Ultraportable laptops and Ultrabooks have become the new machines to have. They are smaller, thinner, and lighter making them the preferred choice for most engineering and IT professionals over the older clunkier notebook workstations. Even before the push by Intel...
Call me weird, but for whatever reason I find version control really interesting and a crucial part of your build and release model. Maybe it's because it's saved my bacon a few times so I appreciate what it does, or maybe it's because it lets me see how my code has...
One of the powerful features of a full enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) system is being able to post process content uploaded to it. For example, adding a watermark, or changing a revision of a document automatically. The idea behind Solidworks Workgroup...
Every administrator runs into the FTP question eventually: Can we get FTP for our site? Setting up FTP is relatively easy with a few concerns around security. Old FTP sites were prone to security holes and configurations that were difficult. With vsftpd, the host...
In my last blog post, I gave 5 reasons to use ntop (Network TOP) to monitor your company's network. The tool is actually very straightforward to install and configure for infrastructure management, but there are a few steps you'll need to do before you're monitoring...
For the everyday user with a laptop or desktop, this article may not apply. And for those of you who have no need to have more than one PC on your desk -- kudos! But from time to time, its necessary to have several PC's on your desk at the same time -- especially...
Have you ever sent out an email with a bunch of important questions and received a reply that began with "my answers are in blue". Have you then found yourself combing through your large email searching for those answers only to discover that your email provider...
With websites, it's important to have a consistent method to gate keep incoming connections. This is primarily to maintain security and ensure a common access point for all traffic. Web proxy servers allow channeling of traffic and proxy content from internal servers...
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...
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...
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...