it

A quick update about my Dell Latitude saga.  I called customer service today at 7:00 a.m. and had a pleasurable and productive, albeit lengthy, exchange with their representatives.  I have managed an exchange for the ill-fated Latitude XT, and the process is everything that it should be.  They are sending a replacement laptop, and when I receive it, I'll just have to send the broken one back.  Hopefully they will ship it overnight, but that is doubtful, and I still haven't received any confirmation e-mails or phone calls that the exchange is going to actually happen.  I am cautiously optimistic.

Quick Update (2/10/2010):

I have heard back from Dell, and everything appears to going well so far.  I will say that I was dismayed that the standard laptop exchange takes 10-12 days to process.  They have assured me however that my exchange is a high priority and will be shipped overnight when it is ready.

Another Quick Update (2/18/2010):

 So, I received the replacement laptop as of yesterday, and everything works.  Well, pretty much everything.  The battery it came with was near dead, and while I did receive two CD-ROM attachments, one doesn't fit the CD-ROM, and the other, which does fit the CD-ROM uses e-SATA instead of USB, which the laptop doesn't have available.  So 8 days, and overnight shipping means it wasn't too bad of a wait for exchange, and just as I was about to call Dell about the not quite right bits I received a call from them.  They were OK with me swapping batteries, and tech support should take care of getting the right CD-ROM bit to me.  All in all, it took about three weeks to get everything straightened out, which was a tremendously long time, but on the plus side everytime I interacted with Dell's customer support staff, it was delightful (minus the call about the original shipment of the first laptop).

Dell has been the primary provider of commodity hardware in my current and last job.  At the NITC they were our primary provider of commodity servers, but the more exotic kit such as SAN, switching, and routing gear were left to field leaders in those areas.  I was extremely happy with their servers, we had great support, good pricing, and rock solid reliability.  At the KU School of Engineering Dell is the primary provider of all our IT systems including desktops, laptops, some switches, and all of our storage gear.  Again, I have been satisfied for the most part, though the prices and features for some of their re-branded storage kit has been painful.  The point of all that is that when it came to purchasing a replacement tablet for my girlfriend choosing a Dell Latitude XT series tablet seemed like a no brainer.  Wow, was that a mistake.  The entire experience has just been a nightmare.

So recently I have run into some fun to do with the apache Web server, and I thought it was worth sharing.  Well I didn't really, but my buddy Jeff did.  Just about every time there is a holiday over the weekend at my work, at some point the Web server would run out of memory so badly it would crash.  It would crash so hard in fact, that it had to be hard power cycled.  I have tried just about everything short of sacrificing a chicken to try and figure this out.  Everything from cron jobs to bad PHP scripts (not mine of course ), but never really figured out the root cause.  Of course that was until MLK Jr. Weekend.

I just released a new version of formunculous to the Internets.  It has

a bunch of new features for managing database or email backed Web forms.  It offers a lot of new functionality, and continues to bring easy form creation and processing.  Check it out at the Formunculous Source Forge page.

Here are the release notes:

I ran across this today while updating one of my clients Web pages, and I simply had to share.  Incredible.

Oh, and another representative line:

<p align="center"><strong><br /> </strong></p>

I have been waiting years for something like mod_gnutls to show up.  Finally I can use named hosts with SSL/TLS.  I just setup a new VPS and needed to setup three sites with SSL.  The problem is that I only have two IP addresses and an additional one would cost $1.50/month.  I was going to be happy with paying that extra money to have secured Web communication for authentication purposes, but I'm a cheap skate.

I created a scripting framework for Powershell that makes running scripts for help desk employees/end users much simpler as well as assisting with managing the many scripts you may have, and providing simplified methods of coding common tasks such as using CSVs and Active Directory for input. There is even a brain dead way to provide multithreading in your scripts for increasing performance on long running scripts. I have posted the code under GPLv3 at http://posh.codeplex.com. Contributions to the script library are always welcome, as well as bug reports and enhancements for the framework itself.

One of the projects I've worked on at the University of Kansas, School of Engineering is the thin client PiXiE thin client project. This project started as brainstorm for creating high performance machines that provide limited but critical functions for engineering students. As a university we have constant budget problems and a difficult time coming up with enough money to maintain current computer hardware. This problem is compounded by the fact that engineers use a lot of high end memory, graphics and processor intensive software for modeling designs. Add to this that most of our students have better computers than we can offer due to budget constraints and typically only use our computer labs for free printing and Web access at school and we have the PiXiE projects.

Fri, 27 Feb 2009

It has been a long time since I have posted, and just thought I would link in some of the things I do for work at the University of Kansas School of Engineering. I have been working there about a year now, and the amount of change and work that I have done there is pretty insane. We have moved ahead nearly a decade technologically in the way we manage computers, rollout services, and secure the school's IT infrastructure. The first thing I'll note is the blog, which is available at http://www.engr.ku.edu/computing