Home Page

Home Welcome to Vapor Labs International. This is our virtual work place, where we understand work to be an expression of our species-being, and approach it as a process that's only finished when we're happy with it. By the way, if you haven't read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig, I highly recommend it.

We are a small shop with a broad range of interests and abilities. Here you will find demonstrations in areas that intersect our work/homelife balance.

Here's a snapshot of what our employees keep in the virtual box:

Kali is a Debian-based distribution geared toward penetration testing and security hardening.

Zappa is a Debian server for Hunchentoot, a Lisp web server implementation named after a play written by Frank Zappa.

CentOS 7 (C7) servers: This set of three servers provides the training environment for staff to practice for their LPIC and RHCSA certifications.

Haiku, a fork from BeOS and written in c++.

MenuetOS, a compact OS written in assembly.

In 1999 Neal Stephenson wrote an essay called, "In the Beginning was the Command Line where he compares OSes to vehichles. While we have a station wagon (Windows) parked on the lot, we mainly drive tanks (Linux), but like to take a spin in the batmobile (BeOS) once in a while. We even have a go cart (Menuet, though not mentioned in the article) for the novelty of it. Cloud-E Sourcing As the company grew - or at least aged - we identified resources in other markets. Here are some of our partners:

Great Harvest Bread Co. in Cedar Rapids for all of our catering needs.

Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, IA for our higher educational needs. The generalist survives.

Central College in Pella, IA for refreshing perspectives. And wooden shoes.

Pluralsight: On-line training for our staff.

Fog Lights This area is dedicated to navigating our way through the murk. Here are some of the bright spots.

Fog Log: Our version of a blog, this is our flog. The site is currently off-line for maintenance.
Soc: Understanding the importance of both context and agency.

What's Hot

KeePass is a nice, secure, password manager available as a free download for your PC from your phone's app store. If you haven't heard of it, you should really check it out.

: We obviously employ no artists, but Inkscape web tutorials made it possible to at least create the logo.

: Microsoft's Swiss Army knife, PowerShell has been in our environment since 2012

: Python is a scripting workhorse outside the PowerShell world. Since we need the exercise, we are working on translating all of our PowerShell scripts to python.

: Common Lisp is the Holy Grail of programming for our developers. Unfortunately, they seem to be looking in the wrong place, even with the help of this definitive Bible on the subject.

What's Not (Yet)

bash scripts: coming soon
posh scripts: coming soon also
python conversion scripts: coming not quite so soon
Common Lisp: somewhere down the road

Mist Opportunities Like gorillas, opportunities fade in and out of the mist. Sometimes you chase them and get hopelessly lost. Sometimes they appear when you're standing still and least expect it. Here are some of the things I'm working on in case something comes barreling out of the mist while I'm sitting at my desk.

Pluralsight

CSS: mainly to get up to speed and update this web site after decades of neglect
Linux Certifications: I've started working my way through courses to prepare me for the LPIC (Linux Professional Institue Certification) and RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) exams
Python: to improve my scripting repetoire
Other Past and Future courses

PowerShell: several courses from basic to advanced over a 5 year period
Emacs: a handy editor, especially as an IDE for multiple scripting environments
vim: vi is still the default editor on linux, and for good reason
System Center: various aspects of SCCM and SCOM to help me with job duties

This will depend on where I go next, but will update when that happens

About Us Vapor Labs is the theme of my personal web site. It's international because we have relatives in other countries. Established in 1991 as an excersize in creating web pages, VLI was inspired by an article in Computer Gaming World about a game that, although the developers kept promising it was close to release and had a couple of nice demos, never quite made it to market. They referred to the game as "vaporware."

Thus, Vapor Labs was born. We like to think of it as a promising place. Delivery on those promises is another thing altogether. Here you will find an eclectic collection of things I find interesting, useful, or entertaining, organized around the theme of an ineffectual manufacturing company.