Interference Cancellation

By James Gaskin

When I visited a company in the technical district of San Francisco, they joked there were so many wireless signals in the area they didn't need a microwave for their popcorn - they just put the bag in the window. Needless to say, wireless connections for their internal computers didn't work because they couldn't find a clear channel. If you struggle with interference for data and cell phone signals, help is on the way.

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Unix Tip: Mirroring your root partition with Solaris Volume Manager

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

Solaris Volume Manager can make easy work of mirroring your root file system, but you have to use the right commands in the right sequence to make easy work of this task. In this week's column, we'll run through each of the commands required to mirror root and show how you can check on what is happening in each step.

System migration may be the most dangerous thing you ever do

By Joel Shore

Pity the poor IT department that is about to migrate a key application from one platform to another. Or perform a major upgrade. Or worse, merge into another company’s systems after being acquired. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Consider the plight of Mailbank.com, the Boulder, Colo.-based provider of e-mail and Web services under the name NetIdentity. Acquired recently by Toronto-based Tucows, the companies are moving, migrating, and otherwise homogenizing millions of e-mail accounts, including one of mine.

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Blog Insights: Click fraud

By Dan Blacharski

This week's Business Week Online dove into the issue of online advertising click fraud, in a tale that may well portend another major shift in the advertising business. Advertising on the Internet is big business, and it is the fuel that keeps it going. Despite many early attempts to convince people that they should pay for content on the Internet, that idea never caught on, leaving content providers with little choice but to rely on advertising to form the basis of their
business models. Flat-rate banners were the first to appear, but this soon gave way to pay-per-click ads. Big search engines like Google make most of their revenue from pay-per-click.

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Does work actually flow?

By Sean McGrath

In businesses, things happen that cause employees to do stuff. This 'stuff' is called 'work'. Work generally does not start and end in an instant. Like everything else in life, it happens with respect to time. This stuff called work flows and therefore we naturally call the phenomenon workflow.

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IT Controls Benchmark Survey Results - Gene Kim, IT Process Institute

Results from the IT Controls Benchmark survey, published by the IT Process Institute, demonstrate how IT organizations can begin to move from being a good performer to being a great one when handling IT control issues. Gene Kim, co-founder of the independent research institute, shares the two top controls that are more universally present in high performers and virtually absent everywhere else. Read the full interview here.

Web Application Security Audits

By James Gaskin

There are four Web vulnerability tool companies, and one, Acunetix(.com) now offers a free audit through a download on their Web site. Through this service, they have gathered plenty of information about the state of Web development security even though they've been a commercial product for less than a year.

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Stay tuned. We will be right back after these.

By Sean McGrath

Some time ago I upgraded my satellite TV service to include the ability to record programs very easily via an integrated hard disk. In effect my satellite receiving box became a computer known as a Digital Video Recorder (DVR).

In the intervening period between then and now I have become a significantly less useful individual to TV advertisers. Here is why this is so ...

Pray for tape; its demise would be disastrous for small businesses

By Joel Shore

Sitting just a few feet from me in my home office is 2 terabytes of RAID 5 storage, in a cabinet barely bigger than a one-gallon milk bottle. Lying on my desk are four 8-gigabyte Compact Flash cards, each no bigger than a fifty-cent piece. Is it any wonder that few people seem to talk about tape for the SMB market anymore?

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Does security need independence?

By James Gaskin

IBM's deal to purchase Internet Security Systems brings some real conflict of interest questions to mind. Essentially, can you trust a security company that can't control its own destiny?

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If 80 gigs is enough, then...

By Sean McGrath

I have an 80 gigabyte hard disk in my laptop and, for the first time in my career in computing, I am having difficulty filling it up with stuff that I need to do my job. Sure I can fill it with lots of audio and lots of video (given enough bandwidth and patience) but to be honest, the amount of multimedia stuff I need for my day job is limited to some podcasts and the occasional product demo video.

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Outsourcing the middleware layer

By Sean McGrath

Apparently (I am too young to remember) photocopier machines were greeted with suspicion in some quarters when they were first introduced. How can you know that the machine has made a perfect copy of your vital document? I'm told by someone who remembers those days that he used to proof read the copies coming off the photocopier to check for accuracy.

This sounds silly now, which isn't to say that mechanical copying no longer needs to be done with care [1]. Rather, we are now comfortable with the idea that all we need is a quick visual inspection of the photocopied page to see if it is all there. Once we have that, we do not need to inspect the individual letters to know we have a good copy. We trust the photocopier.

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Deploy on your schedule, not Microsoft's Auto-Update schedule

By Joel Shore

There are probably as many holes in Windows' and Internet Explorer's security infrastructure than there once were in the poorly maintained roads of legend in Blackburn, Lancashire (4,000, according to a 1967 U.K. Daily Mail news story famously paraphrased by John Lennon).

One of the things I like about Windows XP is its ability to heal thyself, using Auto Update to download and apply patches to fill those holes as Microsoft deems necessary. Unfortunately, it needs to do that way too often. That is very likely to become a problem when Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7.

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Caller ID Hacks Go Hollywood

By James Gaskin

Who predicted the way to make Caller ID hacking a front page topic was to enlist a Hollywood tabloid princess and a brain-dead party girl? But that's exactly what we have with Lindsay Lohan accusing Paris Hilton of hacking her voice mail.

Could this be a giant publicity stunt by SpoofCard.com, the accused hacking enabler? Perhaps, because you should never underestimate the slime quotient of Hollywood PR.

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Top Resume Tips

Susan Ireland, resume expert and author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Resume and Ready-Made Resumes Software, offers advice on creating the perfect resume, and how to market yourself into that next great job!

Top 5 Resume Tips:
1. Your resume is about your future; not your past.
2. It is not a confessional. In other words, you don't have to "tell all." Stick to what's relevant and marketable.
3. Don't write a list of job descriptions. Write achievements!
4. Promote only skills you enjoy using. Never write about things you don't want to repeat.
5. Be honest. You can be creative, but don't lie.

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