The use of open source software (OSS) within the medical device industry is a double edged sword. On one end of the spectrum, you have freely available code that is available for the world to scrutinize. In the process, one would hope that bugs are more easily...
One of the main reasons people purchase a smartphone is to have information at their fingertips. Does that apply to the world of CAD applications? The answer is very dependent on what you want to actually do with this data. Do you want to design a complex...
Recently, Oracle announced the release of Java 8. This latest edition has some interesting new features, most notably the inclusion of lambda expressions and the ability to do multiple inheritance through default methods. We’ll spend the bulk of this article exploring...
Chances are if you are in IT management or providing IT services you have had to deal with virtualization hosts. When it comes time to retire your old hardware and move to a new host, there are a number of different ways to go about it. One in particular for ESXi lets...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Everyone knows that troubleshooting “slow performance” is one of the most challenging tasks we have as IT services providers, but is also one of the best ways to improve productivity (and morale!). Although replacing hardware and buying more expensive computers can...