At work I’ve been working on a big Amazon Web Services related project. For part of this project, I wanted to record some information in a database. Previously, all I’ve used has been relational databases like MySQL. One could use AWS Relational Database Service, but that’s expensive if you’re only storing a small amount of [...]
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Cloud Life: Week 2 – Pixel Hardware Review
While it doesn’t take two weeks to review the hardware of a laptop, I wanted to give the Chromebook Pixel a chance to strut its stuff (plus I just didn’t get around to writing anything sooner). I’ll go right ahead and say that the Pixel is a nice computer; it’s a $1,300 machine and it [...]
Cloud Life: Day 1 – A Pixel Arrives
I love Chrome. I’ve use Chrome exclusively for several years now and vehemently refuse to use anything else (Sorry Firefox). As such, the idea of the Chromebook has always appealed to me. Previously, I got my hands on a Cr-48 and took the Acer AC700 for a spin. So when the Chromebook Pixel was announced, [...]
Password reset questions are getting out of hand
As soon as the Web had developed sites that required logging into, it also developed the problem of lost passwords. The solution for that was simple: password reset questions. You’ve probably run into these a hundred times and they are typically the same questions on every site, like “Where were you born?”, “What’s your mothers [...]
Snowulf Mobile lives again!
This past week or so has been pleasantly quiet for me at work, so I’ve actually had some time to myself. Additionally, I managed to spend a fair amount of time on the blog this weekend, both writing and doing miscellaneous site maintenance. One of the site maintenance related items was the discovery that the [...]
WordPress 3.5 and mod_pagespeed do NOT play well together
WordPress 3.5 may look cool, but it has found a dozen new and clever ways in which to break itself. Last week, I figured out how to fix the “Add Media” button. This week, I discovered that I could no longer select any drop-downs in the admin screens, add tags, or click most buttons. I [...]
Securing your Apple adapters in conference rooms
Modern IT is an increasingly Mac-friendly endeavor. One of the major annoyances (in my book) with Macs is the use of adapters and dongles. It isn’t so much that adapters are required, it’s that in shared spaces (such as conference rooms) you need to have them easily accessible AND removable, but not-easily wandered off with. [...]
“Add Media” broken in WordPress 3.5
A little while back I upgraded to WordPress 3.5.X like a good little server admin. Sometime shortly thereafter I noticed the “Add Media” button stopped working, or it would work randomly for one post and not another. Very strange and very annoying since that is the one button I actually need (I write in HTML [...]
Using Geckoboard with HelpSpot
One of the cool tech toys I’ve been introduced to at my job is called Geckoboard. It’s a nice slick website that allows you (or your company) to have a custom web-based dashboard with whatever data you want. Geckoboard is cool, but the power lays in its ability to be used for custom widgets. With [...]