LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, has reported that its user database has been hacked and the encrypted passwords of 6+ million users have been stolen. Even though the password database was encrypted, users with weak passwords could be exposed with...
SPK Blog Post
A Six Step Setup Process for Incorporating CSS and jQuery into Your Electric Commander Plugin
Let's suppose you've been tasked with developing a custom dashboard for your Electric Commander installation to show off some real-time stats about your software development process. If you read my previous article about displaying Commander metrics in a GWT...
How a Disaster Turned out to be an Opportunity
This post started out as a discussion of how Clonezilla made my life easy and Acronis made my life hard, but it quickly morphed into something different and more personal. Hopefully someone can take away from this that disasters can be quite bad when they happen, but they can also set you on a path you didn’t expect that may end up being wonderful.
Gain Greater Control Over Windows Disk Defragmentation with Defraggler
This week we have a look at an alternative to Windows Disk Defragmenter. Piriform has a number of Windows utility offerings, among which is Defraggler. Defraggler has the following capabilities, a number of which are not available with the Windows default utility. 1....
Outsource Your System Administration to Set Your Engineers Free
The inquisitive nature of engineers, which makes them so good at designing, developing and building products, can also lead them to become distracted by other “interesting things” like managing the very systems and tools that allow them to do their engineering....
Setting up Web metrics with Webalizer
When managing websites, it's important to have metrics on the site for both admin and content owners. One of the easiest ways to do this is Webalizer. It is a free tool that uses the Apache access log to provide a graphical presentation of usage. Attached is a quick...
How to add more disk space to your Redhat server without reformatting
One of the common tasks for any system administrator is managing disk space on a server. It doesn't matter what operating system the server is running, free disk space is always something you keep an eye on. I won't go into a boring lecture on why managing disk space...
SDLC Basics: The Vision Statement
In the Beginning In the beginning, there was an idea. The idea took shape and became a project. The project became an application and the application got used. Or maybe it didn't get used. Maybe it was completely the wrong application for the business. Or maybe it was...
Incorporating Accessibility Into Your Software Engineering Projects
Are you missing out on reaching 25% of the US population with your current software engineering project? Maybe the elderly, at 13% of the population, aren't part of your target market, or maybe it's the 12% of the US population who are disabled that you aren't...
In Celebration of IPv6
On June 8th of last year, an event known as World IPv6 Day was celebrated. Well, “celebrated” might carry a little too much emphasis – perhaps instead, World IPv6 Day was observed. And what did you do to celebrate this observance of the future? Well, if you are like...
Using Speccy to Understand What’s Inside Your Computer
This week we’d like to cover a tool that assists with understanding what is actually in that desktop or laptop you work with. Most of us know in lesser or greater detail that there is a CPU, some random access memory (RAM) a hard disk drive (HDD), various peripherals...
How to Obtain Electric Commander Metrics for Use in a GWT Plugin
Developed by Electric Cloud, Electric Commander is an extremely versatile tool for enhancing and automating your organization’s software development build-test-deploy cycle. Commander makes it possible to eliminate unnecessary lag time between phases of the...