Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with using Jira as an issue tracker. But for those of you who have been juggling issue tracking and meeting SLA requirements -- and for those of you who had the recently acquired VertygoSLA addon -- this article may be useful...
As a provider of engineering services, the majority of my projects involve developing GWT applications, and I do all my work almost exclusively in Ubuntu. Ubuntu 12.04, specifically, has many convenient features and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get their...
I recently upgraded to Windows 8 from Windows 7 on my HP Pavillion dv6 laptop. For me, it was a matter of needing to re-install my system after a hard disk failure. I opted for Windows 8 mainly to test the new operating system. From a feature standpoint, Windows...
Pretty much every day I do some system administration on one of our many Linux servers that we support as part of our managed IT services. It occurred to me that I use a bunch of utilities and tools within Linux to make my job easier and wanted to share my top 5 Unix...
Almost a year ago, I wrote about 10 Pitfalls that Can Impact VMware Performance. I thought I’d revisit this topic, provide some specific situations I've encountered over the past year, and explain what I've learned from them. You may have already taken the advice of...
It's easy to get caught up the task at hand -- more so if its something you find interesting. But over the years, more and more papers are being published on the hazards of non-stop work, from eye strain to carpal tunnel, there are countless pitfalls to sitting in...
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...
When involved in IT strategy consulting services, you need a way to keep track of passwords in a safe and accessible manner. There are a number of different options out there ranging from single machine managers to cloud-based services. The one I found to be a great...
The value system and practices that embody Agile Software Development have been around for well over a decade, and have been touted as having "crossed the chasm" by organizations such as the Agile Alliance, Gartner, and Forrester Research. Numerous studies indicate...
This seems to be the age of “Big Data”. Every sector seems to have a need for it -- from biotechs doing genome sequencing, to financial providers mining market data. For many, the ability to store massive amounts of structured or unstructured data is the key to...
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...
Sometimes finding the information you want for IBM Rational ClearQuest can be a challenge -- and when you find something, it can be that the level of detail needed is not present. That's why we at SPK and Associates started this series of technical how to guides to...
