Some people talk about technology like it is a magic wand. Buy new software, problem solved. Move to the cloud, everything is modern. Add AI, and suddenly the office runs like NASA. Install a new system, and years of bad habits, messy data, missing documentation, and “we’ve always done it this way” will just disappear. No. That is not how
Tag: automation
A sysadmin’s look at the improbable persistence of BASH in a world increasingly convinced everything must be modernized immediately. The Black Screen That Terrifies Ordinary People Technology has spent much of the last three decades attempting to persuade humanity that computers ought to feel effortless. Tap here. Click there. Swipe gently. If something goes wrong, an agreeable interface appears bearing
How to use PowerShell to find the living machines and the listening services, and then document the carnage You run a network. People lie about what is online. Firewalls pretend to be polite. Your job is to stop believing statements and start believing signals. Ping sweeps and port scans do what polite questions will not: they expose truth. Do this
The danger isn’t that the machines will become sentient. The danger is that we’ll stop acting like we are. We built machines to think for us. Then we built better ones to think faster. Now we’re teaching them to think without us, and to smile while doing it. Academics call it a “paradigm shift.” I call it a slow-motion dismantling
CMD survives because it still works. PowerShell dominates because it can do everything CMD never imagined. The Command Line Never Died CMD is not dead. Microsoft did not bury it. It still waits patiently for someone to type ipconfig or dir like it is 2002. For its core tasks, CMD is simple and consistent. It remains the screwdriver every Windows
The best engineers don’t just fix things. They build systems that survive them. Git is where that discipline begins. The Myth That Git Is Only for Developers I used to believe Git was for people who built apps, not networks. The ones who spoke in JavaScript, not BGP. The ones who pushed commits, not packets. Then I realized something. Managing
The Network That Never Sleeps Networks don’t take breaks. They hum through nights, holidays, and your supposed day off. Every ping, packet, and login request demands precision and continuity. For those of us in IT, it’s not glamour, it’s survival. That’s where automation steps in. Not to replace you, but to give you back the hours you’ve been surrendering to
Data quality is not a feature you turn on. It’s a discipline you build into every edit, every rule, and every record. Introduction For this tutorial, you help the City of White Rock improve the quality of its streetlight inspection data in ArcGIS Pro. Each pole has four inspection tests: hammer, pole, wiring, and panel. Each test is scored from
Virtualization did not fade because it failed; it faded because it worked. The technology became so good, so stable, that it disappeared into the fabric of everything else. The best innovations are often the quiet ones, the ones that become invisible because they’re everywhere. There was a time when virtualization felt like magic. Spinning up a new server from a
ArcGIS does not just test your certificates. It tests your process. Every PFX is a confession that trust must be built correctly, and every renewal is a reminder that shortcuts will always cost you twice. When our SSL certificate expired this month, I found myself performing the same ritual every administrator (ArcGIS, systems, network, application – yes, that’s me too)