Some days, I love the Internet!

So I was having a problem with a cygwin installation. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Two minutes of googling later, I’d found someone with my exact problem, who had solved the problem and posted to the cygwin mailing list: “I just wanted to post this in case someone else runs into this … [Read more…]

CUUG Talk on Cloud Computing

I’ll be giving a talk at the February 22, 2011 Calgary Unix User’s Group (CUUG) meeting, updating my previous talk to CJUG two years ago. Cloud Computing Speaker: Tom Malaher, NetStart Consulting Ltd. What is Cloud Computing? This talk will survey the landscape (cloudscape?), try to define cloud computing, where and how it can be used, and demo some live … [Read more…]

Cloud Computing Presentation

The presentation went well, the Elluminate software worked just fine. People reported good audio quality, and the features like “raise hand” and the chat window allowed for questions to be asked and answered during the presentation. The screen sharing seemed to behave as expected. I’ve made the presentation slides available for dowload: Cloud Computing Presentation … [Read more…]

Calgary Java Users Group presentation on Cloud Computing – March 11, 2009

I’ll be giving a presentation on Cloud Computing at the Calgary Java Users Group meeting on March 11, 2009 at 5pm MDT. What is Cloud Computing? Every vendor seems to define it differently. Last month’s CJUG speaker (Nikita Ivanov from GridGain) talked about how to more easily use cloud computing resources for grid computing. Of … [Read more…]

Refactoring Dynamic Code

This has been one of my concerns all along. The claim is that “enough testing” will eliminate the need for the compiler to do static checking at compile time. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=217080 Frank Sommers seems to be saying otherwise… in the long run. So, I’m feeling justified in my decision to stick with Java, where I gain … [Read more…]

More on Searching

When I was presenting to the Calgary Java User’s Group about Building your own search engine, the topic of Egothor came up. I’ll have to check it out. See my previous comments on searching email. Powered by ScribeFire.

Password lockbox

With the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley, it seems everyone is hot to start changing their passwords on a regular basis. This is enough of a problem for people, but when systems need to use passwords to get things done automatically, it turns into a nightmare. I started putting together a specification for a password “lockbox” that … [Read more…]