BlackBerry Self Test
Nov 30, 2009 Cell Phones, Technology, Work
A nice “hidden” feature of BlackBerry phones is the ability to run a self test application to diagnose usability issues. You can test most of the functions on the phone from the keyboard, trackball, screen, vibrate mechanism, gps and much more. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: BlackBerry, Cell Phones, Testing
How To: Fixing an electric Swingline stapler cheaply
Nov 25, 2009 Work
At my job there are only 2 IT people. We get requests to fix just about anything that is an electronic device. Sometimes we can fix things and sometimes it is just a little out of our ability. We have several employees with electric Swingline staplers on their desks and several of them have broken over time. The usual cause is the staple tray release button. Below I will outline what I did to quickly fix 2 of these staplers so they did not have to order new. Read the rest of this entry »
3ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID array Degraded
Nov 20, 2009 Server Virtualization, Technology
This week I have started to look into converting my home Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) x64 VMware Server 1.0.5 server to ESXi. The main reason behind this is that my work runs ESX 3.5 and I am trying to learn a bit more items related to ESX. Before I fully wiped all of my system I wanted to make sure that ESXi would run on my hardware, so I removed my 9650 card as well as the SATA connection to my main boot drive. This way I could revert back to my old system without loosing anything if ESXi would not run. The motherboard I have in the system is a MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX board which can boot from USB. I have picked up an 8GB USB flash drive to run ESXi on instead of a hard drive. After a lot of tweaking ESXi was running smooth on my system without my RAID drives and it was time to boot back into my original system to get some files and configurations off. During the system boot I was notified that the RAID array has been degraded and that there was a problem. Below I will show you the trouble shooting steps I used to get the RAID array back online and rebuilt. Read the rest of this entry »
Quick way to download Flickr images
Nov 20, 2009 Web Development
So I was browsing around on Flickr.com and found some images I wanted to save to my computer. The problem is that when you right click on an image you get a file called spaceball.gif which “covers” up the image from right click to save the image file. To get around this you will need the following:
- Firefox
- Adblock Plus
Once you have installed the Adblock Plus extension into Firefox follow the steps below:
- Navigate to Flickr page that you want to save the image.
- Right click the image you want to save and select Save Image As. If the filename is called spaceball.gif cancel the download
- Right click on the image and select Adblock Plus: Block Image
- Select the very first option under the Look for pattern which will more than likely be: |http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceball.gif and click Add Filter
- Refresh page and try saving picture again
Enjoy saving images from Flickr when there is no option to download larger files.
Tags: Extensions, Firefox, Flickr, Images
Cell phone tip of the day: Battery pull
Nov 13, 2009 Cell Phones, Work
At my work most of the staff have cell phones. As time goes on you find that a cell phone will stop functioning just like anything else. When you first experience a problem with your cell phone the best tip / troubleshooting technique you can use is to pull the battery out and try again. I frequently have users that cannot get the keypad to work, earpiece volume does not work, can’t make/receive calls or some other strange combination. It is best to pull the battery while the phone is turned on. This is especially true for troubleshooting BlackBerry devices.
Tags: Cell Phones, Tip, Troubleshooting
High load on Windows 2003 Terminal Server
Nov 11, 2009 Server Virtualization, Work
All this past week we have had extremely high CPU usage on our main Microsoft Windows 2003 R2 x64 Terminal Server. This server has 4 CPU cores assigned to it and 16GB of RAM allocated to it on our VMware ESX 3.5 host. This server averages about 60 users logged in at any given time throughout the day and maxes out at a little over 100 users logged in on occasion. After doing a lot of searching all over the internet for a solution to fix the problems I ran across: Virtual machine CPU usage spikes and remains abnormally high after VMotion in a VMware DRS enabled cluster. After my boss got back from being on vacation due to his wife having a baby we finally were able to update VirtualCenter 2.5.0 to Update 5. This has improved our issues but has not resolved them totally. Next thing to do is setup a Terminal Server cluster to share the load between multiple virtual servers in our 2 ESX server setup.
New website
Nov 4, 2009 Uncategorized
I have created this website to post different things such as pictures, projects and general news about what is going on with me. I will also be creating specialized pages for things such as my computer support prices, resume, and a few other things. Please subscribe to the RSS feed to stay up to date on things here. It may be a while between posts but lets see where things go from here on out.