slaptijack

In today's global marketplace, even small to medium-sized businesses cannot afford to ignore the value of information technology. As James Senn (2004) notes, interconnected groups of computers offer four benefits to business: speed, consistency, precision, and reliability. Together, these information technology benefits allow businesses to respond quickly to an ever-changing …

Information Tools

As fully vested members of the Information Age, we manipulate data everyday without really taking notice. Personal computers (PCs) are in our homes and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are in our pockets. These pieces of hardware were designed solely for the purpose of collecting and manipulating data. Hardware …

As Stewart Clegg, Martin Kornberger, and Tyrone Pitsis (2008) so perfectly describe it, "like bad habits, organizations are difficult to change" (p. 374). The effort required to change the processes and behaviors of large groups of people can be an overwhelming task. This applies to the Tech Division of Company …

As organizations have accepted the integration of technology into their everyday business practices, it has become necessary to focus the technological activities of organizations into a specialized group of individuals. This has led to new positions such as system analysts, who focus on formulating technological solutions for organizational problems. Many …

Most of OS X Caching Only Name Server series was written in the pre-Leopard days. The final step in that process was to make the new server the preferred DNS server. Unfortunately, a change was introduced in Leopard that only allows you to add the local server to the list …

I ran across an instance of Asterisk the other day that was working fine except that none of the MeetMe conference bridges were valid. The conference bridges were previously working, but the server had recently lost power and rebooted. Whenever someone tried to use a conference bridge, the following message …

Chance asked me to post the Perl script I've been using to collect and graph protocol specific usage information in MRTG. Below, you will find a link to the zip file containing the Perl script.

You can put this script where you like, but you will need to reference it …

In my office here at the Slaptijack world headquarters, I have a cordless phone attached to a Linksys (née Sipura) SPA-2100. Thanks to the Visual Message Waiting Indicator (VMWI), I have a nice blinking LED whenever I have a voicemail waiting on my Asterisk server. Unfortunately, the Linksys SPA-2100 is …

For whatever reason, my iMac had some problems this week and I was forced to shutdown uncleanly. I didn't notice much in the way of repercussions until I tried to use Parallels with shared networking turned on. When I opened up Leopard's Network Preferences Pane, I noticed that the Parallels-NAT …

I manage servers and network devices that, for a variety of reasons, allow users to connect via SSH from anywhere in the world. Although the traffic generated by these connections is encrypted, leaving this open to the world does present a bit of a security risk. Would-be crackers use compromised …

The Mozilla Project released Firefox 3.0.7 yesterday. This minor release addresses several stability issues in addition to a few critical security problems. It is recommended that all users upgrade in order to get access to these security fixes. Additionally users of the Flashblock add-on will enjoy a better …

A buddy of mine is getting about 1 Mbps through his Cisco 2621XM based VPN. Additionally, the CPU was maxed out during the transfer. (In my testing, I was able to max out a 7 Mbps cable modem using the Cisco VPN Client connected to the same endpoint, so the …

The IEEE802.16 standard defines five Quality of Service (QoS) classes.

Unsolicited Grant Service (UGS)

UGS was designed to accommodate services that create fixed-size data packets on a regular basis. This class offers grants on a periodic basis and removes the need for subscriber unit access requests. This QoS class …

If you use a new Linksys VoIP phone (for example, the Linksys SPA942), you probably don't have to worry about the change to Daylight Savings Time that began in 2007. By default, your phone has the right information about when Daylight Savings Time begins and ends.

On the other hand …

Google may have added this feature back in October, but I'm just now noticing it. Although I don't use footnotes very often, I know some folks that really like them. Alex at GoogleOS pointed out some issues with the new footnote system when they first hit the scene.

Somewhat related …