programming

I’m a big ServiceNow fan.  I became a bigger fan when they opened up a new Developer Program that included access to a free, personal ServiceNow Instance.  Just go to that link, register, and then ask for your Developer Instance. Having a personal instance is amazing, because “back in the day” you’d have to request access to a shared demo Instance.  The problem with these is that they were often used as sandboxes by lots of other people, completely wrecking your ability to test ideas or see how something would react.  If you wanted to see an out-of-box Instance and compare to yours, you were hosed, these always had modifications to them. Now you don’t have to...

The Problem A few days ago, we started having strange behavior in our Configuration Management Database (CMDB).  When looking at certain classes of Configuration Items (CI) we would see the User Interface (UI) display repeated buttons, and there were no CIs in the List View.  Additionally, if you went to the Tables & Columns module and tried to delete all records from cmdb_ci_netgear, the UI would report that the table was already empty (but it wasn’t): Worse still, none of the New or Edit… buttons worked on this List View any longer. The Investigation Our partner talked internally, and found another consultant who had seen this behavior previously, he informed us that it occurs within CMDB List...

A friend of mine (he has a blog over here) gave me an idea for a program. He wanted to know when his kids got home (and when they left).  His idea was to have an application that would interrogate his wireless network to see if a specific client was associated with his Access Point.  I started down the path of using SNMP to query the Apple AirPort Extreme he owns, but quickly gave that up.  The main reason I gave up on that solution (which would have been perfect) is that Apple, in their infinite post-Jobs wisdom) has removed support for SNMP configurations from AirPort Utility 6.0 and has eliminated SNMP from their newer AirPort models.  So, dead...

I was wrong. That’s not something anyone likes to admit, but when I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. Some quick background for any readers who are experiencing my personal saga with Macintosh Finance software for the first time. Back in February of 2010, I was terribly frustrated with the direction that Intuit was taking with Quicken for Macintosh, or the lack thereof. I vented that frustration in my article titled, Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac. Why Bother? I fired up the Macintosh Quicken community. So much so that I got the attention of senior people inside the Intuit organization. I ended up interviewing Aaron Patzer, the GM/VP of Personal Finance at Intuit, and the...