Posted via web from Ed’s Posterous

Photo Credit: iboy_daniel

In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges faced by IT and Technology Professionals is keeping up with technology. It’s also one of the most important for any Technology Pro that plans to stay relevant and remain competitive in the field. This is something I can speak on from experience. Technology is in a constant state of change, and everything you’ve mastered today might be less relevant in 6 months or a year. It is important for Tech Pros not only to keep up on the latest technology, but also to revisit and brush up on some of the standard technologies as well.

Add this constant rate of change to the state of the economy, reduced or even no training budgets, or worse, an unemployed IT worker that needs to pick up a new skill set to compete in a scarce job market and you may start to feel a little overwhelmed.

Working for a company that has so far provided no formal training assistance, I have relied on other methods and resources to educate myself and stay focused on tech. The web is full of training, course materials, ebooks and other self-study and educational resources, all available for free. I thought I’d share a few of my favorite ones with you here.

HP Learning Center

The HP Learning Center is full of resources and instruction for a range of IT levels and functions from Business and Business Process, to PC Maintenance and Security, to courses specifically targeting the IT Professional.

MIT Open Courseware

MITOpenCourseware is provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is loaded with free courses and materials. In addition to Technology and computer Sciences, you can find courses and materials  covering other subjects including Architecture, Biology, Engineering, Economics, Physics, and much more.

Some of the courses date back a few years, but over all the information and materials are still relevant.

Linux Online

http://www.linux.org/lessons/

Linux Online provides free online Linux training courses broken down into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced courses.

• Getting Started with Linux – Beginner’s Course
• Intermediate Level Linux Course
• Advanced Linux Course

You will also find a couple additional areas with more focused Tips and How-To’s to satisfy your quick fix.

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a lot like MIT Open Courseware in terms of providing access to a range of educational topics. In addition to Computer Science, you can catch up on subjects including Mathmatics, Physics, Philosophy, Chemistry and more. One main difference is that Acacemic Earth has connected with select instructors at several Universities including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkely to provide free access to online learning materials and video “class lectures”.

Microsoft Learning

Microsoft Learning provides both Free and paid training courses and materials. I included it here because it does have a lot of free training available if you want to browse through the learning catalog. Courses and resources here cover Office, Server Technologies, Dynamics, Windows OS (servers and desktops) and a few other areas.

Runner-up

Open University has a number of general computer and IT related learning courses

This is a shortlist of some of the more “formal” resources. Let’s not forget all the incredible smart people who share with us what they have learned in countless blogs, online communities and personal web sites. If you know of any other great free online learning resources for technology professionals, share them in the comments.

Found this in an IT blog comment about Network Password Policies.

During a company’s recent password audit, it was found that a blonde employee was using the following password:

“MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento“

When asked why she had such a long password, she said she was told that it had to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital.

Posted via web from Ed’s Posterous

"Recently, you may have had trouble instantly watching movies or TV episodes via your Netflix Ready Device due to technical issues.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. This is not a great way to begin your Netflix membership. So that you can properly experience Netflix, we would like to extend your free trial.."

Posted via email from Ed’s Posterous

Keywords for edwardstafford.com

One of the short-comings with using WordPress is that it does not provide an easy, built-in way to include metadata for your web page descriptions and keywords (and rightfully so). Why Not? The reason is simply that WordPress cannot read your mind. I know it’s hard to believe when you consider what you can do with wordpress, but it’s true. The issue with Description and Keyword page metadata is that, to be truely effective, it should be created to  describe the content found on each individual page. It’s how search engines like google determine how to categorize and index each page. Now, there are some SEO “experts” who will argue that this information is not very relevant anymore, and I do agree with that for the most part, but there are still SEO benefits to including this metadata vs. not including it at all.

I’ve been giving this some thought lately and developed a couple ideas of how to add these features into a wordpress site without too much difficulty. A bulb went off in a moment clarity when I started to think about using the Custom Fields to store page specific metadata. I was even naive enough to think I was on to something new (should have known better) but as I started researching some ideas, I realized there were others already doing similar things. Oh well, a minor detail. I took my own approach to the idea anyway, if for no other reason than a learning exercise. Ultimately, this could be added as a premium feature to any custom theme using a couple hooks and some custom theme options magic.

Okay smarty-pants! So how do we include description and keyword metadata?

The solution isn’t difficult to implement and can be used to add page specific metadata inside the <head> tag of any wordpress page. In this example, I’m going to show you a simple solution, but with some creativity and a little thought, you can expand this to provide a more robust solution for your own needs.

Part I: Defining a Custom “Keywords” Field

Custom Fields are a little used gem found in the Posts and Pages page of the WordPress dashboard / admin back end and available when you add a new post or page, or edit an existing post or page.

Create a new custom field

To create a new custom field to use for your page or post keywords, scroll down to the Custom Fields section below the main editor and click the “Enter new” link.

That action will activate the input fields for “Name” and “Value”.

In the Name field type the name identifier you’d like to use. This identifier/name will be used to reference the custom field name/value pair later so make it something relevant to avoid confusion. For this example, I am using “keywords“.

In the Value field, type the string of keywords or phrases that you want to use as the keyword metadata string for the page/post. For this example, I am using wordpress, seo, metadata, custom fields

Add New Custom Field Inputs

When you’re done, hit the “Add Custom Field” button.

If you have already created a “keywords” Custom Field for a previous page or post, you will have the option of selecting it in future pages and posts from the Name drop down menu.

Select from Custom Fields Menu

Select the Keywords item from the menu and then add the keywords or phrases for your new page to the Value field. When your done, make sure you hit the “Add Custom Field” button to confirm it.

That completes Part I. You now have a functional Custom Field assigned to your post/page.

Next up! Adding and understanding the code that generates the keyword metadata tag.

Part II: The Magic Code.

function set_keywords(){
global $post;
$keywords = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘keywords’, true);
$default_keywords = “Your, selection, of, default, keywords”;
$metatag= “”;

if (empty($keywords)){
$keywords = $default_keywords;
}
if (is_home() || is_front_page()){
$keywords = $default_keywords;
}

$metatag=”\t”;
$metatag.= “<meta name=\”keywords\” content=\”";
$metatag.= $keywords;
$metatag.= “\” />”;
$metatag.= “\n\n”;

echo $metatag;
}
add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘set_keywords’);

Adding this block of code to your Theme’s functions.php file will create and insert page specific Keyword Metadata into inside the <head> tag of your pages and posts assuming you have completed Part I.

How the code works

function set_keywords(){

The first line declares our function and sets the name “set_keywords”.

global $post;
$keywords = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘keywords’, true);
$default_keywords = “Your, selection, of, default, keywords”;
$metatag= “”;

These four lines set up the variables that will be used later in the function.

global $post allows the function to reference values stored in an array containing post information that was previously set by WordPress outside of the current function.

$keywords = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘keywords’, true) is up next and sets our variable, $keywords to a string value equal to the “keywords” Custom Variable if it was set for the current page in Part I by calling the wordpress function get_post_meta().

get_post_meta() is passed three arguments.

1. The post ID ($post->ID)
2. a Custom Field Name reference (keywords)
3. a boolean value (true)

These three arguments tell get_post_meta() to grab the “keywords” Custom Field value for a specific page ($post_ID = a reference to the current page) and return a string result (true).

Note: If the Boolean argument were set to “false”, get_post_meta() would return an array object instead of a single string.

$default_keywords = “Your, selection, of, default, keywords” sets a set of default keywords to use when the $keywords variable is empty or not set, or when you just want to include a general set of keywords.

$metatag = “” rounds up the variables for the function and is used to build the metadata tag string that will be inserted into the page <head> tag.

if (empty($keywords)){
$keywords = $default_keywords;
}

The next step in the code is a conditional statement. Here I use the common PHP empty() function passing the $keywords variable as an argument to check whether the $keywords variable contains a value. If the empty() function returns true it means that $keywords does not contain a usable value, or that is has not been set. If this condition is true, it will set the value of $keywords to that of $default_keywords.

If the Keywords Custom Field was set for the current page, then the get_post_meta() function should have set the $keywords variable to a usable value equal to the Keyword Custom Field value. The condition will return false and the variable retains it’s Custom Field value.

if (is_home() || is_front_page()){
$keywords = $default_keywords;
}

Next I have another conditional statement that uses WordPress functions  to see if the current page is either the home page – is_home(),  or the “blog” page – is_front_page() If the current page matches either of these pages, I want to assign the value of $default_keywords to the $keywords variable.

The reason I do this is because the content on these pages is more dynamic and has a tendency to change often, effecting keyword relevancy. So I want to provide a generic set of default keywords instead of page content specific keywords.

Note: It is possible, using more in-depth techniques not covered here, to also include the Keywords Custom Field for these pages and enable a set of more targeted keywords for them.

$metatag=”\t”;
$metatag.= “<meta name=\”keywords\” content=\”";
$metatag.= $keywords;
$metatag.= “\” />”;
$metatag.= “\n\n”;

These lines are used to build the actual text string creating the metadata tag for our page’s <head> tag.  for example, if our page contained a keyword Custom Field with a value of  ”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″, the output for a blog post or single page would be:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″ />

echo $metatag;
}

Wrapping up the function we have echo $metatag followed by the closing bracket bringing our function to a close.  echo $metatag simply writes the output of the $metatag variable to the source of your web page inserting the keyword meta tag in the page’s <head> tag.

add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘set_keywords’);

And finally bringing this code bit to an end is add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘set_keywords’). The add_action() function is a wordpress function used to hook your custom function to a WordPress action. In this case we are hooking our function set_keywords to the wordpress action wp_head. This is the piece that actually inserts your meta tag into the page <head> tag.

Note: It is up to the individual theme developers to include the wp_head action in their themes, so there is a chance that your theme will not have it. In that case, check the documentation for your theme to see what action hooks are available to you.

That pretty much wraps it up!

By now you may be thinking, “Great, but what about the Description meta tag you mentioned?”.

You can use this same technique demonstrated here to create unique page descriptions with just a few minor code changes. Just replace keyword references with description references.

Do you have any suggestions to imporve on this? Find it helpful? Have some else to share? Leave a comment!

Security Watch posted an interesting article today discussing the value of personal login credentials, or username and password combinations used to access online services. I often get asked question about why people hack into computers, or write and spread viruses and malware. My answer has always been that it’s less about damaging computers or systems anymore, and more about being stealthy and collecting valuable information that can be used for monetary gain. This article paints a general picture and help to explain of how much our information is worth, answering the question – Why do they do it?.

According to the article, the actual value of account credentials is based mainly on popularity of the application, and the `popularity’ of the account, but I’d also include type of application, authority of the account holder, and the probability of an account granting access to additional valuable data as determining overall value of the credentials.

Read the full Article here.

Posted via web from Ed’s Posterous

A little more than a year ago, I decided to start a weekly Beer O’Clock ritual by selecting a different brew each Friday to feature and share thoughts about it with friends online. Let me state from the start that I am in no way a beer snob, expert, aficionado or anything else along those lines. I just like beer and want to experience as many different kinds as I can and try to learn a little more about the different types of brew along the way. I’ve even tried adding my incredibly amateur opinions / reviews with selections when I can.

Up till now, I used flickr, twitter and facebook to post weekly selections. But now it’s time to graduate to something a little more permanent, so I have set up a posterous page to post weekly selections to. The good thing about posterous is that the Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook updates will still continue.

So, if you like beer and want to check out what’s being featured each week and share your own thought and opinions about them, head over to http://beeroclock.posterous.com

Posted via web from Friday Beer O’clock Selections

For the most part I don’t pay too much attention to these claims, but this one hit a nerve. Below is a the excerpt that sums it up.

… Most of you are too busy to do it all yourself and don¹t want the hassle of fussing with the technology. Some of you have thrown up your hands in despair.

So here’s the good news: We’re going to do it for you, and it’s not expensive. For a limited time, you can start for as little as $XXX.xx [edit] a month. Our new business, [removed] , will review and setup all the components of your social media infrastructure. We’ll even extract and write your blogs, or edit your original blog posts. We’ll twitter for you and maintain your connections. Without breaking a sweat, you’ll be a master of the new social media.

The Bold parts are what I have a problem with. The Red Bold part is what put it over the edge for me. Really? I can be a Social Media Master by letting someone else pretend to be me and do all the work? Who knew it was that easy?

I was always under the impression that this Social Media thing was about being a real person, with a real voice, with real ideas and opinions. Conversing, interacting, engaging with and getting to know other real people. Is it possible that I had this all wrong the whole time?

Is this sort of thing now common practice? I would think there are a great number of risks involved if your exposed, or when the service agreement ends. What happens then? The more I think on this, the more questions I have about it.

I don’t claim to be a Social Media expert or even a “Master” and I know there are legitimate business out there that help other businesses and brands build and create Social Media profiles and identities, but their claims just seem wrong regarding Social Media.

Posted via web from Ed Stafford – Mobile Mutterings

Cannot unregister the machine <Virtual-Machine-Name>  because it has 1 hard disks attached

Before a VM can be unregistered or deleted, all disks that have been “attached” need to first be disassociated from the VM. For this example, I’m using a virtual machine that I have set up and named “VNAS” that was used to test an OpenFiler NAS installation (which, by the way, worked great). Now that testing is complete, I am ready to remove it.

The removal for a standard VM install can be completed in a short list of steps.

Step one: Get the name or UUID and details of your VM

VBoxManage list vms

VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.8
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

“VNAS” {8a48759d-4e6d-473f-ab0f-8ff59aa727eb}

That command will return the names of all registered VMs and their UUID. Make sure you get the correct name or UUID for the VM you will be modifying.

Step two: Get the disc information for your VM

There are two methods you can use to the get the information for each virtual disk registered to a virtual machine. The first is to list the VM info for a specified VM which includes the Virtual Disks that are in use by it.

VBoxManage showvminfo <Virtual Machine Name or UUID>

VBoxManage showvminfo VNAS
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.8
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Name: VNAS
Guest OS: Other/Unknown
UUID: 8a48759d-4e6d-473f-ab0f-8ff59aa727eb
Config file: /secondary/.Virtual/machines/VNAS/VNAS.xml
Memory size: 512MB
VRAM size: 8MB
Number of CPUs: 1
Boot menu mode: message and menu
Boot Device (1): Floppy
Boot Device (2): DVD
Boot Device (3): HardDisk
Boot Device (4): Not Assigned
ACPI: on
IOAPIC: off
PAE: on
…
Primary master: /secondary/.Virtual/vdisks/OFInstallDisk (UUID: xxxxxxx)
Primary slave: /secondary/.Virtual/vdisks/VNASStore1 (UUID: xxxxxxx)
Secondary slave: /secondary/.Virtual/vdisks/VNASStore2 (UUID: xxxxxxx)
…

In this example you can see I have 3 disks registered with the vm.

• Primary Master (hda)
• Primary Slave (hdb)
• Secondary Slave (hdd)

NOTE: You might be asking, Why does the sequence jump from hdb to hdd? What happened to hdc? The answer is, hdc is reserved for CD/DVD mounting, so you can’t add a virtual disk there.

The second, alternative method is to use the the VBoxManage command “list” with the “hdds” option to list all the Virtual Disks in the system. This will display a list of All the disks you have created and registered for ALL VMs. Information for each Virtual Disk and the VM it is registered to is displayed. Here you can see the three disks registered with my VNAS VM indicated by the “Usage” lines.

VBoxManage list hdds

UUID:         eebbb4c7-c539-4da4-b8ab-e5777b32520b
Format:       VDI
Location:     /secondary/.Virtual/vdisks/VNASStore1
Accessible:   yes
Usage:        VNAS (UUID: 8a48759d-4e6d-473f-ab0f-8ff59aa727eb)

UUID:         9f238d31-f794-420f-83a7-ccf811d52244
Format:       VDI
Location:     /secondary/.Virtual/vdisks/VNASStore2
Accessible:   yes
Usage:        VNAS (UUID: 8a48759d-4e6d-473f-ab0f-8ff59aa727eb)

UUID:         2ce976c9-0a37-49c1-8d34-3962c563a256
Format:       VDI
Location:     /secondary/.Virtual/vdisks/OFInstallDisk
Accessible:   yes
Usage:        VNAS (UUID: 8a48759d-4e6d-473f-ab0f-8ff59aa727eb)

In my opinion, method one the easiest quickest way to see what Virtual disks are assigned to a specific VM.

Step Three: Disassociate the Virtual Disk[s]

VBoxManage modifyvm <Virtual Machine Name or UUID> –hda none

VBoxManage modifyvm VNAS –hda none

If you have more than one disk registered with a vm as I do here, you’ll also need to disassociate those as well.

VBoxManage modifyvm VNAS –hdb none

VBoxManage modifyvm VNAS –hdd none

Step Four: Unregister and delete the VM

VBoxManage unregistervm <Virtual Machine Name or UUID> –delete

VBoxManage unregistervm VNAS –delete

Step Five: Confirm

VBoxManage list vms

VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.8
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

[NOTE: there are no VMs listed]

This is the same command that was executed in step one. After running this command again you should no longer see your Virtual Machine listed.

Note: This process will only remove your VM from VirtualBox. It will not remove/delete the actual virtual disk file (.vdi). You can delete that manually, or save it to use with another virtual machine instance.

For this example we can assume a few things:

1. You have already set up a headless VirtualBox server
2. You have already created a Virtual Machine instance. For this sample, we will call the Virtual Machine “MyVM”.

Believe it or not, setting up bridged networking to allow your VM to access your network is pretty simple and completed by issuing the following VBoxManage command in a terminal window.

Command: VBoxManage modifyvm “MyVM” –nic1 bridged –nictype1 82540OEM –bridgeadapter eth0

Break it down

To understand a bit more about what’s happening here, let’s break down the command string from the beginning.

VBoxManage - This is the command line utility used to access, control, configure and manage your VirtualBox Virtual Machines.

modifyvm - This command allows you to make changes to the properties of a Virtual Machine, including the amount of memory assigned, nic interfaces, Virtual device boot sequence, number of CPUs, etc. It can be compared to the Settings dialog of the VirtualBox Graphical user Interface. The command line version, however, offers additional advanced options not found in the GUI.

Note: the VM must be registered within VirtualBox, but must not be running

“MyVM” – This is simply the name of the VM you want to modify.

–nic1 bridged - The –nic1 parameter is used to set the type of networking your VM should use for each of the it’s virtual network cards. You can have more than one network card in use for a VM so the paramater is written as –nicX where X is the network card being targeted. Here, “–nic1″ is the first network interface, –nic2 would be the second and so on. This portion of the command string is setting the type of networking on the first interface to “bridged”.

–nictype1 82540OEM – The –nictype1 parameter allows you to specify which networking hardware VirtualBox should emulate for the VM’s virtual network cards. Here we set the networking hardware to emulate an Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop card or 82540EM.

–nictypeX follows the same sequence numbering and –nicX for multiple interfaces where –nictype1 is the first virtual card, –nictype2 is the second and so on.

Note:  The following is a list of the available nic hardware types and the associated ID recognized in VirtualBox.

• AMD PCNet PCI II = Am79C970A
• AMD PCNet FAST III = Am79C973 (the default)
• Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop = 82540EM
• Intel PRO/1000 T Server = 82543GC
• Intel PRO/1000 MT Server = 82545EM
• Paravirtualized network adapter = virtio-net

–bridgeadapter1 eth0 – Finally we have the –bridgeadapter paramater. This is the only part of the command string that references a part of the VirtualBox host and tells your VM which physical host adapter to pass it’s traffic through.

Again, this uses the same sequence numbering as nicX and nictypeX for multiple interfaces. Here, we are setting the bridgeadapter for our first virtual network card to use the eth0  interface on the host. Note that is eth zero, as in the number and not the letter O.

And that’s it. Restart your VM and you should now have a working bridged network interface for you VM with full network and internet access.