February 2014

Think Lean

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, “lean“, is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.

Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as “lean” only in the 1990s.^[1]^[2] TPS is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world’s largest automaker,^[3] has focused attention on how it has achieved this success.

Continue reading “Think Lean”

Definitely fake

Messages asking for personal information: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8253

Reporting suspicious messages: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=29381

I ‘ve received this message:

Estimado Usuario de Gmail,

Sus dos correos entrantes se colocaron en estado de espera debido a la reciente actualización de nuestra base de datos. Con el fin de recibir los mensajes haga clic aquí para iniciar sesión y esperar la respuesta de nuestro servidor.

Les pedimos disculpas por las molestias que este cambio les pueda ocasionar y gracias por su comprensión.

Atentamente,

Atención al Cliente.”

It’s a scam called phishing to try steal your private info / password , click on the down arrow at the top right of the email and select “Report phishing” from the drop down menu. This will help Gmail warn others that the email is a scam , or use the following form: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse_phishing

some info :

never give out your password to emailed requests , any email from Google must end @google.com – also click the show details arrow and make sure the domain you see next to the ‘mailed-by’ or ‘signed-by’ lines matches the sender’s email address. If you see messages claiming to be from google.com, but are not properly authenticated as coming from google.com, then they are, phishing messages. Google will never ask you for your password (other than in their normal sign in screens, etc.). If you ever get an email asking for your password, you can be guaranteed that it isn’t from Google/Gmail.

DNS cache in Firefox

Clear DNS cache in Firefox

During the day I switch my VPN connection on and off several times. When I try to hit a server inside my company’s network while the VPN connection is down, it obviously fails and because I’m using OpenDNS every hostname resolves to an ip-address (in this case an ip-address of a server at OpenDNS).

I connect to VPN and then reload the page in Firefox and the same error page shows up. The reason for this behavior is Firefox’s internal DNS cache. The only remedy at that point is to close Firefox and restart it, which clears the in-memory DNS cache.

However, there’s a solution that does not require a restart.

type about:config in Firefox’s address bar
acknowledge the warning that appears next
find an entry called network.dnsCacheExpiration and set it’s value to 0
if there’s no such entry, create a new integer item with the name above and a value of 0
now go back and change the value to 3600

In step 3 (or 4) we tell Firefox that the expiration time for DNS cache is 0 seconds, which means that cache entries expire immediately, essentially clearing the existing cache. In step 5 we go back to the standard 3600 seconds (1 hr) cache expiration. The net effect of these steps is an empty DNS cache, meaning that the next time you hit the trouble server above, Firefox will attempt to resolve the hostname to an ip-address.