Category Archives: technology

Blackberry Enterprise Server Activation hangs at “Activating email@domain.com…”

Posted on March 25, 2009 by drlidbom

When trying to activate a new Blackberry device on a BES Server, occasionally the device will hang immediately after beginning synchronization.  I have read many troubleshooting steps to this, but the one that worked for me was to obtain the … Continue reading →

Posted in technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Deleting files in a text file (OSX)

Posted on March 25, 2009 by drlidbom

Someone had a list of absolute paths of files they needed to delete. I sent them this tiny script to help them out: sed ‘s/\ /\\ /g’ filelist.txt | xargs rm Explanation: Take filelist.txt, replace all the spaces with backslash … Continue reading →

Posted in technology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stock Rider FINALLY launches

Posted on December 16, 2008 by drlidbom

Stock Rider, a game that we’ve been developing at Trone, finally launched today.  Jeremy Glover put a TON of time into it and was the lead developer.  Mark Rickert contributed more code, and Scott Scaggs and Taryl Fultz contributed design, … Continue reading →

Posted in technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The consumer profiling possibilities are almost endless

Posted on December 1, 2008 by drlidbom

I can only begin to imagine the data-mining opportunities that are being made possible by the just-launched Facebook Connect Service. Previously the social networking sites have made it easy to destroy any privacy as far as personal information goes (sharing … Continue reading →

Posted in technology | Tagged | Leave a comment

The sounds of hard drives failing

Posted on November 16, 2008 by drlidbom

I already posted this to my public delicious, but I thought it deserved a mention in my blog: http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

Posted in technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

DoubleCommand

Posted on October 19, 2008 by drlidbom

There are several things that still bother me about macs/OSX, even though I’ve been enjoying the “switch” for several years.  Two that come to mind are how items are selected with the finder (up/down arrows selecting more items no matter … Continue reading →

Posted in technology | Tagged | Leave a comment

Get a Dell Service Tag remotely via vbscript

Posted on October 13, 2008 by drlidbom

Just found/customized this little snippet to allow me to get any Dell service tag over the network: strComputer = WScript.Arguments.Item(0) Set objWMIservice = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2″) set colitems = objWMIservice.ExecQuery(“Select * from Win32_BIOS”,,48) For each objitem in colitems … Continue reading →

Posted in technology | Leave a comment

I love awk…and grep…and sed…and terminals

Posted on October 9, 2008 by drlidbom

Today’s terminal fun: find /Volumes/Data/ -mtime -2d -exec ls -al {} \; | grep “Oct  7″ | grep -v “.DS_Store” | grep “/” | awk ‘$8 ~ /\:/ { print $3″,”$5″,”$8″,” substr($0, index($0,$9)) }’ > October7.csv That will find all … Continue reading →

Posted in technology | Tagged | Leave a comment

When will they learn?

Posted on July 28, 2008 by drlidbom

Facebook accidentally publicly revealed personal information about its members, which could be useful to identity thieves. Earlier this month, the full dates of birth of many of Facebook’s 80 million active users were visible to others, even if the individual … Continue reading →

Posted in Security | Leave a comment

Dear Preston,

Posted on July 14, 2008 by drlidbom

Emails that look as similar to spam as this does are the most sure way to confirm I will ignore them. (That’s the email I sent to my Dell rep after I received this message from him)

Posted in technology | Leave a comment