Digital Choke Daynotes

 Monday, October 16, 2005       mail    link   the story

Spent most of the day with some code fixups on some web pages that I maintain for work. Some minor differences in how Cold Fusion code is interpreted between the old and current version broke a few pages. It took a while to dig into what the problem was.

Turns out that date fields in a database that don't have data have NULL data. When a date value is displayed, you can apply a function that formats the output in various date formats. If a particular record doesn't have a date value in that date field, the formatting of a NULL date causes an error. So the fix was to test for a NULL date value, and output accordingly. An obscure error that I didn't find in the update docs. But we were a couple of versions behind on the server side of Cold Fusion.

All is better now, but it took most of the morning to figure out the problem. As usual, though, a Google search got me pointed to the direction of the problem. People sometimes ask me how I learned all of this stuff. Most of it was through trial and error, but a lot is just knowing where to search on vendor support pages. I often use the "site:" parameter in a Google search to search support information.

Another project is "playing around" with some forensic tools. Helix is the one I am working with at the moment. It's a standalone CD-based forensic tool that wraps various Linux forensic tools into a desktop-type interface. It also has a Windows executable if you want to run it on a system without powering down that system. That's useful, because you can copy an image of the hard drive (and even memory) on a 'suspect' system without having to do a restart/reboot. A restart can destroy some vital information, so that capability is useful, especially on audits that can result in legal action.

So I've grabbed a random users' system to practice on. The user's computer was replaced with a newer one. And I do have specific permission to do this type of snooping around --- er, auditing. (See "Is That a Felony on Your Computer?" report that I did a while back.)

Since Helix runs off of a CD, various tasks can be a bit slow. But it's an interesting learning exercise.

 Thursday, October 16, 2005       mail    link   the story

More playing around with Helix the last couple of days, along with some updates to some web pages that I built a while back in a previous position here. Some tweaking of some pages, and some additional admin-type information pages to help out the users.

Helix is a bit slow...I usually start a function on it and then have to remember to go back to it later. I got an external USB drive for making the disk images, but having problems getting that to work well. I think it's a problem with the external drive, but not sure yet.

Heard from Stacy today (youngest daughter, in her last semester nursing program at BYUI). She went a career fair and talked to some people that run a nursing program in Ethiopia. Don't have many details on the program yet. So far, I told her that it would be a long drive back for Sunday dinner.

And Christine & family (oldest daughter, married, three children) are aiming for a new job for Jared (husband) in Utah. Which is also a long drive back for Sunday dinner. It is a good opportunity for them. They need a larger house with their three children, but housing prices here are quite high (mostly thanks to all the transplants from the San Francisco bay area). Median price is around $400K; prices have been increasing 20-25% the past three years. A larger house is pushing their budget quite heavily, especially since they are a one-income family. Median house prices in Salt Lake City area are around $225K, so the move would be good for them financially.

No news on that new job for Jared yet, but it looks quite positive. The negative is them moving. I really enjoy having them (and the grandkids) nearby, with their regular Sunday visits.