2005 September | The Tlog - a technology blog

Monthly Archive for September, 2005Page 4 of 6

Work: being productive… or keeping busy?

Published

3 years, 2 months ago

. 2 Comments

I don’t know if I’ve been unlucky in most of the jobs I had, or if it’s like this everywhere, but, if you work in IT, does it look to you as if your boss doesn’t really care about your achieving objectives, being productive, having everything working smoothly, tasks being done quickly and efficiently, etc. - he only cares about whether you’re busy all the time or not?

Or, to put it in another way: were you hired, and are you being paid to do your job, perform your assigned tasks efficiently, keep everything running smoothly, anticipate problems and make sure they don’t happen, optimize what can be optimized, solve problems as they appear, help users with problems, and so on… or were you hired to be busy 7-8 hours a day?

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Blogging tips #10.5: Be a good host

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Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Blogging and Blogging tips

. 1 Comment

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

Another “dot five” part. Will they ever end?

I’ve mentioned comments in part 10, but, there, I was referring to your comments in other blogs. But there’s also the reverse: other people’s comments in your blog.

And they are more important to your blog’s success than you may think.

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Linux and usability

Published

Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Unix / Linux / *BSD

. 3 Comments

(NOTE: this is translated and a bit expanded from a comment I originally posted, in Portuguese, on Carlos Rodrigues’ blog.)

Many people (including geeks, and including Linux users) often say that “Linux isn’t ready for the desktop”. Yet, I’m using it on mine (at work), so it must be ready for at least some desktops, right?

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Work: When your boss wants to direct your career

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Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Systems administration and Work

. 0 Comments

Welcome to the first article in the freshly created “Work” category.

The first question: have you ever been in a situation where your boss attempts to direct your career - probably in a different direction than that you yourself have chosen?

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Silktide SiteScore

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Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Blogging and The Tlog (site)

. 1 Comment

A service I just found out about: Silktide SiteScore. It checks your blog/site in several ways, including HTML correctness, popularity, how many people link to it, whether it includes several features, its accessibility, its speed, etc..

Then it gives you a nice score. I’ve just scored 8.3! According to them, “Your website is ranked #1,295 out of 42,352 SiteScores!” Enough to add a button to the right sidebar, I believe.

One thing about it, though: taking the test several times (it’s free) may give different results (I got 8.1 and 8.3 without changing anything), just due to normal Internet speed variations. And the popularity rankings will, of course, change (hopefully, improve) with time. I wonder whether the button will change by itself without me taking the test again… Oh well, we’ll soon see.

Blog Top Sites: the ascension :)

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Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Blogging and The Tlog (site)

. 0 Comments

Less than a week ago, I added this blog to the technology section of Blog Top Sites. Since then, I’ve been climbing in position a lot - I’m already at 13th place! (it doesn’t have a huge number of sites there, though, but it’s still fun).

I don’t think I can ever beat the current top 3, but I hope to get in the top 5 in the not too distant future.

Why not submit your own blog(s) there (in the appropriate category, of course)? It’s a nice feeling, seeing your blog climbing in rank.

Blogging tips #8.5: Use the Ping, Luke

Published

Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Blogging and Blogging tips

. 0 Comments

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

Another “dot five” part. I really should have written about this earlier in the series.

You may have heard (and indeed used) “pings” in the computer networking context, like when a computer “pings” another to see whether it’s “alive” and whether there’s a connection between both. Here, however, I’m talking about another kind of pings.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, your blog is probably already indexed on several blogging-related sites. Not just search engines or directories. There are also external aggregators. And “last updated blogs” lists, like Weblogs.com or blo.gs. And Technorati or IceRocket, which index not just blogs, but their very articles, by subjects or “tags”, and also index which blogs link to which blogs. Maybe you use FeedBurner for your feed(s). Maybe you’re on BlogShares. Or Syndic8. No, this list isn’t exhaustive - far from it.

The point here is that all these sites, to be useful (that is, to not only do the things they do (BlogShares, for instance, is like a virtual stock market, with blogs - try it!), but also to bring you new hits), need to know when you’ve updated your blog, when there are new posts.

To do that, you ping them.

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IPsec woes

Published

Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Security, Systems administration and Unix / Linux / *BSD

. 1 Comment

OpenSwan, ipsec.conf man page:

CONN PARAMETERS: MANUAL KEYING The following parameters are relevant only to manual keying, and are ignored in automatic keying.

and, still in that section:

esp ESP encryption/authentication algorithm to be used for the connection, e.g. 3des-md5-96 (must be suitable as a value of ipsec_spi(8)'s --esp option); default is not to use ESP

Note that that option (”esp”) doesn’t appear in the AUTOMATIC KEYING options list. From the above, one would guess that it’s only for manual keying, and that for automatic keying that option is ignored - that, indeed, it’s not necessary.

Right? Unfortunately, that’s not true, from what I’ve seen.

Until I added:

esp=3des-sha1-96

to a particular automatic keyed connection, it simply wouldn’t work, because the default is to use md5 instead of sha1, and the other side used sha1.

Oh well… things like this end up making us sysadmins not trust documentation. Unless it’s OpenBSD, of course.

Removing “difficult” IE toolbars

Published

Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Windows software

. 1 Comment

A couple of days ago, I had a friend’s laptop (with Windows XP) at my place, because it was full of spyware (not viruses, thankfully), and hadn’t been “windowsupdated” in a long time.

After the normal procedures:

go to Add/Remove Programs, remove everything “bad” from there,
install AVG anti-virus,
run it (I didn’t know it didn’t have a virus at the time),
install Ad-Aware,
run it,
install SpyBot Search and and Destroy,
run it,
“attack” Windows Update

I found that there was still a toolbar in IE, that was not mentioned in Add/Remove Programs, and the anti-spyware programs didn’t remove it. Spybot has a feature to remove “stuff” from IE, but even that wasn’t able to remove that toolbar. It wasn’t one of the most “evil” ones (didn’t open popups in IE, from what I could see, and didn’t steal/redirect links), though it of course displayed “Gambling” and “Shopping” buttons prominently. And, naturally, it didn’t want to be uninstalled.

After a bit of Googling, I finally found this: ToolbarCop. Problem solved. I can recommend it in these cases (and no, that isn’t an affiliate link, view the source if you doubt me :)).

I still hope that person will use Firefox instead of IE in the future, but that’s another story.

The Potted Plant Test

Published

Pedro Timóteo

3 years, 2 months ago

in Work

. 1 Comment

(this article was originally written for, and appeared in, one of my other blogs, Way of the Mind, but, being related to the kind of bosses us techs often have to put up with, it is also appropriate for this blog, IMO)

As a Unix/Linux sysadmin, I’ve worked at many places, compared to many people I know, who have been where they are for 5 years or more. I’ve done several kinds of jobs (thankfully, most of them related to my skills), and met many colleagues… and bosses.

And I tend to have a problem with the latter.

Not real “conflicts”, I don’t usually have them. But I’ve been in several places (and, indeed, am in one now) where everything would be almost perfect - colleagues, environment, the work itself - except for one imbecile who ruins everything - and who happens to be my boss.

For examples of what these bosses are like, see this entry in my wiki. But, in short, they take all the joy out of our work, because we quickly learn that, by being good, they don’t think they hired a good worker - instead, they see us as a threat. So they try to smother us with stupid, useless tasks, like making reports (and reports about reports - a colleague of mine is now doing one, and she surely is more pacient than I am).

Continue reading ‘The Potted Plant Test’