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.” ...

I found this article over at InfoWorld. http://www.infoworld.com/t/it-management/10-truths-it-must-learn-accept-934?page=0,0

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

I’m glad it’s Christmas. My only regret for this year’s Christmas season is that it has gone by way too fast. I don’t feel like I’ve had time to enjoy it this year. We have been so busy, going from one thing to the next, that I feel like it has all slipped past and I missed it. I never put off buying a gift for my wife, but this year I’m shopping on Christmas Eve. Yikes! ...

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. ...

Hmmm… well maybe not so much. I’ve been caught up in the latest “emergency” patch deployment. I’m thankful that we have made so much progress in our patch deployment processes. I believe we have over 800 workstations in our patch management system. Many of our servers are also in that system, but we still have to connect to each one and allow the patches to be installed. ...

After using my MacBook Pro on a daily basis for several months, I started buying other Mac systems for our home office. (We have a small video business that we run out of our home.) I had originally thought that the transition would be much more painful, but it has turned out to be reasonably easy. ...