A Conservative Techie

And its beta?

Ok this is a little wierd to me, I wouldn’t trust my health records to any company that is a search company. In fact out of the 5 people I showed Google Health to none of them would trust their records.  And more specifically to a beta product.

Why would I want to put my information online with a search company?  Will I be searching for things and see paid advertising for health problems I may or may not have?  What happens if this product doesn’t pan out and I “lose” the information I have put in their?  How safe is the information stored there?

Better yet, when I go to my doctor can I say “upload the visit to google heath for me?” If I tried that, the office would stare at me and then laugh.  Then I would have to take notes and spend my own time uploading the information.  Seriously a waste of my time.

Google has some great products, but this seems to be a flop, a real stinker… However since it is “Google” people will just use it

I doubt there will be a correct response from NBC news, but it is getting hard to determine the difference between NBC News and MSNBC opinion.  This is a great letter from Ed Gillespie who is Counselor to the President.

Some great quotes in here, but let me just highlight two of them:

Are there numbers besides the “government number” to go by?  Is there reason to believe “the government number” is suspect?  How does the release of positive economic growth for two consecutive quarters, albeit limited, stop “just short of the official declaration of a recession”?

So now NBC “News” doesn’t believe the government numbers…. Because they (NBC) knows better?

And this choice quote:

I’m sure you don’t want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the “news” as reported on NBC and the “opinion” as reported on MSNBC

Good luck getting a response….

I work with a product called Altiris (now a part of Symantec) that supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise Linux for imaging and software distribution.  However there is next to no training on how to use these products for Inventory, Software Delivery, etc.  So I am in the process of working on actual hardware to test.

The laptop I have is a Dell Latitude D830 and is using an Intel Wireless card.  In Ubuntu the card works out of the box, however I am unable to find a solution to get it to work.  Anyone out there able to help me?

Thanks

Found this post via techmeme in regards to Why man MCSEs won’t learn Linux and am disappointed by some of the reasosn given but agree with some of them.

A little background about myself.  I am not a MCSE, but I have several Microsoft Certifications, MCSA MCP, MCT, along with my LInux+ certification and several years helping out with the Ubuntu distribution.  I use Linux on a daily basis and at work am considered the Linux guru, which may not be saying much about my co-workers.

The biggest disagreement I have is the difference between a Windows admin and a Unix admin is “the difference between rote learning and the application of theory to practice.”  This statement assumes that MCSEs memorize the tests answers, get the certifiation and then couldn’t admin their way out a situation that doesn’t fall on the test versus Unix/Linux Admins who “understand key ideas and acheive expertise by expanding both the set of ideas and the ability to apply them.”  In other words, Unix/Linux admins are smarter because they can apply practices and ideas, not test questions.

In my travels as a Windows consultant I have met a large number of Windows admins who not only are willing to try new ideas and new utilities but then apply those ideas to solving business needs.  As a consultant for a management product the people that are hardest to get to change are the Unix/Linux people.  A Linux admin is more stuck in their ways and assumes they know the best way to do things is the way they have always done things.  That no one could ever come up with a better management tool or utility to help them out is a common occurence.

The author of the post makes a comment that scripts from a book in 1984 provides great scripts that still run today.  That is great, but is it still the best way to manage the devices?  Is there a more powerful way then a script or cron job?  Some form of centralized reporting software that can track hardware/software inventory, patch management, and software delivery?  Or should we still rely on these scripts as the “best” way to do things.  A Windows admin is more wililng to adapt and change to the best practices.

Also the author compares a Windows 2000/2003 admin trying to figure out how to admin a Windows NT box.  I remember when I made the trasnsition from NT 4 to Windows 2000 and it was a large change.  However I didn’t give up, I was forced by my company to adapt or to start looking for a different job.  I wonder if the people the authors talks about that are  Windows are admins that shouldn’t be in either a Windows environment or an Unix environment.

Feel freee to argue

After hunting around for a quite awhile I figured out how to share my document folders from Kubuntu 8.04 Remix laptop with my Windows XP VM. The current problem with Kubuntu 8.04 is that when you run kcmshell4 fileshare you can’t configure sharing due to not having permssions.  Then if you run kdesudo kcmshell4 fileshare, for some reason that I don’t know of, can’t find the command.  I reported this as a bug on bugs.kde.org, but havne’t heard anything more about that.

This post will be a placeholder to help me find this out later in life.

1.  Install samba

2.  sudo smbpasswd jjesse and enter a password

3.  Install system-config-samba (sudo apt-get install system-config-samba

4.  system-config-samba will not function because there is no file located in /etc/libuser.conf

5.  sudo touch /etc/libuser.conf

6.  sudo system-config-samba to setup your drives

From the VM:

Open up Network Neighborhood and map the drive using the username and the password (password setup in smbpasswd)

If there is a better way to solve this, let me know.