All posts by Brent Lea

I've been working in IT for over 30 years. As a result, I drink way too much coffee, my eye occasionally twitches, and no I will not fix your computer. I'm also an amateur photographer, videographer, and I have a love for old cars and trucks. Did I mention I like coffee?
General

Post Corruption

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Post Corruption

I was reviewing the admittedly old content on my personal site and I discovered that several of the posts are corrupted. Additional ASCII characters have been added in various places throughout the posts. I started to clean them up, but decided that everything here is so old, there really is no point.

Since my last post was way back in 2016, maybe it is time to revisit this site and start posting content again. I doubt there will be much interest, but maybe my kids and grandkids can use what I post here against me in the future.

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Jason Bourne

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Last night, I took Becky and Dorie to see the new Jason Bourne movie. We’ve always been fans of that series and Dorie wanted to see this over the other new releases that are out. I think it was a good movie.

Emphasis on the word “think.” Continue reading Jason Bourne →

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Windows 7

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Because my current employer has a select licensing agreement with Microsoft, the final version of Windows 7 became available to us a few weeks ago. Out of morbid curiosity, we downloaded and installed it on a couple of systems that we had been running Windows Vista on. It almost pains me to say this, but Windows 7 is a very nice operating system. It is everything that Vista should have been.

It is faster. After a short problem with a wireless driver, it is much more stable. (Did I mention that it is faster?) I’m also quite taken with the new task bar.

I’ll post more as I can, but my impression after about two weeks of use is that Windows 7 is the new Windows XP.

Apple, Linux, Ubuntu

Leveraging Synergy across two platforms…

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Sounds like a line from a certain “pointy-haired boss,” doesn’t it?

I use a MacBook Pro running OS X Leopard as my main system at the office. I have a secondary display connected to it and I use the built-in “Spaces” feature. My secondary system, a desktop, is running Ubuntu 8.10 workstation. For several months now, I have had two keyboards and mice to deal with. There had to be a way to share one keyboard and mouse between the two systems.

Enter the utility, Synergy.

Continue reading Leveraging Synergy across two platforms… →

Linux

ProFTP on Ubuntu Server

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Installing the ProFTP 1.3.1 server on Ubuntu Server 8.10 is a pretty straight forward process. I won’t go into the whole thing here, but a standard apt-get works just fine.

I started running into problems when a user noticed that after uploading a file to the server, the time stamp on the file was six hours ahead. That corresponds with the six hour offset from GMT for Central Standard Time. The confusing thing was that the problem was only visible through an FTP login. If I connected to the server through an SSH session, all of the date information on the files was correctly showing CST time.

Continue reading ProFTP on Ubuntu Server →

Microsoft

SharePoint

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I have had the opportunity to deploy Microsoft’s SharePoint Services and also Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. I have to admit, they really have it going on with these products.

My current employer is not going to proceed with a full blown deployment of SharePoint, which is too bad, but we do have a couple of small implementations that I maintain. During the last couple of days, I’ve been able to work with these small environments again, and it has renewed my disappointment in our lack of future deployment plans.

Continue reading SharePoint →

LinkedIn, Microsoft

MS08-067 and VNC

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Well, I’ve finally done some testing and it appears that the MS08-067 patch doesn’t break VNC. I have been testing with an XP SP3 system and the latest version of Tight VNC.

I started with the XP system and no patch. I installed and configured VNC as a service and tested it. I was able to take remote control with no problems, which I would expect.

After installing MS08-067 on the XP system, I rebooted as required. Everything seemed to come up fine and I noticed that the VNC icon was in the system tray. Again, this is as would be expected. I fired up my VNC client and took remote control of the XP system without hesitation. All works well.

Keep in mind, this is one system. There may be other problems with other scenarios. Next, I need to do some more definitive testing with GenControl.

Photography

Digital Photography

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I have rejoined the magical world of photography after a few months hiatus. My buddy Mark started using my Nikon D50 a few months ago for sports photography, and I never got it back. It’s just as well. He has been able to use that rig to get some fabulous photos and has even managed to sell a few. His efforts came to a screeching halt when the 55-200 lens he was using went toes up.

Continue reading Digital Photography →

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Church Ministry on the Web

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Unless you want to spend the money to hire a professional developer, there just doesn’t seem to be a great solution out there for churches. Now, I understand that there are some good efforts going on. My problem with those is that I need to be able to hand off the daily maintenance of the site to a staff member or a ministry volunteer and the “good efforts” are still not very user friendly.

Continue reading Church Ministry on the Web →