Category Archives: Blogging

New Beginnings

After nearly 9 years working at the same place, several things fell into place indicating the time was right to move to a new challenge.  It was hard to leave all the people behind, and also stressful starting a new job.  My new company is a small software startup, and I was about the 17th employee.  The people are great, and it is a nice relaxed atmosphere.  It is an exicitng business space, and there is a lot of energy around what we are trying to do.

There is no other IT staff, and they probably needed a person a year ago, so there is a lot to be done.   I need to split out the Small Business Server to get Exchange, AD, Sharepoint, SQL and everything else out on its own.  I need to setup a VM environment for the dev team and QA.  There needs to be some desktop imaging solution for all the growth that they say is coming.  I just hope that they can prioritize what they want done first and that everyone else can understand that there is no quick way to do things right.  The age of zip-ties and duct tape is over!

 

More to come about the new environment and its challenges.

Error 500 – Internal Server Error

So for a large part of today my blog has been down.   I have been trying to troubleshoot for a while on my own and have found several suggestions on the web.  Amongst them was ensuring that php5 was being called in my .htaccess file and also by including a php.ini file to set the memory limit. I found a couple of posts on some WordPress forums as well all relating to the same things.  I also found some posts suggesting I disable all my plug-ins which I did by removing their folders from my plug-ins directory.  Still no luck.

I ended up getting frustrated and called my hosting company 1and1.com.  After a few minutes on hold I got through to a rep and she started to run me through everything I had already tried.  She then went looking in my .htaccess files to verify that I had indeed done what I said.  She came back and then asked to put me on hold.  After a few minutes she came back on and told me that it was all working again as expected.

I asked her what had changed and she told me that when I connect via sftp (ssh) I need to ensure that I explicitly close my connection.  She said that if a connection gets hung up and not properly closed that this error/behavior can happen.  I found that to be a bit strange, but my sites are indeed working again, so I will have to watch to see if it happens again.

SAS70 Control Activity Pains

The company I work for is in our second attestation period.  The first time was very painful and a lot of extra work, but only a 6 month audit period.  This time we’re under a 9 month audit!  It is very taxing to keep on your toes that much, for that long.
During our first period we learned a lot about how we had written our Control Activities to support our Control Objectives.  We were at times too specific on our CA wording and backed ourselves into a corner more than once.  Luckily we did not have any major exceptions and gained a favorable audit opinion which was quite a milestone for our small company.

The single biggest issue that we found was how we worded the Control Activities.  We made the description specific to the control activity in a way that locked us into that description for the duration of our audit.  This became problematic when we ran into an unforseen issue with how we were then required to do things. If there was a problem, we could not change the CA during the audit period.

This is where my biggest/only recommendation comes in.  Word your CAs so that it refers to a policy/procedure document for how you do things.  That way you can update your document as needed without changing the CA itself.

Tracking Outbound Clicks – Part Two

Back in May I was looking for a way to track outbound clicks from my blog using Google Analytics Asynchronous code.  At the time there weren’t any WordPress plug-ins that were able to do this.  Last week I was setting up a new blog and found that there now is a plug-in that has this ability.

The plug-in is simply named Asynchronous Google Analytics for WordPress. It has few options and is really quite easy to setup.  It can be as simple as entering your Google Analytics ID, or you can modify advanced options if you wish.  Some of the options I found useful were turning off tracking for blog admins or segmenting logged in users.  I found it interesting that using the Asynchronous code was not turned on by default (since that is the name of the plug-in).

I’ve been using it for a couple of days and it seems to be working quite well.  Go check it out!