I fell out of the software developer track for a number of years. I was a strong (although not the best) C language developer and had some C++ talent but I shifted gears when Java took off at my company. Since that time, I have done mostly scripting based hacks and small tools as “brain [...]

I got an email today stating, “Please use red text for any information that should be redacted before your report is placed in our teamroom”. Not knowing the work, I went to Google and subsequently to Wikipedia.
in the context of government documents, redaction (also called sanitization) generally refers more specifically to the process of [...]

There has been a significant amount of blogging and press regarding anonymity on the Internet. I have recently blogged on the subject.
However, now I am taking a look at the issue from the other side. In the back of my mind, I knew there were two sides to “authentic sources” and the Internet but the shock [...]

If you work from a home office - i.e. single employee, family business, independent consultant, small Internet business, farmer, new entrepreneur, etc. - you don’t have a big corporate IT department to support you. You *are* the IT department !
With today’s business, “data” has a value that belies it’s invisibility and the tiny physical space it occupies. [...]

A news story on NRP’s “All Things Considered” this evening, had an interesting subtext. The initial context of the news story highlighted that students at Virginia Tech have been using Facebook and MySpace as a means of communicating with each other and with distant friends. The subtext was how the news media has used this [...]

The last piece of the Home Office IT upgrade arrived today and it’s been installed. Last week ended with the arrived of 2 750GB SATA drives. I started this week by replacing my very modern but overly faulty Linksys router with a middle of the road and very stable Netgear router. I paired it with [...]

The following news scares me something wicked …
Google’s ambition to maximize the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was [...]

Doing sufficient backups, building virtual machines, and storing my transient video collection “on-line” requires storage, storage, and more storage. With three computers now getting sufficient backups to give me moderate peace of mind, I needed more storage than my RAID1 NAS (network addressable storage) was ready to serve. I had 2 750GB drives but [...]

I could kick myself if I were more limber … I spend 5 hours completely rebuilding my work machine today because I *thought* I had some security software gunking up the works. I was wrong, it was just Microsoft Windows being a PITA.
The problem: Lotus Notes “Single Login” aka “Log in to Notes [...]

I have been researching various lock solutions for exterior doors. The motivating factors are to make it easy for the right people to get in even when their hands may be partially full and be ADA compliant and require less than perfect dexterity.
Anyone who has followed my musings, knows that fingerprint readers are [...]