Tech From the Trenches

We are always looking for quick and easy solutions to problems. Here at Essdack we have an internally used system for our essk.me service built on Drupal. Which works great. In the last few weeks, I have been looking for a solution for a test project with Spockholm that is a little more robust with [...]

A co-worker recently shared this article. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/9481/Top-6-Reasons-You-Should-Fire-Your-Website-Designer.aspx I have long preached that even ugly websites can sell items. The key is the items for sale, whether E-book’s Information or other products. If people like it they will buy, no matter how ugly the site. While I agree with the article there are two points I [...]

To work around this behavior and display devices when you click Show hidden devices: Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt. At a command prompt, type the following command , and then press ENTER: set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 Type the following command a command prompt, and then press ENTER: start [...]

I realize today was Labor Day, and the staff at Google need the day off too. I was just shocked to hit the Google site today and noticed the Logo was the standard Google Logo. No flag hanging from the “l” no people napping in the “o”‘s nothing. After a quick mouse move I saw an [...]

As you can imagine panic will set it when 10k users cannot access you system becuase they do not get a login screen.  We had an individual with Admin access inadvertently try to change the login screen without fully understanding the process. The result was a very useless error message, which made you believe it [...]

Our organization has been with Alltel for next to forever.  Old news Verizon gobbled them up, basically  swallowed them whole.  So in order to get over to the Verizon government plans (deeper savings, standard billing for line, etc). We need to replace our old phones (less than 3 months for some).  So I have been waffling [...]

I have fought for several days trying to get drive forwarding to show on my Blackboard server. The client tool I use Cord for OSX is a lot like Remote Desktops in the Administration Kit. I have Drive Mapping on in the client and they never show on the server. I finally figured the problem [...]

Firefox has a great built in Spell Checker. However when setting up this site in Drupal, we chose to implement FCKeditor. The problem is FCKeditor uses its own menu system, so the right click context menu is not available for the Firefox spell Check.  Also the Firefox spell checker is not on by default with [...]

I am a huge fan of Expose and Spaces on OSX.  However, as a PC convert, I really miss the Cascade Windows or Tile Features of windows, which allows for all windows or program specific windows to be resized automagically.  When Snow Leopard released I thought for sure I would find this built into the core [...]

I often have routines that run though the night in tandem with my Vampire hours.  However, default power settings often lock up my jobs, because the system decides to sleep or the hard drive goes to sleep. Each of these should recover but I have found that is not always the case.  So as a common [...]