Static Killed My Laptop

A few days ago I walked into my office, sat down and leaned forward to start typing on my work laptop. As both hands hit the keyboard there was a little static shock and the machine instantly turned off.

Shaking my head in annoyance, I unplugged the laptop, pulled the battery and hit the power button

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My Web App Isn’t a Spammer

At work we build and host web based applications. As part of that, our applications generate email. We don’t get too fancy with sending email, we just shoot it out using Windows Internet Information Services (IIS) SMTP service. Traditionally we never really configured it, we just turned it loose.

As the world becomes more and more

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cURL to the Rescue

For reasons mostly lost in the mists of time, we have had a scheduled job on an old Windows 2000 server that launches Internet Explorer with an ASP page. The ASP page does its thing and then closes the browser with a bit of JavaScript. Since the browser is IE 6 this all worked fine.

This

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The Easy Way to Update ProLiant Firmware

A client had an issue with their HP server last week. They called HP Support hoping for some major hardware exchanges but first were told (paraphrased), “You are way behind on firmware updates – until you update firmware for System BIOS, RAID adapter and hard drives you get no support from us!”

(We’d never even

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Windows 2003 TCP Tweak

I have spent the past few days working on migrating a bunch of classic ASP web applications from a Windows 2000 server to a Windows 2003 server. A long overdue task, but one who’s time has finally come. The hardware under the Windows 2000 box has been acting up a bit lately and I’m rapidly

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