S. Scott Hall

I have no idea what’s going on…

  • Fixed: Slow WordPress performance on IIS 7

    I ran into a slow performance issue running a WordPress site under IIS 7. I was in a hurry to get the site up and running, and used Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer to get the site set up. Everything worked right away, but every page took at least a half second to respond. After some…

  • Trusting Facebook

    Recently, Facebook asked me to fill out a survey regarding their privacy practices and features. Most of the questions were run-of-the-mill user experience modeling, but one in particular really stood out to me: Do you trust Facebook with your personal information? My response needed to be on a numeric scale from 1 to 5: 1…

  • I was not arrested

    While reviewing website traffic logs, I discovered a spike on April 10. After some digging, it turns out that most of the traffic was referred from Google by people searching for “scott hall arrested”.  I was most definitely not arrested, but I do happen to share the same name as a professional wrestler, formerly known…

  • Designing maintainable UI Actions in ServiceNow

    ServiceNow is a very powerful and very flexible IT management platform. Because it is so easily customized, it can be easy to design yourself into a corner if you don’t plan appropriately. UI Actions are a frequently customized component of ServiceNow, and are the cause of many of the design-related issues I’ve encountered. UI Actions…

  • How to change web hosting without breaking DNS

    If you’ve ever been tasked with moving a website to a new hosting provider, you have no doubt run into this issue. For those of you considering making a hosting switch, there are a few fundamentals you should understand first.

  • Fixed: Adobe InDesign CS5 layers menu grayed-out

    I came across an issue on a coworker’s Mac where the Layers toolbox and menu in InDesign CS5 were grayed out and unusable. Several calls to Adobe support bore no fruit, so I started troubleshooting the issue myself. It turns out there was a permissions issue for some folders under /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Adobe. After resetting the…

  • Valspar ruined my weekend – Updated!

    This past weekend we took on the task of repainting our front bedroom. We had been renting the room out to a friend, but with boy #3 on the way, it was time to prepare it as a nursery. Little did I know when we began that it would turn into such a frustrating adventure. I…

  • Roseville Galleria mall on fire

    A suspect has been arrested and may be connected to other recent fires at a Wal Mart and several residences. It was pretty impressive to watch. Thankfully, it doesn’t sound as if anyone has been injured, though there are probably multiple millions of dollars worth of damages to the mall and merchandise.

  • I’m glad I don’t have this guy’s job…

    This is crazy.  It’s a recording from the S&P 500 pits during yesterday’s stock market implosion: Hop on over to ZeroHedge for the original post.

  • Thoughts on passwords and Twitter hacks

    The most recent Twitter hack serves as a good reminder to revisit my password management methods.  While this particular hack didn’t compromise Twitter’s servers, it did manage to redirect all traffic destined for Twitter to a server under the hacker’s control.  If you had software running that periodically logs in to Twitter to check updates…