Requirements management isn’t optional in many fields. Medical technology and finance are just two fields where regulatory compliance necessitates requirements management. You and other stakeholders simply must be in total agreement about the requirements of a given...
High Tech
Engineering Inefficiency is the Enemy of Innovation
I was intrigued by the information and conclusions presented in OnShape’s recent report, “The State of Product Development and Hardware Design 2019.” However, I was not as surprised as they were to hear that the biggest problem in R&D is still complex processes,...
How Cyber Security Requirements Can Throw your Medical Device Off Track
In our last article we talked about the four steps your organization must go through when designing secure connected medical devices. With the increasing attention paid to product security in this era of connected medical devices, many companies are scrambling to keep...
Solving CAD File Data Corruption By Looking Beyond the Obvious
One SPK client’s design engineering team was required to email CAD files to a technician to perform 3D printing. However, the CAD files were too large for regular email transmission. The designers manually converted each CAD file into a ZIP format for sending in one...
How To Leverage Jira as a Service Desk
Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with using Jira as an issue tracker. But for those of you who have been juggling issue tracking and meeting SLA requirements -- and for those of you who had the recently acquired VertygoSLA addon -- this article may be useful...
Seven Attitude Hacks for Better IT Service
Attitudes are important things -- they are the lens through which we filter everything life throws at us, and they can either be the secret to our success or our undoing. We've all heard the stereotype that says IT professionals have bad attitudes, and maybe your own...
Firewall HA setup with Juniper NS50s
One item I’ve done repeatedly while doing network consulting services is configuring high availability (HA) networks. The recommended way is Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). This requires that you have two firewalls for every location and they run in...
FlexPOD for Infrastructure as a Service
The other day, I went to a presentation of FlexPOD and was impressed. FlexPOD is a collaboration of efforts from Cisco, VMWare, and NetApp. What it offers is a highly flexible framework to grow IT datacenters they are calling Infrastructure as a service (IIAS). If...
Speed up your Website with Limelight
Today’s clients are global -- and today’s content is rich. Without adapting to the use of modern tools, dynamic content can slow down the performance of your website, frustrating your potential customers. The problems of hosting international sites are well known:...
Installing Java 7 JDK, Eclipse 4.3 (Kepler) and the Eclipse GWT Plugin on Ubuntu 12.04.3
As a provider of engineering services, the majority of my projects involve developing GWT applications, and I do all my work almost exclusively in Ubuntu. Ubuntu 12.04, specifically, has many convenient features and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get their...
Unix 101: Utilize the “Screen” Command
In my previous post, I highlighted 5 great commands to improve administering your Unix machines within your infrastructure. The very first command I mentioned was screen, which allows you to run multiple pseudo-terminal "windows" within one shell session. Screen also...
5 Unix Commands You Might Not Be Using (But Should Be!)
Pretty much every day I do some system administration on one of our many Linux servers that we support as part of our managed IT services. It occurred to me that I use a bunch of utilities and tools within Linux to make my job easier and wanted to share my top 5 Unix...