For those of you who know me outside of my blog (or those that have been following me on Facebook) it will not be a huge surprise that I am engaged.
On June 10, 2011, I asked my girlfriend, Lisa Nicole Vickers neé Shaw, to marry me. We are now officially engaged!
Frequently I write posts that others may find useful. In fact I have even been cited in software manuals and on other sites across the web as a reference or a resource for information on a particular topic. Earlier today a visitor to my site alerted me to the fact that two of my posts on the Nagios system and using it with Mac OS X had been copied outright on a blog located in Belgium.
While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, wholesale plagiarism is not very flattering at all.
The website in question is the WordPress blog published by CP IT Solutions, Inc. Both posts are obvious copy/paste entries from my own blog. Here are the details:
http://cpsolutions.be/wordpress/?p=213
http://cpsolutions.be/wordpress/?p=215
http://arfore.com/2008/10/12/starting-nrpe-via-launchd/
http://arfore.com/2008/09/25/nagios-nrpe-on-os-x-server-105/
The person in question is apparently a Microsoft Certified Professional, and also hosts a Joomla site on the same domain.
WordPress blog – http://cpsolutions.be/wordpress/
Main site – http://www.cpsolutions.be/JOOMLA/
I wonder what his clients would think if they knew that he was just copying other people’s work and putting it up as original thought? I have sent e-mails to both the owner of CP IT Solutions as well as the ISP for his site. Interestingly enough, for someone that provides IT consulting services they use a hosting provider rather than run their own site, as seen by the WHOIS entry below, hopefully they are going to be called on for hosting consultancy services.
WHOIS entry for cpsoltuions.be
% WHOIS cpsolutions Domain: cpsolutions Status: REGISTERED Registered: Wed Sep 27 2006 Licensee: Not shown, please visit www.dns.be for webbased whois. Agent Technical Contacts: Last Name: Kristof De Vlieger Company Name: DVK Systems & Consultancy BVBA Language: nl Street: Luikersteenweg 547 Location: 3800 Sint-Truiden Country: BE Phone: +32.11768005 Fax: +32.11768002 Email: tech@dvkhosting.be Agent: Name: DVK Systems & Consultancy Bvba Website: www.dvkhosting.be Nameservers: ns3.dvkhosting.com ns2.dvkhosting.com
Sure many of us use snippets and other items from our fellow IT professionals, but at the very least give credit where it is due.
After my recent iPad acquisition, I realized that now I need a new bag to carry it in. Normally I use a large Healthy Back Bag, produced and sold by AmeriBag. Unfortunately, the iPad’s shape doesn’t lend itself to being carried in the teardrop-shaped bag. I have narrowed down my choices, and there are oh so many of them, but now I need some help from you, gentle reader. Each of the images below are linked to the product information page on the bag.
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Ristretto for iPad |
The Imago – A Laptop Messenger |
The Australian Vertical Messenger |
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Scout Extra Small |
Distressed Leather Unisex Bag |
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| [polldaddy poll="3961786"] | ||
During the 2010 Tour de France in July, the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Nike worked together to print inspirational messages on the road along the route. This was done using the Livestrong/Nike Chalkbot.
The messages were printed each morning before the stage was to start and they were washed off the road after the stage was completed. The messages were printed using a soy-based material, which was very environmentally friendly.
In the early stages of the race I submitted a small message through the Livestrong website. I imagine that there was a huge response and I have to wonder how many people thought their messages were going to be printed.
On August 10, 2010, 16 days after the race was over I received an e-mail from Nike stating that my message had indeed been printed during the race. The GPS coordinates for my message are: 0.067164,42.950947 and it was printed on July 19, 2010. According to Find Latitude and Longitude website, this is Bageneres-de-Bigorre, France. This would have during stage 15 which ran from Pamiers to Bagnères-de-Luchon.
Like many people, I am a big fan of Google’s mail and calendaring tools. I run all my personal mail and calendaring through Google Apps Personal Edition as well as many of the other domains that I host and/or support.
The Zeta Gamma chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, of which I am a member, also uses Google calendar to keep up with the different events that we plan for the chapter.
This semester I noticed something different about the chapter’s calendar – the times were all off! They weren’t off by a few minutes, but by several hours. I talked to our chapter president, who is in charge of the calendar, about it and he said that it was working fine for him and that he didn’t see any issues with the times.
Turns out that it is an issue with the setting of the time zone for the Google calendar in conjunction with a setting in iCal on my Mac. I connect iCal up to my Google account using CalDav so that I can have my personal calendars appear nicely without resorting to a browser. Using iCal also lets me get, and set, alarms for events.
Well, I noticed after logging into the Google web interface that my personal calendars are set to GMT -5:00 (aka America/New_York aka Eastern Time), whereas the fraternity calendar has a set time zone of GMT +0:00 (aka GMT). It just so happens that I also have timezone support enabled in iCal.
The timezone support feature of iCal allows you to set a time zone for each appointment on any calendar (local or not) that you have editing access for. It just so happens that with timezone support turned on all the events on the fraternity calendar actually show the time using the timezone of the Google event, not my local timezone. If I turn timezone support off in iCal, then like magic all the times are listed accurately.
So, if you use a shared Google calendar, get the owner to set the timezone correctly for their location, then your events in iCal will be automatically updated to reflect the timezone that your Mac is currently in.
