In a recent post, I spent a few minutes with Windows 8 and Office 2013 using a Dell Latitude ST -- and in my excitement over the launch of a new Microsoft tablet, I purchased a Microsoft Surface running Windows 8 RT hoping to see how it performs in an...
At this year's Electric Cloud Summit there was big focus on Agile software development practices. Even a casual look at Electric Cloud's product line, which includes ElectricAccelerator, ElectricCommander, and most recently ElectricDeploy, will make it obvious that...
Evernote has changed my life for the better since I first tried it out a month ago. I have spent much of my life wishing I could keep a little notebook on me at all times to record odd bits of information that I think I might like to remember. Little things. When...
To succeed in any market, a company needs to innovate, pioneer and push out the borders. The recent one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs reminds of one of the tech industries greatest comeback stories. Apple's key to success, other than the charisma of Jobs...
Most enterprise-grade network storage systems allow you to take "snapshots" of the filesystem stored on it so you can quickly restore a single file or directory...or even restore the entire filesystem to that point in time if need be. So, what do you do if you're a...
Outsourcing IT, technical and engineering related tasks, rather than employing extra staff, is a cost effective way of staying flexible in an ever changing market and economy. However, one big question that needs to be answered is; does your outsourcing company have...
The technology industry loves buzzwords. The decade of the '80s was all about synergy and paradigm shifts. In the '90s, it was the web and the Internet. The turn of the century brought talk about virtualization and social media. Today it's all about the cloud. Of...
Recently, we upgraded Confluence to 4.0, the latest revision and was pleasantly surprised by the process. The upgrade was seamless, well documented, and no major issues found. Upgrading confluence would have been really simple if we wanted to retain the same server....
Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
Macs running OS X have been around for quite some time, but only recently have they gained enough traction with our customers at SPK to be used as their day to day desktop environment. Historically, IT organizations have been reluctant to embrace this change. This...
Attitudes are important things -- they are the lens through which we filter everything life throws at us, and they can either be the secret to our success or our undoing. We've all heard the stereotype that says IT professionals have bad attitudes, and maybe your own...
Automated development, rather than just automated builds, offers a more holistic approach to automating the development process including building, testing and deployment. It is the cornerstone of Continuous Integration (CI). CI uses a model of small incremental...
