Weekly Wrap up – bootstrap and groovy

April 24th, 2020 — 1:10pm

I’ve been working on a website using bootstrap for the front end. It’s been a little while since I did much with bootstrap, but it’s a very nice (almost standard) framework for building modern, responsive design sites. Anyway, getting reacquainted with it has been fun!

For my work with Operations Bridge monitoring platform, I did some integration to Service Now. This used a custom action – groovy script, which called a perl script to handle creation of an incident in Service now. Perhaps too many steps in there, but using perl, partially for legacy reasons, also gives us lots of control and fine tuning that would have been a pain with groovy. Plus, I’m not too great at groovy programming, so using perl was faster.

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Weekly Wrapup – jQuery

April 10th, 2020 — 9:07am

jQuery / Ajax – I started setting up a new site for a client, one aspect of which requires a dynamic search box (showing results as the user types). I used straight jquery to a php backend to accomplish this, though the site is still private, so I can’t share the link yet.

Php software – Also as part of this project, I bought a php / mysql script already written with most of the features desired. This will save a lot of time, however, the code was a little more tediously written than I would have liked. I can work with it, but it’s one of the pitfalls of buying source code.

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Weekly Wrap Up – ITOM Certification

March 27th, 2020 — 4:48pm

ITOM – As the title suggests, I spent a decent amount of time this week training and taking tests for certification in the “IT Operations Management” suite of products offered by Micro Focus. For one of my clients, I spend quite a bit of time working with Operations Bridge, among other products. I completed the certification, but it wasn’t easy! The overall suite of products is amazing.

Authorize.net – I’ve a reseller for a long time, but took some time this week to review their offerings. This is a leading payment provider for taking ecommerce / online payments. I suspect that any businesses not selling online will want to reconsider that after these past few months. I put together this payments page to explain how I can help.

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Weekly Wrap Up – Zoom Zoom!

March 20th, 2020 — 5:22pm

Here’s what I was up to this week:

Zoom – Seems like everyone who never used a conferencing platform suddenly wanted one, all due to the corona shutdowns. Though I had used Zoom before many times with clients, I finally paid for my own subscription. This is handy for business and even personal use, since your invitees don’t need an account.

Flash EOL – as browsers move to ending Flash support, I had a client with some old flash content suddenly break. Turns out the javascript code we used to run the flash (swfobject.js) was no longer working with the latest browser updates. We just bit the bullet and moved the content to Youtube (it was video anyway). By the end of 2020, browser support for flash is going away, or so they say. I’m not sure I buy it.

Php – more custom php work, for an LMS, and also some other misc. work.

Corona note – So far my workload has kept strong during the economic muffling we’re going through. It’s hard to say how long that will continue, but these are times where new opportunities present themselves. Many industries may be changed after this, because the way we live will be different. Companies may start “onshoring” more, as a way to diversify production. Events and social gatherings may change. Some business models will die, but new ones will emerge. Stay aware, often great businesses rise from the ashes of a crisis.

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Weekly Wrap up – AWS Metrics

March 13th, 2020 — 5:12pm
  • Cloudwatch – I spent some time working with aws metrics in cloudwatch – pulled via scripts using the “aws cloudwatch” command line tool. This is a pretty powerful way to monitor and track all kinds of metrics on elbs, ec2, rds, and other AWS entities.
  • API – more api work with Dell openManage. API’s are pretty standard now with most web based tools. Mostly, I’m pulling data, and pushing it to another database, or triggering emails, based on various logic / business rules.
  • Coronavirus – my state (PA) is basically under quarantine. Clients (even out of state) have mandated “work from home” for most employees and consultants / contractors. Most of my clients will be able to financially weather this, depending how long it goes. It’s a good lessen in diversifying your consulting clients (or income sources). While this type event is “once in a lifetime”, there are smaller events that hit specific industries more often.

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