John Croson's Blog Home

The Environment Image by justonlysteve via Flickr I work in an industry that deals with Protected Health Information (PHI). According to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) we need to apply certain measures to protect this information, and continue to improve those measures. Over time our company has increasingly found itself turning to the Internet to retrieve information regarding patient visits, explanation of benefits, remittance advise, bank statements, etc. The list grows daily. The Problem As this list grows, so do the accounts (username & password, and sometimes a challenge question). Keeping track of these is becoming a daunting task, and an even greater one is maintaining standards on password strength. In the IT support world, it is common to find weak passwords and poor account management practices: Written on Post-it Notes pasted under keyboards or worse, on the monitor. Using birthdays; pet, children, sibling, or spouse pet names; commo...

Image by Micah68 via Flickr I've been using FileZilla FTP server for some time now and have been happy for the performance. Recently, we needed the ability to expose the FTP service to another client, and the documents that we'd be receiving would be arriving in an un-encrypted form, unlike our other clients. I decided I could simply enable FTPS , the SSL enabled FTP protocol and open a port to 990 on my ASA 5525 Security Appliance and NAT traffic to our server. Unfortunately I quickly found out that a passive FTPS server behind my firewall won't work without some specific configuration changes as discussed in this article . With all that fussing around, I decided to check out freeFTPd, a single deamon that offers both FTP and SFTP, not to be confused with FTPS, but the secure file transfer protocol that is common to the SSH ( secure shell ) protocol. It's fairly straight forward, but is a bit quirky and the documentation is non-existent. Follow some of my ti...

Just finished posting two examples of the dashboards I've been creating for a few of our clients. Image by cobalt123 via Flickr One is a Visit Log , and the other is a Demographic Map . Demo went well with one of our clients, they appeared even a bit exited at the possibilities it represents for them... I'll start working on exposing other data, like Relative Values of services provided, attached receipts, etc.

Some time ago, I wrote an article about using Cognos Impromptu to export data to CSV from a then Misys, now AllScripts Tiger data source, and use DTS in MS Sql Enterprise Manager to import it for displaying data in ASP pages. I started using this method to export other types of data, in an attempt to create a dashboard for our clients. I quickly found that Impromptu is not well suited or reliable enough for scheduling multiple jobs. The requirements and caveats for using Impromptu in this manner are: Each report must be scheduled so as to not be running when the next is scheduled. Impromptu will not allow the next scheduled report to wait too long, and this may cause the "chain" of reports to fail. The workstation running the reports must have a user logged in with the Cognos Scheduler application running in order to fire the reports off. It cannot run via the Windows Scheduled Tasks (AT for us old-timers). If you run your reports against multiple companies, as we do...

Please don't wait. I'm usually not one to step on a soap-box to promote a product (steps down...) but this is a good one, one which many already know about and use. I used to be a heavy Evolution user. Dunno why I initially made this decision, only that it came installed on my Ubuntu Jaunty install as the default email client with the Gnome UI . I started having some issues with it recently, where the retrieval of my POP3 or sending mail caused it to hang. I read a few bug reports and posts related to clearing out temporary ~/.evolution files, but this really never worked very well, as the issues always reappeared. The last straw was not being able to expunge the Trash bin , and after a little bit of playing, decided I needed to migrate my mail to something else. I figured since I already used Firefox , I might just as well take the Thunderbird plunge. Boy, was I glad I did! It was a snap using these directions, " How To Migrate From Evolution To Thunderbird In Ubunt...

Image via Wikipedia I recently had the need to provide printer admin access on an ERP server to ordinary users. Nothing makes me shudder more than elevating a users access on a machine that holds your entire business operation on it's drives... I was able to come up with a solution using CPAU.exe which I've written about here . The scenario: An active label printer and a backup. When one goes down, the other needs to be put into service, but it needs to have the same name as the active one did. The users then also need to be able to "flip a switch" to put the active one back into service. First, I needed the guts of the switching script, which makes use of Microsoft 's prncnfg.vbs script, stored on all Windows boxes in the %windir%\ system32 directory (Called ChangePrinter.cmd) : @ECHO OFF @SET _ONE=ACTIVEPROD @SET _ONE_DOWN=ACTIVEPROD_146 @SET _TWO=BACKUPPROD @SET _HOST=BAPFSVR03 :: PRINTERS RECEIVE ADDRESSES VIA DHCP :: WHEN NO ERROR CONDITIONS E...

This afternoon my wife had to work, so dinner was on me. She left me a bag of assorted frozen seafood we bought at Woodman's in Kenosha defrosting in the sink. What to do, what to do... I had a half a vadalia onion left over in the fridge. Image via Wikipedia One yellow bell pepper. One heaping teaspoon of chopped garlic ( from the jar ). One heaping teaspoon of ginger paste. One large tomato. Two heaping teaspoons of lemon grass ( from the jar ). 1/2 Can drained garbanzo ( chickpeas ) beans. 1 15oz can chicken broth . 1 15oz can coconut milk . 2 cans ( use one of the others you emptied ) water. 4 chicken bullion cubes. 1/2 teaspoon red chili pepper . 1 teaspoon ground coriander. 6 green cardomom seeds. 1/2 stick cinnamon. 1 teaspoon yellow curry. 1 teaspoon fish sauce . 2 teaspoons ghee . 2 tablespoons olive oil . Salt to taste. Holy crap, that's allot of ingredients. In large'ish pot, add ghee and oil (oil keeps ghee from burning...it tolerates higher heat). Add cho...