling the pressure to frequently author web page content, update existing content, and share documentation with online visitors.
The increasing pressure...
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Jan 01, 2012
Another year behind us in the post-modern Internet world -- a world where cloud computing provides near-instant infrastructure and application platforms like Drupal provide near-instant data-driven applications [still a world where you should be following an End-of-Year IT Checklist, however]. Sadly, most of the IT...
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Dec 08, 2011
So you’ve been tasked with building a report or a module that requires the output to be in multiple formats: HTML, so the casual observer can view it, CSV for that hardcore number cruncher, and let’s pretend that we want a system monitor to monitor the data and that the monitor only reads JSON, so we will...
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Nov 29, 2011
If you've ever been to an AppliedTrust event you know that we REALLY enjoy our beer. In fact, we even have a few in-house homebrewers. As part of the MyATE program, last year a group of us beer enthusiasts decided we wanted an easier way to share some of those homebrews, as well as our favorite local microbrews, with...
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