Opinion

Beware of post-recession bargains

Low prices may lure you into wasting money

Upgrade cautiously as the economy edges north

You can't spend as though it's the late '90s — but don't overlook useful innovation

Just because we think it’s always about business change doesn’t mean anyone else does

Dear Bob … You've written a lot recently about the importance of IT taking a leadership role in the achievement of business change. This is exactly what I've been thinking for about the last 5 years: Shouldn't Info Services be involv

Better clams

As if I have nothing else to do, I've updated clamstats. v0.2 requires LogDate set in clamav.conf, and is currently tested with clamav running with MIMEDefang. If you're not running MIMEDefang, you'll have to edit the regex. More than

More on creating a process culture

Several correspondents wrote to add a critical bit of advice to At wits end, who was having some trouble instituting strong processes in his IT organization. The missing advice, which I strongly endorse, is to pay close attention to what kinds of beh

How to stick to Teflon

Dear Bob … I've been a firm believer in and practitioner of The Theory of Everything Else for years. We've developed a solid reputation within our enterprise for delivering on the promise of business change through technology. The challen

When fear is justified

Sneak attacks against Web apps are worth fretting over

Windows XP Media Center injects new life into the boardroom

Relive the highlights of a recent meeting (or the Super Bowl)

HP loses its way, Dell ports don’t play

Oh, what a knight

Grid computing puts licensing in limbo

How will software vendors charge for software usage when grid computing kicks in?

Device independence

Your computer is an extension of you — subtract the hardware, and you have the future of computing

The case for outsourcing the disposal process

A college administrator evaluates do-it-yourself disposal and decides the costs are too high

Disposing of IT assets

How to make sure the equipment you throw out today won't become a security threat tomorrow

Don’t buy the hype: Dark horses can haul wagons as well as the others can

In fact, some thriving failures fare better than their seemingly healthy counterparts

Preventive measures

I know you’re tired of hearing about Mydoom or Novarg, or whatever it is; so am I

FC storage prices falling: Is it still news?

SMBs targeted for networked storage

An exercise for the reader

A recurring theme here and in Keep the Joint Running is that you often must suboptimize the parts to optimize the whole. So here's a question: How much of popular business theory and practice are rooted in the opposite assumption – that optimizi

How to be in the top ten percent

Dear Bob … I keep getting the same career advice, and it's both mutually contradictory and mathematically impossible. Which is to say, I'm supposed to do what I love instead of focusing on what the market wants to hire. If I just do that,

Creating a process culture

Dear Bob … I'm CIO of an IT department that employes about 150 IT professionals. For the past year and a half I've been trying to move us from a process maturity level of around one (in my own estimation, at least) to a targeted

When to disagree

Dear Bob … Six months ago, I took over as CIO of a thirty-something member IT department. One of the managers reporting to me thought he should have been promoted to this job instead (I was brought in from the outside). I took your advice for this

Winternals Recovery Manager saves us from certain Mydoom

Admins can roll back to previous system snapshots and modify them at a granular level

Content-aware searching

Adding a little structure to HTML content elicits a knowledge management payoff

IT grows out of control

Ever-increasing complexity is forcing IT to relax its tightly held command  

Apple iLife hacked, DVD suit axed

Is Sniffer a fluke?

Compiling the v2.6 kernel

How the Linux kernel gets built

Understanding kernel math, maintenance, and more

A new view on data

Enterprise information integration pulls the data you need, when you need it

Linux as King Kong

Its new kernel will help the penguin conquer the enterprise core

Being right stinks

Yes, I predicted it, but that doesn’t make the arrival of Novarg any nicer

CNT offers one ounce of prevention

Troubleshooting for long distance storage

Linux v2.6 scales the enterprise

Bigger, stronger kernel sizzles in our performance tests

It isn’t only candidates who stretch the truth

Dear Bob … Why do people lie during job interviews? I'm not talking about job applicants – their motivation is obvious. But on many different occasions I've seen interviewers tell flat out lies about the company they represent. In one sit

Moving

To prepare for my impending house move, I've moved GN to my colo server. If you're hitting the feed, please update the address to http://guerrillanetworking.net/index.rdf. If you use a browser, update your bookmarks to http://guerrillanetwo

And so it goes

As if my weekend wasn't bad enough. I last saw my Nokia 6161 cellphone on Saturday when I was driving the pickup to the dump with about one ton of construction debris. I switched it to ringer, as it's usually on vibrate only, and shoved it

In a small town with no place to go

Dear Bob … I don't know there is any advice that can help me, but I'm out of ideas. Worse, I'm out of gas and heading toward burnout. I'm a Windows systems administrator. The company I work for keeps asking for more: Longer days

How to keep work onshore

Dear Bob … I'm feeling trapped. I'm under a lot of pressure to send work offshore, and while I don't want to, the financial pressure to do so is nearly overwhelming. Do you know of any successful strategies for keeping work on-shore

Shortcut for IP conversion

I got sick of spending time converting IP addresses to various formats. ipconv.pl is a quickie CGI shortcut to convert a dotted-quad IP address to decimal, hex, octal and binary. And here's the quickie code: #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw use strict; my ($

Case study

Finally. It's taken Compaq/HP years to design a decent rack server case; years. I recall swearing at many a server produced by either company every time I had the misfortune of having to deal with hardware changes. Non-standard bolts, inaccessib

The art and science of software testing

Test-driven development tools like Agitator help you validate before you write

How much IT can you manage?

Veritas delivers utility computing basics

Return of the worms

They’re baaa-aaack! After a period of relative quiet, worms are once again gearing up to attack your enterprise

Citrix’s sweet MetaFrame Access Suite boosts collaboration for remote users

Handy-dandy applications include Secure Access Manager and Password Manager

Oracle chief hitched, AT&T Wireless ditched

Nuptials and disruptuals

Two IP phones worth picking up

Phones from Swissvoice and Clarysis demonstrate VoIP's maturity

Unix for Windows

Microsoft takes a seat at the Unix table with Services for Unix 3.5

Apple’s mouth says ‘No’ to the enterprise, yet all other signs point to ‘Yes’

Apple's product line and hiring choices suggest an enterprise interest that company execs deny

Technology meets art

Our top 25 CTOs show that it takes more than budget management and skill to lead during a poor economy

E-forms for home buyers

Microsoft’s InfoPath running on Tablet PCs helps new home salespeople navigate thousands of customer choices

Next-generation e-forms

Paper will never die. Instead, it’s going digital and providing a better, XML-enabled way to enter critical data

No time

So it's been awhile since the last post. That was all the way back in 2003, after all. So what to write about? SCO's recent sickeningly false and misleading letter to congress? How much Expose on Panther rocks? NeDi is going SQL? How impres