“iPad-controlled helicopter hits shelves in September”: is the shiver I feel panic or anticipation? Open another tab in your browser by clicking this: http://tinyurl.com/3yh6un4. Click past the annoying ad. There, now what’s that sensation you’re feeling, after reading that? I feel like the little cartoon Devil has appeared on one shoulder, the Angel on the …
Removing a disk from a Logical Volume set
Has your favorite Linux distribution changed its default partitioning scheme to a logical volume layout? Why did they do this, and what does it mean? Put simply, logical volumes let you grow a filesystem by making multiple physical partitions look like a single logical partition. Cool, huh? If you keep filling up /var, you can …
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Moving to the cloud: What you’re really worried about
So we’re talking about cloud computing, specifically the question, “What are my real concerns when I move my applications/platform/infrastructure to the cloud?” Bandwidth. Productivity means people aren’t waiting for a sluggish interface to respond. Do you have a T1 now? What’s its utilization? Because you may be moving up to a T3. Already on an …
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Moving to “The Cloud”? What the heck is that?
I’m watching several clients as they move, or consider moving, parts of their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Some of their issues have really given me pause. What is “the cloud” anyway? It’s several things, among others a currently-hot catchphrase in IT. It can be software as a service (SaaS), for instance using Gmail for …
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Dealing With Operation Aurora
As you know if you follow my maunderings, I’ve been keenly interested in the “Operation Aurora” incident that involved, among other things, hacking into Google’s servers to gather information on Chinese political dissidents. This was a significant attack, primarily because it was so sophisticated. It exploited a weakness in Internet Explorer 6 (God please deliver …
HP-UX: a fading star
I have to admit HP-UX is growing on me. It’s prevalent in medical environments, primarily in imaging applications like MRI. So maybe it’s no accident that the 60-pound workstations are called the Visualize series: they come with serious DVI video cards, run Fast SCSI for their drives, run a tightly-integrated 64-bit Unix on HP’s PA-RISC …
Good as their word, Google leaves China
The people at Google had a motto, though you don’t hear much of it any more: Don’t be evil. It looks like we can judge them for what they do, not what they say, because they warned China that they’d leave if the Chinese government wouldn’t enforce sanctions or investigate ongoing hacking activities within their …
Why Software Projects Fail, part 5
Reason 5: Needless Complexity Crowds Out Simple Functionality I consider this the flip side of the “fad of the moment” disease. Google Wave: Gotta Get It! AJAX: Gotta Have It! Oh cool, Google released Google Gears. Let’s build our site around their Javascript libraries! Except that Google has dropped support for Gears, in favor of …
Why Software Projects Fail, part 4
Reason 4: Complete Inability to Define Requirements OUR SCENE: A conference room; several people seated, a whiteboard on one wall. [Programmer:] Okay, let’s map out a couple of these workflows. [Stakeholder 1: a high-level member of one division:] So we’re going with blue as the theme? [Stakeholder 2: Stakeholder 1’s opposite number from a different …
Why Software Projects Fail, part 3
Reason Number 3: Most organizations do not have the skills to properly scope an application project. I won’t single out the entities that I’ve seen declare the “scope” of a project in a series of vaguely worded requirements – inevitably subject to endless veto as developers trot out one pony after another. Projects go wildly …