Best posts made by WingCreative

Hey, we can always assume this trend is caused at least in part by IT pro outrage regarding their questionable practices right?

If there's one thing studying psychology taught me, it's that correlation = causation ✓

Today was one of those perfect storms of random problems all popping up at once, including my supervisor being out sick all day. On the other hand, one of our copiers got a firmware update and that seems to have gone off without a hitch, so I guess karma is real.

@JaredBusch I know, right? Based off of the few blog posts I've read, this seems like one of those projects that a developer built for themselves, then thought "oh I might be able to make some money off of this too... I dunno, $50 per person sounds about right?".

My only caveat for this is that I want to inspect the source code with a fine toothed comb before actually using it in production - It will both hold client data and transmit payments, so there's a lot at stake in terms of security.

We're not on Rackspace, but we had continuous Outlook prompting issues a while back. Turning off Cached Exchange Mode stopped the login prompts for us. According to this, Cached Exchange Mode can be adjusted using Group Policy so it might be a decent workaround for the time being depending on your client's workflow.

Hope this helps!

There are two things that I keep coming back to in the source story:

1. They thought a kid brought a bomb to school so... they arrested the kid without evacuating the school. If I were any other student or a parent of a student at that school, I would be horrified to know that the school won't do anything to actually protect anyone in the event of a bomb threat - just punish who they think is responsible.

2. The statement by the police where they say Ahmed was "handcuffed for his safety". What? No. I get that whoever prepared that statement was on a tight deadline to translate their racial profiling into standard procedure, but that line is just infuriating to me.

You're going to want to figure out what college teaches well that will help you the most in IT, because IT can't really be taught well in a college setting.

With that said, in my opinion, if you're interacting with people for your job, taking psychology classes can help you interact with them more effectively.

This is especially true for IT: if you do any help desk stuff, you're going to be dealing with frustrated, anxious people who don't understand why they can't do the thing they need/want to do. You'll be asking these people questions about what led to the problem that they don't understand. Learning how to empathize and relieve this anxiety in the moment helps convert defensive users into helpful users. Learning how to frame questions so you avoid guiding users toward a certain response helps you get accurate answers to technical questions. This is all stuff I learned from my psych major, and it has already helped me support users countless times. So think about taking some psych classes!

Sincerely,

A guy who went to college thinking he wanted to go into counseling, noped outta that career track, and ended up in IT incredibly grateful for his psychology degree.

My Most Valuable Psych Classes:

• Cognitive Judgement & Decision-making: Helped me realize what sorts of errors people can make that can lead to tech issues.
• Statistical Analysis: Learning the format for non-leading questions on surveys helped me learn how to ask questions without letting my assumption on what the underlying issue affect the response I get.

@scottalanmiller said:

Important to note that many end users call these clouds. But there is no cloud technology or approach in Pydio or ownCloud. There are just fileservers, nothing cloud about them.

Good point - I run mine on a hosted VPS and set it up as a sort of private cloud storage, but on a local test lab they would essentially be fancy file server interfaces.

It's like your DR plan being "Fire whoever caused the disaster. You're all done!"

@Draco8573 said:

@scottalanmiller I understand that I will be 25, but the thing is while I want to learn and want to get better. And you are right schools are a little behind the time. And while I can figure things out my brain doesn't work like the rest of yalls. I don't learn like everyone else. Sometimes I just have to have things explained to me a certain way or it just goes right over my head and if I was all by myself I would probably be lost. For example I had a calc class where the professor was decent but I just wasn't understanding what he was saying so i went through like 8 professors that put their lectures on youtube till I found one that made sense to me. I have a pretty bad strain of ADD, because of it i have very bad short term memory and so like I said it helps when I am able to walk up to someone and ask questions.

That makes sense - do you have any examples of learning methods/styles that have worked particularly well for you when learning other topics? There are a wide variety of online courses and classes out there for online IT learning, so if you have the motivation you should be able to find one that works for you. The best part: they're all cheaper than college!

I was just looking at the hx750i for my next build... from what I could tell the HXi line is one of the best options for PSUs on the market right now.

Here's the summary of TechPowerUp's exhaustive review of the HX1000i. Long story short: it's really good!

Trying to decide if I'd rather add Imagick to PHP on one of my WordPress sites or give HHVM (where it's preinstalled) another shot.

Leaning towards HHVM because I've learned enough since the last time I tried to know that the problems I ran into testing it weren't actually HHVM's fault.

In my experience, it has been pretty straightforward to stay within the free tier as long as I stick to one EC2 instance at a time with <30gb attached EBS storage.

Learning to use AWS would definitely be a marketable IT skill - here's a rundown on what you can use the AWS services for. The AWS console is a lot to take in at first, but you can do a lot with it just by learning how to manage EC2 instances. You can also run one small instance for free for the first year you have your account - which is probably all you would need to get some good hands-on experience building servers from scratch.

I started learning how to manage virtual servers on DigitalOcean. The interface was much easier for me to learn how to use because it's entirely focused on building virtual servers... unlike AWS, which can do about a billion different things with its dashboard full of options. You also have the ability to load up a variety of pre-configured servers on DO, so if you'd rather skip learning how to install an application at first you can dive right into messing around with it.

Just went to check out the FAQ page and got a 404, is the page not published or set to private?

There may be a plugin to handle all of this for you automagically, I can take a look later this evening. Just offhand it does sound like you will want to set a width on the FAQ item element with height set to auto, but it's hard to say without being able to see the page.

edit: to be more specific about the width element, usually it's best to use percentages versus absolute pixels in today's world of super variable screen sizes. That would look like:

width: 100%;

for setting an element to take up as much horizontal space as possible.

@scottalanmiller said:

@WingCreative said:

Also whoa my gravatar just changed, am I a space invader now?

Looks that way. It's just a place holder. You should set up a real one

Yeah I have been entirely too lazy on that front. I actually kinda liked the old pattern, but I guess gravatar went all "phase two ugly color combo" on me to encourage a switch.

Yup, when you pay up front for a job it means you are the business' income stream.

Add in a referral system and you have yourself a full-blown pyramid scheme!

@johnhooks said:

@WingCreative said:

Agreed that it's a combination of the inline styling and the non-breaking spaces used for the placeholder text. Oddly, the inline height was set to 120px when I checked it. Either way, setting "height: auto !important;" for the element will probably fix it as @johnhooks suggested.

The question is how the inline styling got there to begin with... I am assuming this is probably due to some javascript in the accordion plugin? Is there any setting in the accordion plugin that is set to about 120, or any settings related to height? If the !important flag works then it might not be worth bothering with for now, but generally every !important flag in your stylesheet is a shortcut that doesn't really address whatever root issue you're wrestling with.

I just unchecked the 121px in developer tools, it did initially show that way for me also. I used the !important just because it wouldn't override without it.

For whatever reason, sometimes these plugins have hard coded sizes (and in px even) so it's fun to have to do your own styling on top of their styling.

Same - I am hoping the inline styling is something that can be set in the plugin settings, but it's possible that it's just hard-coded in there. I thought it was odd that it was slightly different on my screen though, as if the inline style was being dynamically generated or something.

I'll admit I have plenty of !important flags in my own stylesheets due to things like this, I mostly mention it as a potentially more elegant way to solve the issue if OP is interested in learning more about CSS.

"Hypervisor" is one of those somewhat ridiculous tech words that I'm happy to be able to say in serious, real life situations.

It sounds like something out of a 90's sci-fi movie.

This is something I've been wondering about ever since I dove into Linux webserver administration.

Everywhere you go, Apache seems to be the default way to serve files online. If there's an open source web app you're looking at, chances are good it's built on the assumption that you're using Apache.

Yet despite its ubiquity, I haven't found anyone explaining why it's the default. All I can find are references to Apache's ubiquitous nature being used to justify young web developers having to learn about it, contrasted with tale after tale about the performance and efficiency gains one can expect from switching to nginx.

Personally, I spent a bit of time using Apache because I didn't know enough about nginx to configure it at first and stuck to default configs, but I switched over as soon as I could and have never looked back. I really hope more experienced web developers have a reason to use it besides "it's what we've been using"...

I guess I'm just having trouble understanding why Apache is still the default when there's a viable alternative that is just as easy to install and configure... an alternative that seems better in every way from my perspective.

Is it just momentum at this point? Is it because there's still a ton of Apache-centric tutorials and documentation for newbies? Or is there actually something about Apache that actually makes it better in certain cases?

@johnhooks said:

@WingCreative said:

@johnhooks said:

@WingCreative said:

Agreed that it's a combination of the inline styling and the non-breaking spaces used for the placeholder text. Oddly, the inline height was set to 120px when I checked it. Either way, setting "height: auto !important;" for the element will probably fix it as @johnhooks suggested.

The question is how the inline styling got there to begin with... I am assuming this is probably due to some javascript in the accordion plugin? Is there any setting in the accordion plugin that is set to about 120, or any settings related to height? If the !important flag works then it might not be worth bothering with for now, but generally every !important flag in your stylesheet is a shortcut that doesn't really address whatever root issue you're wrestling with.

I just unchecked the 121px in developer tools, it did initially show that way for me also. I used the !important just because it wouldn't override without it.

For whatever reason, sometimes these plugins have hard coded sizes (and in px even) so it's fun to have to do your own styling on top of their styling.

Same - I am hoping the inline styling is something that can be set in the plugin settings, but it's possible that it's just hard-coded in there. I thought it was odd that it was slightly different on my screen though, as if the inline style was being dynamically generated or something.

I'll admit I have plenty of !important flags in my own stylesheets due to things like this, I mostly mention it as a potentially more elegant way to solve the issue if OP is interested in learning more about CSS.

I edited the post but not in time :P. I wonder if it is dynamically changing based on resolution, but why a 1px difference? And why in px?

There's the mystery... without knowing which plugin is being used it's hard to know for sure.

If @Sparkum were interested in digging deeper into this, he could try pasting some dummy paragraphs from a Lorem Ipsum generator into one of the blank boxes before setting the height flag. It might be built to dynamically set the height for each accordion item, but I don't understand why the plugin dev would do that versus a simple "height: 100%" setting.

Dear leaders of the People's Democratic Republic of MangoLassi,

Directly hotlinking to images is generally considered poor internet manners in the circles I've run in, but that doesn't seem to be universal so I won't argue that.

More pragmatically, hotlinking allows someone else to effectively embed arbitrary content on your site should they so desire. This introduces the potential for performance and security issues you cannot directly control should the image host get vindictive...

Example: if someone notices dog.jpg on their site is getting way more traffic than makes sense, they can replace it with dog1.jpg on their site's links and then do whatever they want with the original image. This can range from introducing performance issues (dog.jpg is now a 10mb photo!) to, if they are truly nasty, embedding malware within the image to be served wherever it's linked.

The chances of this actually happening are pretty low, of course, but it's possible and I don't know if anything could be done on the website to check for changes in what's getting served from hotlinks.

I'm hoping the NodeBB devs use the Imgur API to automatically upload images linked to and serve that instead. That would eliminate the bandwidth concerns as well as the potential revenge issues.

I'd appreciate some sort of option to turn topic icons off in the meantime, but I also understand it would probably be a lot of work to add that in if NodeBB doesn't already provide it!