Category: Tech stuff

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Network troubles? Start at Layer 1!

    Whether it’s a copper network cable connecting your computer to a router, a fiber optic cable connecting an ISP to the Internet, or a microwave beam between two antennas, lack of respect for the physical layer (Layer 1 of the OSI model) has perpetuated more problems than I care to count. So why start at…