Product Review

Kindle 2 vs Nook

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:30:00 EST

So far I’ve remained relatively aloof from the whole “eBook” craze. Ordinarily, given my geeky background and borderline insane craving for technology, one would think that I’d be all over these things. The problem is, my love for the written word also extends to a love for the experience of reading a book. Call me crazy, but I love the smudged thumbs I get from a 3-hour reading session where the real world ceased to exist and it was just me and my alternate reality, lovingly prepared for me by my favorite authors. I love the smell of books and the feel of curling up with a book in a comfortable chair with a ridiculously strong coffee.

Windows XP Installation Issues on ACPI Enabled System

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:52:00 EST

ACPI or Advanced Configuration and Power Interface is an industry power management specification. It enables an operating system to control the amount of power required to be given to each device that is connected to the computer system. Thus, it eliminates device management responsibilities for firmware interfaces. However, when ACPI is enabled, your system BIOS might create issues. These problems are typically observed when you try to install Windows XP on your computer. You might be compelled to perform clean installation of Windows XP in such cases to solve the problem. Since the process deletes all the data that is stored on the hard disk, you will need to restore it from the recent data backup available. At times, backup might prove incompetent to restore the required files and folders. To cope up with such problems, you need to use an efficient data recovery tool that could extract the data thus lost

Plone and Drupal: Different Approaches, Different Results

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

Plone and Drupal are two leading open source Content Management Systems (CMS). Both were recognized in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards, run by Packt Publishing. Both also have large installed bases and large developer communities. This is made evident by some quick searching on Google: A search for LinkedIn profiles that mention Plone (search for 'plone site:linkedin.com/pub/') turns up 1350 pages—a large increase from 500 results in 2006.

PowerBuilder 12 .NET Review

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Yakov Werde has just written an article on DevX, which looks at the new version of Sybase's long running and successfull RAD development tool... PowerBuilder. 'A dormant giant gets a new lease on life as a .NET-compatible development environment.' I dont know if I totally agree with him on the use of dormant, as there are still many customers continuing to use PB, but the rest of his statement...how right he is, as PowerBuilder 12 .NET includes new features such as...

Choosing Between Azure and VMM Private Clouds

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:45:00 EDT

I’ve spent the past day reviewing all that’s floating around the Interwebs on the Azure announcements from the WPC this week. There are definitely a lot of nice nuggets to digest and stuff that’s going to take a while to process. Most of the Azure talk at WPC has been, as expected, about how partners [...]

Learn SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Sun, 31 May 2009 14:56:00 EDT

Report Builder 2.0 provides an extremely flexible GUI with user friendly wizards for creating the Tablix data regions, a versatile construct that includes tables, matrix, and charts and gauges. In this excerpt from my book, the User Interface of Report Builder 2.0 is described in detail. Feature rich reports can be created or modified using this GUI which can later be managed by the Report Manager front end.

Book Review: Head First PMP

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:15:00 EDT

Have you tried to prepare yourself for PMP certification or exam? If so, then you share with me the opinion that most of the PMP books and guides are remarkable of hundreds of pages that are full of hard to understand complex sentences that leave you by the end of studying day dizzy and could hardly get couple of information to remember.

Kevin Hoffman's Review of Iron Man

Mon, 19 May 2008 06:00:00 EDT

I took the advice of a friend of mine and steered clear of the 'normal' movie theaters and went a little out of the way to go to a DLP movie theater. The experience of comparing a regular movie theater to a DLP movie theater is like comparing standard def analog TV with a 1080i HDTV signal. The movie itself was awesome. I was pleasantly surprised. I expected, wrongly so, another loosely connected chain of high-impact special effects moments like most of the other recent comic book adaptations have been.

Sun Certifying Ubuntu

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has been telling Reuters that Sun is in the process of certifying Ubuntu on some of its low-end and mid-size hardware. The code it's certifying is Hardy Heron, the Ubuntu 8.04 rev that's due out later this month. Sun told the wire service that it's making sure its Java programming language, tools and Java server are compatible with Heron.

Book Review: Advanced AJAX by Shawn M. Lauriat

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:00:00 EDT

Because AJAX moves so much application logic from the server to the client, it forces many developers to master a wider range of web technologies than ever before. To work effectively on AJAX projects, front-end developers have to concern themselves with database performance, business logic and other server-side concerns. Back-end and middleware developers, meanwhile, have to make friends with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and a wide range of browsers.

Ubuntu 1, Windows 0

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 11:00:00 EST

I installed Ubuntu on the Toshiba laptop. Ubuntu installed in 15 minutes - 49 for Windows XP and 125 for Windows Vista. Ubuntu's desktop came right up. I opened the pre-installed Firefox browser and found I could browse the Web immediately. Ubuntu installed a network adaptor for the Toshiba laptop. I shake my head at this Windows foolishness!

Product Review: Zend Studio for Eclipse

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:30:00 EDT

Zend has decided, and I think this is a great idea, to join in with the Eclipse community that was founded in large part by IBM a number of years ago. The values that can be added by joining with the Eclipse community are many and varied. Since Eclipse was primarily established as a Java development environment it has certainly grown in leaps and bounds by way of add-on libraries just to name one popular area.

Dokuwiki - A Practical Open Source Knowledge Base Solution

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:30:00 EST

Whether you're a company of one or 100, managing knowledge is a core concern and implementing a knowledge base is a sensible way to capture your content. Dokuwiki is a practical open source Web application for creating a knowledge base that's easy for novice Webmasters to set up but flexible and full-featured.

SugarCRM - A Sweet Mix of Commercial and Open Source

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:00:00 EST

I've always wondered where the word 'oxymoron' came from. What does 'oxy' have to do with 'moron'? What about the words 'commercial' and 'open source'; do these words form an oxymoron when combined in one phrase?

Product Review — Running Windows on Linux

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 12:15:00 EDT

Regardless of how fast, stable, and geek-chic desktop GNU/Linux has become, we still live in a Windows world. Many vendors, either through lack of vision or funding, will produce only a Windows version of their software or drivers. If you're a gadget geek like me, you likely end up in the same old quandary of 'I want that gadget, but it only has Windows drivers.' If you're even more like me, you'll elect not to take the high road and search for ways to run that bad boy on your desktop GNU/Linux box.

rPath: The Software Appliance Company

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:00:00 EDT

One of the most touted benefits of Linux and open source programs is their flexibility. However, as the popularity of Linux has grown, some of the flexibility seems to have been sacrificed. As larger Linux vendors have become more standardized to support certified applications, the freedom to mold your Linux distribution to your needs has diminished a bit.

HP Announces New Customer Wins for its Midrange Storage Line

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:00:00 EST

HP today announced that Rydex Investments and Wheaton Franciscan Services have deployed HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) in their IT environments.

"A Watershed Event for Open Source Office Suites": Linux.SYS-CON.com Reviews StarOffice 8

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:30:00 EST

On September 27, Sun released StarOffice 8, their cross-platform office suite, which they believe to be the best alternative to the business standard, Microsoft Office. This new product release along with the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0, on October 20, was a watershed event for open source office suites. With a host of new features and increased functionality, both suites have never before offered such a robust and feasible alternative to the undisputed productivity suite leader, Microsoft Office. Sun Microsystems has been developing the product since their acquisition of Star Division, the previous maker of StarOffice, in August of 1999. For the first time in its history, StarOffice (and OpenOffice.org) has the best chance to convert millions of Microsoft Office users as a result of the latest crop of improvements.

CRYPTOCard's CRYPTOServer

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:45:00 EST

Lost passwords, easily guessed passwords, accounts with no passwords - they are all huge security risks; however, there often isn't a better, more economical way for companies on a limited budget. Biometric authentication can be expensive to implement, and many organizations have to trust employees anyway, so static passwords are a no-brainer. Still, the majority of successful security attacks are achieved through password access. What are the options? CRYPTOCard's CRYPTOServer for Linux is a good one at $499.

OpenGear's CM4008

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 14:15:00 EST

I've been looking at a lot of console server and other out-of-band management solutions recently. These days, there's no shortage of console servers, appliances to manage console servers, and appliances to manage those applicances, each at enterprise cost availability.

Taking Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, and PHP to Their Logical Extreme

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:15:00 EDT

Let's play word association. I say 'Web Hosting.' I bet 'fat margins' didn't jump into your head. More likely, you thought of some of the 'where are they nows' of the bubble, like Exodus and PSINet. Let's do another round - I say 'New York City,' and I'd wager that 'cheap rent' wasn't the first thing you thought of, either. So it may surprise you to learn that one hosting company that's been around since 1993 and that's actually making money, Logicworks (www.logicworks.net), just happens to be based in New York City.

Tackling Dependencies

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 16:00:00 EDT

You don't have to be around Linux for long before you hear about 'the dependency problem,' which is no problem at all for many users - until the day it bites them. In a nutshell, the problem is that most Linux applications depend on the operating system to provide various pieces of functionality that the applications need. These components most often take the form of shared libraries that are dynamically loaded and linked to the application at runtime. Problems occur when one or more of these libraries are replaced with a different (usually newer) version. Provided all the interfaces remain the same and the semantics of the functionality remain the same, there's no problem. However, due to security fixes, bug fixes, or new or improved functionality, the interfaces and semantics can and do change, and the changes can be enough to break the application.

Why the ProMEPIS Buzz? New Linux Distro Is Increasingly Popular

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:15:00 EDT

MEPIS has released two versions of Linux. SimplyMEPIS is designed for non-technical end users. ProMEPIS is designed for more technical users, administrators, IT professionals and web developers. SimplyMEPIS has become the sixth most popular desktop Linux distribution on www.distrowatch.org and recently MEPIS was number three in the monthly rankings.

VMware Workstation 5: The Software Testers' Friend

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:15:00 EDT

I love virtual machines. They enable me to stretch my limited hardware by letting me run more than one operating system on a single computer. But my needs pale in comparision to those of quality assurance and testing teams. They have to test tens if not hundreds of configurations and setting up individual machines is expensive in terms of both time and hardware.

Sun Fire V40z Server

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

With their Sun Fire V40z Server, Sun is moving into new realms in three different ways. First, it's a move onto a new hardware platform - namely the AMD Opteron CPU. Second, it's a move into the 64-bit arena on a platform other than their familiar UltraSPARC environment. Third is the adoption of a mainstream Linux distribution as a primary operating system choice.

WatchIT Releases Linux Education Series

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 00:00:00 EDT

WatchIT, a rich media company that produces education on demand, recently released a six-part series of interactive programs titled 'Linux Education Series,' targeted at executives and others who would like to learn about the Linux platform and the world of open source. The series consists of six programs ranging from high-level overviews of Linux to some fairly specific steps for Linux security.

Samba Update

Tue, 18 May 2004 00:00:00 EDT

It's fascinating that so much has happened since the last Samba Update. To those of us close to the action it seems that development just continues at a steady pace. This edition of the Samba Update update reports on the roadmap for Samba-3, the decisions made at the SambaXP Conference, and the exciting new documentation for Samba-3.

EmergeCore's IT in a Box

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 00:00:00 EDT

EmergeCore's president and CEO, Dave Brown, learned that in the ISP business, reliability and value were keys to success for his customers. That's why he chose Linux as the operating system to power his IT in a Box IT-100. The IT-100 is a 'Swiss Army Knife' of Linux servers and services.

Stalker CommuniGate Pro

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 00:00:00 EST

CommuniGate Pro 4.1 (CGP) is a comprehensive e-mail platform that includes a variety of messaging services. First and foremost, CGP provides standards-based e-mail services, including SMTP, POP, and IMAP. E-mail can be accessed and sent via most any e-mail client or via a Web interface. In addition to e-mail, CGP provides an integrated LDAP directory and calendaring (via Outlook, Web, iCAL, or vCAl) and list server.