Author Archive

Pray for Better, Prepare for Worse

October 21st, 2006

All things mechanical will fail. A lack of sound disaster recovery procedures should keep a knowledgeable IT administrator awake at night. Measures to prevent data loss are needed by many recovery scenarios and are a worthwhile vehicle to discuss the overall need to practice disaster recovery procedures. Data backups are a key component of disaster […]

But You’re Management!

October 20th, 2006

The desire of managers to be involved with technology is natural. They want to seem able to learn quickly and adapt. After all, failing to use new technologies puts a company at a disadvantage against its competitors. Effective use of technology can develop a small upstart into a best-of-breed market dominator. Management sees the potential […]

So, Where Do You Work?

October 16th, 2006

A post at /. points out a USA Today article that notes a growing trend where people perform their jobs at places other than home and office. I realized that I have been using Starbucks as a makeshift office months ago. In general, being able to work at alternative places during atypical hours increases productivity. […]

Celebrating Software Modularity

September 7th, 2006

I have recently been involved in the modification of several software systems. In one system, service provider preferences changed, which required code that interfaced with the new provider to be implemented. The presence of engineered software architecture simplifies change. A desirable architecture for a system with uncontrollable external dependencies facilitates changes that are localized to […]

UCI’s School of ICS Makes Slashdot

July 29th, 2006
Posted in - blah - | No Comments

UCI’s School of Informaiton & Computer Science made Slashdot today for their research in topic modeling. Organizing a large number of texts in such a way that mining the collection for useful information can be done effeciently is a challenging task. Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images has been on my Amazon Wish […]