142 Articles · 2008–2023
The Complete Archive
Every dispatch from SMB IT Journal, newest first.
2023.
Why QuickBooks Can’t Be Stored on Google Drive for Multiple Users
Before we dig into specifics, it is important to understand that this is a general concept and we can actually distill this to “why can’t client/server or shared database file applications be stored…
2017.
The Risks of Licensing
There are so many kinds of risk that we address and must consider in IT systems it is easy to overlook risks that are non-technical, especially ones that we often do not address directly, such as…
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
We’ve all heard that plenty, right? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” People use it everywhere as a way to discourage improvements, modernization or refactoring. Many people say it and as with many…
The Social Contract of Sales
In IT we tend to deal with more sales scenarios than most business positions will do. An accountant, for example, is rarely in a position to buy equipment, software or products for their business…
Virtualize Domain Controllers
One would think that the idea of virtualizing Active Directory Domain Controllers would not be a topic needing discussion, and yet I find that the question arises regularly as to whether or not AD…
When a Backup Is Not A Backup
Conceptually the idea of “backup” has become a murky area within IT. Everyone seems to have their own concepts of what a backup is and how they expect it to behave. This can be dangerous when the…
Hiring IT: Speed Matters
After decades of IT hiring, something that I have learned is that companies serious about hiring top talent always make hiring decisions very quickly. They may spend months or even years looking for…
When to Consider High Availability?
“High Availability isn’t something you buy, it’s something that you do.” – John Nicholson Few things are more universally desired in IT than High Availability (HA) solutions. I mean really, say those…
IT’s Most Needed Skills
IT does not exist in a bubble. IT is a business enabler, a way of taking an existing business and making it more efficient, cost effective, nimble and capable. Except for home hobbyist, and even…
Using Certifications to Drive Education
There is little denying that Information Technology is a field driven by certification. What other field is filled so completely with certifications for every approach, niche, vendor, product…
Rethinking Long Term Support Releases
Traditionally Long Term Support operating system releases have been the bulwark of enterprise deployments. This is the model used by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Suse and Red Hat and has been the…
Linux Distro Release Schedules
One of the aspects of the Linux work compared to the Windows one is the variety and challenges of different release schedules. In the Windows world this is pretty simple, there is one product and it…
The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure
IT Infrastructure is a challenge for any company and especially companies that are not large enough to implement their own, full scale datacenters. Like many things in IT, major challenges come in…
All IT is External
In IT we often talk about internal and external IT, but this perspective is always one from that of the IT department itself rather than the one from the business and I feel that this is very…
Titanic Project Management & Comparison with Software Projects
Few projects have ever taken on the fame and notoriety of that achieved by the Titanic and her sister Olympic ships, the Olympic and the Britannic, which began design one hundred and ten years ago…
Standard Areas of Discipline Within IT
Information Technology and Business Infrastructure are an enormous field filled with numerous and extremely varied career opportunities not just in the industries in which work is done, but also in…
2016.
The Software RAID Inflection Point
In June, 2001 something amazing happened in the IT world: Intel released the Tualatin based Pentium IIIS 1.0 GHz processor. This was one of the first few Intel processors (IA32 architecture) to have…
Legitimate University Programs Are Not Certification Training
The university educational process is one that is meant to broaden the mind, increase exposure to different areas, teach students to think outside of the box, encourage exploration, develop soft…
Understanding Technical Debt
From Wikipedia: “Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is “a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the…
New Hyperconvergence, Old Storage
We all dream of the day that we get to build a new infrastructure from the ground up without any existing technical debt to hold us back. A greenfield deployment where we pick what is best, roll it…
You Can’t Virtualize That!
We get this all of the time in IT, a vendor tells us that a system cannot be virtualized. The reasons are numerous. On the IT side, we are always shocked that a vendor would make such an outrageous…
The Commoditization of Architecture
I often talk about the moving “commodity line”, this line affects essentially all technology, including designs. Essentially, when any new technology comes out it will start highly proprietary…
No One Ever Got Fired For Buying…
It was the 1980s when I first heard this phrase in IT and it was “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” The idea was that IBM was so well known, trusted and reliable that it was the safe choice as a…
SMBs Must Stop Looking to BackBlaze for Guidance
I have to preface this article, because people often take these things out of context and react strongly to things that were never said, with the disclaimer that I think that BackBlaze does a great…
Choosing a University for IT Education
In previous articles I have tackled the questions around approaching university education and selecting a degree program but, thus far, I have not provided any guidance in selecting an institution at…
The Scale HC3 Advantage
For years I have been pitching ideas about how a performant, highly reliable architecture for the small and medium business market should be approached. Concepts like maintaining high reliability…
Leveraging Microsoft RDS on Scale HC3
One of the great advantages of a centralized and unified infrastructure platform like the Scale HC3 is the ability to use the platform to provide centralized desktop and end user services along side…
Finding A Job, or Finding THE Job
Nearly everyone overlooks this incredibly basic question and yet nearly everyone has to face this it when thinking about their career decision making and their future. This applies to middle school…
Logical Volume Managers
A commonly used but often overlooked or misunderstood storage tool is the Logical Volume Manager. Logical Volume Managers, or LVMs, are a storage abstraction, encapsulation and virtualization…
Drive Appearance
One of the more common, yet more tricky fundamental concepts in computing today is the concept of drive appearance or, in other words, something that appears to be a hard drive. This may sound…
Buyers and Sellers Agents in IT
When dealing with real estate purchases, we have discrete roles defined legally as to when a real estate agent represents the seller or when they represent the buyer. Each party gets clear…
The Emperor’s New Storage
We all know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. In Hans Christian Anderson’s telling of the classic tale we have some unscrupulous cloth vendors who convince the emperor that they have clothes…
Disaster Recovery Planning with Existing Platform Equipment
Disaster Recovery planning is always difficult, there are so many factors and “what ifs” that have to be considered and investing too much in the recovery solution can itself become a bit of a…
Understanding Bias
I often write about the importance of alignment in goals between IT and vendors and how critical it is to avoid getting advice from those that you are not paying for that advice, because that makes…
Decision Point: VDI and Terminal Services
Two basic concepts vie for prominence, if technologies care about prominence, when it comes to remote graphical desktop interfaces: VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) and terminal services. The…
A Public Post Mortem of An Outage
Many things in life have a commonly accepted “conservative” approach and a commonly accepted “risky” approach that should be avoided, at least according to popular sentiment. In investing, for…
The Physical Interaction Considerations of VDI
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is different from traditional virtualization of servers because, unlike servers which provide services exclusively onto a network, desktops are a point of…
Business: The Context of IT
I would estimate that the vast majority of people working in the IT field come to it out of an interest in or even a passion for computers. Working in IT lets them play with many big, fast, powerful…
2015.
Understanding Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
VDI (or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) has been all the rage in IT circles for the past couple of years. Once the virtualization of servers became the norm, looking to desktops as the next frontier…
The End of the GUI Era
We should set the stage by looking at some historical context around GUIs and their role within the world of systems administration. In the “olden days” we did not have graphical user interfaces on…
Understanding the Role of the Dell VRTX
Dell’s VRTX is one of those devices that is just sexy, as IT hardware goes. It strikes a chord and drives IT professionals nearly wild. It looks cool, it has an incredible amount of power, it can be…
Choosing a University Degree Program for IT
In my last article I looked at the overarching concerns and approaches to an university program and how it would apply to us in IT. Now we will look at individual programs and how to approach the…
How to Approach the University Experience
All discussions of university versus non-university aside, once a university (or college as the Americans generally refer to it) is chosen, the next step is choosing a degree program that will…
Getting Started with IT Certifications
This question surfaces very regularly: you are at the beginning of your IT career or maybe have not even gotten into your career yet, and are wondering where to get started with certifications. Maybe…
Making the Best of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom
The 3-2-1 or Inverted Pyramid of Doom architecture has become an IT industry pariah for many reasons. Sadly for many companies, they only learn about the dangers associated with this design after the…
Why We Avoid Contract to Hire
Information Technology workers are bombarded with “Contract to Hire” positions, often daily. There are reasons why this method of hiring and working is fundamentally wrong and while workers…
Ferraris and Tractor Trailers
Working in the SMB world, it is actually pretty rare that we need to talk about latency. The SMB world is almost universally focused on system throughput and generally unaware of latency as a need…
Types of IT Service Providers
A big challenge, both to IT Service Providers and to their customers, is in attempting to define exactly what an IT vendor is and how their customers should expect to interact with them. Many people…
Avoiding Local Service Providers
Inflammatory article titles aside, the idea of choosing a technology service provider based on the fact or partially based on the fact that they are in some way located geographically near to where…
The Jurassic Park Effect
“If I may… Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You…
Make Your Business Jealous
I have, in the past, discussed how home technology infrastructures and lab environments are one of the keys to personal career success and how IT practitioners should set a high bar in their own…
Virtualizing Even a Single Server
I find it very common in conversations involving virtualization to have the concept of consolidation, which in the context of server virtualization refers to putting multiple formerly physical…
You Are Not Special
It is not my intention for this to sound harsh, but I think that it has to be said: “You are not special.” And by “you” here, of course, I mean your business. The organization that you, as an IT…
Explaining the Lack of Large Scale Studies in IT
IT practitioners ask for these every day and yet, none exist – large scale risk and performance studies for IT hardware and software. This covers a wide array of possibilities, but common examples…
Practical RAID Choices for Spindle Based Arrays
A truly monumental amount of information abounds in reference to RAID storage systems exploring topics such as risk, performance, capacity, trends, approaches and more. While the work on this subject…
Slow OS Drives, Fast Data Drives
Over the years I have found that people often err on the side of high performance, highly reliable data storage for an operating system partition but choose slow, “cost effective” storage for…
What Do I Do Now? Planning for Design Changes
Quite often I am faced with talking to people about their system designs, plans and architectures. And many times that discussion happens too late and designs are either already implemented or they…
Better IT Hiring: Contract To Hire
Information Technology workers are bombarded with “Contract to Hire” positions, often daily. There are reasons why this method of hiring and working is fundamentally wrong and while workers…
On DevOps and Snowflakes
One can hardly swing a proverbial cat in IT these days without hearing people talking about DevOps. DevOps is the hot new topic in the industry picking up from where the talk of cloud left off and to…
Practical RAID Performance
Choosing a RAID level is an exercise in balancing many factors including cost, reliability, capacity and, of course, performance. RAID performance can be difficult to understand especially as…
2014.
It’s a Field, Not a Road
Over the years I have become aware of a tendency in the Information Technology arena to find strong expectations of exactly how much someone should know about certain technologies based on their job…
The Home Line
In many years of working with the small and medium business markets I have noticed that the majority of SMB IT shops tend to one of two extremes: massive overspend with an attempt to operate like…
Should IT Embrace Subscription Licensing
With big name, traditionally boxed products like Microsoft Office and Adobe’s Creative Suite turning to new subscription licensing models we, as IT, have to look into this model and determine if and…
The Weakest Link: How Chained Dependencies Impact System Risk
When assessing system risk scenarios it is very easy to overlook “chained” dependencies. We are trained to look at risk at a “node” level asking “how likely is this one thing to fail.” But system…
One Big Flat Network
There is a natural movement of networks to become unnecessarily complicated. But there is great value in keeping networks clean and simple. Simple networks are easier to manage, more performant and…
Starting the IT Clock Ticking
Everyone is always happy to tell you how important experience is over certifications and degrees when working in IT. Few things are so readily agreed upon within the industry. What is shocking…
IT Generalists and Specialists
IT Professionals generally fall into two broad categories based on their career focus: generalists and specialists. These two categories actually carry far more differences than they may at first…
What is RAID 100?
RAID 10 is one of the most important and commonly used RAID levels in use today. RAID 10 is, of course, what is known as compound or nested RAID where one RAID level is nested within another. In the…
Comparing RAID 10 and RAID 01
These two RAID levels often bring about a tremendous amount of confusion, partially because they are incorrectly used interchangeably and often simply because they are poorly understood. First, it…
It Worked For Me
“Well, it worked for me.” This has become a phrase that I have heard over and over again in defense of what would logically be otherwise considered a bad idea. These words are often spoken innocently…
Doing IT at Home: Enterprise Networking
In my fifth installment in the continuing series on Doing IT at Home I would like to focus on enterprise networking. Many ways in which we can bring business class IT into our homes can really be…
The Cult of ZFS
It’s pretty common for IT circles to develop a certain cult-like or “fanboy” mentality. What causes this reaction to technologies and products I am not quite sure, but that it happens is undeniable…
Understanding the Western Digital SATA Drive Lineup (2014)
I choose to categorize Western Digital’s SATA drive lineup for several reasons. One is that WD is the current market leader in spinning hard drives so this makes the categorization most useful to the…
Choosing Software Versions for Deployment
Something that I see discussed very often in IT circles is “which version of software should I install.” This could apply to a database, an application, firmware or, probably most often, operating…
Doing IT at Home: Logging
Continuing my series of making your home more like a serious business environment, this time I want to talk about log collection. We touched on this a little in “Doing IT at Home: Ticketing and…
The Desktop Revolution Is Upon Us
With the pending end of support for Windows XP looming just around the proverbial corner, it is time to take stock of the desktop landscape and make hard decisions. Windows XP has dominated the…
2013.
Doing IT at Home: Ticketing and Monitoring
Treating your home network more like a business network is often far easier than people realize and far more useful too. There is a lot of utility is how businesses run their IT departments and it is…
Contract to Hire
There are so many horrible hiring practices commonly used today one hardly knows where to begin. One of the most obviously poor is the concept of “Contract to Hire” positions. The concept is simple…
Doing IT at Home: Good Documentation
One of the most rewarding home IT projects that I have done was to implement a system for “home documentation.” In a business environment documentation is critical to nearly any process or…
Doing IT at Home: The Home PBX
I am often asked what projects I would recommend for someone to do at home to get more IT experience and I am often at a loss to come up with anything very interesting that is both educational and…
Replicated Local Storage
With the increased exposure of virtualization and the popularization of platform-level high availability solutions because of it the need and awareness of high availability storage has come to the…
When to Consider a SAN?
Everyone seems to want to jump into purchasing a SAN, sometimes quite passionately. SANs are, admittedly, pretty cool. They are one of the more fun and exciting, large scale hardware items that most…
Dreaded Array Confusion
Dreaded Array Confusion, or DAC, is a term given to a group of RAID array failure types which are effectively impossible to diagnose but are categorized by the commonality that they experience no…
The Inverted Pyramid of Doom
The 3-2-1 model of system architecture is extremely common today and almost always exactly the opposite of what a business needs or even wants if they were to take the time to write down their…
When to Consider a Private Cloud?
The idea of running a private cloud, hosted or on premise, for a single company is rapidly becoming a commonplace one. More and more businesses are learning of cloud computing and seeing that running…
Stick to IT, Don’t Become Another Department
I see this very regularly, it seems to be a huge temptation of IT departments to overstep IT bounds and want to take on the roles and responsibilities of other company departments. In the SMB this…
Is it Time to Move to Windows 8
Microsoft’s latest desktop reboot is out in the wild and lots of people are getting their hands on it and using it today. Is it time to consider moving to Windows 8? Absolutely. That doesn’t mean…
Hello, 1998 Calling….
Something magic seems to have happened in the Information Technology profession somewhere around 1998. I know, from my own memory, that the late 90s were a special time to be working in IT. Much of…
The Smallest IT Department
Working with small businesses means working with small IT shops. It is very common to find the “one man” shows and I am often in discussions about how to handle environments so small. There is no…
Comparing SAN and NAS
One of the greatest confusions that I have seen in recent years is that between NAS and SAN. Understanding what each is will go a long way towards understanding where they are useful and appropriate…
The Ripple Effect of Windows 8
Windows 8, with its new, dramatic Metro interface, is a huge gamble for Microsoft. A huge gamble not only because they risk slowing update cycles and attrition of their desktop installation base but…
Keeping IT in Context
Information Technology doesn’t exist in a bubble, it exists to serve a business or organization (for profit, non-profit, government, etc.) The entity which we, as IT professionals, serve provides the…
Solution Elegance
It is very easy, when working in IT, to become focused on big, complex solutions. It seems that this is where the good solutions must lie – big solutions, lots of software, all the latest gadgets…
2012.
The History of Array Splitting
Much of the rote knowledge of the IT field, especially that of the SMB field, arose in the very late 1990s based on a variety of factors. The biggest factors were that suddenly smaller and smaller…
RAID Notation Examples
As the new Network RAID Notation Standard (SAM RAID Notation) is a bit complex, I felt that it would be useful to provide a list of common use scenarios and specific implementation examples and how…
Network RAID Notation Standard (SAM RAID Notation)
As the RAID landscape becomes more complex with the emergence of network RAID there is an important need for a more complex and concise notation system for RAID levels involving a network component…
One Big RAID 10 – A New Standard in Server Storage
In the late 1990s the standard rule of thumb for building a new server was to put the operating system onto its own, small, RAID 1 array and separate out applications and data into a separate RAID 5…
Virtualization as a Standard Pattern
Virtualization as an enterprise concept is almost as old as business computing is itself. The value of abstracting computing from the bare hardware was recognized very early on and almost as soon as…
Choosing RAID for Hard Drives in 2013
After many, many articles, discussions, threads, presentations, questions and posts on choosing RAID, I have finally decided to publish my 2012-2013 high level guide to choosing RAID. The purpose of…
Virtual Eggs and Baskets
In speaking with small business IT professionals, one of the key factors for hesitancy around deploying virtualization arises from what is described as “don’t put your eggs in one basket.” I can see…
Choosing a RAID Level by Drive Count
In addition to all other factors, the number of drives available to you plays a significant role in choosing what RAID level is appropriate for you. Ideally RAID is chosen ahead of time in…
Hardware and Software RAID
RAID, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, systems are implemented in one of two basic ways: software or dedicated hardware. Both methods are very viable and have their own merits. In the small…
You Aren’t Gonna Need It
I’m lucky that I work in IT but come from a software engineering background, this gives me a bit of a different perspective on the world of IT both in understanding much of what is happening behind…
Where Windows 8 Fails
There is a lot of talk about why people love or hate Windows 8, but I see a lot of talk about this from the perspective of the IT department and the big picture seems to be often dropped completely…
Nearly As Good Is Not Better
As IT professionals we often have to evaluate several different approaches, products or techniques. The IT field is vast and we are faced with so many options that it can become difficult to filter…
Choosing a Storage Type
While technicalities defining which type of storage is which can become problematic, the underlying concepts are pretty well understood. There are four key types of storage that we use in everyday…
How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love BYOD
Bring Your Own Devices (or BYOD) is one of those hot topics this year that seems to have every IT department worried. What does BYOD mean for the future of IT? People have already begun to call it…
The Windows Desktop Cycle
Microsoft has been bringing out desktop operating environments for decades now and those of us who have been in the industry long enough are aware of a pattern that they use, perhaps unofficially, in…
Hot Spare or a Hot Mess
A common approach to adding a layer of safety to RAID is to have spare drive(s) available so that replacement time for a failed drive is minimized. The most extreme form of this is referred to as…
What Windows 8 Means for the Datacenter
Talk around Microsoft’s new upcoming desktop operating, Windows 8, centers almost completely on its dramatically departing Metro User Interface, borrowed from the Windows Phone which, in turn…
When No Redundancy Is More Reliable – The Myth of Redundancy
Risk in a difficult concept and it requires a lot of training, thought and analysis to properly assess given scenarios. Often, because risk assessments are so difficult, we substitute risk analysis…
Choosing an Open Storage Operating System
It is becoming increasingly common to forgo traditional, proprietary storage devices, both NAS and SAN, and instead using off the shelf hardware and installing a storage operating system on it for…
2011.
The True Cost of Printing
Of all of the things that are handled by your technology support department, printing is likely the one that you think about the least. Printing isn’t fancy or exciting or a competitive advantage. It…
Just Because You Can…
I see this concept appear in discussions surrounding virtualization all of the time. This is a broader, more general concept but virtualization is the “hot, new technology” facing many IT…
Spotlight on SMB Storage
Storage is a hard nut to crack. For businesses storage is difficult because it often involves big price tags for what appear to be nebulous gains. Most executives understand the need to “store”…
Apple’s Roadmap for iOS
Guessing at a company’s roadmap is always a dangerous venture. In the case of Apple today and their iOS family of products, it feels less like predicting a roadmap and more like computing a…
Do You Really Need Redundancy: The Real Cost of Downtime
Downtime – now that is a word that no one wants to hear. It strikes fear into the heart of businesses, executives and especially IT staff. Downtime costs money and it causes frustration. Because…
Patching in a Small Environment
In enterprise IT shops, system patching is a complicated process involving large numbers of test systems which mirror production systems so that each new patch arriving from operating system and…
Never Get Advice from a Reseller (or Vendor)
This is general business advice that often applies to IT but is certainly not limited to that realm alone. Outside support in IT comes from two main sources: firms who are paid (by you) to advise you…
Seven Reasons It Is Time for Windows 7
What’s your reason for not upgrading to Windows 7? Many IT managers wait for the first service pack before deploying an OS upgrade; others update the operating system as part of a hardware refresh…
Hiring IT: The Reverse Interview
Corporate interviewers often forget that interviews are a two way street: yes the company is interviewing the hopeful job candidate, but that candidate is interviewing the company as well. Unless you…
Why IT Pros’ Home Computers Are Different
My sister in law once asked me why they have so many computer problems and we do not. My wife and I are both technology consultants and our home network probably seems incredibly stable to the casual…
IT Roles: Productivity and Availability
As IT managers we face the need to deal with two very different types of technical professionals. These two types of professionals are separated, not by their personality types or working styles, but…
Why We Reboot Servers
A question that comes up on a pretty regular basis is whether or not servers should be routinely rebooted, such as once per week, or if they should be allowed to run for as long as possible to…
2010.
IT in a Bubble
It is an old story in SMB IT, IT managers who get their start young, stay with a single company, work their way through the ranks and become venerable IT managers who have never worked outside of…
IT Managers and the Value of Decision Making
When I was new to IT I can remember people using the phrase “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” At the time I was young and didn’t think too much about what this phrase implies. Recently, I heard…
State of Thin Clients
The IT world loves to swing back and forth between moving processing out to the user via fat clients and moving processing back to the server leaving users with thin clients. The battle is a long…
Choosing an Email Architecture: Internal or Hosted
If you talk to email specialists what you seem to find, in my small, anecdotal survey of the market, is that half of all of these professionals will tell you to simply install email locally, normally…
Linux Virtualization Deployment Advantage
As more and more businesses begin to deploy virtualization broadly, we must begin to step back and reconsider the opportunities presented to us by this shift in datacenter architecture…
In House Email for Small Businesses
In small businesses the primary concern with email is cost. Email is a commodity and especially in smaller shops the biggest differentiating factor between email products and vendors is cost. In…
RAID Revisited
Back when I was a novice service tech and barely knew anything about system administration one of the few topics that we were always expected to know cold was RAID – Redundant Array of Inexpensive…
Virtualization for Small Business
In the last year or two we have seen virtualization go from a poorly understood concept to a much-hyped industry buzz word being bantered about constantly in every conversation involving technology…
The SMB IT and Vendor Relationship Dilemma
When most people compare enterprise IT and the small business IT markets they generally think about size and scale. Enterprise environments are huge and small business IT often consists of just one…
2009.
The Dangers of Blade Servers in SMB – Debunking the Blade Server Myth
Blade Servers are the hottest trend in datacenters today. I am sure that you have heard the hype: lower cost and better efficiency. To be sure, blades have come a long way in the last few years and…
Using a Wiki for Quick Documentation
If your business is anything like the businesses with which I normally deal one of the hardest items to tackle is documentation. This can include all kinds of documentation from human resources…
MicroBlogging for Business
If you mention microblogging to anyone today the first thing that you are going to get is an ear-full about the importance of social media and platforms for enabling the conversation and about…
Desktop and Laptop Purchasing
The first rule for any purchasing situation is, of course, plan. Desktop and laptop purchasing is no different. A good plan is the first step to good spending when it comes to your small business’…
Buying Printers for Small Business
While some small businesses today have managed to ween themselves from the world of paper, the vast majority of small and medium businesses are still tied, to some degree, to their printers and faxes…
Considering NetBooks for Small Business
There really is not any question about whether or not NetBooks will be an important tool for businesses of all sizes – they will be. The upsides to NetBooks are too big to overlook: highly portable…
Free Web Reporting with Google Analytics
As a small business it can often be a challenge to obtain deep insight into the workings of your information technology organization. When it comes to web sites there have always been a number of…
Using GMail to Backup Your Email
When disaster strikes it is a good time to reflect on what preventative measures might have saved the day. Working in IT, as I do, mitigating and even preventing disaster is a big part of the job. No…
2008.
Project Management of the RMS Titanic and the Olympic Ships
The idea to build the R.M.S. Titanic and her sisters, the R.M.S. Olympic and the H.M.H.S. Britanic, first began to take shape in 1907. These three ships together were White Star Line’sOlympic…