• Alexa

    Install the ask command-line interface for Alexa on macOS

    You’ve written an Alexa skill. Now you want to upload it to Alexa and submit for certification. Before you do anything, you’ll want to make sure you have a developer account setup and that you’ve accepted the EULA for the Alexa developer program at https://developer.amazon.com/alexa. To do so, simply go there and click sign in and it’ll take you through the prompts. You’ll need this as when you init your session, you’ll be prompted to link an account through the Amazon website. Once done, let’s get the technical stuff out of the way. First, install the latest version of node from https://nodejs.org/dist/v6.10.0/node-v6.10.0.pkg (it’s a package so follow the defaults to…

  • Business

    6 Things Every Boss Must Do to Help Employees Stay Calm Amidst Change

    My latest Inc Post, 6 Things Every Boss Must Do to Help Employees Stay Calm Amidst Change, is up at https://www.inc.com/charles-edge/6-ways-to-keep-your-cool-when-change-hits-your-com.html It starts off like this: I once spent hundreds of hours creating a training program and corresponding curriculum. It turned into a lesson on how quickly things change in the technology industry — the program was out of date within two years. The experience also was frustrating in another way. We had too many rules at the company about how things were created, so changing the program was a tougher bureaucratic slog than it should have been.

  • Active Directory,  cloud,  Consulting,  iPhone,  Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Windows Server

    Dig TTL While Preparing For A Migration

    Any time doing a migration of data from one IP to another where that data has a DNS record that points users towards the data, we need to keep the amount of time it takes to repoint the record to a minimum. To see the TTL of a given record, let’s run dig using +trace, +nocmd to turn off showing the version and query options, +noall to turn off display flags, +answer to still show the answer section of my reponse and most importantly for these purposes +ttlid to toggle showing the TTL on. Here, we’ll use these to lookup the TTL for the https://krypted.com/ A record: dig +trace +nocmd…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Changing the Background for DeployStudio

    DeployStudio has a very nice background image that it uses by default for the NetBoot set. But you can customize the image that’s used if you wish to have something more, well, customized. Simply mount the DeployStudioRuntime sparseimage file from the DeployStudioRuntime nbi file that was created when you elected to generate the NetBoot set. You can do so by simply opening the nib file and then double-clicking on the sparse image. From here, browse into the System and then the Library and then the CoreServices directory in the NetBoot set. From here find the DefaultDesktop.jpg file. Replacing that file will replace the background that is used when you boot…