Cloud Delusions

Had a client email me a few days ago, panicked that their web site was down. It wasn’t. Instead, their registrar’s domain name servers (a.k.a., DNS) were down. Despite the fact the registrar had four domain name servers, spread across diverse geography,...

Windows 10 is coming and it’s … free?

Well, maybe. On July 29th, Microsoft will launch their latest version of Windows, known as “Windows 10.” What happened to Windows 9? It’s a bit of a mystery. Reality is, actual software version numbers used to track technical changes by...

Modal help for Formidable form fields in WordPress

In the Formidable forms visual designer, each form input field has an section titled “click here to add a description or additional instructions.”  It’s handy for putting hints where a user might need a bit of extra help.  The hints text can be...

Choosing a hard drive: Does the brand matter?

It’s not easy to get comprehensive information on hard drive reliability. Most of us in the information technology world have anecdotal tales of hard drive reliability and failures, but one or even a few data points about brand and model hard drive reliability...

The Shellshock Bash Vulnerability – Patching CentOS

The Shellshock vulnerability and evidence of its use has now been widely reported in tech media.  Like the Heartbleed exploit I wrote about back in April, the sheer breadth of the vulnerability is staggering.  All of the mainstream Linux distributions contain the...