Rambling About Work
Looking back at my previous list of things to get done at work, I see I’ve hardly made a dent. It’s not for lack of working, it’s because I keep ending up working on other things.
First there was the system acting a little funny. With all the viruses and worms running around, I decided to just reimage the computer instead of trying to clean it up. That turned into a nightmare. First I had to find the original WinXP disks. After tearing apart the office I discovered a huge pile of disks stuck in the back of a filing cabinet. After reinstalling the OS, I had to fight with the Win2k domain controller to get the computer onto the network. I’d play with it for a while, give up and work on something else, then fool with it some more. I’m rather weak in the Win2k server area and the entire network is put together rather haphazardly, so it took several hours to get things working properly. Next time should be quicker.
I did somewhat lock down the point of sales systems. They no longer have internet access at all. Two other computers on the sales floor (yes, there is a real store that is associated with the internet business) needed to have their access limited. I installed Squid Proxy and SquidGuard. Now porn, warez, and webmail websites are blocked (I argued against blocking webmail). The blocking is actually rather easy to get around at the moment, but that will change when I get a better router in the office.
A funny thing happened after I implemented the blocking. The boss did a net search that the blocking software decided was a bad thing. The search phrase was Peavey Triple XXX Head. Yes, that link is absolutely work safe. I decided to remove the rather unreliable key word blocking after that episode and stick to specific domains (about 40,000 domains on the list).
Another project was to import customer data from the store database and shove it into the electronic newsletter database. The actual coding wasn’t that difficult. A quick perl script to read from an XBase database and write to a MySQL database. Unfortunately, the Win2k domain reared it’s ugly head (again) and argued with me about letting my linux box talk to the windows server. I eventually won that argument, but I’m damn close to taking a shotgun to the windows server.
Finally, there was some time spent with several suppliers teaching them how to use our ecommerce software so they could add their products to our catalog. It was worth it since it means we won’t have to input that data ourselves.
There were other things such as talking with an ISP about switching our T1 provider (I think we’re currently paying too much), discussing secure wireless networking equipment with our computer supplier, trying to figure out why Miva (the ecommerce software) and OrderManager (the sales database) are charging the customer instead of just verifying the credit card (an especially bad thing when an item isn’t in stock). I still haven’t figured this one out, so it will have top priority tomorrow. I wish I knew more about Miva.
