Am going to Vegas for the first time to celebrate a friends 30th birthday.. Am very excited and looking forward to what Vegas can offer :). Am sure that there will be a few pictures to post.
admin
Cacti – Installing on Windows
Cacti is a great tool to graph network utilization. I discovered it during my previous job to create some utilization graphs of satelite links. I highly admire the talent of the kid maintaining this software… Cacti can be used by any organization wanting to graph network utilization. It is also flexible enough to graph other stats (disk utilization, CPU utilization.. etc.)
I used Linux for all of my previous installs of Cacti. The whole install is very well documented. My team is still not very Linux savvy and wanted to try Cacti out in a Windows environment. There is adequate documentation for installing Cacti on Windows, but I ran into several issues when following this guide. If I was starting all over again, I would rather try this documentation. It is more up-to-date and detailed. The author missed mentioning that you have to change the “DocumentRoot” value in the Apache conf file.. But that is a minor issue.
Am still having issues with the scheduler tool in Windows to run the poller every 5 minutes. The scheduled job is only running when someone is logged into the server. As soon as you log off the server, the scheduler seems to be stopping. I will post an update as soon as I fix this.
Lazy weekend
It was a rather lazy weekend.. but got to attend two parties at some friends houses. Today afternoon, went to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba to try out some tapas. Highly reccomend the Chicken Paella at this restaurant. It was a bit on the pricey end, but the atmosphere was rather casual and laid back. Love places like this.
Here is a shot of me enjoying a good pint of english ale with my friend Sri.
And the Chicago Bears are on a rampage :). Looks like 2005 is going to be a good year for the Chicago sports fans..
Go BEARS!!!!
MSFT Windows : Offer Remote Assistance
My team uses the “Remote Assistance” functionality offered in Windows XP pretty extensively. One of the problems with the tool for the tech support personnel is that there is no easy shortcut to “offer” remote assistance. One has to launch remote assistance, search for “offer assistance” and then click on the link that shows up. Sounds easy, but if you are doing it 20 times a day, gets rather irritating :)..
Here is a trick to bypass the search.. Right click on your desktop and go to “New” –> “Shortcut”. Enter “hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/Unsolicitedrcui.htm” (without qoutes “”) into the location of the item box and hit next. Choose a name for the shortcut and click on Finish.
Double click on the shortcut and voila.. instant access to offering remote assistance :).
Passport photos for $0.29
All of us had to take a passport picture, sometime or the other. Usually you would go into a general pharmacy and get a picture taken for ~$8. The stores usually take a digital picture, print out 6 pictures and give you only 2!!!. Instead you can take your own digital picture, use the photo kiosks and print out 6 passport pictures for $0.29 :).. Kudos to cheapness!!
Public Speaking
I had to do a presentation today at work in front of a relatively large group (~50). It was received relatively well, but this is one area I would really like to improve on. No matter what you do, one is never prepared for the anxiety and excitement for public speeches. Couple of notes that helped me
1) Prepare for the meeting. Unless you are a Bill Clinton, you need to have some notes :).
2) Run a practise session. Helps to review the first step and also time your presentation.
3) Don’t go into details!!!
4) And speak LOUDLY and c-l-e-a-r-l-y. The first part is an issue for me :).
Microsoft related site
Looks like today is going to be a day of “Cool Sites” posts :). Here is a site maintained by Daniel Petri containing all sorts of MSFT articles. Daniel writes a lot of articles about issues that admins run into on a daily basis and he has some great practicle advice. Highly recommend visiting it regulary.
2005 Half Marathon
It’s been a while since I updated the site :). Wanted to give some updates on my running accomplishments for 2005. After finishing last years Lasalle Marathon, I thought that I could train on my own this year. BIG MISTAKE!! :). Unless you are really (and I mean REALLY) motivated, it is very difficult to train alone for a marathon. So my training was pretty bad this year. I did manage to finish the marathon though. Only 30 minutes longer than last year :).
Here is a picture from the 2005 Chicago Half Marathon, I ran as part of my training
