Benjy's IT Blog

Posts

Cybersecurity

I went to a Cybersecurity conference last week hosted by Data Connectors and I want to give kudos for the job well done in running the conference. First of all they held the conference in a very nice Westin downtown, so the facility was great! The Vendors were very informative and the presentations were very good as well! There was a good mix of breaks so we could talk with the Vendors and learn more about their products. The lunch and snacks were good too! Always a plus! But back to the subject of Cybersecurity. It's truly amazing all the cyber attacks made against companies, websites, home owners, smart phones, etc. I don't remember the exact numbers, but at the time they presented them, I was amazed how high it is, and how high it's going to be. Everything on the web is exposed and most people don't realize the bad exposure that's out there. Yes, bigger companies are spending lots of money to protect their data but the regular "Joe" with

2nd Quarter Review

So I must admit I've been slacking on my blog posts lately. When the weather starts getting warmer and you start vacationing, it's a little more difficult to stay in a good routine. These aren't necessarily bad distractions but I'm at least I'm aware of it and one of my goals for the 3rd Quarter (and 2nd Quarter next year) is to fight through those distractions and stay more focused. Before I move on with my goal updates I wanted to share something sad that happened right before we left for vacation. The night before we left my daughter's guinea pig died, must have died in her sleep. We didn't realize this until about 20 minutes before having to leave for the airport. I also didn't want to break the news to my daughter before the trip b/c I wasn't sure how she would react. So we decided not to tell her until we returned and had someone dispose of the guinea pig later that day. When we returned from vacation we told her the bad news, but to

File Size Upload Limits using Godaddy Hosting

I've been working on a new project for a friend of mine and came across an issue with trying to upload photos using the infamous freeASPUpload code. I've used the code in the past for some past projects but don't recall having issues with limits on uploading files. I'm posting this on my blog b/c there's nothing on the internet that discusses this (or at least I wasn't able to find any explanations), and hopefully this can be a resource to someone else that comes across the same issue. Now I know there are other options, utilities, etc. for uploading pics/files/etc. but freeASPUpload is simple, I've used it in the past, and this project is pretty basic. So, if you want to change the upload file size limit you will first want to go into your Godaddy's hosting account. Next go into the Virtual Directories option, then click on Directory Properties. Towards the bottom there is a section called "Maximum size of entity body of an ASP request

New Emojis Coming and Reset Your Router!

I'm sure you've heard the warnings by now but the FBI is recommending you restart your home routers because of a malware called VPNFilter. The average home router doesn't have much malware protection so you should probably take the necessary steps to reset your router and everything connected to it! Here's what you should do by Tyler Lacoma And on a lighter side, 157 new emoji's will be released on June 5! This will include some new animals such as the peacock and hippo. There will be a bar of soap and a lab coat. Also included will be a skateboard and pirate flag! You can check out all the new emoji's here!

Alexa Is Listening, Recording, and Sending!

Check out this story where a couple in Oregon was having a private conversation and Alexa recorded and sent the conversation to one of their contacts! They were not aware until the contact contacted them about what had happened. The couple contacted Amazon and they verified the series of events. But what's even more bizarre is the couple wanted to return their Amazon home devices but Amazon has not agreed to return the costs for the devices! Check out the article here by Bruce Brown on Digital Trends

Nonclustered Index in SQL Server

So, I've run into an issue with one of my queries because it takes about 40 seconds to run and according to the Recent Expensive Queries section of the Activity Monitor in SQL Server, there is a section of code taking up about 51% of the query. First, let me say that I've been writing Transact SQL for quite awhile but have never ventured into the Clustered and NonClustered areas of forming Indexes. I do use indexes on all my tables but that's just the regular Primary Unique key. We've been using this query for awhile and it does work but when the result set is about 5K records it takes a little while to run. So here's the actual query itself SELECT PartNo , SerialNo , HeciCode , ScanDate , OrderType , PoNo , po . IssueDate , SoNo FROM ScanHistory sh WITH ( NOLOCK ) LEFT OUTER JOIN trkRWPOHeader po WITH ( NOLOCK ) ON sh . PoNo = po . PONum WHERE len ( PoNo ) > 2 AND ScanDate >