During my twenty-five or so years of technology consulting, I’ve witnessed many in-house software development projects. Large or small, too often companies tend to believe their needs are too special for any sort of off-the-shelf solution. The true stumbling block tends to fall into the category of “we’ve always done it this way”. Outdated processes and an unwillingness to change force overworked IT staff to build an in-house solution where feature creep is rampant and the project never meets expectations. At the same time, development costs skyrocket far beyond the cost of even the most expensive off-the-shelf alternative. If a close open source alternative exists, those same developers could work within the community to enhance the project and submit code back to the project for inclusion and benefit both the company and the community.

I have been a user of Synergy for several years. I first learned about Synergy on an episode of Hak5. It is very simple to set up whether the server or client OS is Linux, Mac or Windows. For the Systems Engineer, it is a godsend. As a Synergy user, I am very excited to read that the project has been picked back up and we will begin seeing new features.

Have you ever typed rm -rf .* within a directory only to find the command had unintended consequences?

TweetShareI haven’t seen the Google Nexus One yet, but I’ve listened to and read reviews.  From what I’ve heard, if I were to give up my iPhone, this would be the phone I would choose.  …

Those of you who regularly work with virtualization technologies know the many frustrations and concerns surrounding providing a proper storage infrastructure for virtualization. In particular, we often spend top dollar for high-end storage arrays from companies such as EMC in order to gain the support and high availability that these arrays offer. However, much of what makes these arrays high-end winds up being wasted in the implementation of these arrays for virtualization.

OpenGL and Linux users you should avoid the chip xpress200 and xpress1100. I have a xpress1100 on a Acer laptop Aspires 5100, and I had disappointment to note that this chip does not manage or very little the OpenGL, the consequences?

In trying to do some performance tuning on my zenoss server, I wanted to access the database. It had been quite some time since I initially installed zenoss and I couldn’t recall the password I had assigned.

Recently I did a full re-install of one of my Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 boxes to the new Ubuntu Junty 9.04. After installation, adobe flash was no longer working within mozilla for some sites.