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.
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....
The difference between quality assurance (QA) and testing is often misunderstood. In fact, the terms are frequently used interchangeably. However, testing is actually just one part of QA. Quality assurance, on the other hand, covers a larger, more holistic part of the...
Any project can be divided into different parts including requirements gathering, design, implementation, documentation and so on. One key aspect of the project lifecycle is quality assurance (QA), but it's often overlooked. Although almost all project managers...
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....
Nagios is an invaluable tool to help monitor a customer's infrastructure. Last year, I explained how easy it was to be able to integrate Network Appliance health checks. In fact, Nagios provides a plethora of out of the box plugins. Additional plugins are available...
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...
Get insight into your laptop’s status and taking some precautions with CPUID’s Hardware Monitor and CPU-Z and Belarc Advisor It happens to most laptops eventually. After two or more years of heavy (ab)use, most of our laptops are not in the condition they were...
Software asset management tools, particularly license usage and monitoring software are gaining more and more interest among large corporations. It should come as no surprise since by utilizing such tools they stand to gain upwards to 10% in cost reductions and that...
When on the internet, there's always concerns of security. If you're listening on some services but not others, you need to modify the Linux firewall to allow this. Also, if there's undesirable clients accessing ports and hacking, IPTables is an effective...
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...
All of us who work in software development want the products that we release to be high quality, and also low cost to maintain in the field. This is no big revelation; it’s common knowledge, and it’s common sense. It’s not clear that there is any silver bullet in...