www.itminddesign.com

I am not a big user or follower of folks on twitter.  However, I did find a handy use for twitter.  Since I have connections from my Blackberry and IM to twitter, it is fairly convenient for me to put something in twitter.  My company pays for millage to any other office or offsite visit required of its employees.  So I often queue up several trips before I file an expense report.  If I go many times in short period of time I find that I often forget the dates and purpose for my trips.  To help me remember, every time I go offsite, I just enter a twitter message. Then I login to twitter when it’s time to do an expense report and I can easily find which days I went to each place.  Kinda neat.

Thought this might be useful.

Just wanted to let everyone know that itminddesign.com now has a twitter account for those who like to follow sites and posts through twitter.

http://twitter.com/itminddesign

While doing my usually reading for interesting things on the web I found this webpage/document that is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users.  This collection was created by Colin Barschel and this cheat sheet is distributed under the under Creative Commons.

 The topics include:

1. System
2. Processes
3. File System
4. Network
5. SSH SCP
6. VPN with SSH
7. RSYNC
8. SUDO
9. Encrypt Files
10. Encrypt Partitions
11. SSL Certificates
12. CVS
13. SVN
14. Useful Commands
15. Install Software
16. Convert Media
17. Printing
18. Databases
19. Disk Quota
20. Shells
21. Scripting
22. Programming
23. Online Help

And cover OS’s like Solaris, Linux, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD.

A few days ago I signed up for a beta for grand central.com. I had seen this site mentioned on a few blogs including Blogger Buzz and BlogNewChannel. I’m not sure how it works, but I know I like it.  It’s a neat concept of having one phone number that takes your incoming calls and rings all the phones that you specify at the same time. It screens calls and allows you to block people and numbers. It is pretty customizable with grouping callers into different categories have each category going to a different phone.  You can even make custom voice mail messages for each contact.  There is a bunch of other customizations and some I haven’t tried yet.  It seems like a nice concept though one downside seems you can’t get phone numbers in every area that one might want.  At the main site you can sign up and wait to be invited or I found this link on the blogs mentioned above that was suppose to be for bloggers but it works for anyone who wants to sign up.  Apparently, Goggle had purchased them some time ago which is not something I knew Goggle had done.  I’m not out advertising for Grand Central but I thought was a neat concept and one I had actually tried.

For those IT geeks out there that use visio for diagrams of their solutions or environments I thought I would include a few links to some good resources for vendor’s stencils. Also, I’m looking for Unisys Mainframe stencils should anyone know where to get those, please email me at feedback at itminddesign dot com.  If there are others you think others might benefit from, email those links to me as well.

Visio Cafe

includes the official collections of:

• Aruba

• BlueArc
• Data Domain
• Dell
• EMC
• Emcor Enclosures
• Fujitsu Siemens
• Hewlett-Packard
• Hitachi Data Systems
• IBM
• Mitel
• nCipher
• NetApp
• Server Technology

and some unofficial, various collections as well, including:

• StorageTek 
• Sun Micro

Additional Vendors:

• Brocade devices (requires support account, no cost)
• Cisco Networking
• Dell (from dell.com)
• F5 Networks (requires support account, no cost)
• Panduit equipment
• VMWare

A final resource:

A page with a large amount of links (Note:some don’t work) can be found here.